Editing Constant Lambert (section)

==Jazz influence==
Lambert's best-known composition followed. ''[[The Rio Grande (Lambert)|The Rio Grande]]'' (1927), for piano and alto soloists, [[choir|chorus]], and orchestra of brass, strings and percussion, sets a poem by [[Sacheverell Sitwell]]. It achieved considerable success, and Lambert made two recordings of the piece as conductor (1930 and 1949). He had a great interest in [[African-American music]], and once said that he would have ideally liked ''The Rio Grande'' to feature a black choir.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Palmer | first=Christopher | title=Constant Lambert: A Postscript | journal=Music & Letters | volume=52 | issue=2 | pages=173–176 |date=April 1971| doi=10.1093/ml/LII.2.173 }}</ref> He held a very positive view of jazz rhythms and their incorporation in classical music saying once that:
{{Blockquote
|"The chief interest of jazz rhythms lies in their application to the setting of words, and although jazz settings have by no means the flexibility or subtlety of the early seventeenth-century airs, for example, there is no denying their lightness and ingenuity … English words demand for their successful musical treatment an infinitely more varied and syncopated rhythm than is to be found in the nineteenth-century romantics, and the best jazz songs of today are, in fact, nearer in their methods to the late fifteenth-century composers than any music since."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W3000_GBAJY9256501|title = The Rio Grande (Lambert) - from CDH55388 - Hyperion Records - MP3 and Lossless downloads}}</ref>
}}
Lambert was to take his interest in jazz much further in works such as the Piano Sonata (1929) and the ''Concerto for piano and nine Instruments'' (1931), where the style moves away from the "symphonic jazz" of [[Gershwin]] and [[Paul Whiteman]] to something much more tense and urban, with popular and formal elements of composition closely integrated, rhythms jagged and extreme, and harmony sometimes approaching atonalism.<ref>Hardy, Lisa (2012). ''[https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843837985/the-british-piano-sonata-1870-1945/ The British Piano Sonata, 1870-1945]''. pp. 129–140.</ref> The second movement of the Sonata features a blues in rondo form.<ref>[[Giles Easterbrook|Easterbrook, Giles]] (1995). [https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDH55397 "Notes to Hyperion CDH55937"].</ref> The Concerto's unusual chamber scoring becomes something of a hybrid between a jazz band and the ensemble used in Schoenberg's ''[[Pierrot lunaire]]''.<ref>[https://atuneadayblogdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/constant-lambert-concerto-for-piano-and-nine-instruments-1931/ 'Lambert, Concerto for Piano and Nine Instruments']. ''A Tune A Day''.</ref>