Tying in with the 100-year anniversary in 2013 of the composer’s birth, we here present two such works, performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Edward Gardner with Chandos stars Tasmin Little and Howard Shelley. The Violin Concerto, here performed dazzlingly by Little, is essentially tragic and weighty in tone, perhaps reflecting his growing concern with the escalation of war-related hostilities. Under Shelley’s fingers the Piano Concerto – in a rare recording with the original third movement, “Recitative and Aria” – is generally lighter and brighter, more transparent and simpler in style.

Melly Still's production for Glyndebourne finds the "delicate balance between whimsy and mysticism" (Daily Telegraph) at the heart of the opera, which Vladimir Jurowski conducts "with lustrous style: you can hear the birds in the score, feel the sunshine and thrill to the starlit night sky in the final scene" (Opera Today).

Violinist Livia Sohn is the featured soloist on this recording of Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto - a landmark of the repertoire, unbridled in it's lyricism and constituting a poignant commentary on the devastating brutality of war. Composer Jonathan Berger, dismayed by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, also wrote a violin concerto, Jiyeh, to express his frustration with the senselessness of war. Sohn, for whom the work was written, is partnered with cimbalom soloist Jan Roykta on this world premiere recording. Accompaniment for the Britten is provided by the Orchestra Sinfonica del Teatro Marrucino di Chieti conducted by Luigi Piovano and the Banff Centre Chamber Orchestra conducted by Henk Guittart for the Berger.

Classical Music

Nearly all of Daniel Purcell’s surviving solo harpsichord music consists of arrangements, the only clear exception being the short Toccata, a brief essay in the style of the preludes from Henry Purcell’s harpsichord suites. The Suite is a simple but effective arrangement of movements from the composer’s own suite

A unique and symbolic encounter: the most distinguished Czech conductor of the present time and a fabulous British orchestra communicate the profound messages in the works of great national composers.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This fairytale melodrama was adapted from a book by Algernon Blackwood A Prisoner in Fairyland for a West End theatre production staged during World War 1 with music by Elgar. Based on a new score which has been adapted by Sir Andrew Davis who also here conducts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra this is the most comprehensive recorded version to date. The two-disc set includes the incidental music with narrative by Simon Callow and an extended suite of freestanding orchestral movements and songs.

"Those who love this score as much as Elgar did - and I do - will welcome this new recording. ... All Elgarians must hear this superb set." – Paul Corfield Godfrey, MusicWeb International

"Performance: ***** Recording: **** This is a very valuable addition to the Elgar discography.” – Calum MacDonald, BBC Music [1/2012]

“[L]ovingly played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and features the excellent baritone soloist Roderick Williams.” – Andrew Clark, Financial Times [12/8-9/2012]

“Elgar’s score is enchanting – and Davis and the SCO deliver it with evident affection.” – Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times (Culture Magazine) [11/11/2012]

“Davis secures absolutely first-rate results from the Scottish CO. Elin Manahan Thomas’s light silvery soprano could hardly be more suited to the parts of the laughter and Jane-Anne, while Roderick Williams is in glorious voice throughout. Everything has been captured by the microphones with ingratiating amplitude, bloom and glow.” – Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone [11/2012]

"[T]he songs are delivered with just the right lightness of touch by soprano Elin Manahan Thomas and baritone Roderick Williams. ***" – Andrew Clements, The Guardian [10/26/2012]

Classical Music

Classical Music

The orchestra relishes Delius’s contrasts.

It is a delight to welcome performances of two of Delius’s American-inspired works by forces from Florida, where Delius lived from 1892 to 1895. Although Sea Drift, a setting of a poem by Whitman, is overtly about an American subject, the music is more universal than specifically American. While the initial drafts of Appalachia were made in Paris the year after Delius left Florida - Marco Polo, Naxos’s sister label, once had a recording (8.220452) of this earlier version in their catalogues under the title of American Rhapsody - the work was very substantially expanded to the form we have it here some eight years later, long after Delius had returned to Europe.

I first heard Sea Drift in the original Beecham recording issued on a limited edition Delius Society release of four 78s (now on Naxos) - I still have them. Beecham’s account of the score remains a marvel of sympathetic identification with the spirits of both Whitman and Delius. Unfortunately all of his recordings - and there are a good many of them, from studio and live broadcasts, not all currently available - are in mono. This is a score which absolutely demands the atmosphere of stereophonic sound. Similarly Beecham never recorded Appalachia in stereo, and his last (mono) LP (reissued by Sony) suffered from a baritone who had seemingly been chosen for his ability to sing Danish for the coupled recording of the Arabesque rather than any ability to sing sympathetically in English for the closing ‘negro spiritual’ section of Appalachia. One cannot possibly accuse Leon Williams of sounding un-American, but the tone of his voice is nevertheless rather English and rather too polite. He is not helped by the rather close proximity of the microphone, which brings him closer than the rest of the performers rather than blending him into the whole. Bryn Terfel, in his Chandos recording of Sea Drift with Richard Hickox (coupled with the Songs of Sunset and Songs of Farewell), digs far more deeply into the meaning of the words than Williams does here. The emotion of the latter is too generalised, and his voice lacks the light and shade of Terfel or John Shirley-Quirk on Hickox’s earlier Decca recording.

