Alongside their British Isles Overtures series, the BBC NOW and the conductor Rumon Gamba launch a project to bring often neglected symphonic poems by British composers to wider attention and fame. This first volume presents some of the most individual, yet rarely heard, British tone poems written in the early twentieth century, by composers ranging from the long-established Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Alwyn to Balfour Gardiner and Granville Bantock, giants in their time. Works include Bantock's atmospheric The Witch of Atlas, based on a poem by Shelley, Frederic Austin's symphonic rhapsody Spring, Gardiner's evocatino of summer A Berkshire Idyll, recorded here for the first time, and Gurney's mysterious A Gloucestershire Rhapsody, never performed before 2010.

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REVIEW:

This is quite a nice find for lovers of British orchestral music. Spring, by the almost-forgotten Frederic Austin, consists of five fleeting glimpses of the season, not profound but immensely tuneful, and it is an all-but-unknown work. A Gloucestershire Rhapsody, by the hugely underrated Ivor Gurney, has "an elegiac quality absent in the innocent, pre-war sound worlds of even a Ralph Vaughan Williams, and more than that it seems to carry an indefinable intensity. Features fluent, enthusiastic performances by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba and excellent engineering accomplished at the BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff.

– All Music Guide (James Manheim)