Frederick DELIUS (1862-1934)
Appalachia (1903) [35.19]
Sea Drift (1904) [24.52]
Leon Williams (baritone)
Master Chorale of Tampa Bay
Florida Orchestra/Stefan Sanderling
rec. Mahaffy Theatre, St Petersburg, Florida, 5-7 January 2012
Texts available at the Naxos
website.
NAXOS 8.572764 [60.11]
It is a delight to welcome performances of two of Delius’s American-inspired
works by forces from Florida, where Delius lived from 1892 to 1895. Although
Sea Drift, a setting of a poem by Whitman, is overtly about an American
subject, the music is more universal than specifically American. While the
initial drafts of Appalachia were made in Paris the year after Delius
left Florida - Marco Polo, Naxos’s sister label, once had a recording
(8.220452) of this earlier version in their catalogues under the title of
American Rhapsody - the work was very substantially expanded to the
form we have it here some eight years later, long after Delius had returned
to Europe.
I first heard Sea Drift in the original Beecham recording issued on
a limited edition Delius Society release of four 78s (now on Naxos)
- I still have them. Beecham’s account of the score remains a marvel
of sympathetic identification with the spirits of both Whitman and Delius.
Unfortunately all of his recordings - and there are a good many of them, from
studio and live broadcasts, not all currently available - are in mono. This
is a score which absolutely demands the atmosphere of stereophonic sound.
Similarly Beecham never recorded Appalachia in stereo, and his last
(mono) LP (reissued by Sony)
suffered from a baritone who had seemingly been chosen for his ability to
sing Danish for the coupled recording of the Arabesque rather than
any ability to sing sympathetically in English for the closing ‘negro
spiritual’ section of Appalachia. One cannot possibly accuse
Leon Williams of sounding un-American, but the tone of his voice is nevertheless
rather English and rather too polite. He is not helped by the rather close
proximity of the microphone, which brings him closer than the rest of the
performers rather than blending him into the whole. Bryn Terfel, in his Chandos
recording of Sea Drift with Richard Hickox (coupled with the Songs
of Sunset and Songs of Farewell), digs far more deeply into the
meaning of the words than Williams does here. The emotion of the latter is
too generalised, and his voice lacks the light and shade of Terfel or John
Shirley-Quirk on Hickox’s earlier Decca
recording.
Appalachia fares rather better in this reading. The orchestra relishes
the contrasts in Delius’s set of variations, with a nicely winsome touch
in passages such as the waltz variation at 19.57; Beecham allowed a very gusty
breath of the ballroom to intrude here. Earlier they are beautifully atmospheric
in the passage from 17.01 which recalls Delius’s Florida opera The
magic fountain. The chorus is nicely distanced in their brief interjections
in the earlier variations, and come into their own with the own variation
at 27.50, when they appear to move closer. Unfortunately the close microphone
placement given to Williams at 31.52 serves only to emphasise how precisely
English is his diction, and the choir are now very far forward indeed, which
brings a sense of stridency which is entirely foreign to the Delius idiom.
The passage at 33.28 sounds uncomfortably like the closing titles for a Hollywood
Western - not at all the area of America that Delius had in mind.
This Naxos disc duplicates exactly the contents of one of Richard Hickox’s
earliest recordings of British music, issued originally on an Argo LP in 1980,
with Shirley-Quirk at the peak of his form in the baritone solos, which is
certainly a reading which deserves to be in any Delius collection - it remains
available from Arkiv
Music . The Naxos recording is more immediate in general sound than the
analogue Hickox, but the latter has plenty of atmosphere and the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra - many of whose members must have played this music under Beecham
- respond with affection to Hickox’s somewhat slower tempos. Indeed
Sanderling could sometimes be accused of hurrying, as at the baritone entry
at 2.58 where the soloist sounds a bit hustled. It is important to keep Delius’s
music moving, not allowing it to stagnate, but the flow can be maintained
without undue haste; Sanderling shaves nearly four minutes off Hickox’s
speeds in his earlier recording, almost a fifth of the whole duration of a
fairly short work. Beecham, even with the constraint of 78 sides, was slower
than this, and Delius always expressed his conviction that this conductor
understood his music better than anyone else.
It is always a suspicion that when one knows a particular performance well
one might be allowing nostalgia to colour reactions to a performance. To test
this I played the recording of Sea Drift to a friend of mine who, although
he knew and loved the poem, did not previously know the music at all. He like
me vastly preferred Hickox, observing that although that performance was noticeably
slower, it at the same time had a sense of purposeful motion that Sanderling
lacked. He also actually preferred the more integrated sound of the older
recording.
Naxos’s cover photograph by Giorgio Fochesato is particularly beautiful
and appropriate, and the booklet commendably includes the complete texts of
both works. The orchestra and chorus both perform superbly; it is nice to
hear a really big choir sing this music - 137 singers are listed - as Delius
would have expected in his earlier performances. They maintain pitch even
in the most exposed passages of Sea Drift.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
The orchestra relishes Delius’s contrasts.