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Review: BBC Music Direct
Review: FonoForum
Review: Gramophone

Frederick Delius
1. Prelude to Margot la Rouge
2. In a Summer Garden

Five Songs
(Orchestrated about 1915 by Philip Heseltine) [ 3 ] – [ 5 ]
(Orchestrated 2011 by Bo Holten) [ 6 ] – [ 7 ]
3. Il pleure dans mon coeur
4. Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit
5. La lune blanche
6. Chanson d’automne
7. Avant que tu ne t’en ailles
Henriette Bonde-Hansen, soprano

8. Paris: A Nocturne (The Song of a Great City for orchestra)

Aarhus Symphony Orchestra
Bo Holten, conductor

French Masterworks Š
At the age of 26, on 6 May 1888, Delius left London for Paris, having spent most of the four preceding years first in America and then in Germany, where he had studied music at the Leipzig Conservatorium. What was it that now attracted him to France, where he was – could he have but known it – to live out the rest of his life?
There had already been several months spent in that country, to which he had first been dispatched by this father when he was 19. The purpose of that stay had been for him to gain experience in the wool business, Julius Delius’s Bradford firm having an agency in the southerly town of St-Étienne. He probably worked fairly diligently while there, but life was, it seems, dull, and so a few weeks of escapism on the French Riviera, where he was able to sample the comparative delights of Monte Carlo, must have proved irresistible. When his father learnt of his son’s effective
truancy Delius was immediately recalled to St-Étienne and then a little later back to Bradford.
In 1888 though, a further attraction would certainly have been the fact that the aspiring composer’s uncle, Theodor Delius, who led a cultured life in Paris, was prepared, at least initially, to house his nephew and to introduce him to Paris’s musical circles. Julius Delius therefore reluctantly acceded to his son’s request to leave the family business behind him and somehow to try, with a more-than-helpful financial allowance, to make a life in music. Of course, a further evident attraction of this move was the opportunity for the young Delius at last to break the bonds that linked him to the strict family environment in Bradford and to what had promised to be a life spent enduringly in commerce. Paris itself was the great draw, and the social and cultural pull it must have exerted on the 26-year-old Delius would have been at once powerful and decisive.
So Paris it was – and would be – for the next decade or so, and Delius immersed himself in all things French. Ever seeking new impulses, he started to look deeply into French life and literature for musical inspiration, just as he had looked to the American South for his Florida suite for orchestra, completed earlier that year, and as he was to look even more deeply into the life and literature of Norway and Denmark as his life continued and as his taste for Nordic culture accelerated.

RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 2012

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 728

EAN: 5709499728000

Product Type

CD, MP3, FLAC