Lyrita
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Hurlstone: Variations, Magic Mirror Suite / Braithwaite
Benjamin, Stevens, Panufnik, Bax & Berkeley: Works for Strin
Berkeley: The One Act Operas - Dinner Engagement, Cataway, & Ruth
Berkeley’s first opera, Nelson, was put on at Sadler’s Wells in 1954. The others were performed by the English Opera Group which had been founded by the young Benjamin Britten, Joan Cross, Eric Crozier and Peter Pears in 1946. In the same year as the Nelson premiere Berkeley’s first one-acter, A Dinner Engagement, featured at Aldeburgh. Aldeburgh was also the scene of Ruth in 1956 and Castaway in 1967. Each work inhabits its own world, and each finds Berkeley’s musical imagination delivering new sounds to match the drama.
Cannon: Lord of Light, String Quartet & 5 Chansons de femme
Alwyn: String Quartets Nos. 6-9 / Villiers Quartet
William Alwyn’s musical style is in the main of a romantic nature firmly grounded in tonality, notwithstanding some forays into modernity, calling on dissonance and freedom of form when he felt the need. This approach can be keenly felt in the works included on this album, all of which were completed when he was aged between eighteen and twenty-five. The medium of the string quartet held a long and lasting fascination for Alwyn, which began during the earliest years of his composing career. He was to compose a total of sixteen string quartets between the years 1920 and 1984. Alwyn considered that the string quartet was the ‘most intimate of mediums’ and reveled in the challenge to provide interesting material in which to balance the four instruments. The sixteen string quartets that he was to compose can be divided into two groups; the first thirteen quartets were composed between 1920 and 1936, and the last three quartets were composed between 1953 and 1984.
Divertimentos & Sinfoniettas
Rands: Concerto for Piano & Orchestra - Music for Shoko: Aub
Simpson: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6 / Davis, London Symphony; Groves, London Philharmonic
Robert Simpson wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1972 in response to a commission by the London Symphony Orchestra. The first performance of the symphony took place on 3 May 1973 at the Royal Festival Hall, under the direction of Andrew Davis. Another London performance took place on 29 March 1984, again in the Royal Festival Hall, with the Philharmonia, the conductor again being Andrew Davis. In both cases audience and press reception was unanimously enthusiastic. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in a review in the Sunday Times headed “Power of Robert Simpson”, detected “some shattering personal crisis” and observed that the 4th and 5th Symphonies “compel all but the most rigidly advanced of listeners to take a closer look at this remarkable composer.” He found the Fifth “bolder, tougher and more mysterious in substance.” Simpson’s Sixth Symphony, of 1977, was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with funds provided by the Arts Council, who later sponsored the recording of the Sixth and Seventh, and also contributed to a number of later Commissions. It received its premiere performance on 8 April 1980 at the Royal Festival Hall with The London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Groves. Edward Greenfield wrote in his Guardian review: “Happily Dr Simpson’s metaphors are incidental to his genuinely musical imagination. So after the fragmentary germinal motives at the start, he turns very quickly to a bold tonal melody such as Nielsen might have written. One might even say that another of Dr Simpson’s great influences is represented too; he has often acknowledged his debt to Beethoven and here he has in effect written a Pastoral symphony for the 20th century, a view of nature observed not through the eye of the individual but through the microscope.”
Bush: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime & Trumpet Concerto
Francis Shaw: Piano Concertos
Elgar: Symphonies No 1 & 2 / Adrian Boult, London Po
Symphony No. 1 clearly was Boult's less favored of the two, and his EMI recording suffered from a degree of stiffness (especially compared to Barbirolli). But the Lyrita version has a raw, edgy quality--with swifter tempos and snappier rhythms--that's most welcome. The London Philharmonic sounds slightly less polished in 1968 than in 1976, but the playing is still excellent. Some collectors may find Lyrita's close and clear recorded sound preferable to EMI's plushy resonance (though the latter has greater dynamic range). As it stands, this Lyrita set, priced at 2-for-1, is an essential acquisition for Elgarians (and Boulters).
