Enjoyable and recorded so as to flatter. A remarkable effort all-round.

Arthur Benjamin was born in Australia. A fighter pilot in WW1 he is reputed to have tangled with the German ace Hermann Goering later to achieve infamy alongside Adolf Hitler. Benjamin was supported by Thomas Dunhill into an RCM open scholarship to London. His claim to popular fame rests on the Jamaican Rumba, based on the tune, Mango Walk. He wrote a great deal of film music of which these three samplings are a small part. At another level he wrote some estimable concert music including three string-instrument concertos (Dutton), two works for piano and orchestra (Everest), a masterly Symphony (Lyrita and Marco Polo), light orchestral pieces (ABC), chamber music (Dutton; ABC) and much else including piano pieces (Lyrita, ABC).

The little four movement suite for The Conquest of Everest speaks of the grandiloquent confidence of the New Elizabethans in Coronation year. Its sense of human striving, of the awesome scale of nature and of valiant endeavour is frankly and impressively expressed. Strings surge and brass ring out in a chest-swelling blend of Walton with a dash of Korngold. This documentary film had a narration written by Louis MacNeice. Wind back two decades to The Storm Clouds Cantata from The Man Who Knew Too Much. There you can hear a more doom-inflected accent and a pall of darkness. The choral writing is influenced by Walton’s Belshazzar premiered only three years earlier. There’s also a touch of Rimsky in the chirpy woodwind at 5:10 and of Tchaikovsky at 5:40. It’s a dramatic little piece to words by Dominic Wyndham-Lewis (1891-1969) – and yes the words are there in full on pages 40 and 41 of the booklet. Hitchcock re-made the film in 1955 and Herrmann re-used and slightly extended the Benjamin cantata. Herrmann is also seen conducting the cantata as part of the re-made film. The Waltz and Galop puts in a Viennese appearance in An Ideal Husband. This ersatz contribution is a convincing piece which catches the manner rather well and strikes parallels with a work I often cite in such comparisons, Barber’s gloriously indulgent Souvenirs orchestral suite not to mention Benjamin’s own Cotillion. There’s also a touch of Herrmann’s later score for The Magnificent Ambersons. Herrmann conducted this bipartite piece for his well known 1970s collection of British film music.

Londoner, Leighton Lucas was at first a dancer, part of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This connection arches over his music. Various ballets are prominent in his worklist. In 1923 he conducted Boughton’s The Immortal Hour during its first and greatest celebrity. He also essayed concert music including the Partita (1934) for piano and chamber orchestra, the Sinfonia brevis (1936) for horn and eleven instruments (said by Philip Lane to be touched with the influence of gamelan long before Britten and McPhee), a clarinet concerto (Dutton), the Ballet de la reine (ASV), and various works for brass band.

The Lucas scores included in the second part of this disc are to films many of which were shown during Sunday TV matinees in the 1950s and 1960s. In those far-off days there were only two or three channels and 405 line analogue broadcasts. It’s a treat to hear this music now in such good sound. The Yangtse Incident material is predominantly light and jaunty – a touch at tr. 10 of Walton’s Crown Imperial strikes a glancing blow off Coates. Dedication from Portrait of Clare is a luxuriant arrangement of Schumann’s Widmung from Myrthen. The Prelude and Dam Blast from The Dam Busters will do very nicely thank you. The brass sing their souls out. There’s a calmly succulent trumpet solo at 2:13 alongside the nobility and swagger. This is more than just the famous march and we do get a Tapiola-inflected insight at 4:10 into the murderous floods released by the successful breaching of the dams. The Stage Fright Rhapsody is another in that specialist genre of sub-Rachmaninovian pocket piano concerto. It’s very effective too and can happily stand alongside similar examples by Bath, Addinsell and Rózsa. The Suite from Ice Cold in Alex is in three movements – a hammeringly tense movement which may have given John Williams the idea for one of his Star Wars themes and a lushly romantic interlude indebted to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. There’s also a scorching march with a touch of Handel about it and a Scotch snap. The compact suite from the travelogue This Is York is commanding, playful, folksy (III) and thoughtful. The second movement doffs the hat to Honegger and Pacific 231. Back finally to the Second World War for the grand March-Prelude from the wartime documentary Target for Tonight. Ireland’s Epic March puts in an appearance. The Chandos team also remind us of their splendid way with the brass and especially with the BBCNOW’s horns.

