English Symphony Orchestra & Kenneth Woods: Fiddles, Forests and Fowl Fables
Nimbus Alliance
Listeners with a love for orchestral storytelling pieces like Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat should find Fiddles, Forests and Fowl Fables as much to their liking. This thoroughly appealing eighty-two-minute collection features not one but five stories performed by the English Symphony Orchestra under Kenneth Woods' direction and narrated with great panache by a star-studded array of actors. The works created by composers Kile Smith, David Yang, Jay Reise, Thomas Kraines, and Woods are brought to vivid life by Gemma Whelan (The Bremen Town Musicians), Hugh Bonneville (The Ugly Duckling), Davood Ghadami (The Warrior Violinist), and Henry Goodman (Lubin, from Chelm and Hansel and Gretel).
They bring to the endeavour esteemed careers in television and film, Whelan known, for example, from Game of Thrones and Killing Eve and Bonneville Downton Abbey. Appearing alongside the latter in Notting Hill (a small but memorable turn as the hotel concierge), Goodman brings to the recording a long list of stage and screen credits, while Ghadami is perhaps best known for Eastenders. Their theatrical deliveries do much to bring these enduring tales to life (interestingly, a few moments arise in Bonneville's and Ghadami's readings that remind me of John Gielgud and Jude Law, respectively), and neither should one overlook the fine renderings of the composers' scores by the ESO.
The release opens on a high with Smith's treatment of The Brothers Grimm story The Bremen Town Musicians, which couples a delightful performance by Whelan with equally delightful writing by the composer. She distinguishes her lively reading with a variety of accents and intonations to give the donkey, dog, cat, cockerel, and robbers distinct personalities. In this long-loved tale, the animals are making their way to Bremen in the hopes of a better life before encountering a group of thieves and ending up not quite where they expected. Part of the work's charm has to do with Whelan's schoolmarmish calling-out of the musicians over a series of misplaced entrances and the like, and her performance is note-perfect for its effortless execution of dialects. Memorable too is the stirring fanfare-like music Smith created for the piece, as well as how effectively his writing complements the story throughout its various twists and turns.
Bonneville's dulcet voice makes for a graceful partner to Woods' music in his affecting treatment of The Ugly Duckling. In dealing with self-loathing, rejection, and, ultimately, self-acceptance, Hans Christian Andersen's story is timeless and serious too, even if the fairy tale garb with which it's presented gives it the impression of being lighter fare. Like Whelan, Bonneville brings incredible versatility to his performance in giving voice to an abundance of characters and accents, and like Smith Woods punctuates the narrative with music that effectively mirrors the dramatic developments of the story as its advances from solemnity and turbulence to triumphant rapture.
Orchestrated by Woods and narrated by Goodman, Yang's Lubin, from Chelm recasts the traditional English folk tale Lazy Jack as a Yiddish tale of the kind Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written. Without giving too much away, Lubin, a layabout still living at home with his mother, fails his way to the top, so to speak. Again the musical design complements the story content, with in this case Yang incorporating Klezmer musical stylings and Yiddish turns of phrase into the piece. Hilarity abounds as Goodman convincingly conveys the persona of the titular schlemiel as well as that of his long-suffering Jewish mother.
Appearing after Goodman's, Ghadami's narration is reserved by comparison during Reise's The Warrior Violinist, though not displeasingly so. Based on an Egyptian folk tale, the story concerns a young violinist whose obsession with playing changes when an even greater love arrives in the form of the Pharaoh's daughter. Wishing to win her heart, he asks the Sphinx to turn him into a great warrior, but when the princess declares that she can only love the man she once heard playing the violin, the warrior discovers he can no longer play. Ghadami's delivery is rich in character and well-modulated, and Reise's music partners with it effectively, especially when it includes a strong solo violin performance by Zoë Beyers.
A rather more restrained Goodman returns for Kraines' Hansel and Gretel, the enduring tale of the brother and sister cruelly abandoned by their woodcutter father and his evil wife. As Kraines clarifies in liner notes, a number of sources were called upon in the writing of the score. The woodcutter's theme is a thinly disguised motive from Strauss's Metamorphosen, for example, and the witch/stepmother's theme is a Schoenbergian tone row. Such aspects are embedded so seamlessly into the writing, however, that only musicologists rather than general listeners will likely notice, especially when the narrative appears in tandem with the music. Goodman's personifications of the stepmother and witch are effective, though they do also make the relative blandness of the other characters more conspicuous.
Caveats? Two of minor import. Whereas the ideal balance between narration and music is achieved in The Bremen Town Musicians, Hansel and Gretel, and The Warrior Violinist, the result is less satisfying when the music is less prominently featured than the narrative, as happens in Lubin, from Chelm. Some might also find Goodman's performance in Yang's piece a little too over-the-top, though there's no denying the energy and enthusiasm of the performance. As Woods says, “It's been great over the years to see thousands of young people at our concerts laugh at the exploits of Lubin, the hapless robbers in the Bremen Town Musicians or the grandiose Condessa Duck.” Yet these tales have much to offer listeners of all age groups, not just one. Listening to the recording is a pleasure, and a more delightful and entertaining release than Fiddles, Forests and Fowl Fables would be hard to find.August 2021