Richard Hickox Haydn London Vol. 1

This is a major contribution to the Delius discography. It is a magnificent achievement and a deeply moving experience. The major work, A Mass of Life, dating from 1904-5, is a masterpiece. It is not a conventional Mass, but a celebration of life. It is based on more lyrical, less preaching sections of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. The Requiem rejects religion more overtly in favour of living life to the hilt, a pagan philosophy that condemned the work to oblivion for some forty years and overshadowed its considerable merits. Hickox’s readings contain many memorable highlights, including the sublime closing section of the Requiem celebrating the arrival of spring and nature’s promise of perpetual renewal; and, in the Mass, the gloriously uplifting opening choruses in both parts; the orchestra’s evocation of wide perspectives and distant mountain vistas at the beginning of part two; and the magical, affirmatory ‘Midnight Hour’ closing section.

30 years after his death, DG commemorates the quintessential Kapellmeister with a 42-CD set of Complete DG Orchestral Recordings presented in original jackets. In addition to the complete symphonic cycles of Bruckner (the first ever complete recorded cycle), Beethoven and Brahms, this set offers the entire Jochum orchestral recordings for DG for the first time. Several recordings appear on CD for the first time including recordings of Weber, Mozart and Beethoven.

These performances transport us from the work that marked Frank Bridge's arrival as an orchestral composer in 1904–the symphonic poem Mid of the Night–through to the familiar, fabulous Enter Spring from 1927. The fact that the over-extended Mid of the Night receives only its second-ever performance on CD is not especially surprising, but it certainly highlights the ambition of the 25-year-old Bridge. His passion for Tchaikovsky is evident both here and in the altogether more engaging and coherent symphonic poem Isabella–a tale of love, murder and a ghostly apparition based on Keats/Boccaccio.