DELIUS: THE FOUR VIOLIN SONATA

These performances received Gramophone's "Recording of the Month" award for June 1997, as well as a 1998 Gramophone "Critic's Choice" award.
REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (11-12/97, p.186) - "...The instrumental ensemble is very fine, and Christine Brandes has a lovely, fresh soprano that sails through this music with melting ease....The sound is warm and congenial..."

CLASSICS FOR A SUMMER EVENING

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Cambridge Trinity College Choir. Conductor: Richard Marlow.

STRAVINSKY, ET AL.: MUSIC FOR

One of the charms of this Purcell garland is the way Marlow explores the tonal potential of his singers, hardening and rounding voices as the music demands.

"It is a staggering fact", Peter le Huray's note tells us, "that, apart from the funeral anthem Thou knowest, Lord, Henry Purcell had composed every piece that is recorded here by the time he had reached his twenty-fifth birthday." What a time it must have been when the Chapel Royal establishment was furnished with so many brilliant young people, fired with the adventure of restocking the service lists with music after the 15 years of the Commonwealth, when the Chapel had been disbanded. The patronage of Charles II is often mentioned in terms of his fondness for music which would make his foot tap. Much of the music here, one can only assume, was sung when he was elsewhere, since only four of the anthems would have found favour if the legend be true, and the feel of a collegiate sing-in is generally as strong as in the pre-Commonwealth church. Apart from Blow up the trumpet in Sion, the Jubilate, I will sing unto the Lord and Iwas glad we are in a world of deeply personal expression which does not exclude but does not need an audience. The anguished pleading of Remember not, Lord, our offences and Hear my prayer, 0 Lord belongs to the singers. Overhearing it, one can perceive only half its power. Even the awesome penitence of the Funeral Sentences, sung at Queen Mary's funeral and shortly after at the composer's, casts no net towards the congregation. The majesty of death in the presence of God is chillingly conveyed. That liturgical problem child Benedicite omnia opera stretches even Purcell's tolerance a little and his in-house setting is more fun to sing than to hear. This performance makes more sense of it than any I have heard.

One of the charms of this Purcell garland is the way Marlow explores the tonal potential of his singers, hardening and rounding voices as the music demands. One is tempted at first to miss the plaintive innocence of boys' voices, but I doubt if anyone could get much nearer Purcell's technical requirements than this. Those same sopranos who breathed the warm passion of Parry (reviewed above) are cooled and polished with ice cubes and the altos likewise (tenors and basses freeze in sympathy)—as in the final item, where every turn of the harmonic screw in Hear my prayer, O Lord is calculated to grip the heart. Even though this can only mean the most to those who sing it, no listener could fail to search his conscience as it is sung. My only complaint concerns the maddeningly unobtrusive organ parts, cooing so modestly. However, this is a small matter in so well conceived and so well executed a presentation, backed by first-class engineering.

– Gramophone [9/1987]

M. HAYDN: PRO FESTO SANCTORUM

A vibrant selection of pictorial-impressionist exotica.

This disc made little impression when first issued and the undertow caused by the fall of Conifer delivered the coup de grace. It certainly deserves better if you have a taste for Russian nationalism.

Mtzyri is a nice piece of Russo-Oriental pictorial-impressionist exotica. Its elements include a Sheherazade-sinuous song for solo violin and the minaret and the muezzin are never far away. Think in terms of a more lucidly orchestrated brother of Balakirev's Tamara and the tragic-tormented aspects of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred. It’s all done with real conviction and soprano Barainsky (13:20) holds an impressive high note with throbbing invincibility.

The Symphony is lively enough and wends its way between Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov - nearer to Tchaikovsky. The quiet shuddering footfall in the third movement recalls the Capriccio Italien.

The booklet notes - now standard in ArkivMusic licensed discs - are by Toccata's Martin Anderson and are therefore a rewarding read in their own right. They are in English, French and German. They paint in the details of the life and music with a fine brush.

A minor gripe is that despite there being plenty of space we have only one attractive segment of the Caucasian Sketches - the composer's only claim to popularity. There was room for the whole suite.

This is a handsome offering and something to tantalise until we can hear his other works. There are six operas including The Last Barricade (1933-34) which has as its subject the Paris Commune. We would do well in our safety and superiority not to hold against him that, as the times dictated, ‘patriotic’ pieces were required and were delivered: Song of Stalin, Hymn to Work, Voroshilov March, The Year 1917. Further afield there is a Catalan Suite and a four movement work, Karelia - possibly intended as his Second Symphony. Other folk-influenced material include An Evening in Georgia, Musical Pictures of Uzbekistan, On the Steppes of Turkmenistan and Turkish Fragments.

If you would like to delve beyond this disc try Naxos 8.553405 (Caucasian Sketches – suites 1 and 2), Marco Polo 8.223629 (Yar-Khmel, Ossian Tableaux, Jubilee March and Episode from life of Schubert etc) and Marco Polo 8.220217 (Symphony 1 and Turkish Fragments).

Gary Brain is a sensitive and confident advocate for this largely unknown music. It is to his credit that he continues to champion the wilder periphery. His discography includes the Truscott Symphony (Marco Polo) and a cycle of orchestral discs presenting music by Polish-Swiss composer, Czeslaw Marek (Koch International).

