Frederick DELIUS (1862-1934)
Brigg Fair (1907) [16.20)
In a summer garden (1908) [14.07]
The walk to the Paradise Garden (1906) [10.11]
North County Sketches (1914) [27.02]
Florida Suite (1887) [37.52]
Two Aquarelles (1932) [4.49]
On hearing the first cuckoo in spring (1912) [7.00]
Summer night on the river (1911) [6.01]
Dance Rhapsody No 1 (1909) [13.13]
Dance Rhapsody No 2 (1916) [8.06]
Orchestra of Welsh National Opera/Sir Charles Mackerras
rec. Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, August 1989, August 1990, December 1990 and May 1991
Presto CD
DECCA 460 290-2 [68.05 + 77.08]
For many years, during the composer’s life and thereafter, the touchstone of Delius interpretation lay in the hands of Sir Thomas Beecham who not only performed and recorded much of the composer’s substantial output but also edited the scores, which frequently lacked instructions for practical realisation (dynamics and tempo indications in particular), in a manner which gained Delius’s heartfelt approbation at a time when few other conductors could be persuaded to undertake performances of his music. Beecham himself made much of the difficulty of realising the scores, and his keen sense of self-publicity (as well as his commitment to the Delian cause) ensured that his interpretations remained the cornerstone of the recorded Delius repertory even when some of the recordings lacked the ideal sense of modern resonance. However the two CD set of his EMI recordings made towards the end of the conductor’s life remain very precious as examples of his art. Indeed it was not until after Beecham’s death that other English conductors made any substantial inroads into the Delius discography, although such interpreters as Sir Charles Groves, Meredith Davies, Sir John Barbirolli, Norman del Mar and others substantially expanded the representation of the composer on disc and their example has found many successors.
The two discs here largely come into competition with those Beecham recordings of the late 1950s, being made at the outset of the digital era during the years 1989-91 when Sir Charles Mackerras was the musical director of Welsh National Opera, undertaking not only the series of sessions here at the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea but also a highly recommendable performance of A Village Romeo and Juliet in Vienna – one of his achievements to rank alongside his justifiably famous Janačék cycle made in Vienna a few years earlier (I reviewed it enthusiastically for this site some years ago). The orchestra too was no stranger to this recording venue, having already enshrined here their performances of Tristan und Isolde (for Decca) and Parsifal (for EMI) with Sir Reginald Goodall at the helm.
This collection assembles nearly all of Delius’s major purely orchestral works – hence no Appalachia or Song of the High Hills, with their wordless choral passages – although with the regrettable exception of Paris. It does however score over Beecham by including not only the North Country Sketches but both of the Dance Rhapsodies – Beecham only included the second of these in his EMI stereo sessions, and similarly never set down Paris in stereo either. Beecham indeed, in his hilarious if regrettably incomplete autobiography A Mingled Chime, was thoroughly rude about Delius’s scoring in the First Rhapsody drawing particular attention to his employment of the bass oboe; he described the result at the first performance (conducted by the composer himself) as being reminiscent of “the painful endeavour of an anguished mother-duck to effect the speedy evacuation of an abnormally large-sized egg.” There are no such concerns about the playing here, which is elegance itself; and indeed the playing of the WNO wind soloists is one of the delights of these recordings throughout. Also missing both from the Beecham and Mackerras collections is the late Song of Summer (which Delius revised from earlier sketches with the assistance of Eric Fenby) and the Lebenstanz which Delius himself suppressed during his lifetime.
The recording by various Decca engineers has been criticised (by the authors of the Penguin Guide among others) for a lack of warmth in the string sound, mirroring similar concerns about recording techniques during the early digital era. I have to say that I did not find this troublesome, and indeed rather the reverse. The Beecham stereo analogue sound was often very rich and warm, especially in the Florida Suite, to an extent that on occasion submerged subsidiary lines which Delius might perhaps have regarded as important. (One should bear in mind that he would never have heard Beecham conduct this early score, which indeed Beecham had to edit in preparation for its first performances in the 1950s.) And indeed the slightly analytical effect of the recording actually has real merits in allowing us to hear the inner workings of the composer’s scores. My only concern would be the lack of acoustic reverberation around the percussion, the cymbals in particular, and the slightly noisy effect of the most fully scored passages – which are in any event rare in Delius’s orchestration. The performance of the sublime Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet is even more effectively impassioned here than in Mackerras’s sun-drenched Vienna recording. Indeed, if I were seeking to make such an analogy, I might describe these recordings at having a spring-like vitality to set against the lazy summer heat of Beecham. Both approaches are equally valid, and indeed Delius like all great composers can freely allow for such variety.
To cite a single example of these contrasts, I might mention the opening of the Florida Suite, by some distance the earliest work on these discs. This is an altogether remarkable passage, with its typical Delian fingerprints of shifting string harmonies accompanying a languorous woodwind solo (here an oboe) which would recur throughout the composer’s career until the Song of Summer at the end of his life. And these same fingerprints anticipate by some nine years Debussy’s “ground-breaking” Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune and even elsewhere Franck’s Psyche written a year later. I discussed these points back in 2012 when I reviewed William Boughton’s Nimbus recording of the suite, and took the opportunity then to draw comparisons with not only Beecham and Mackerras but also with the recordings conducted by Richard Hickox (EMI) and David Lloyd-Jones (Naxos). In that review I also mentioned the performance of the same passage conducted by Norman del Mar in his complete recording of Delius’s opera The Magic Fountain, which repeats the same music exactly; and it is horrifying to realise that we still after nearly ten years await the reissue of the BBC CDs which have long been unavailable except in second-hand copies at horrendously inflated prices (and the same applies to the equally unique BBC recording of the complete Irmelin).
It is therefore doubly welcome in the meantime to have these two well-filled discs restored to circulation, thanks to the reissue programme of Presto; and the booklet notes by George Hall, relatively brief but serviceable, come in French and German as well as English. For those whom the programme suits (and who do not regret the absence of Paris or the Song of Summer), this set provides an excellent compilation of Delius’s orchestral scores.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
