Delius Florida Suite & Orchestral Works

Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan":

This volume of modern premières of works by Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688 – 1758) was recorded in concert, the programme opening the 2023 International Fasch Festival, in Zerbst, the city in which he was Capellmeister to the princely court.

Not known to many today, Svend Erik Tarp (1908-1994) was one of the most prominent Danish composers of his time, boasting a large and versatile body of work which more or less has survived in obscurity. This series now sheds new light on a selection of Tarp’s orchestral works, opening chronologically with some suites, overtures, and two small concertos. These are early and charming works that show a development from the elegant and easily accessible towards a more clarified neoclassicist style, which later became one of Tarp’s hallmarks.

This volume of modern premières of works by Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688 – 1758) was recorded in concert, the programme opening the 2023 International Fasch Festival, in Zerbst, the city in which he was Capellmeister to the princely court.

This recording brings together four extraordinary mid-20th-century composers who helped shape America’s musical destiny. Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land is a moving tribute to the American rancher and farmer. It forms a profound celebration of those unsung heroes of that country’s landscape, and is perhaps his greatest expression of the preciousness of life. Walter Piston is represented by his colorful and beguiling The Incredible Flutist, which depicts a traveling circus led by a magical musician who is able to heal the sorrows of those who hear his music. The two premiere recordings here are the original orchestral version of Paul Creston’s thrilling Saxophone Concerto, and Ulysses Kay’s Pietà – a beautiful elegy inspired by Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

When George Butterworth joined the army in 1914, his most recent works included the song cycle Six Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad' as well as the Rhapsody 'A Shropshire Lad', which he called 'an orchestral epilogue' to his settings of A. E. Housman's poems. The Rhapsody has since been described as 'one of the greatest of all English orchestral works' and when Butterworth left England to fight in the First World War, he was seen as one of the bright hopes of British music a hope that in August 1916 was extinguished in the trenches at the Somme.

Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields present these highly acclaimed world premiere recordings of orchestral works by Gordon Getty. Although most of Getty’s output is vocal music, he has also written for orchestra, chamber ensembles and solo piano and this programme showcases six orchestral pieces, including the overture from his first opera, "Plump Jack".

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Enrique Granados’s birth the three internationally admired volumes of his orchestral discs have been brought together. Characterised as “affectionate and characterful” by Gramophone (volume 2 on 8573263) they include one of the greatest pieces in all Spanish music, the Intermezzo from Goyescas, as well as much that is exceptionally rare, such as the symphonic poem Dante, one of the most ambitious and exciting Spanish orchestral works of its time.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for a century or more. This third volume presents his very first orchestral work, a strikingly assured Overture in D major, written when he was seventeen, and his last, a sombre, dignified and deeply felt Prelude and Fugue for strings, composed on the death of his mother in 1910.