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Includes anthem(s) by Orlando Gibbons (Renaissance). Ensembles: Fretwork, Cambridge Trinity College Choir. Conductor: Richard Marlow. Soloists: Christopher Allsop, Philip Rushforth.

FAURÈ: PIANO WORKS VOL 1 KATH

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (11-12/97, p.215) - "...These tunes should be familiar to Episcopalians above all, but also to Methodists, who share the same heritage in hymns up to a point. But as music they will impress anyone who understands the genre."

This coupling of Symphonies 1 and 5 is second to none, offering new insights in every movement of both symphonies.

...[T]his new Handley coupling of Nos. 1 and 5 is second to none... [T]he pungent force of the opening statement is very arresting indeed, sharply pointed and lean... The forward momentum has enormous thrust and even more vitality and edge than with Hickox, while the contrasting evocative episode has an almost eerie delicacy of texture and feeling, yet never quite loses its moments of wistful amiability. Handley moves on relentlessly and thrillingly to complete the movement in 9'51'' with a coda full of vibrant energy. His Andantino then relaxes completely, opening with delectable delicacy... In the fugal finale, Handley resolutely follows the composer’s con fuoco marking... The RPO are on their toes and there is the most delicate, bravura scherzando tracery from wind and strings, a nice touch of piquant humour at the engagingly lighthearted piccolo interlude (4'30'') and a dramatic final chorus from the full orchestra for the tune which ends the work so exuberantly and positively...

The superb Fifth Symphony ought by now to be in the concert repertory and as popular as other more famous Fifths. It has some marvellous themes and its scoring shows the composer at his most colourfully imaginative... In the first movement...Handley takes the composer’s Tempestoso marking literally (8'44'' against the composer’s 10'31''): the result sounds much more avant-garde, more dissonant in effect; in the scherzo, too, Handley really is Con fuoco and the irony is pungently emphasized at the expense of geniality. But in the slow movement Handley’s more restrained lyricism is touching by its withdrawn sparseness of sentiment, and at the work’s close the uplift of the ‘big tune’ is expansively forceful and one’s spirits rise and stay risen, for all the ambivalence of the gentle close... I enjoyed this disc very much indeed: it has new insights to offer in every movement of both symphonies. Buy it by all means.

-- Ivan March, Gramophone [10/1996]

Malcolm Arnold is the master of what might be described as the 'quarter-hour concerto'. Neo-classical in scale and aim, the genre demonstrates his brilliant ability to compress his style, and write for particular performers with jewelled concision, adopting neo-classical stylistic patterns—as in the Double Violin Concerto written in 1962 with Yehudi Menuhin and Alberto Lysy in mind—but also letting his lyrical gift blossom too in amiable, often catchy tunes.

These four works, all involving string orchestra alone, provide outstanding examples of the genre, and are beautifully performed with excellent soloists—two of them principals in the Philharmonia Orchestra, of which Mark Stephenson has also been a member—to provide the first recording by a talented new group, London Musici. Stephenson, a cellist in the Philharmonia, is the guiding spirit of London Musici, and on this showing both he as conductor and the London Musici strings richly deserve the confidence of Conifer, who have signed them up for a long-term series of recordings.

The work new to records is the Double Concerto and as Hugo Cole points out in his intensive study of Arnold's music, just published by Faber (Malcolm Arnold: An introduction to his music), the example of Bach's Double Violin Concerto has provided an obvious model in the way that the two soloists chase each other's tails in rapid figuration. Kenneth Sillito and Lyn Fletcher are most sweetly matched in writing which provides the severest demands on purity of intonation.

The other three concertos have all been recorded before, and I should like to take this opportunity to urge EMI to reissue their fine versions of all of them on CD. It would make an excellent reissue on the Studio label to have the four concertos (the Clarinet, Horn, Oboe and Trumpet) contained on Norman Del Mar's excellent LP with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta (EL270264-1, 8/85) supplemented by one or other of the EMI recordings of both the flute concertos (nla). It is rather disconcerting to find on the Conifer issue that no one in charge of labelling seems to be aware that this Clarinet Concerto and this Flute Concerto are each the first of two which Arnold has written. As to the performances on this new issue, they are a match for any competition, with Richard Watkins in the Second Horn Concerto, for example, every bit as brilliant as the late Alan Civil on the EMI issue. He may not be quite so extraordinarily wide in his tonal range, but he is weighter in the slow movement and even brisker in the finale.

Urgency marks out all the London Musici performances, with Michael Collins in the Clarinet Concerto No. 1, faster and more resilient than Janet Hilton was on EMI, and with Karen Jones in the Flute Concerto No. 1 very purposeful in the spiky writing for flute, which exceptionally avoids the low chalumeau register throughout the work.

Remarkable in all four works is the rich resonance of the London Musici string ensemble. You would expect that such a sound came from a band much larger, and no doubt it was a help to make the recording in the warm, helpful acoustic of The Maltings at Snape. I look forward to more London Musici recordings, promised by Conifer at the rate of three a year. The next, due this autumn, will be of Mendelssohn's string symphonies.'

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [8/1989]

ADAM: GISELLE ERMLER, ROYAL O