The English Symphony Orchestra announces Adrian Williams as its John McCabe Composer-in-Association for 2019/20.

During this period, Williams' music will be showcased by the ESO. In addition to performances, recordings will also be made. Ken Woods, the ESO's Artistic Director, says:

"I only discovered Adrian's music very recently in 2017, but as soon as I encountered it, I realised I was listening to the work of one of the greatest composers of his generation.

"Adrian is just the kind of composer we had in mind when we established the 'John McCabe Composer-in-Association' chair, a creative artist of the highest calibre who will become an active part of the ESO family, and who we will try our utmost to support through performances and recordings. We couldn't be more excited to get to work with him this year."

ESO founder William Boughton first established the tradition of working closely with composers including Michael Tippett and Nicholas Maw. When Ken Woods was appointed ESO Principal Conductor in 2013, one of his first actions was to invite John McCabe to be ESO Composer-in-Association. Sadly, the partnership only lasted from 2013 until McCabe's untimely death from a brain tumour in 2015.

Woods commented: "It will forever be a source of deep regret that John's appointment as composer-in-association with the orchestra coincided almost exactly with the onset of his illness. There were so many more projects we wanted to do, and I know John bitterly regretted the times he was unable to travel to join us.

"John was so excited about the prospects for the partnership and was infinitely generous with his wisdom and energy, helping us to put his music in the right contexts. The video interviews we recorded as part of the association are fascinating - John could speak with awe-inspiring fluency on any musical topic.

"He was someone who could inspire and instruct the most expert professional musicians and engage with a general audience with wit and warmth." 

Following McCabe's death, the ESO permanently renamed its Composer-in-Association Chair in memory of McCabe. Philip Sawyers became the first McCabe Composer-in-Association (2015-18), followed by David Matthews, for the 2018-19 season.

A celebration of the publication of Kaikhosru Sorabji's Letters to Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) will combine music by both composers with an introductory talk and readings. 

The book has been edited by Brian Inglis and Barry Smith and was recently reviewed in the BMS E-News.

Sorabji's passionate Sonata no.1 for piano and Peter Warlock's quirky Folksong Preludes will be played by Gabriel Keen, while Mark Oldfield and Christopher Scobie will perform a selection of Warlock's much-loved songs.  

This article is the second in a series exploring this British composer and his recorded works.

The 9^th Symphony was written down in 2012 although Dr Johnson’s liner notes tell us it had been in his mind for many years and may be an unconscious memorial to his first wife who died in 2004.
 
It has three movements; a dynamic stormy first is followed by two which are in the form of Passacaglias, a form favoured by Britten.  The work is instantly arresting with a jagged swirling melody sweeping through the whole orchestra.  Thereafter much of the material is developed by different sections of the orchestra each maintaining their own character. 

Dr Johnson certainly understands the character of each instrument and section.  His writing is staggeringly assured for someone who had never heard any of his own orchestral music.  This is further shown in the following movements where the variations highlight different instrumental combinations. The first passacaglia has melodies of heart-breaking beauty that Dr Johnson subjects to brilliant variations.

The final movement has something of Stravinsky in the rhythms from about two minutes. The second passacaglia, a slow procession, builds to a huge dramatic climax and a hugely satisfying end to a remarkable symphonic utterance.

‘Communion Antiphon No. 14’ is scored for smaller forces, with piano, celeste, harp and glockenspiel standing in for the bells of St. Boniface Whitechapel.  The music has a calm ritualistic feeling to it, though fundamentally a beautifully coloured chorale, which may or may not be based on plain chant. 

‘Motet No.2’ is based on plainchant though the composer will not be drawn on which ones. I am not sure why he has called it a motet as it is entirely orchestral.  The conductor feels there is more affinity with Samuel Barber’s Essays for orchestra, and it is indeed as tightly argued as those masterworks.
 

PAUL RW JACKSON

‘The opening chords of the first movement are reminiscent of Debussy and Britten in their distinct timbres, and the entire work has a distinctly impressionistic flavour. [The composer’s] admiration of Fauré… is also evident in the harmonic language, while the idioms of English folksong and hymns, and melodic motifs redolent of John Ireland and the English Romantics remind us that this is most definitely a work by a British composer with an original musical vision.’     

Frances Wilson on ‘Airs of the Seasons’, a sonata for piano duet

If readers were asked to guess the subject of this review of a work premiered at St George’s Bristol in 2018, how many would be able to identify the composer as Ailsa Dixon (1932-2017) - indeed how many would have heard her name at all?   

