Walton Chandos

The Doric gives outstanding, virtuoso performances of William Walton’s two string quartets. The first of them, formidable in its technical demands and harmonic language, is virtually unrecognisable from the Walton of maturity, embracing as it does the avant-garde ideas he flirted with in his youth. Walton said it was “full of undigested Bartók and Schoenberg”, but, when played with such panache, it provides a pungent contrast to the clarity and spry rhythmic sparring of the later A minor Quartet.

In this third volume of Edward Gardner’s Walton series with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, James Ehnes leaves his violin to tackle the taxing soloist role in the Viola Concerto.

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.

Laura van der Heijden joins the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth for this album of British cello concertos. Frank Bridge’s Oration, composed in 1929–30, was intended as an outcry against the inhumanity of warfare, and a tribute to the victims of the First World War. Its arch-form single continuous movement exhibits the intense chromaticism typical of Bridge’s output from this era.