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Arnold Bax – Four Orchestral Pieces … Phantasy for Viola and Orchestra … Overture, Elegy and Rondo – Philip Dukes/BBC Philharmonic/Andrew Davis [Chandos]

Mysterious and enchanted, the first of the Four Orchestral Pieces (1912-13), ‘Pensive Twilight’, enjoys an Elgarian wistfulness before blossoming into summer reverie and rapture. It’s all wonderfully open-air before sinking down to the nocturnal reflection that the title intimates. Delius is also suggested, but Bax is Bax and this first recording of the Pieces is …

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Philip Dukes – 20 years anniversary concert at Purcell Room [with Piers Lane and Julian Lloyd Webber]

It is twenty years since Philip Dukes made his Purcell Room debut. He chose to mark the occasion with this afternoon recital, enticing in choice of repertoire and excellent in quality of performance, Dukes enjoying the dedicated collaboration of Piers Lane and Julian Lloyd Webber. Arthur Benjamin’s Viola Sonata proved a real discovery. Australian-born, London-domiciled …

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Somme – BBCNOW/Adrian Partington – Shropshire Lad, Gordon Jacob, Herbert Howells, Pour une fête de printemps, Francis Purcell Warren, Delius’s Requiem

No conflict has generated so many artistic responses than The Great War, and this commemorative concert, simply entitled “Somme”, was a tribute to the 19,000 British men who lost their lives on the first day of that conflict and which started exactly one hundred years ago. Apart from George Butterworth’s familiar piece, it was an …

Somme – BBCNOW/Adrian Partington – Shropshire Lad, Gordon Jacob, Herbert Howells, Pour une fête de printemps, Francis Purcell Warren, Delius’s Requiem Read More »

Geoffrey Burgon

While Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010) is possibly best-known for music for film and television, his catalogue of works includes a wide variety including orchestral, vocal, choral and chamber music. His setting of the “Nunc Dimittis” used at the end of each episode of the television adaptation of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979) became very popular, and …

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York Bowen – The Complete Works for Viola & Piano – Lawrence Power & Simon Crawford-Phillips

While British music of the first half of the twentieth-century was dominated by the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, there is a wealth of excellent music that sprung from lesser-known composers. Londoner York Bowen (1884-1961) was a student-contemporary of Arnold Bax at the Royal College of Music and notable as a pianist …

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A Song of Summer

An evening of ‘Proms Firsts’ – all three works were given their world premieres at the Proms – and an evening of British music into the bargain. Nominally Delius’s last purely orchestral score (though derived from an unfinished project of a decade earlier), A Song of Summer (1929) is among the numerous pieces written with …

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Nash Inventions

Having often spread new and recent commissions out across a whole season, the Nash Ensemble here chose to concentrate them into a single concert: thus Nash Inventions, with its sequence of premieres and revivals combining for a 70-minute programme as varied as it was absorbing. Two of the revivals were commissions first heard last year. …

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Huw Watkins Premiere

One of the many things the Proms does well is to provide a sympathetic context for new music. I am not referring to the audience, usually disposed toward the unfamiliar (although, in my experience of the Arena, not without its Cro-Magnon element), but to programme-planning which surrounds the ‘novelty’ (Henry Wood’s terminology) with repertory works …

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