Frederick Delius News
English composer
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Commemorations 2024 (Death: Frederick Delius)
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2024-03-19
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2023-12-14 04:30:00
Is It Time for New Classic Recordings?
by Bill HeckAll right, I admit it, I confess: I'm spoiled by modern digital recordings by amazing musicians. Many readers of Classical Candor have been around long enough to know about the "classic" recordings of classical music, the ones on any number of "recommended performances" lists. Whose collection of recordings would be complete without, say, the Reiner / Chicago recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, the Kleiber / Vienna Beethoven 5 and 7 pairing, or Beecham’s conducting of anything by Delius? I'm speaking here of stereo recordings, which puts us after the mid-1950s or so. There are specialists, as well as the more curious among us, who want to hear Toscanini's Beethoven symphony cycle, or Schnabel's set of the piano concertos, recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own works: the list goes on and on, and for those folks, even bad recordings are better than no recordings at all. But […]
2023-12-02 12:00:44
Mark Elder, the Bergen Philharmonic and co are powerful advocates for Delius’s epic choral work, while Irish vocal group Resurgam showcase the distinctive brilliance of Weelkes• Frederick Delius’s A Mass of Life (1905), or Eine Messe des Lebens, opens with a choral explosion, only fitting for what turns out to be a battle of the will as expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra. The Bradford-born Delius used passages from the German philosopher he so admired – and who had great influence at the time of the work’s composition – for his humanist cantata for four soloists, double choir and orchestra, premiered at London’s Queen’s Hall in 1909. Many consider this overwhelming work the masterpiece of a composer still, nearly a century after his death, awaiting critical redemption. It doesn’t hold back, which makes others squirm.A new recording, in German, may be the longed-for boost the mass needs. Mark Elder, […]
2023-09-25 13:47:06
Florent Schmitt, 2023
[…] angel either, but we’ll return to Shostakovich another time). Schmitt was born on September 28th of 1870 in the town of Meurthe-et-Moselle, Lorraine, the area that was passing from France to Germany and back for centuries – thus the German name. At 17, he entered the conservatory in nearby Nancy, and two years later moved to Paris where he studied composition with Gabriel Fauré and Jules Massenet. While in Paris, Schmitt became friends with Frederick Delius, the English composer of German descent who was then living in Paris. In the 1890s he befriended Ravel and met Debussy. Schmitt tried to get the prestigious Prix de Rome five times, submitting five different compositions every year from 1896 to 1900, when he finally won it with the cantata Sémiramis. He spent three years in Rome and then traveled extensively, visiting Russia and North Africa, among other places. One of his most popular […]
2023-05-19 00:00:00
Box of Delights and Bliss, Delius and Vaughan Williams Orchestral Works (Barry Wordsworth et al)
[…] - 18 Metamorphic Variations [37'40]BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Barry WordsworthNimbus NI5294 [recorded in January 1991; CD issued 1991][digital download; flacs, cover and inlay scans, booklet derived from archive.org]Recording venue: Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, Wales.Recording engineer & Producer: not given.This was the first commercial recording of Bliss' last orchestral work Metamorphic Variations and, as far as I know, the only following recording so far is the Naxos issue with David Lloyd-Jones and the Bournemouth Symphony.Frederick Delius:01 A Village Romeo and Juliet - The Walk to the Paradise Garden [10'11]02 Brigg Fair [14'51]03 Two Pieces for Small Orchestra - No. 1, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring [7'21]04 Two Pieces for Small Orchestra - No. 2, Summer Night on the River [5'40]05 A Song Before Sunrise [6'36]06 Koanga - La Calinda [4'14]07 Three Small Tone Poems - No. 1, Summer Evening [5'43]08 In a Summer Garden [14'02]London Symphony Orchestra conducted […]
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