Among the many women composers side-lined in musical history who are becoming the focus of new interest, Ailsa Dixon only began to receive her share of recognition in the last months of her life.  While there were a handful of performances during the 1980s and ’90s (notably by Ian Partridge, Lynne Dawson, and the Brindisi Quartet led by Jacqueline Shave), there followed several decades of almost complete neglect.  Then, in 2017, a work that had been lying in manuscript for thirty years was chosen for premiere as part of the London Oriana Choir’s Five15 project highlighting the work of women composers.   These things shall be, an anthem setting verses from a prophetic poem by John Addington Symonds, received its first performance in the spectacular glass-roofed concert hall surrounding the keel of the Cutty Sark, just five weeks before she died.  

Pictured above: Five 15 at the Cutty Sark, July 2017.  Photo: London Oriana Choir / Kathleen Holman

It was sung again at memorial concerts in London and Bristol, and is now showing signs of entering the choral repertoire, with subsequent performances by choirs in Oxford and Cambridge, and festivals from Little Missenden to Romsey Abbey.  

Pictured above: Ailsa Dixon (centre) at the premiere of These things Shall be in July 2017, with fellow composers Dobrinka Tabakova (left) and Cheryl Frances-Hoad (right).  Credit: London Oriana Choir / Kathleen Holman

Since her death, discoveries in Ailsa Dixon’s musical archive have stimulated a succession of new performances, including posthumous premieres for Airs of the Seasons in 2018, and a cycle of songs for soprano and string quartet, The Spirit of Love, forthcoming at St George’s Bristol in February 2020.  A recording of her complete works for string quartet is planned for 2021.  Her manuscript scores are now being digitised as part of a project in Finland to preserve the work of neglected female composers, and there are plans to deposit her archive at Heritage Quay, home to the British Music Collection.

Born Ailsa Harrison, she came from a musical family background: next to the piano in the cottage where she grew up was a portrait of her musical ancestor Feliks Janiewitz (1762-1848), the Polish composer and violinist who co-founded the first Edinburgh Festival. 

She studied the piano with Hilda Bor, took her LRAM, and went on to read music at Durham University in the early 1950s.  There was no formal tuition in composition, but it was there that she wrote her first work for string quartet (now lost), though it was to be some decades before she returned to composition in earnest.

Pictured above: Ailsa (with lute) and contemporaries at Durham in the early 1950s

The intervening period was spent teaching, singing and playing the lute, but her musical life took a new turn in 1976, when she undertook a production of Handel’s Theodora, in which she sang the title role, with her husband Brian conducting and a cast formed largely of her singing pupils.  The project left her with such withdrawal symptoms that afterwards, to fill the gap, she began to conceive an opera of her own.  Letter to Philemon, based on an episode in the life of St Paul, was performed in 1984 and proved to be the start of her most fertile period as a composer.

In the following two decades she wrote three works for string quartet (Nocturnal Scherzo, Sohrab and Rustum, and Variations on Love Divine), chamber works including a set of three Fugues on Biblical subjects, and the sonata for piano duet (4 hands) Airs of the Seasons.  Among her vocal compositions are many songs and duets, including settings of two Shakespeare sonnets for soprano and tenor, a cycle of 5 Songs of Faith and Joy for mezzo soprano and guitar, and Shining Cold, a vocalise for high soprano, ondes Martenot and strings.

Religious themes are a strong element in Dixon’s work, and many of her compositions were inspired by literary texts, from medieval Latin lyrics to Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold and Walter de la Mare.  When asked about her musical influences in an interview shortly before she died, she cited ‘Fauré (for his harmonic suppleness), Britten (for his powers of evocation and empathy), and Bartók (studying his compositional processes at Durham stimulated an interest in his lively variations of time signature and the elasticity of musical motifs)’, while observing that ‘the Greats preside over it all’.

Her interest in counterpoint is especially prominent in the three instrumental fugues and the quartets, and was often deployed to figure the interplay and resolution of conflicting emotions.  In Letter to Philemon a farewell fugue interweaves the contrasting impulses of four central characters at a pivotal point in the drama, while in the Nocturnal Scherzo, the contrapuntal treatment of musical themes enacts a dream vision in which a pair of commedia dell’arte characters represent the contest and reconciliation of two halves of the psyche.

