Our new album of music by Dorothy Howell and her milieu, Beauty Veil’d, is available now, from EM Records. The title is taken from Keat’s poem Lamia, which inspired Howell’s breakthrough symphonic poem of the same name. Fittingly, pride of place in the programme is our premiere recording of Howell’s ‘lost’ String Quartet in D minor, a firm ensemble favourite since our very own Dan Shilladay reconstructed it from the composer’s rough pencil sketches in 2018.
The album is completed with four further premiere recordings of works by Howell and her circle. John Blackwood McEwen, her composition teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, is represented by his Nugae: Seven Bagatelles for String Quartet. These intimate, folk-tinged and beautifully crafted character pieces provide a perfect foil to Tobias Matthay’s Piano Quartet in One Movement, an ardent and virtuosic early work by Howell’s piano teacher and one-time friend of McEwen.
Howell and her near-contemporary Marie Dare probably never met, yet their lives followed a similar path from early acclaim as composer-performers to later obscurity. Dare’s darkly lyrical Phantasy Quintet, scored for string quintet with two cellos, echoes the same sumptuous late-Romantic language that condemned both composers to obscurity as modernism swept Europe in the wake of two World Wars. Howell’s own Adagio and Caprice for violin and piano completes the disc. Written in 1955, its quiet and dignified air of melancholy never found fame in a musical world that had moved abruptly on.
The album is officially launched for CD and digital sales on 22 August, but CDs are available now from EM Records: be amongst the first to hear these fascinating (and in the case of Howell’s quartet, twice-lost) pieces!
The ensemble wishes to thank the Vaughan Williams Foundation, the Francis Routh Trust and The John Ireland Charitable Trust for their invaluable assistance in the recording of the album.