Ireland: The Holy Boy

Choirs and orchestras join for a beautiful celebration of 20th-century British Christmas favourites recorded in sumptuous Argo sound. Book-ended by two perennial favourites – Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Finzi’s In terra pax – this collection explores the subtle and radiant music of Howells, Warlock, Ireland and Holst, and includes an orchestral number popularized by Beecham, Delius’s Sleigh Ride. A magical Christmas journey!

Here is a lovely collection of Christmas Carols from the ever-improving cathedral choir in Chester. A varied selection of old and new carols is interspersed with some short organ interludes.

Frederick Delius’s beautiful songs show his extraordinary gift for melody. John Ireland admired Delius enormously and his songs are inspired by a wide variety of literature, including his hugely popular setting of John Masefield’s Sea Fever. Renowned cellist Julian Lloyd Webber celebrates both composers’ remarkable melodic gifts in these sensitive arrangements, and pianist John Lenehan has received great acclaim for his Naxos recordings of Ireland’s complete piano music.

This recording revives a tradition which was common at the beginning of the last century, arranging the best of vocal music for instruments, of which the singing voice of the cello is one of the best suited. The performing cast here is something of a dream team. Julian Lloyd Webber’s large following will take little persuasion to explore his playing on this beautiful CD, and he is joined both by his cellist wife Jiaxin Cheng and Ireland expert John Lenehan, whose recordings include the Gramophone awardwinning Michael Nyman Piano Concerto (8554168).

Julian Lloyd Webber is one of today’s leading cellists. He has given the premières of more than fifty new works for cello and has inspired new compositions from composers as diverse as Malcolm Arnold and Joaquín Rodrigo to James MacMillan and Philip Glass. His partnership with John Lenehan began in the mid-1970s and they have since given recitals together all over the world. “…the doyen of British cellists” The Strad

Thomas Trotter, described by BBC Music magazine as ‘one of the greatest living organists’, in a virtuoso display of the full range of power and colour of the Royal Albert Hall organ – one of the world’s greatest concert hall organs.

A programme of popular organ works and transcriptions right from the heart of the Victorian concert hall tradition, ideally suited to the organ in the home of the Proms.

Over 70 minutes of dazzling musicianship, breathtaking virtuosity and sheer entertainment!

Dutton Epoch’s survey of tuneful short works by John Ireland (including the last two unrecorded songs orchestrated by Ireland himself and sung here by Roderick Williams) is filled out with a selection of encores by British composers and two unrecorded orchestral songs by Elgar. The overture by Tranchell, a gorgeous interlude by Walter Collins and tuneful folk dance arrangements by Herbert Murrill are coupled with more substantial fare by Lionel Sainsbury – a muscular and invigorating Allegro Risoluto for strings and Elis Pehkonen’s evocative and finely drawn orchestral sunset, Sunset and Evening Star.

Naxos’s acclaimed recordings of the music of John Ireland continue with this disc of the three piano trios and music for violin and piano.

The tuneful Phantasie Trio of 1908 was one of the first of his works to bring him to public notice. The Second Piano Trio (1917) reflected Ireland’s intensely emotional response to World War 1, while his Third Piano Trio (1938) returned for its inspiration and musical material to his earlier Clarinet Trio of 1912-13, withdrawn shortly after its composition, to which Ireland added a new slow movement of great lyrical beauty.

The shorter pieces for violin and piano highlight Ireland’s melodic gifts.

A composition pupil of Stanford and recognised as an outstanding talent by Parry, John Ireland was inspired as student by the music of Beethoven, Brahms and Elgar, and later by Debussy, Ravel and the early Stravinsky.

This recording features the genial, Brahmsian 1898 Sextet for clarinet, French horn and string quartet, unheard in public until 1960, and a reconstruction by the Canadian clarinettist and clarinet maker Stephen Fox of the Clarinet Trio of 1912-14.

Also included are Robert Plane’s transcription for clarinet and piano of Ireland’s very popular piano prelude The Holy Boy, written on Christmas Day 1913, and one of Ireland’s finest and most beautifully crafted chamber works, the Fantasy Sonata for clarinet and piano (1943).

Simply idyllic, this 2-CD set couples a traversal of English seasons (CD1) with idyllic music for cello and orchestra by English composers, all rapturously performed by the Academy and Marriner.