The Rio Grande (Lambert)

He later wrote: ‘After the humdrum playing of the English orchestra in the first half, it was electrifying to hear Will Vodery’s band in the Delius-like fanfare which preluded the second.

The chorus’s fortissimo opening statement is a direct transcription of the fanfare that appears frequently in Delius' work (the famous "Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo and Juliet, to quote just one instance, has it in almost every bar).

The Rio Grande is scored for alto soloist, mixed chorus, piano, brass, strings and a percussion section of 15 instruments, requiring five players.

[5] It combines jazzy syncopations, ragtime and Brazilian influences, harmonies and rhythms inspired by Duke Ellington, with a traditional English choral sound.

[8] Music critic Christopher Palmer said of this piece that: Lambert would be the first to concede, today, that some of the harmonic and rhythmic clichés he decried in others had slipped into his own work.

Now hard, now soft, it sparkles and glitters one moment, then seduces us the next with the kind of bluesy urban melancholy to be found in deeper, richer measure in a quite different context in Summer's Last Will and Testament.

[8] Angus Morrison, discussing the long cadenza accompanied by percussion, noted that: It was always Constant's idea that the piano should be, like the 'I' of a novel, a central narrator interpreting and reflecting upon the varied episodes that appear in the course of the poem...the cadenza [is] not only a brilliant showpiece of dazzling virtuosity and bravura (which always seems to issue from the preceding trombone glissandi with the force of a rocket) but also a sort of journey in which the player, as narrator, seems to take the listener by the hand and guide him through the streets and squares of this imagined city.

[16] The first concert performance was in Manchester on 12 December 1929 with Sir Hamilton Harty as piano soloist, and the composer conducting the Hallé Orchestra.

[5] There was also the first chamber performance, on 15 June 1930 at a party given by the composer Arthur Benjamin at his house in London (66 Carlton Hill, St John's Wood), for two pianos (Benjamin & Julie Lasdun), Albert Whitehead (alto solo), a choir of six, Lambert on percussion taking the part of five players, and William Walton turning the pages.

[18] On 28 August 1945, aged just 23, the pianist Kyla Greenbaum first appeared as a soloist at the BBC Proms in a performance of The Rio Grande.