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com
Ireland, Delius & Bax: Cello Sonatas
Carwithen, Pitfield & Others: Music for Violin & Piano
Jones: Symphonies Nos. 12 & 13; Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life
A fine example of Jones at his most succinct and incisive, the Twelfth Symphony (1985) was commissioned by the Civil and Public Services Association as a farewell gift to their retiring General Secretary, Ken Thomas The Twelfth Symphony was first performed by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and conductor Erich Bergel at a gala concert at St David's Hall, Cardiff on 26 September 1985. The score bears a superscription consisting of a brief quotation from Pushkin, which reads 'Yet one last tale, And my chronicle is ended'. Daniel Jones's Symphony in memory of John Fussell (Symphony No.13) (1992) was first performed by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and conductor Richard Hickox at the Brangwyn Hall, Swansea on 17 October 1992 at that year's Swansea Festival. The work is a personal tribute to a friend of the composer, who was Swansea's Director of Music and City Organist from 1970 until 1990, the year of his death. The cantata Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life (1987) was written in memory of John Aeron-Thomas, whose widow Margaret commissioned the work. A devout Christian, John Aeron-Thomas had been a founder-member of the Swansea Festival, who commissioned Jones's First Symphony. among other works. The text is taken from poetry by George Herbert (1593-1633), which details his sacred journey.
Coke: Cello Sonatas Nos. 1-3 / Callaghan, Wallfisch
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REVIEW:
Composer and pianist Roger Sacheverell Coke (1912-1972) was born into an affluent family and produced a large body of works before a number of mental and physical health problems took their toll. Coke bankrolled concerts to promote his music, yet critical acclaim largely eluded him. Then again, his unabashedly Romantic idiom, heavily influenced by Rachmaninov, had fallen out of fashion. However, pianist Simon Callaghan’s passionate advocacy on Coke’s behalf may be spearheading a revival. If you like early 20th-century British Romantics like Arnold Bax, Cyril Scott, and York Bowen, you’ll definitely respond to Coke’s aesthetic.
His three sonatas for cello and piano date from between 1936 and 1941, and are characterized by lush yet never cloying harmonic invention, skillfully deployed balances between the instruments, slow movements that build toward intense climaxes, and occasional moments of wry humor–the First sonata’s jauntily acerbic Scherzo, for example (sound clip). Perhaps the Second sonata is the strongest and most substantial of the three, with its bold, declamatory motives and inventive textural interplay.
Callaghan and cellist Raphael Wallfisch throw themselves into each work wholeheartedly, embracing the idiom’s full-blooded heights and stark moments of respite with both abandon and sensitivity. Excellent, informative notes and fine engineering enhance this worthy addition to the chamber music catalog.
– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)
Holst: The Perfect Fool / Groves, BBC Northern Symphony
The opera opens with a Wizard working his mystical ways and summoning the spirits of air, fire and water in the form of a brilliant ballet. His plan is to wed the Princess who is destined to select a husband that very day. An older Mother enters with a drowsy sleep-prone son in tow. The Mother is obsessed with a prophecy her son will woo and win the Princess. There is an elixir of course and once drained the man who does so will be loved by the Princess. The Wizard tries some of this on the Princess. The Mother has already switched it for pure water while administering the elixir to her yawning son. The Wizard flies into a fury promising to bring death and destruction on everyone. He departs. A troubadour and a wanderer have appeared and pay songful court to the Princess which she is having none of. When the Princess sees the Fool she falls in love with him and asks him to marry her. He answers with the word ‘No’ but the whole scenario leaves you wondering about their future. The Wizard returns with his horrors but after some stern and encouraging words from the Mother all the Wizard’s fell crew are burnt to a crisp.
A BBC studio recording, broadcast on 7 May 1967.
REVIEW:
The opening dances, the best music in the work, invariably overbalance things given they all appear at the start. Charles Groves directs, and his Holst studio recordings – The Hymn of Jesus, Short Festival Te Deum, Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda Group 2 and the Ode to Death – were always an index of his excellence in this repertoire, as indeed in all his recordings of British music. He finds the core of Holst’s rhythmic vivacity in the dances, those piquant cross-rhythms and jaunty use of his own instrument, the trombone, and he is just as good in the limpidity of the Spirits of the Water dance as he is in the vivid pounding, Planets-like, of the Dance of Fire, with its eventful touches of Spanishry and convulsive, well-balanced percussion.