The music here may be short-winded but it is enjoyable and is recorded so as to flatter. Neither will the documentation let you down. It shows the same flair and dedication that has gone into rescuing and reconstituting this music from soundtracks. A remarkable effort all-round.

If you have liked the other discs in the series then you will need this one as well.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

I cannot remember having enjoyed this music more. Petri Sakari’s performance is totally unaffected, plain and full of enthusiasm; the players sound as if they are enjoying this score and communicate their pleasure.

– Gramophone, reviewing original release

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This reissue features performances of incidental music by Jean Sibelius, recorded in 1992 by Petri Sakari and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Sakari’s recordings with this orchestra during the 1990s made a significant contribution to the discography of Scandinavian music, notably of works by Grieg, Sibelius, and Madetoja.

Sibelius composed the score for King Christian II, a play by his friend Adolf Paul, in 1898 and it anticipates the richly romantic sound of the First Symphony. Here the usual suite is expanded by the inclusion of two movements from the incidental music not usually heard: the Menuetto and "The Fool’s Song."

Maurice Maeterlinck’s much-performed yet complex psychological drama Pelléas et Mélisande inspired works by Debussy, Fauré, Schoenberg, and Sibelius, whose incidental music consists mainly of interludes in a uniquely dark, subdued, and typically Nordic vein.

Altogether sweeter is the delicate and poetic score for Swanwhite, August Strindberg's "idealistic play of pure beauty." Sibelius condensed the original music into a charming concert suite of seven movements, five of which are recorded here.

Edward Gardner and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra present Volume 2 in their series Mendelssohn in Birmingham; this time they perform Symphonies Nos 1 and 3 and the Overture to Ruy Blas. The impressive first volume was roundly praised, International Record Review commending the ‘powerfully engaging and alert performances’, while The Sunday Times made it their ‘Album of the Week’.

Among the fruits of his prodigiously gifted youth were thirteen string symphonies, which Mendelssohn composed privately as ‘practice’ pieces. At age fifteen he returned to the last of these, expanded the orchestration, and published it as the first of his mature numbered symphonies. As heard here, this energetic work, bursting with youthful high spirits, shows the influence of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, but that influence is always absorbed in a personal way.

Although numbered as the third of five, the ‘Scottish’ Symphony was actually the last which Mendelssohn composed. Inspiration for it had come while Mendelssohn was visiting Edinburgh in 1829. He was immediately moved to compose the brooding melody that begins and ends the work, but not until 1842 did he actually finish this masterpiece.

No such time span was needed to complete the Overture to Victor Hugo’s tragedy Ruy Blas, which was commissioned only three days before the production’s opening night. Mendelssohn loathed Hugo’s drama and though the opening is suitably sombre, the rest of the overture disregards the play’s form and character, concluding in celebration where Hugo’s story culminates in murder and suicide.

Review:

Gardner conducts these pieces with a highly satisfying blend of freedom and discipline. In some of Mendelssohn's more lyrical moments you need a metronome to judge his rhythmic flexibility, so naturally does he apply it, and throughout the disc the strings articulate with splendid vigor.

– BBC Music Magazine

Recorded in: New Broadcasting House, Manchester 16,17 December 1991 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Brian Pidgeon Sound Engineer(s) Don Hartridge

This exceptional multi-album set offers Chandos’s complete Lutoslawski series, featuring a string of the composer’s masterpieces performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner in exemplary partnership, along with some of Chandos’ finest soloists, and captured in surround-sound. It includes all five albums as well as the original booklets, and is offered at a highly discounted price. The featured soloists on these albums include soprano Lucy Crowe, tenor Toby Spence, baritone Christopher Purves, clarinetist Michael Collins, violinist Tasmin Little, cellist Paul Watkins, and pianist Louis Lortie.

