Alfreda Hodgson

Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók were Hungary’s two most important composers in the 20th century. They were both friends and colleagues, working separately and together to document and preserve folk music from Hungary and its surrounding regions. The music they collected strongly influenced their own compositions. Decca was one of the first major record companies to invest in recordings of the choral music of Kodály. Perhaps spurred by the success of István Kertész’s recording of Psalmus Hungaricus, they continued to record a number of the composer’s choral works under the direction of László Heltay. All of these recordings are collected over a double-CD, coupled with Bartók’s Cantata Profana, one of Sir Georg Solti’s last recordings, for which he provides very moving commentary in the booklet.

The great Evgeny Svetlanov (1928–2002) was music director of the USSR State Orchestra (1965–2000) and also had permanent positions with the LSO, the Residentie Orchestra in the Hague and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

He frequently guest conducted the NHK Orchestra in Japan, the Orchestre National in Paris as well as the Philharmonia in London. May 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of his death and ICA mark this with a coupling of Rachmaninov’s The Bells and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky. These two composers were very closely associated with the conductor. The performance of The Bells was taken from Svetlanov’s last concert in April 2002; he died one month later.

Robert Tear and Benjamin Luxon star in this abridged version of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. The recording, on one CD, features all of the choruses.

“Gibson's performance is impressively spontaneous and very dramatic" Penguin Guide

Now rightfully acknowledged as a towering figure, Vaughan Williams was the first composer to write in the English language, using folksong in the Norfolk Rhapsody, a Tudor hymn in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and absorbing and transforming his influences in the stunningly beautiful Serenade to Music.

During the 16th and 17th centuries England had been a leading participant in the delevopment of European music, but after the early death of Purcell in 1695, music in England came to be dominated by musicians of foreign origin: notably Handel and Mendelssohn. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is the best-known of a new generation of composers that came after Elgar and made up what became known as the English Musical Renaissance. Along with Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams travelled the country collecting and preserving English folksong traditions, and was largely responsible for the revival of interest in folksong. So strong was his interest in the subject that, like Holst, folksong was absorbed into his compositional style and was to influence his concert music, giving it a uniquely English quality. Starting with the evocative Thomas Tallis Fantasia, (RVW's look back at his great 16th-century predecessor) this set contains some of the composer's best-known and most-loved music, including the popular Fantasia on Greensleeves and the beautiful Lark Ascending.