Delius: To Daffodils

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, this is part one of a two disc series which will comprise the first complete recording of the songs of Frederick Delius. It features a number of world première recordings. Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow’s Butterworth collection (5060192780024) received great critical acclaim “exquisitely performed” Classic FM Magazine.

Dame Felicity Lott, revered British soprano, says of this CD:

“ Summertime also has many of my favourite songs in English, French and German. We made the CD at a friend`s house, and the sessions were so relaxed, with no London traffic to cause endless retakes! It`s a real mix of beautiful songs of all kinds, on a summer theme. I chose songs I loved, from Gershwin to Christopher Robin….

Three centuries of song are represented here, and, as BBC Music Magazine's Hilary Finch put it “such is the skill of Johnson's programming that the entire recital seems to be a single, sustained exhalation of rapture and reflection”

She went on to say:

The upper reaches of Lott's still gleaming soprano inhabit Barber's 'Shining Night' and Fauré's Clair de lune'. And her robust English version of Schubert's 'Who is Sylvia?' finds an irresistible companion in Arne's 'Where the Bee Sucks', with its veritable midsummer night's dream of an accompaniment from Johnson. The artists' palpable sense of joy and well-being gathers momentum as they visit Berlioz's 'L'île inconnue' and as they sing on the water with Schubert. . . . And Lott and Johnson know well that the only way to face sentiment is to acknowledge its own integrity, as they do when they listen to Haydn Wood's 'Little Brown Bird' and eavesdrop with Fraser-Simson on Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

This CD features songs from a great variety of composers - Gershwin, Barber, Cole Porter, Bernstein, Brahms, Schubert, Arne, Schumann, Berlioz, and many more. A full 29 tracks of summer-themed songs!

These recordings, made over the space of a decade from March 1954 to December 1964, capture Peter Pears in the high summer of his career and at the peak of his powers, a period roughly framed by some of the highlights of his partnership with Benjamin Britten: the creation of the character of Peter Quint in the composer’s The Turn of the Screw in Venice in September 1954 and the euphoric response to the first performance in 1962 of the War Requiem, one of the great events of post-war English musical life. The title ‘An Anthology of English Song’ was chosen by Decca for a projected three volumes featuring Pears. The first, with Julian Bream, included Renaissance lute songs by Dowland, Morley and others. The second was presumably intended to included 18th and 19th-century titles but was never made. The third, made in 1955, consisted of 20th-century English song, and much of this material appears on CD for the first time [CD2: 10-21].

A year earlier, Pears and Britten recorded nine of Britten’s folk song arrangements; these particular recordings (made in the same sessions as those for Winter Words) too receive their first release on CD [CD2: 1-9].

More British song was recorded with Britten in 1963 and with pianist Viola Tunnard (who worked closely with Britten in the 1960s, particularly on the Church Parables) in 1964. Of special interest too, will be works Pears commissioned from contemporary composers including the Cycle for Declamation by the South-African-born Priaulx Rainier, a testing tour de force for unaccompanied voice and Richard Rodney Bennett’s dramatic 1961 setting for voice and cello of the anonymous 17th-century ballad Tom O’Bedlam’s Song.

The recorded legacy of the great English tenor Peter Pears is substantial and wide-ranging. It embraces Baroque repertory and Elizabethan songs as well as a vast amount of twentieth-century English music and German Lieder.

This anniversary collection features Pears in a wide selection of this repertory and it also charts his career as a recording artist from landmark recordings such as the first recording of Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings (made in 1944) through to Britten's Canticle V The Death of St Narcissus (composed in 1974), recorded near the end of his career in 1976.

Many recordings included here appear on CD for the first time as international releases. Performances of Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge, and of Tippett’s Songs for Ariel , are of especial interest, and in a different vein, Pears sings Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées, which he commissioned.

A true rarity is the first ever release of Schubert's Ganymed.

Packaging is cap box; 28-page booklet features a new essay on Pears by George Hall.