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Review excerpts of some of the previously released volumes included in this set:

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Lutoslawski: Orchestral Works Vol. 4

The BBC Symphony Orchestra plays this sometimes tricky music with great proficiency and understanding, and Gardner’s inspiring leadership, plus first class Chandos sound, enables us to hear every strand of the texture.

– Fanfare

Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 2; Grave; Cello Concerto; Mala Suite

This disc is a further triumph in a series that looks like it’s becoming the finest overview yet of the work of one of the late 20th-century’s most significant composers.

– Fanfare

Lutowslawski: Vocal Works / Crowe

With the best lineup of soloists around and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, this was always going to be something a bit special, and it lives up to expectations.

– MusicWeb International

After winning the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand in 1839 and spending two years in Rome, Gounod should have gone on to study in Germany, but he managed in 1842 to persuade the authorities that he should remain in Rome to work on a symphony. In 1843 he visited Mendelssohn who (while trying to dissuade him from wasting his time on Goethe’s Faust!) urged him to write another symphony. We do not know how much of the First Symphony Gounod had completed by then, but it is not surprising that Mendelssohn figures as one of the key influences on both symphonies. After performances of individual movements in 1855, premieres were given of the First on 4 March that year and of the Second on 13 February 1856. Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrate outstanding precision and musicality in these unjustly neglected works.

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REVIEW:

There’s a spring in Tortelier’s step with the Icelanders, a sappy bounce to the opening Allegro molto. The strings are alert and light and the woodwinds attack Gounod’s melodious writing with élan. If Haydn is the influence on the First, it is Beethoven who looms large over the Second.

– Gramophone

Thirty years after having recorded Dvorák’s complete Symphonies on Chandos, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its laureate conductor, Neeme Järvi, tackle another romantic Czech composer, Julius Fucík, famous for his more than 400 polkas, marches, and waltzes, a mouth-watering selection of which is featured here.

Fucík studied violin in his early years, switching later to the bassoon, with a subsidiary in percussion and timpani. Playing in Austro-Hungarian regiments, he gained invaluable experience of writing for military band and became a very prolific composer of marches. The most famous of these is of course Entry of the Gladiators, completed in 1899 and soon performed throughout the world. Full of energetic, effervescent Bohemian cross-rhythms, tuneful brass melodies (often now associated with a circus atmosphere), but also more lyrical expressions, this album is a festival in itself. - Chandos

'Never was there a more complete triumph', wrote The Times after the premiere of Elijah by Mendelssohn. The performance, conducted by the composer at the 1846 Birmingham Music Festival, marked the beginning of the life of Elijah as one of the best-loved choral works in the repertoire, a status it still holds.

A grand oratorio in two parts, Elijah is very much composed in the spirit of Mendelssohn's baroque predecessors, combining the dramatic sweep of Handel with episodes of sublime meditation such as are found in Bach. It tells the story of the stern Old Testament prophet Elijah who preached against the idol worship of the Israelite people. Mendelssohn adapted the Biblical texts to produce intensely dramatic scenes depicting, for example, the resurrection of a dead youth, a contest of the gods, and Elijah's ascension into heaven on a fiery chariot.

This recording, made in April 1989, presents an all-star cast with Willard White in the title role and Rosalind Plowright, Linda Finnie, Arthur Davies, and Jeremy Budd singing the various supporting parts. Conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus is the late Richard Hickox, a musician who built an immense reputation for his masterful performances of choral music during his career. This release is a part of the ongoing Richard Hickox Legacy series.

Ives was and remains a great musical pioneer, and as such open to misunderstanding, but the first two of his symphonies hold onto conventional sonorities from the rich European legacy of the past. … These are both works with their origins in Ives’s student years, the First Symphony taking clear cues from great predecessors such as Dvo?ák, and with the flavour of Brahms and others. If you know your Nielsen symphonies you could almost swear that little descending A F# E theme in the Second Symphony might have leaked across to Denmark, and though this is as good as impossible it may give some idea of the character to be found here.

