MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

 

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

 


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews

 


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

REVIEW
Plain text for smartphones & printers


Gerard Hoffnung CDs

Advertising on
Musicweb



Donate and get a free CD

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical


Nimbus Podcast


Obtain 10% discount


Special offer 50% off

Musicweb sells the following labels
Acte Préalable
(THE Polish label)
Altus 10% off
Atoll 10% off
CRD 10% off
Hallé 10% off
Lyrita 10% off
Nimbus 10% off
Nimbus Alliance
Prima voce 10% off
Red Priest 10% off
Retrospective 10% off
Saydisc 10% off
Sterling 10% off


Follow us on Twitter

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing
sample

Sample: See what you will get

Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Senior Editor
John Quinn
Seen & Heard
Editor Emeritus
   Bill Kenny
Editor in Chief
   Vacant
MusicWeb Webmaster
   David Barker
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

Support us financially by purchasing this disc from

Ernest John MOERAN (1894-1950)
Overture for a Masque (1944) [9:27]
In the Mountain Country (1921) [6:24]
Rhapsody No. 1 in F major (1922) [11:26]
Rhapsody No. 2 in E major (1924/41) [12:17]
Rhapsody in F sharp major (1943)* [17:32]
Benjamin Frith (piano)*
Ulster Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta
rec. Ulster Hall, Belfast, UK, 17-18 September 2012. DDD
NAXOS 8.573106 [57:06]

Moeran’s singingly open-air exhilaration and poignant poetry have won his music staunch friends. Enlightened and more accommodating times have opened the door and welcomed him in where not so very long ago he was dismissed as otiose.
 
A Moeran orchestral score, whether early or late, is readily identifiable. The man has a clear aural signature. His G minor Symphony has done quite well on record. It basked in Leslie Heward’s pioneering British Council-sponsored recording during the days of the 78. A 1970s EMI LP brought us Neville Dilkes’ reading with the English Sinfonia which stood a doorstep down from Boult’s Lyrita version - still the finest overall. Naxos and David Lloyd-Jones recorded it with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra - an excellent version. In addition Dutton have recorded Martin Yates’s realisation of the Second Symphony.
 
Last year Naxos issued what I consider the best version of the problematically laid-back Cello Concerto with JoAnn Falletta conducting. She, together with soloist Guy Johnston, really made it work. The gorgeous Violin Concerto has a floor plan similar to that of the Delius Concerto and lends itself more easily to successful performance. It will feature in concert twice this year at the English Music Festival on 23 May with Rupert Marshall-Luck and the week before at King’s Lynn on 17 May with Pauline Lowbury. Little has recorded it in an illustrious and splendid version with Chandos (CHAN 10796) who, remarkably enough, already had the Concerto in its catalogue with Lydia Mordkovitch as soloist. The complete solo piano music has also been recorded by Duncan Honeybourne for EM Records.
 
Now Falletta returns with another Moeran disc. This one couples all three Rhapsodies with two other concert works; one of them drawing from the same well as the Rhapsodies. In fact In the Mountain Country might well be counted as Rhapsody No. 0.
 
There is no direct competition for this group of works. To achieve anything approaching it you would need two mid-price Chandos discs (review review) where the Ulster Orchestra again are conducted by Vernon Handley. I have a lot of time for the Ulster Orchestra and although they have probably gone through several changes of personnel since the early 1980s I always thought that something went out of the wings of Bryden Thomson’s Chandos Bax cycle when he switched from them to the LPO after recording a still unmatched Fourth Symphony.
 
Back to Moeran: There is a logic to having the three Rhapsodies together although the last one is more of a compact ‘cinematic’ piano concerto. What Falletta brings to these scores we also heard in the earlier Cello Concerto disc; that is an oxygen-rich, gale-blown vitality. There is nothing bland or short-changed here and I rather hope that Naxos will let her loose on the Symphony in G minor. Boult is superb in that work but Falletta would bring the sort of blood-rushing Tchaikovskian passion that we heard from Vassily Sinaisky when he conducted the work at the BBC Proms in 2009 and John Longstaff who directed the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra in 2005. The Moeran symphony thrives under that sort of treatment. Allowing for some very slightly blurred lines here and there by comparison with Boult’s version of the uproarious, yea-saying Overture on Lyrita this Naxos disc is well worth your cash.
 
The sound is full-on and splendid, courtesy of Tim Handley and Phil Rowlands. The booklet notes are by Paul Conway and are admirably done.
 
JoAnn Falletta brings real vibrancy to these scores.

Rob Barnett 

Moeran review index