Richard Hickox Haydn London Vol. 1

Richard Hickox was a fine Holst conductor, and it was typical of his championship of English music and of his enthusiastically exploring mind that he should have left as one of his last records this collection of such-little known works… This is a fascinating record…

Christmas with The King's Singers New music, old music, music from the Renaissance and Baroque, spirituals, folksongs, jazz and pop… The Beatles, David Bowie, swing, classical avantgarde, waltzes by Strauss, and musical theatre songs. Which genre of music are the King's Singers actually yet to interpret? Which style have they not yet captured within their unique global reach and within their transparent and intimate six-voiced sound world? One thing is for sure - when the King's Singers came together at the end of the 1960s in Cambridge, no one would have believed the success story that lay ahead of them. Some musical experts were scathing: a male-only vocal sextet was most likely to be found in the pop sector.

It is astonishing that such fine pieces have been so completely neglected.They here inspire Hickox and his team to performances just as electrifying as those they have given of the great series of late Haydn masses.

Dioclesian is the tale of a simple Roman private, Diocles, who fulfils the prophecy of Delphia (a prophetess, and hence Dioclesian's alternative title) that one day he will become emperor. In the meantime, Diocles avenges the slaying of the previous emperor and becomes a hero. With ambitions realized he discovers the he has over-played his hand by responding to Princess Aurelia's advances in the place of a nice homely girl called Drusilla, whom he had agreed to marry. The prophetess, who happens to be Drusilla's aunt, plans his come-uppance before he realizes the emptiness of his aspirations, abdicates and returns to nature and Drusilla.

George Dyson (1883-1964) studied with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music and Dyson's own compositions tend to reflect the kind of romanticism of both Stanford and Perry or the era just before Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and William Walton. His music is always lyrical if a bit modest,or perhaps understated is a better word after all, leggiero means "lack of pomp or pretention or prolixity." In this, he resembles Frederick Delius. The works on this disc come from Dyson's later years 1949 to 1951 which were his most creative.

Richard Hickox was renowned primarily for his unparalleled service to British music, with a vast discography covering not just the obvious Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Delius but composers whose output seldom gets an airing in the concert hall. I make no comment on the worth of much of the music revealed to us-but if we don’t get to hear it we cannot judge at all!

This, Vivaldi's very first opera, was premièred in Vicenza in 1713 and was an instant hit. The story is a relatively uncomplicated one by the standards of Baroque opera, of amatory pretences and misunderstandings: it has been admirably summarised by Eric Cross (who has edited the work) as a 'light-weight, amoral entertainment in which the flirtatious Cleonilla consistently has the upper hand, and gullible Emperor Ottone (a far from heroic figure) never discovers the truth about the way he has been deceived'. The score proceeds in a succession of secco recitatives (with just a very occasional accompagnato) and da capo arias – which the present cast ornament very stylishly.

The profane and the profound, the lurid and the saintly, rub elbows in Menotti's operas. In The Saint of Bleecker Street, religious faith and disbelief are interwoven with drunken outbursts, taunts, and a stabbing. It's as if Puccini's Suor Angelica and Il Tabarro had been crossed with Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The plot concerns the fragile Annina, a girl revered in New York's Little Italy because of her supposed ability to heal the sick. She hears voices, sees visions, and receives the stigmata as she vicariously relives the Passion of Jesus Christ. Her obsessively devoted brother Michele rejects these phenomena, believing them simply to be mumbo-jumbo imagined or thrust upon her by others.

There's no lack of glorious melody in Sir Johnin Love, and not just folksong cunningly interwoven. Musically, what comes over strongly, more richly than ever before in this magnificent recording from Richard Hickox, is the way that the writing anticipates later Vaughan Williams, not just the radiant composer of the Fifth Symphony and Serenade to Music, with keychanges of heartstopping beauty, but the composer's darker side, with sharply rhythmic writing.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century, England was at its apogee as an imperial power and, as every Englishmen at the time knew, the foundation of that power was the royal navy. In those days, a land army was a fine thing for European wars, but you couldn't beat a navy for projecting imperial power – and nobody could beat the royal navy. An Irish Protestant of English lineage, composer Charles Villiers Stanford deeply appreciated the royal navy – who else could bring an English army across the Irish Sea to put down the an Catholic rebellions? – and his three most popular choral-orchestral works amply prove the sincerity of his appreciation.