Imagine, now, a 21-year-old having a piece premiered on the Proms and it gaining such a reception {that a} repeat efficiency is straight away shoehorned in for the next week. That occurred in 1919 for Birmingham-born Dorothy Howell and her Keats-inspired tone poem Lamia, the one beforehand recorded work of the 5 on this persuasively pleasant survey from the BBC Live performance Orchestra.
Howell is among the 4 feminine composers whose tales had been advised final 12 months by Leah Broad in her ebook Quartet, and nonetheless the least acquainted, thanks largely to dangerous luck plus the combination of disparagement and faint reward that may stay a feminine composer’s due for a lot of the twentieth century. But if Lamia is a spotlight right here, so too are the Three Divertissements, written twenty years later: candy but by no means saccharine, they brim with heat and, within the case of the second, a flippantly worn however haunting melancholy.
There’s additionally her nonetheless unstaged 1921 ballet Koong Shee, evocative of its chinoiserie topic with out being twee; a realizing Humoresque; and The Rock, a light-footed overture impressed by a go to to Gibraltar. The shut miking doesn’t all the time do the BBCCO favours, however Rebecca Miller conducts buoyant performances that showcase Howell’s quicksilver items.
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