Appalachia fares rather better in this reading. The orchestra relishes the contrasts in Delius’s set of variations, with a nicely winsome touch in passages such as the waltz variation at 19.57; Beecham allowed a very gusty breath of the ballroom to intrude here. Earlier they are beautifully atmospheric in the passage from 17.01 which recalls Delius’s Florida opera The magic fountain. The chorus is nicely distanced in their brief interjections in the earlier variations, and come into their own with the own variation at 27.50, when they appear to move closer. Unfortunately the close microphone placement given to Williams at 31.52 serves only to emphasise how precisely English is his diction, and the choir are now very far forward indeed, which brings a sense of stridency which is entirely foreign to the Delius idiom. The passage at 33.28 sounds uncomfortably like the closing titles for a Hollywood Western - not at all the area of America that Delius had in mind.

This Naxos disc duplicates exactly the contents of one of Richard Hickox’s earliest recordings of British music, issued originally on an Argo LP in 1980, with Shirley-Quirk at the peak of his form in the baritone solos, which is certainly a reading which deserves to be in any Delius collection - it remains available from Arkiv Music . The Naxos recording is more immediate in general sound than the analogue Hickox, but the latter has plenty of atmosphere and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - many of whose members must have played this music under Beecham - respond with affection to Hickox’s somewhat slower tempos. Indeed Sanderling could sometimes be accused of hurrying, as at the baritone entry at 2.58 where the soloist sounds a bit hustled. It is important to keep Delius’s music moving, not allowing it to stagnate, but the flow can be maintained without undue haste; Sanderling shaves nearly four minutes off Hickox’s speeds in his earlier recording, almost a fifth of the whole duration of a fairly short work. Beecham, even with the constraint of 78 sides, was slower than this, and Delius always expressed his conviction that this conductor understood his music better than anyone else.

It is always a suspicion that when one knows a particular performance well one might be allowing nostalgia to colour reactions to a performance. To test this I played the recording of Sea Drift to a friend of mine who, although he knew and loved the poem, did not previously know the music at all. He like me vastly preferred Hickox, observing that although that performance was noticeably slower, it at the same time had a sense of purposeful motion that Sanderling lacked. He also actually preferred the more integrated sound of the older recording.

Naxos’s cover photograph by Giorgio Fochesato is particularly beautiful and appropriate, and the booklet commendably includes the complete texts of both works. The orchestra and chorus both perform superbly; it is nice to hear a really big choir sing this music - 137 singers are listed - as Delius would have expected in his earlier performances. They maintain pitch even in the most exposed passages of Sea Drift.

-- Paul Corfield Godfrey, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

"Hickox's superior Elgarian credentials are immediately established in the glorious orchestral "Meditation", where his conducting demonstrates a noble flexibility, sensitivity to dynamic nuance and feeling for climax that are wholly beguiling. Equally, the Chandos production team see to it that the familiar Elgarian 'glow'-.-a component largely missing from Sir Charles Groves's rival Liverpool recording—is in generous supply; indeed, the engineering, sumptuous yet nicely detailed, comes close to the ideal. The LSO respond for their Associate Conductor with playing that is both warm-hearted and alert; as ever, the London Symphony Chorus contribute to proceedings in exemplary, splendidly disciplined fashion..."

- Gramophone, (From the original 1993 release.)

This re-release of The Light of Life by Sir Edward Elgar forms part of the new Hickox Legacy commemorative series on Chandos Records, leading up to (and continuing beyond) the fifth anniversary, in Nov 2013, of the conductor’s untimely death.

The Light of Life, an oratorio for soprano, contralto, tenor, and baritone soloists, full choir and orchestra, is a lesser-known but imposing work by the composer who brought us the mighty Dream of Gerontius. The story concerns the blind beggar whose sight Christ restored. The words are taken from the Gospel of St John, with additions by the Reverend Edward Capel Cure.

Elgar proposed to call this his first oratorio Lux Christi, but his publishers persuaded him to provide an English title: as the work was written with the 1896 Three Choirs Festival at Worchester in mind, the concern was that an Anglican cathedral festival might detect a Roman Catholic bias… Elgar complied, and the work was given the more suitable title by which we know it today.

Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were joined on this recording by the soloists Judith Howarth, Linda Finnie, Arthur Davies, and John Shirley-Quirk.

- Chandos

Another re-release from Hickox’s classic recordings finds us knee-deep in lesser-known and widely varied works of Gustav Holst. The Suite de Ballet is one of Holst’s lighter orchestral pieces, worked colorfully with a slightly French flair. Song of the Night for solo violin shows the composer in a confident and imaginative Romantic frame of mind. Finally, the comic chamber opera The Wandering Scholar was one of Holst’s latest works, stripped down to only the barest necessities. Hickox’s lively performance was hailed as inspiring “full-blooded music-making” throughout.