The role of the Wizard is taken by the bass Richard Golding and you can imagine him in the The Dream of Gerontius though I see that he was active in opera and sang in a Scottish performance of George Lloyd’s John Socman and in a TV performance of Arthur Bliss’ Tobias and the Angel. Given the strange temperature of the opera, it comes as a surprise that Holst can turn in a seemingly straightforwardly fine scene – try track nine – where the words are well set and the choral role is sensible. There’s more than a whiff of G & S though in the subsequent passage, and when the Troubadour appears (John Mitchinson), Holst pokes fun at Verdian posturing allowing the Princess, the fine Margaret Neville, to pastiche the Troubadour’s own pastiche. In the twelfth track one finds another G & S chorus, Wagnerian vengeance and a stock peasant character. There’s a brief sonic cataclysm in the thirteenth track, trumpets and percussion to the fore, that shows that Holst couldn’t quite suppress his instincts for drama and in fact the orchestration throughout is always apt and colourful.
Contralto Pamela Bowden has a strong role as The Mother and all the characters, singing or speaking, acquit themselves well. In the service of what, precisely, I’m not quite sure. There are lots of operas that really aren’t operas so maybe if you think of The Perfect Fool as a pantomime-ballet-pastiche operetta rather as one thinks of Lord Berners’s The Triumph of Neptune as a ballet-pantomime-harlequinade, you won’t be far wrong and you won’t be disappointed. Full credit to Lyrita for this retrieval however, though you’ll notice a few deviations from the libretto in the actual performance. Talking of this, the notes are contained in one booklet, the libretto in another. The box artwork has been well selected. This work has never appeared in full on disc before and the archive sound quality is excellent.
– MusicWeb International
Voices Of Our Ancestors
Paul Conway writes: “One of Musgrave’s most powerfully expressive and lavishly intricate vocal works, Rorate Coeli (1973) is scored for unaccompanied SATB choir. There are also five soloists (SSATB), who sing both as a quintet and as individuals. This dramatic and virtuosic piece shows an inventive approach to text-setting in its use of quasi-improvised musical effects. The Voices of our Ancestors (2014) is scored for brass quintet (horn, two trumpets, trombone and tuba), organ and SATB choir. Substantial and ambitious, The Voices of our Ancestors draws upon ancient texts from a number of linguistic sources, including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Egyptian and Chinese, all translated into English. Commissioned by Wells Cathedral, Missa Brevis, for SATB choir and organ (2017) was first performed by Wells Cathedral Choir, on the Feast of John the Baptist, Sunday 24 June 2018, in the presence of the composer. This compact setting of the Ordinary of the Mass has a reassuring, positive character with several of the sections concluding brightly on major chords.”
Maw: Orchestral Works / Mackenzie, Boughton, BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Nicholas Maw’s most fervent desire was to communicate directly with his audiences and produce material which performers would enjoy playing and Spring Music, written with the express purpose of diverting and entertaining an audience, finds the composer at his most uninhibited and freely expressive. Fresh, colorful and vibrant, this score has the exotic, open-hearted spirit of a curtain-raiser by William Walton or Alan Rawsthorne. In its final, slimmed-down version, it rapidly became one of Maw’s favorite pieces among his own output and he once described the long-breathed cello-led melody as ‘one of the best tunes I think I’ve actually ever written’. In 1995 Maw was commissioned by the BBC to write a work commemorating the 300th anniversary that year of the death of Purcell. Maw soon came to the conclusion that he wanted to round off his tribute piece with an example of a chaconne, a form in which Purcell was pre-eminent. The theme which Maw chose to embellish is derived from the first of his Life Studies for 15 solo strings. Taking his lead from Tchaikovsky, Maw decided that the main title should reflect precisely the reference vocabulary of the piece and so the piece became known for a while as Romantic Variations. Later still the title was altered to its definitive form of Voices of Memory: Variations for Orchestra. Described by Andrew Burn as ‘a major contribution to the genre’, the Sonata for Solo Violin was requested by Jorja Fleezanis, to whom the work is dedicated. In Maw’s Sonata for Solo Violin, the constraints of writing for a single stringed instrument in a four-movement, large-scale work are deftly surmounted by the composer’s gift for melodic lines and rhythmic invention. Each movement has a vivid sense of color, formal logic and onward momentum so that the writing, however demanding it may be, never suggests an arid study or a shallow technical exercise.
