Donald t Phillips

William Perry is best known as a composer of film scores, and especially for silent films from which Swordplay! raises the curtain on the swashbuckling films of Douglas Fairbanks. This sparkling selection of world premiere recordings comes from Perry’s substantial catalogue of music for the theatre and the concert hall. Toujours Provence takes us on a cinematic journey through France’s most picturesque region, while the ballet suite derived from his Tony-nominated Broadway score for Wind in the Willows vividly brings to life favourite characters from the story such as Mole, Rat, Toad and the Chief Weasel.

Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in 1548 in Avila, the birthplace of St Teresa. Just as she seems to personify the religious ethos of sixteenth-century Spain (the good side of it, at least), so Victoria came to embody the best of the Spanish character in music. As a youth he learnt his art as a chorister at the Cathedral of Avila. So promising was he that he was sent to Rome at seventeen years of age, patronised by Philip II and by the Church, to study at the Jesuits’ Collegium Germanicum…