BBC Symphony Orchestra

These three works all are released here for the first time on CD. The music of Bent Sørensen has been highly praised by all the major classical music magazines, with BBC Music Magazine awarding 5 stars and ‘Choral & Song Choice’ for Sørensen’s Requiem (6220571) in October 2012.

Rolf Hind is an English pianist and has earned an enviable reputation as one of today’s foremost interpreters of new music. The pairing with the BBC SO gives this release a strong platfom in the UK market.

In 1943, at the height of the War, the London-born John Barbirolli had returned to England from New York, to take on the difficult task of rebuilding the depleted Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. His achievement in accomplishing the transformation of an orchestra that had suffered from the conscription into the armed forces of many of its male members and the uncertainties of public and personal war-time privations, was astonishing: within months, the reconstituted Hallé Orchestra under Barbirolli had given a series of concerts that heralded a transformation in British orchestral life, followed by two major recordings sponsored by the British Council – the first recording of a Symphony by Arnold Bax (No 3), and the world premiere recording of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, which had received its first performance in London less than a year earlier at the Henry Wood Proms, conducted by the composer. Barbirolli went on to conduct the world premieres of both the Seventh Antartica and Eighth Symphonies (the latter work is dedicated to him as ‘Glorious John’) – but it was not until 1950 that Barbirolli conducted the Fourth Symphony for the first time.

Earlier issues from the Barbirolli Society have documented the conductor’s deep empathy with the Vaughan Williams’s music. Barbirolli’s performance of the Fourth Symphony is, overall, almost five-and-a-half minutes longer than the composer’s own, yet it is no less overwhelmingly powerful, if less concentrated in its fury. Barbirolli digs deep into this work, and the result is a performance that must have delighted the composer, for existing correspondence between the two men around that time acknowledges the composer’s heartfelt thanks to the conductor in programming all six (then) extant symphonies in the first Hallé season in the new Free Trade Hall marking Vaughan Williams’s 80th birthday in 1952. In February, 1953, Barbirolli and the Hallé were to give the premiere of the Seventh Symphony (recording it for HMV soon afterwards).

Arthur Benjamin’s Symphony is a fine work, deeply serious and cogently argued, and there is no doubt that – despite the inevitable shortcomings in broadcast sound of well over 60 years ago – Barbirolli gives a staggeringly impressive and committed premiere of the music.

This re-release of Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi and A Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song forms part of the new commemorative Hickox Legacy series on Chandos Records, leading up to (and continuing beyond) the fifth anniversary, in Nov 2013, of the conductor's untimely death. The recording is released on the Classic Chandos label at Mid Price.

The reputation of Herbert Howells has reached new heights in recent years, no doubt helped by recordings such as this one of Hymnus Paradisi. Howells wrote the work in memory of his young son Michael who had died of polio at the age of nine. It is not a conventional requiem, in that it does not contain the whole text of the Requiem Mass. Instead it sets Psalms 23 and 121 with ‘I heard a voice from heaven’ and words from the Salisbury Diurnal, ‘Holy is the True Light’. It is an intense and powerfully emotional work – the composer’s attempt to come to terms with personal tragedy.

BBC Music Magazine wrote of Hickox’s performance of Hymnus Paradisi: ‘[He] brings passionate commitment to his performance and shapes Howells’s long lines lovingly. He is aided by the fine playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and sensitive choral singing.’

The secular cantata A Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song was intended as a wedding present for the baritone Keith Falkner and his bride, Christabel – although they had to wait two decades for the work to be presented to them. ‘No two people ever received a more delayed wedding present’, Howells wrote to them, adding that it came ‘with apologies and affection’.

The Wooing Song features Howells in an unusually extrovert mood, in music set to texts dating from the 1600s. Words from Thomas Vautor’s sprightly madrigal Mother, I will have a husband (sung here by Joan Rodgers) provides the girl’s side of the story, while ‘I have House and Land in Kent’ (sung by Alan Opie), a text adapted from the composer Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata, gives the suitor’s perspective on courting.

This latest release in the highly regarded SOMM-BEECHAM series features the long-awaited live performance of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No.3 and is a premiere release on CD. Beecham first conducted this work in the presence of the composer himself.