As I hear it, Sir Andrew Davis’s interpretations take that authentic approach, removing the wilder later works from the picture and approaching these scores as serious attempts to create grand personal statements based on the musical influences to hand at the turn of the century and, in the case of the First Symphony, being tamed by the conventions held as gospel by Ives’s teacher Horatio Parker. Parker both restrained the harmonic excesses of his student while at the same time introducing him to the greats of the Germanic tradition. Davis is sensitive to this, and you can hear Brahms in the shaping of the string notes of the melodic lines in the Second Symphony in particular. Ives’s grafting of American tunes onto his Romantic symphonic model has little effect in releasing the work from its historic constraints. Ives wasn’t writing for laughs, and ‘hamming-up’ the naïve strangeness and unusual confluence in either of these symphonies doesn’t help their cause. A side-effect of seeking refinement is indeed a loss of boisterous energy, but is that what Ives would have been after at this point?

Unencumbered by controversy and artificially introduced passions but filled with atmospheric expression and full of clarity in their adherence to the letter of these scores, I really quite like these performances, and look forward to what Sir Andrew Davis does with the later symphonies. That twinkle in his eye tells me this series might be starting out as something of a sleeper and, as with Ives himself, the best is yet to come.

– Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Chandos Records is delighted to present this new recording of Elgar’s choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius and the popular song cycle Sea Pictures. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus are conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, a peerless Elgarian who this year was awarded the prestigious Elgar Society Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the composer’s music. In Gerontius the soloists are Stuart Skelton, David Soar and Sarah Connolly, who also sings in Sea Pictures. This recording was made in the days leading up to their triumphant live performance of Gerontius in April 2014. Skelton was praised as “the ideal tenor for the role of Gerontius,” Soar described as “an implacable, dark-sounding Priest,” and Connolly, “a consummately polished Angel” (The Guardian).

This compilation at Classic Chandos price gathers exhilarating performances of some of the loudest orchestral pieces ever written. The powerful, characteristic Chandos sound is best revealed in these resounding recordings of popular works. So turn up the volume of your Hi-Fi, move away any glass or crystal, make sure your neighbors are either out, deaf, or very good friends...and enjoy!

Kalinnikov: Symphony No. 1 - Glazunov: The Sea, Op. 28 - Spr

Considering that it was for long the least-played and most poorly regarded of the tone-poems, Eine Alpensinfonie is now well represented on record and to regard it as a masterpiece is no longer to brand oneself as an eccentric. I was, and still am, very impressed by Haitink's recording on Philips which I described last year as the finest interpretation I had heard. I stand by that opinion, but Järvi put me to the test. Both conductors reach beyond the illustrative features of the work to its pantheism and its origins as a work about the 'Antichrist', whereas Solti (Decca) seems concerned only with the pictorial elements.

Although there is only about ten seconds' difference between their timings, Järvi is more expansive than Haitink in the last sections of the symphony, from the calm before the storm to the end. The crux of Haitink's interpretation is the mysticism he imparts to the Vision episode. On the whole, the Philips is a clearer, brighter recording—in this respect compare the Concertgebouw oboe and cor anglais in "Elegie" with the SNO's. And I suppose that taken as a whole, the Dutch orchestra is superior, but not by much. There is beautiful SNO string-playing in the "Entry into the Wood" and atmospheric and evocative playing of the "Alm" and "Summit" sections, with the brass in the latter really magnificent.

The addition of the four songs, and in such enchanting performances, gives the Chandos disc an advantage over its rivals. Felicity Lott's fresh and lustrous singing of Morgen! is one more manifestation of the miracle of this song, which seems to draw something individual from all its finest performers. That ability to convey true Straussian rapture which is the hallmark of Lott's singing is particularly evident in Freundliche Vision, and she is delightful in the lullaby Meinem Kinde and in the blithe Das Bächlein, which Strauss dedicated to Goebbeis with the best of misguided motives back in 1933.

-- Gramophone [12/1987]

Britten: Rape of Lucretia (The)

Carole Farley Sings Richard Strauss: Capriccio and Daphne Cl