Jones: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 5
Musgrave: Concerto For Orchestra, Clarinet Concerto, Etc / De Peyer, Tuckwell
Born in Scotland but now resident in the United States, Musgrave’s career and output have always matched breadth with a rather single-minded determination to work as she has wanted to, and not as fad or fashion might have suggested. An example would be her adherence to the dramatic qualities of her music in their conscious rejection of tonality while at the same time avoiding the formality of serialism. Thus the concerto as a genre proved a suitable vehicle for the resultant exploration of structure with gusto. Particularly since, for Musgrave, her music’s performers are more actors than conveyors of a pre-existing score. That’s very evident in the orchestral pieces here.
The Concerto for Orchestra is a work full of tension, tonal and temporal. Indeed, it explores the notion of instruments ‘in revolt’ against the conductor. There is a certain liberality of interpretation (freedom to repeat, with rubato) which is designed to strain the very fabric of the music. For this to be effective the playing has to be impeccable; every note has to be heard; every attack and decay controlled; every timbre distinct. And so it is on this landmark recording by another provincial orchestra (the Scottish National Orchestra) than that to which the work was dedicated (the CBSO). The playing is crisp, vibrant, rounded, tuneful; yet it fully conveys the apparent waywardness of line which is in fact the very essence of the concerto. The supremacy of the clarinet before, throughout and after the stunning tutti and crescendi is key to the work and emerges with great effect here. Exemplary.
Musgrave’s Clarinet Concerto has the distinction of requiring the soloist to promenade through the orchestra. It’s a logical progression after the Concerto for Orchestra - again exploring aural space. Musgrave was (and has remained) fascinated by the way sounds group in space as well as time and ways in which (orchestral) soloists can wrest the lead from the conventional director of events, the conductor. Once again there are extremes of volume and texture. Once again, the forces of - this time - the LSO are more than up to the task, playing with a certainty and conviction that carry the work as far, surely, as Musgrave intended it to go: these were the days before sounds were savoured exclusively for their own sake with emphasis on massed percussion or aleatoric devices. Notable (as was the case with the Concerto for Orchestra) is a major part for harp; there is also a prominent accordion part.
The Horn Concerto also builds upon Musgrave’s concept of ‘Space music’: in this piece members of the horn section themselves move around the hall. There are also ‘prepared’ instruments – a piano with screws, a book and a metal bar; and a harp with paper threaded through some of its strings. This is not a frenetic or self-conscious work; rather a virtuosic and lyrical concerto, although the extent to which the leading role of the horn soloist is established yet undermined confers an iconoclastic quality on the piece. As de Peyer’s in the Clarinet Concerto, Tuckwell’s (the work’s dedicatee) articulation and phrasing in this concerto are outstanding.
Monologue is the earliest (and shortest) piece on this disc; it does experiment with serialism. Again, this is a piece of contrasts and music distinguished by Musgrave’s characteristic ‘tumultuoso’ marking, it still lives in the world of contrasts and the sort of subdued rhetoric which was to interest Musgrave later on in her career when composing vocal and operatic works. Again, beautifully played by Musgrave herself.
Excursions is interesting in that it was written for four hands on one piano also as a teaching piece: one ‘easy part’ for pupils to play with their teachers literally close at hand. In the first four of the eight pieces the easy part is the lower one; in the second four the top one. Miniatures they are – but with a substantial impact. Although they do have descriptive (of car journey) titles, these are only printed in small type at the end of each piece. Inasmuch as the material in Excursions is intended to emphasise learning, composer clearly has much respect for pupil. She is joined by Malcolm Williamson.
This is a disc whose primary interest will certainly be historic: it makes available again music that made waves in the early 70s, but music that has clung to a place in the repertoire – and justly so. Played with conviction and delight by the Scottish National and London Symphony orchestras under Gibson, Del Mar and Musgrave herself, it rightly acts as testament to just how significant and appealing her works were then. Perhaps it will revive interest in them now.
-- Mark Sealey, MusicWeb International
Lennox Berkeley: Nelson - Opera in three acts / Howarth, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers
The opera centres on the love affair of Horatio Nelson, and Emma, Lady Hamilton. Completed in 1951, it was first performed in full in 1954. The British Embassy in Naples is the scene of a birthday party for Nelson, arranged to celebrate his victory at the Nile. He appears with ‘the sadness of the world upon his lips’ and while the other guests are dancing, Nelson, with Emma Hamilton, the Ambassador’s wife, beside him, hears a servant foretell his future unhappiness. This releases the passionate feelings of the couple for each other and the conflict in their lives.
Jones: Piano Quintet
Jones: String Quartet
Jones: Brass Quintet "Quinquifed"