By the late 1990s the impulse to compose seems to have diminished.  In a letter dated 2001, accompanying the scores of ‘Fire’ and ‘Water’ (two duets from an unfinished cycle The Elements), she wrote ‘I might take a break in composition now.’  In fact, these two songs were to be among her last works.   As for many British composers, a sense of place was often important to her writing, and whereas a move to Sussex earlier in her composing years had prompted a song of great contentment in New Home, a copy of the manuscript of one of the late Fugues suggests a more wistful nostalgia for an earlier home.  Psalm 137 (which many composers have responded to as a song of exile) was the inspiration for this fugue; at the end of the score she wrote out the opening verses:

    By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept; 

    We hung up our harps upon the willow:

    How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

And afterwards in brackets a dedication, ‘To Lincoln Green’, her first married home in Oxfordshire, which she and her husband Brian had built themselves, where they had raised their family, and where Letter to Philemon had been written at the outset of her most fertile period of composition.  Was this sense of loss and displacement felt as a signal to hang up her harp?

It was some years since the last public performance, and for a quarter of a century her music went unheard, until the score of her anthem These things shall be came to the attention of conductor Dominic Ellis Peckham, and plans were set in motion for the premiere at the Cutty Sark in 2017.  Setting that performance by the London Oriana Choir in the context of their wider enterprise to highlight the work of women composers, Peckham reflected in a recent interview, ‘That experience of enabling Ailsa to hear her piece for the first time at the very end of her life made us realise how important this project is… [in] giving recognition to the many female composers over the centuries whose music has been neglected.’ 

The premiere of The Spirit of Love in February 2020 will be programmed alongside the string quartet in E Minor by Ethel Smyth, which also had to wait over a decade for its first performance.  Together with the increasing number of recent and forthcoming performances, these are welcome signs of a musical revival for one of the many female composers missing from the history of British music in the twentieth century.

More details at www.ailsadixon.co.uk   To subscribe to occasional newsletters featuring recent and upcoming performances of Ailsa Dixon’s works, click here. 

All three works on this CD are World Première recordings, quite surprising regarding the exceptional quality of the music. Arnold Cooke is a master of contrapuntal chamber composition.

Pianist Harvey Davies of the Pleyel ensemble has written a comprehensive and lucid programme note picking out all the details of the history and construction of the music that it is important to know.

He highlights composers who were inspirational for Arnold Cooke, his teacher Hindemith, Shostakovich and finally Brahms. His inspiration is most discernable in the Quartet. The influence of Alun Hoddinott who commissioned the work is evident only in the Quintet.

In the Trio the music is terse and highly concentrated with great clarity of structure. Thematic content is passed skilfully from one instrument to another in the first movement. The second, more overtly melodic, is rather melancholy while the finale is lighter and often rather playful.

The Piano Quartet is instantly more broadly melodic and following the suggestion of Harvey Davies more Brahmsian. Piano and strings stand out from one another more in this work, each taking the lead in turns. ‘Scherzo’ in Italian means jest or joke, and with his playful interplay of piano and strings Cooke’s music delivers that idea splendidly. 

Melody stands forth in the slow movement, Lento, especially in an attractive passage where the cello takes the lead. In the lively Rondo Allegro, imaginative use of variation is important and at the conclusion with his coda, Cooke gives us that bit extra for our money.

Having been composed some twenty years later, the Piano Quintet is more melodically angular reaching out towards the outer edges of tonality. The Scherzo is, as Harvey Davies suggests, very  reminiscent of Scherzos by Shostakovich in the way in which melody and rhythm are rousingly combined. As in his other slow movements, the Andante is melancholy but melodically attractive becoming almost impressionist towards the conclusion. The Quintet concludes in lively and animated spirit with Arnold Cooke’s most imaginative contrapuntal writing. 

Please order through mikepurtonrecording.com

ALAN COOPER

Belinda Williams mezzo-soprano
Mark Wilde tenor
David Owen Norris piano

This enterprising CD provides the listener with a valuable insight into the song repertoire from the reign of Queen Victoria, beginning in the 1840s ending with the end of the century.

The programme begins with songs by William Sterndale Bennett – an interesting composer who was a friend of Mendelssohn and Schumann. It was Bennett who led the way in the development of what was to become a lively cultural interchange between Great Britain and Germany.

The CD focuses on this close relationship encouraged by the artistic activities of the German-born Albert, Prince Consort and, not least, by the young Queen herself.

