Review:
It’s a wonderful recording, and Bo Holten and the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra seem to have got it absolutely right. In fact the orchestra sounds as if it has been playing Delius for years, so completely has it got itself into that very particular idiom. The last of the Five Songs – “Autumn” – is quite marvellously done. So Bo hasn’t let us down after the first four – rather he’s surpassed himself in finishing on a splendid high note. As for “Lebenstanz”, for me it’s the finest ever, and it has all the immediacy of a concert performance.
Reuter’s fine, whilst Bonde-Hansen is out of this world.
Frederick Delius
1. An Arabesque – for baritone, chorus and orchestra
Five Danish Songs (Orchestrated by Bo Holten)
2. The Page sat in the lofty Tower
3. In Bliss we walked with Laughter
4. Two Brown Eyes
5. I Hear in the Night
6. Autumn
Seven Danish Songs
7. Silken Shoes
8. Irmelin Rose
9. Summer Nights
10. In the Seraglio Garden
11. Wine Roses
12. Through Long, Long Years
13. Let Springtime Come
14. Intermezzo from the opera Fennimore and Gerda
(Preludes to Scene 10 & 12 – arr. 1936 by Eric Fenby)
Two Danish Songs
15. The Violet
16. Summer Landscape
17. Sakuntala
18. Life’s Dance
Henriette Bonde-Hansen, soprano (2-13)
Johan Reuter, baritone (1, 15-17)
The Danish National Opera Chorus and Aarhus Chamber Choir (1)
Aarhus Symphony Orchestra
Delius in Denmark ©
Delius’s longest stays in Denmark came in 1909 and 1915, when he and his wife Jelka were guests, for several weeks in all, of Einarand Elisabeth Schou, the owners of a large estate on the eastern shores of mid-Jutland. The friendship had been established some two years earlier when the Schous were living in London. Their beautiful old manor house was built on the site of a former fortification and is today still known as Palsgaard Slot (Palsgaard Castle). The piano on which Delius, like many other distinguished guests from the European nrusical world, would have played remains in the main salon. In June 1998 Palsgaard was the focus of a three-day Anglo-Danish music festival, ‘Delius and Friends in Denmark’, celebrating the composer’s connection with the area. The festival opened with a concert in the city of Aarhus, some 70 kilometres to the north, the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra being conducted by Bo Holten and the programme containing a number of the works featured on this disc. Also represented in this particular concert were other composers who knew the area well: Paul von Klenau, Frederic Austin and Percy Grainger. An instrumental and choral presentation followed at Palsgaard the following day and the festival concluded a day later with an open-air concert in Palsgaard Park’s imposing amphitheatre.
Delius’s preoccupation with Scandinavia its arts, its history and its peoples dates from the beginning of the 1880s, when as a 19-year old he was sent for some months as an agent of his father’s wool business to the industrial town of Norrköping in southern Swedcn. A second visit to Sweden followed a year later. The first visit in 1881 had procured some uselul orders for Delius and Co. back in Bradford, but its follow-up, on the other hand, proved to be a commercial failure. On each of these two trips the young Delius struck out some exploratory byways, first of all to Stockholm, but then west to Norway, a country whose magnificent scenery captured his imagination as none other was to do. By the time he next returned to Norway in the sunmer of 1887, he had rejected the mercantile career planned for him by his father and had secured grudging family agreement to begin a course of study at the Leipzig Conservatory in the autunn. By now a competent pianist and a proficient violinist, he was single-mindedly determined upon a career in music – not, however, as an executant but as a composer.
RELEASE DATE: JUNE 2000
CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 536
EAN: 5709499536001
