The precursor to this album made a Critic’s Choice of the Year in Gramophone (2013). The program presented includes works by Benjamin Britten, William Mathias, Arnold Cooke, and Gerald Finzi. Michael Collins brilliantly walks the line between being a soloist and conductor, as he serves as both in this recording. The accompanying ensemble here is the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The First and Fourth Symphonies of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) both have a strong sense of place. They retain a hint of Bruckner but are fluid rather than monumental. The First is lyrical and grandiose in equal measure, reflecting the grandeurs of the Swiss landscape. The Fourth was inspired by memories of childhood visits to Liechtenstein and spins out tunes and atmosphere with the profligacy of a Hollywood film score.

Composers who orchestrate the music of earlier colleagues often serve them best when they add something of themselves to the work in hand. These three orchestrations by the English composer Robin Holloway (b. 1943) demonstrate his profound understanding of and affection for two of the most important Romantic composers – and his re-imagining of Brahms’ Sonata for Two Pianos (which Brahms himself recast as his Piano Quintet) as a symphony gives one of the greatest of all compositions a wild and thrilling energy, making it also a masterpiece of our own age.

In addition to Sir Adrian Boult’s (1889–1983) masterly conducting of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s symphonies, these live stereo performances include several new additions to the conductor’s illustrious discography: Rossini’s La scala di seta and Beethoven’s Die Weihe des Hauses Overtures, as well as Weber’s Euryanthe Overture which he last recorded in 1937.

The celebrated violinist Francesca Dego is joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and her regular collaborator Dalia Stasevska for this recording of the violin concertos by Brahms and Busoni.

A cornerstone of the repertoire, Brahms’s Concerto dates from 1878, a year after the Second Symphony, and was composed for (and dedicated to) the virtuoso Joseph Joachim. The Concerto takes the standard three-movement form, and as in Beethoven’s Concerto (considered by many as Brahms’s inspiration for the work) the first movement is significant in its length and its complexity.

Busoni’s Violin Concerto in its turn is inspired by both Brahms and Beethoven, and like both previous works it is in the key of D major. Premièred in Berlin in 1897 by the Dutch violinist Henri Petri, the Concerto is dazzlingly virtuosic. Francesca Dego writes: ‘To be able to record Brahms’s Violin Concerto is a dream and a milestone for every violinist and I feel that with “my” Brahms I do not want to compete with the many gorgeous versions out there but instead to declare my own love and history with my favorite violin concerto. Busoni’s Concerto, however, is a rarely performed work, brought to the studio only a handful of times. It represents a different kind of responsibility, one that pushed me to want to rediscover every detail of this music as if it had never been played before.’

Making his debut on Chandos, Sakari Oramo, who with the BBC Symphony Orchestra this year has championed new and rarely performed works, presents in surround sound the extravagant musical world of Florent Schmitt. The recording follows two exceptional Barbican performances with the same forces, a ‘sensuous and exotic’ Antoine et Cleopatre, according to the Financial Times (2016), and the first performance for nearly a dozen years of Symphony No. 2 (2017). The Second Symphony, the last major work by Schmitt, has nothing valedictory about it: as lavish and rhythmically sophisticated as his earlier music, emphatically bounding in fast passages and supple in slow, it also encompasses all the different musical expressions and styles that he had used over almost eight decades of composing. On the other hand, it is far from being an ‘old man’s piece.’ ‘It is really exuberant- very, very inventive, and incredibly busy for everyone,’ as Sakari Oramo explained in a BBC Radio 3 interview. The symphony is paired with the two orchestral suites from Antoine et Cleopatre, music written for Shakespeare’s play, premiered in 1920 at the Paris Opera, and very rarely recorded since then.

The great French conductor Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) was naturally considered a specialist of his native country’s music, though he would never allow this to restrict him. This new set of previously unpublished recordings seeks to set the record straight, with a strong representation of German repertoire, notably Brahms’ Symphony No.3 with the Boston Symphony, which he never recorded commercially, in a rare ‘live’ performance from the 1956 Edinburgh Festival. More Brahms featuring two celebrated virtuosos –the Violin Concerto with the French violinist Zino Francescatti, and the Double Concerto where he is joined by his compatriot Pierre Fournier, both ‘live’ recordings from the Royal Festival Hall in 1955. Both selections featured here are previously unpublished.

This previously unreleased live recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Schumann Cello Concerto is her first public performance of the work, given in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 December 1962 with Jean Martinon conducting the BBCSO. She had worked intensively on the concerto with Paul Tortelier in Paris prior to this concert. When Du Pré studied the Schumann with Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1966, he exclaimed, ‘This is the most perfect Schumann I have ever heard’. The 1962 live performance of the Dvorák Cello Concerto by Rostropovich has also never before been released. He is partnered by Carlo Maria Giulini, who went on to to make a studio recording of the same concerto with him in 1977. The Times critic described this Edinburgh Festival performance as an ‘exciting’ and ‘emotionally supercharged interpretation’ with Giulini’s reading ‘full of finely wrought points of detail’. The attractive bonus features Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the Ária from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras.

This set of ‘live’ authorized recordings featuring the highly distinguished conductor Bruno Walter with the BBC Symphony Orchestra comes from the BBC’s annual May Festival, held in London in 1955. None of these recordings has been published before, and in the case of Wagner’s Faust Overture, this is Walter’s only post-war account. The mid-1950s saw Walter at the height of his powers, and the ‘live’ recordings here are very focused, having a great sense of forward movement and excitement – most notably in Haydn’s Symphony No.96 and Mahler’s Symphony No.1 – compared to some of the studio accounts in the early 1960s when Walter was well into his 80s. The set also contains Walter with the great German soprano Irmgard Seefried in ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which illustrates both her superb artistry and his genius as a Mahler conductor. Brahms’s Song of Destiny (Schicksalslied), a Walter favorite, completes the set. All recordings have been sourced from the Richard Itter archive, as Beecham caught ‘live’ often showed the mercurial side of his character, and no performance was the same either in the studio or in the concert hall. All the performances included here from the Edinburgh Festival, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall and the BBC Studios are from Beecham’s final years, from 1954 when he had fully established the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and himself as central figures in England’s musical life, to 1959 when he conducted an extraordinarily memorable account of Brahms’s Symphony No.2. Every broadcast is captured here in exemplary sound for the time.