Review: Our latest Delius English Masterworks is Record of the Month “CHOC” in the French Classica Magazine, undoubtedly one of the most important things ever for a Danish recording.
2012 is the Delius Anniversary Year and we are proud to release the third CD in our Delius Masterworks series. A long awaited release again featuring never before recorded orchestral songs by Bo Holten. As in the two previous releases (both Gramophone Editor´s Choices!) the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra is playing with soloists Henriette Bonde Hansen and Johan Reuter. A clear winner!
Frederick Delius
Songs of Sunset
1. A song of the setting sun!
2. Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad
3. Pale amber sunlight falls
4. Exceeding sorrow consumeth my sad heart!
5. By the sad waters of separation
6. See how the trees and the osiers lithe
7. I was not sorrowful, I could not weep
8. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter
Three Songs (Orchestrated by Bo Holten)
9. Love’s Philosophy
10. Indian Love Song
11. To the Queen of My Heart
North Country Sketches
12. Autumn (The Wind soughs in the trees)
13. Winter Landscape
14. Dance
15. The March of Spring (Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors)
16. A Late Lark
Henriette Bonde-Hansen, soprano – [ 2 ], [ 4 ], [ 6 ], [ 8 ], [ 9 ]–[11], [16]
Johan Reuter, baritone – [ 2 ], [ 5 ]–[ 8 ]
Aarhus Cathedral Choir and Aarhus Symphony Orchestra Choir – [ 1 ], [ 3 ], [ 6 ], [ 8 ]
Aarhus Symphony Orchestra
Bo Holten, conductor
English Masterworks ©
Earlier in life Delius had declared ‘I don’t claim to be a British composer’. Influenced by the music, literature and landscapes of countries as distinct as America, Norway, Denmark, France and Germany, as well as his native England, his output has always been difficult to categorize, and even today he is frequently omitted by critics from lists of ‘typically’ English composers of his own or later generations. But then for all of his productive life Delius lived in France. His more formal musical education had earlier been contained within two years at the Leipzig Conservatory, and shortly before that some of his earliest creative impulses had been nourished in the course of a similar period spent in America – the singing of the black workers on his plantation in central Florida and subsequently of those in the tobacco factories of Danville, Virginia, having been readily absorbed and long recalled by him. Moreover, during the second half of his life, there were many more visits to Germany than there were to England. However, it has to be said that his first serious lessons as a boy in Bradford and then in London had been given to him by a series of three distinguished British (if not all British-born) violin teachers.
In spite of Delius’s extraordinarily cosmopolitan background, his wife Jelka could ask in 1929 when speaking of Brigg Fair and North Country Sketches, ‘what can be more English in feeling?’ Furthermore she was adamant at the same time in declaring: ‘Fred’s idiom is English, his language is English’. Where the popularity of his music was concerned England was by the 1920s overtaking Germany – these two countries having always been predominant in programming his music with the greatest fervour. It is a curious fact that if in northern Europe and the old anglophone countries of Empire, and indeed to an extent in America, his work has always found the widest outlets, Latin America and the major southern European countries appear to have remained largely immune to its charms.
RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 2012
CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 721
EAN: 5709499721001
