Richard Hickox Haydn London Vol. 1

Richard Hickox continues his excellent Bruch cycle with warm-hearted and forceful readings of the First Symphony and the Third Violin Concerto. Compared with Masur's slightly ramshackle Leipzig performance, Hickox and the LSO provide an extremely fresh sounding performance of the First Symphony. Many opening horn calls and some delightful woodwind solos add to the charm of a work, which should have a firmer hold on the orchestral repertoire. As regards tempi, Hickox is akin to James Conlon and his expansive Cologne performance (EMI) but Chandos' bloom depicts some wonderful playing from the LSO especially in the irresistible Allegro guerriero.

In 1990, Richard Hickox recorded Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Hodie: A Christmas Cantata for EMI, two holiday choral favorites that complement each other well, despite having been created more than four decades apart. The subdued, folk-inspired quality of much of Vaughan Williams' music remained more or less constant through the years in his choral writing, so even though he adopted a more sophisticated and sometimes astringent style in later years, including irregular rhythms and spiky dissonances that never would have passed in the music of his youth, there is a common thread in his choices of modes and harmonies that unites both cantatas.

Vaughan Williams "A Sea Symphony" is one of the greatest and most inspiring works of the 20th century, with excepts from Walt Whitman's masterpiece, "Leaves of Grass". No other work better captures the majesty and beauty of the Sea. Here we have, if I'm not mistaken, the first live recording ever produced by Chandos and the audience is extremely quite to the point of not even knowing they are their. This is a very complex work to perform and record with it's extremely large forces. Richard Hickox does an amazing job at handling all the forces involved. The chorus sounds sumptuous yet precise and the sections are very well defined across the front stereo spread. The balance between chorus and orchestra is almost perfect. Gerald Finley does a superb job with just the right emotional inflections with his dark voluptuous baritone voice.

Joseph Haydn the composer of symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, piano sonatas, and a plethora of other instrumental works was also Joseph Haydn the composer, director, and producer of operas. His employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, greatly enjoyed opera, and for nearly 20 years Haydn's full-time job was running the theater at Esterháza, the Prince's pleasure palace in Hungary. In the first decade, Haydn wrote 10 operas for his company, the most successful of which ran for 20 performances. In tone, they range from the comic to the semi-serious to the wholly serious, and in quality, they range between the operas of Gluck and Mozart.

This album, the first in a series devoted to the 41 symphonies of Michael Haydn, leads off with perhaps the most historically famous one of all: the Sinfonia in G major, Perger 16, is none other than the missing Symphony No. 37 of Mozart, which was not removed from the Mozart canon until 1907. The reason for the error was that a copy of the work exists in Mozart's handwriting; he wrote a slow introduction to the first movement (not performed here), and apparently copied out the piece in preparation. It remains difficult to believe that listeners' suspicions weren't raised before that; the work's simple, squarish movements resemble those of the symphonies Mozart wrote in his mid-teens.

Richard Ashcroft presents his new album Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1. The album features twelve newly recorded acoustic versions of classic songs from his back catalogue spanning both his solo career and his time with The Verve.

Hickox has a wonderful feel for this music…In short I would put Hickox at the top of the list… Seasoned collectors may well have the major Haydn masses well covered, but if you want the less-known early works, along with interesting fillers, all superbly done and neatly put in a single box, you’ll want this as well. There is splendid music here, full of vitality as only Haydn could express it.

–American Record Guide

Langridge is an inspired interpreter of the role of Aschenbach; his performance here is matched by Alan Opie’s sinister portrayal of the six characters who convey him to his doom. Michael Chance contributes an ethereally unsettling Voice of Apollo, and Richard Hickox coaxes out every bit of the score's morbid beauty.