Music Richard Osborne

‘Great carpet, Godfather!’

blissful state. Couples always seem to be nagging and niggling and bickering – parents, in particular, worn down by parental responsibility and worry, are always getting under each other’s skin, sullen silences alternating with false jollity. Thus Together, with James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan, about a man and wife – and their child – during the year of lockdown. I kept thinking, look, just get divorced, the pair of you!

It was very chopsy, with frequent asides and lengthy monologues, as if the characters were on a stage, giving a paying crowd their money’s worth. McAvoy and Horgan expressed their apparent need for each other through insult and accusation – arias of hatred shifting abruptly into panting, tearful expressions of love and remorse.

Jabbering away, the actor and the actress seemed to be there only to demonstrate histrionic facility – and the result was artificial, stilted and non-real. Coronavirus was the pretext for diatribes listen to daily until Christmas,’ wrote one contemporary critic. It quickly became a Proms favourite, chalking up nine outings in 25 years, three of them on the popular Last Night. There were also several recordings, including one by Moura Lympany, a gramophone classic.

Nor was it alone. The richly imagined Second Piano Concerto, a Festival of Britain commission, appeared in eight Proms seasons between 1952 and 2005, with a Last Night outing of its own in 1970. Clifford Curzon gave the 1951 première, which produced another much-collected recording.

Like his good friend and fellow Lancastrian William Walton, Rawsthorne stood at something of an angle to the English musical tradition, closer to the French and Russian neoclassicists of the period. Walton admired the impeccable technique and instantly recognisable style of this quiet, watchful, wryly amusing man, much as he enjoyed his company: ‘gay and genial’, with his ‘unexpected quips’ and views on all manner of subjects.

Between 1942 and the last of Rawsthorne’s Proms commissions in 1968, many of his works were showcased there. No more, alas. Despite the 50th anniversary, none of his music has been advertised for the 2021 Proms, not even for the evening of 20th-century British film music of which he was a revered exponent.

Should we be surprised? The fact is that space is at a premium in the brave new world of diversity-driven programme-making that has so skewed the Radio 3 listening experience since 2018.

Happily, those classic recordings remain, as well as a small treasure-trove of Rawsthorne CDs on the Naxos label. One disc includes his international breakthrough work, Symphonic Studies, and the Oboe Concerto, written for Evelyn Rothwell at much the same time as Richard Strauss was completing his better-known (and to mind rather less involving) piece.

Rawsthorne’s second wife was the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. Where Isabel was passionate and expansive, a force of nature who had run the gauntlet of youthful experience in 1930s London, Paris, and Civil War Spain, he was a more rooted character.

It was a good match. She needed her freedom; he provided the frame that freedom needed in the famously companionable Essex farmhouse they shared in the 1950s and ’60s.

Both, I imagine, would be mildly amused by this year’s events. Alan

about conflicting government advice, the miracle of the vaccine, and how appalling it was that all those old folk died in care homes – but what do old folks expect will happen to them in a care home?

As far as I’m concerned, a quick death from COVID was (is) surely preferable to yet more years drooling from Alzheimer’s. I am a farmer’s son – so I know about being cruel to be kind.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE ALAN AND ISABEL RAWSTHORNE MUSIC MEETS ART

Half a century has passed since the death in July 1971 of Alan Rawsthorne, one of the best-liked and best-regarded composers of his time, not least by Proms audiences and organisers.

The relationship began in 1942 with the première of his scintillating First Piano Concerto. ‘A work I would gladly