The Piano Concerto / Indian Summer / A Sea Idyll / etc

"John Ireland's Piano Concerto of 1930 receives a thoroughly sympathetic, lucid performance, as does the ominously darker Legend of three years later...A delightful disc."
(Daily Telegraph)

"alert to the work's many changes of mood and wide range of pianistic demand. I particularly like [Lenehan's] musing, elegiac take on the haunting slow movement, and the orchestrla playing is impressively responsive throughout...It's good to have new recordings of the Sea Idyll and the cheerful Three Dances, too." BBC Music Magazine, December 2011 ****

Editor's Choice Gramophone December 2011

John Ireland's radiant Piano Concerto was written for his protégée Helen Perkin, and is infused with her sense of vitality. The result is a brilliant work of high spirits and expressive longing. Perkin also premièred Legend, a dark, brooding evocation of the ancient landscape of Harrow Hill on the Sussex Downs. Of the solo piano works, the First Rhapsody is earlier, virtuosic, and in the Lisztian tradition, whereas Indian Summer is a rural postcard of beguiling simplicity. John Lenehan has recorded three volumes of Ireland's solo piano music (8553700, 8553889 and 8570461) to universal admiration: 'Lenehan offers a uniquely vital and dramatic reading of the sonata.' (MusicWeb International on Vol. 3)