After Sterndale Bennet come songs by Hubert Parry and those by the somewhat shadowy figure of Walter Battison Haynes. The songs on this interestingly planned disc were the product of the standard practice of the publishing of much English music by German publishing houses.

Many English composers set German texts with songs performed in translation. Most of the material on this disc is little known; indeed the songs by Bennett and Battison Haynes are receiving world premiere recordings but they are all immensely attractive.

Sir Hubert Parry’s fine settings of a selection of four Shakespeare sonnets follow. These confidently constructed works are performed in two versions – one in the original English and the other in German. David Owen Norris, who has planned the present programme and who provides scholarly notes on the music, knows of no other instance of two different vocal lines with the same piano accompaniment.

Walter Battison Haynes, the third composer represented here, is by far the least known. He was sometimes referred as ”Malvern’s other composer” (other than Elgar). Battison Haynes’s songs are attractive and some quite original – in particular the Schumann-esque Vorsatz.       

A word needs to be said about the exemplary performances. Belinda Williams, the mezzo-soprano, displays a mature and intelligent approach while tenor Mark Wilde’s contribution benefits from a well projected tone and a good sense of style. However, the key figure in the production of this CD is the pianist and musicologist David Owen Norris.

His musicianship and knowledge of the period ensures an authoritative approach throughout. This is a disc that can be confidently recommended.   

ALISTAIR MACDONALD

This is not a review – to cover all the repertoire here in 400 words is plainly not practicable - rather it is a panegyric for a wonderful bargain.

Over a period of 15 years, from 1994 to 2009 the Maggini String Quartet, and others as occasionally necessary, have recorded a huge selection of British chamber music, mostly string quartets of course.

Now Naxos have bundled up their astonishing achievement into a collection of 20 CDs which is available at a super bargain price (eg, about £50 on Amazon).

The composers and discs involved are Alwyn, Arnold, Bax (2), Berkeley, Bliss (2), Bridge (3), Britten (2), Elgar, Ireland, Moeran, Rawsthorne, Rubbra (2) Vaughan Williams and Walton.

Occasionally there are additions to the standard quartet format, for example, a quintet (RVW) a piano quintet (Elgar) and Britten’s Simple Symphony (played on solo instruments). 

There is a whole day’s listening here, and for present purposes I have just sampled the Elgar, Moeran and Walton discs, and can say that the performances are excellent – muscular and tender by turns, with well-judged speeds and rewarding interpretive insights. The recordings are uniformly excellent – in this digital age everything comes up clean, and it is as though the issues are completely new.

My assumption therefore is that it is very likely that these values are to be found in the set as a whole.

The presentation too is beyond criticism, full details are on the back of the individual covers, and there is a 60 page booklet of comprehensive notes to go along with the discs.

If you do not want to go for this immediately, I suggest you put the word about this being a worthy Christmas present.

GEOFFREY ATKINSON

Clearly volume one of these orchestral rarities has been a success and a broad welcome is due this new issue.

The eight composers featured are Foulds, Fogg, Goossens. RVW, Howell, Cowen, Hadley and Bliss. All the music is worthwhile, but it is perhaps not surprising that the better known the composer, the more distinctive the music.

For instance, easily the most exciting piece here is ‘Mêlée fantastique’, the rather bland name of an early work by Bliss, conceived as a ballet but apparently never staged as such. Its vigorous and athletic language points forward to that of the Colour Symphony. Dedicated to the memory of a young friend and painter, the contrast in moods between extraversion and sad reminiscence is very effective and the springy-ness of Bliss’s rhythms is captured by his superb grasp of instrumentation.

Mr Gamba is correctly keen on VW’s early ‘Impressions’. Volume 1 contained ‘The Solent’ and here we have ‘Harnham Down’ an exquisite evocation of the Wiltshire countryside, music now thankfully released from purdah by the composer’s trustees. A brief, and admittedly delicious, Wagnerian transition might not have survived more mature scrutiny, but the overall impression is a soft sensuousness that recalls Debussy, rather than any other influence.  For me, Mr Gamba is a little too indulgent - for this short piece he takes almost a minute and a half longer than Paul Daniel on Albion Records and, at one point the music seems to come to a dead stop.

The surprise ‘package’ on this disc is the once popular ‘Lamia’ by Dorothy Howell (1898-1982). This piece is astonishingly assured for a 20 year old (so much so that one critic accused her teacher, John McEwen, of having a hand in it). She had obviously heard some Bax and Richard Strauss, but that is a plus, not a drawback.  

