Imaginative Work

'... well managed ...'

John Veale died in 2006 aged eighty-four having left for us a wealth of fine music that deserves greater exposure alongside the Violin Concerto, a gloriously Mahlerian work which was, until the arrival of this recorded recital, the only available evidence of his outstanding creative talent. Now the Chandos recording is complemented by this of his String Quartet, an energetic and yet lyrical, imaginative work written while he was studying with Roger Sessions in America in the early 1950s and, apart from a single performance in Oxford in 1953, was not heard again until the present performers, the Adderbury Ensemble, publically revived it in 2008 with understandable astonishment that it had been so long neglected. Even at eighty, Veale had not lost that vital sense of humour!In response to a request from John Turner, he completed the Elegiac Quintet in 2008 as a memorial to his father-in-law, Robin Orr...