Bournemouth

Paul Daniel’s performance with the Bournemouth forces is one of the most successful to reach CD: it has spaciousness, drive and power in all the right places. The orchestral playing is refined, the choral singing robust and the ensemble tight.

Bakels draws ravishing sounds from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, notably the strings…A thrilling experience…this is a performance to stimulate the ear.

Ida Haendel’s sinewy and athletic reading of the often under-rated Britten combines toughness with a cumulative dramatic impetus which is hard to resist. Berglund and the Bournemouth players respond with a terse and argumentative vigour, suitably balanced between resignation and defiant rhetoric, especially in the closing Passacaglia. The Walton Concerto, also dating from 1938-9, is played with an apposite blend of inscrutable panache, as in the irrepressibly brilliant central movement, and elsewhere, a sensuous, if occasionally over-indulgent languor. Rare lapses in the finale can be safely overlooked, in a performance of eloquence and undisputed stature.

This newly remastered recording presents a varied selection of orchestral works by Benjamin Britten, performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Richard Hickox, to mark the great composer’s centenary year. The disc is also a part of The Richard Hickox Legacy, paying tribute to the conductor and leading advocate of twentieth-century British music.

Kees Bakels’ Vaughan Williams cycle is much better than many British critics like to admit. It’s strange, but you would think that it would be a source of pride for foreign musicians to conduct native composers like Vaughan Williams and Elgar. Unfortunately, what usually happens is that the “outsider” takes the music and promptly outclasses the home-grown talent. Such was the case with Slatkin’s Vaughan Williams cycle, which eclipsed the efforts of the likes of Boult and Handley, and it’s pretty much the case here.