John Foulds is represented by his ‘April-England’, a very colourful item, extraordinarily, but exuberantly, orchestrated from an earlier piano piece. Eric Fogg’s pleasant ‘Merok’ sounds like Grieg, but not surprisingly given that it is a set of variations on a Norwegian folk tune. Goossens ‘By the Tarn’ and Cowen’s ‘Rèverie’ are both harmless and do not leave a strong impression. Finally, Hadley’s ‘Kinder Scout’, an evocation of that iconic part of the Peak District, leaves me undecided about its merits.  It seems to me to be a less polished piece of work than the other items on the disc and somewhat crudely orchestrated to boot.  But I could be wrong.

GEOFFREY ATKINSON

It was apparent from the opening bars that this was to be a CD of outstanding quality – in respect of the music (Finzi was a true original), performance (Layton and the Trinity college forces in top form), in terms of sound production (David Minnitt, the recording engineer) and Adrian Peacock (the recording producer).

The listener’s interest was caught immediately by the opening work on the disc – Finzi’s original setting of the Magnificat (1952) with its expansive organ introduction stylishly played by Alexander Hamilton – a worthy preparation for the magnificent first choral entry. 

Finzi’s setting was not intended for Anglican liturgical use, lacking as it does a Gloria and a Nunc dimittis. To satisfy these requirements Layton has included a sensitive setting of the Nunc dimittis by the composer David Bednall, who clearly grasps Finzi’s musical language while preserving a degree of his own originality.

Three short anthems – Finzi’s Op27 – follow. The jubilant ‘God is gone up’ is the best known of these, now with its organ part enhanced by additional brass and percussion. Less familiar are the setting of seven poems by Robert Bridges. It might be said that some of which perhaps lack a certain distinctiveness. Again, however, one poem stands out: ‘My spirit sang all day’ is a triumphant tour de force in this context.

Elsewhere on the disc there is much to enjoy: a setting of William Austin’s ‘All this night’ written for the 400 voice University of London Musical Society is a particular gem. Francis Pott writes in the accompanying booklet note: ‘Finzi evidently took [the size of the choir] into account, conjuring a forcefully jubilant and high-flying short work from homophonic and chordal material’.

The final item in this CD ‘Welcome sweet and lovely feast’ is an incontrovertible masterpiece – an incense-laden setting of texts by the 17th century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw, skilfully combined with two hymns by St Thomas Aquinas. In his note Pott reminds the listener of some of the work’s high points in this remarkable piece, particularly the central exhortation ‘Rise, Royal Sion’ which ‘calls forth one of Finzi’s most radiantly majestic passages’.

All in all, this CD is a masterly production by all concerned and demands to be heard.

ALISTAIR MACDONALD

This is an extraordinarily interesting and important release. Superficially there are several parallels with respect to the concertos.

Both Bright and Gipps wrote these pieces in their mid-20s, both pieces are about 25 minutes long with the first movement longer than the other two together, and, as has to be expected, both struggled against masculine indifference.

The difference between them is that Bright was born in 1862 and Gipps in 1921, so the style and content of both concertos reflect the idioms of their respective times.

Bright’s style is derived, I would suggest from Schumann, via the French sugary lot (eg Litolff), finally to MacDowell, so we can expect a sort of well-digested late 19^th C. lingua franca. She was clearly an expert composer (and indeed pianist). Everything fits and is in place.

There is nothing very profound in the music but it is entertaining. There is more depth in a later piece of hers on the disc, the ‘Variations for Piano and Orchestra’ where she explores the many possibilities of her brief but potent 5-note theme which ultimately begins to sound very much like early Elgar.

Happily, with recent recordings we are beginning to experience a new interest in the music of Ruth Gipps, and this new issue will surely confirm her lasting value. She was a versatile and expert musician - a concert pianist until an accident curtailed her career, a professional wind player, and busy conductor, as well as being, I would suggest, a significant composer.  Her famously stroppy refusal to have anything to do with atonality, was alas, to hold back the recognition she was due. 

The trenchant opening of her concerto shows a liking for the styles encountered in the music of  Bliss and Rawsthorne but then things settle down and she begins to exploit her characteristic love of bitter-sweet harmony. There are numerous moments of imagination, for instance some very characteristic writing for woodwind, and a brief dialogue between soloist and timpani in the first movement.

There is a final filler on the disc, Gipps late work ‘Ambarvalia’, a gentle pastorale written in 1988 as a tribute to the recently deceased Adrian Cruft.

The soloists in both concertos are excellent, with Murray McLachlan being exceptionally magisterial and persuasive. The orchestra are more at home in the Gipps works possibly because the scoring sounds more idiomatic.

There is a charming picture of Ruth Gipps in the liner notes. She looks like everyone’s favourite granny, with a broad grin on her face as she sits at the wheel of her drophead Morgan sports car. 

GEOFFREY ATKINSON

The title ‘The Song of Love’ comes from the final words of ‘Silent Noon’, the second of six settings of poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti entitled ‘The House of Life’.

These were composed by Vaughan Williams between 1903 and 1904. With one exception, Rossetti’s verse is full of quite complex and arcane imagery where it is difficult to fully construe the various levels of meaning, but Kitty Whately’s well pointed verbal stresses along with William Vann’s refined piano playing bring out the clarity in Vaughan Williams’s settings, making Rossetti’s words far more transparent. 

The outstanding exception among the six songs is ‘Silent Noon’. Here Rossetti’s words are crystal clear, superbly evocative and when clad in the delicately coloured music of Vaughan Williams, this song, as the programme note reminds us, is forever popular with singers and audiences too.

The 25 songs on the CD demonstrate the astonishingly wide stylistic range of which Vaughan Williams was an undisputed master. Roderick Williams, whose smooth, warm baritone voice is perfectly suited to lieder or to English song, performs Vaughan Williams’s settings of ‘Three Old German Songs’ of which the third, ‘Morgenstern’ could almost be from the lighter side of Mahler’s ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’. 

Four early French Songs are totally different in style, all of them very attractive, but best of all is ‘L'Amour de Moy’, here delivered with wonderfully light and captivating singing from Mr Williams. 

These are all continental folksong-based items, but England is included with robust performances by Mr Williams of ‘Buonaparty’ an anti-Napoleon army song and ‘The Spanish Ladies’ representing the Navy.

‘To Daffodils’, a gently sorrowful setting of words by Herrick, was said by Stephen Connock, (originally Chairman of Albion Music) to be reminiscent of Schumann and the piano accompaniment would certainly suggest that. ‘The Willow Song’ sung with deep emotional charge by Kitty Whately leads into her performance of ‘Three Songs from Shakespeare’ including a marvellously impish performance of ‘When Icicles Hang by The Wall’.

The CD closes with two finely crafted duets where Vaughan uses the voices apart and then together in the most telling way. He certainly was a master craftsman in voice and piano setting.   

ALAN COOPER

ONE of Britain’s most unfairly overlooked composers, William Wordsworth (1908-1998), may not have reached the heady artistic heights of his far more famous poetic name-sake and distant relative. Yet this luscious music undoubtedly nourishes our musical culture. 

Here is an engaging taste of some charming 20^th century music penned by London-born composer, William Brocklesby Wordsworth. This release is the second of a welcome series of works by a melodic master whose works are certainly worth getting to know. 

WBW was in fact a descendant of the poet, William Wordsworth’s brother, Christopher -- his great-great grandson. In fact, convoluted antecedence apart, this was a composer who, in his own right, wrote some splendid home-grown music, inspired by many British natural wonders.

John Gibbons BEM, a well-travelled and experienced conductor with a personal penchant for championing unfairly neglected British music, coaxes some convincing playing from this accomplished Latvian Orchestra. It is also complemented by thoroughbred sound engineering. 

This uncomplicated music encapsulates that inimitable and distinctive pastoral style which was brought to a head by better-known contemporary names such as Vaughan Williams and Elgar. 

In this release, picturesque topography and scenic serenity are beautifully captured (particularly in genteel, slow movements suitably marked ‘adagio cantabile’) in Wordsworth’s restful piano and violin concertos. Both are expertly delivered by soloists Arta Arnicane (piano) and Kamila Bydlowska (violin).

The sweetly orchestrated ‘Lonely Tarn’, at the heart of a three-movement descriptive work entitled Pastoral Sketches, also projects a dreaminess. Intertwining harmonies – especially from eloquently controlled woodwind and string sections - are cleverly balanced to produce a memorable sound. 

John Gibbons and his polished players dip enthusiastically into the vibrant Wordsworth paint-box to skilfully produce some alluring and vivid colours which certainly pull listeners into Wordsworth’s colourful music pictures. 

Lend these endearing musical works an ear. You won’t regret it!

CHRIS BYE