Elgar Flac Suite no 1

Timothy Ridout gives us the opportunity to discover the splendid viola version of Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto – an arrangement approved by the composer, who conducted its premiere in 1930. In addition to this deeply moving work, he gives us a powerful, poetic reading of Bloch’s all too rarely performed Suite for Viola and Orchestra, in which the Swiss composer indulged his fascination with the Orient.

This 10-CD box set of British orchestral music brings together a mouth-watering selection from the enterprising series of discs that the English conductor Douglas Bostock has made with various orchestras for the Classico label.
Important British composers are certainly featured - there are CDs devoted to Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax and Arnold - but this imaginative collection also includes many surprises, just waiting to be discovered, such as symphonies by Frederic Cowen and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Alan Bush and Ruth Gipps, concertos for orchestra by Edward Gregson, Alun Hoddinott and John McCabe, plus a host of smaller works. The recordings here, many world premieres, date from 1998 to 2005.

A century or so ago, Haydn Wood’s name was quite well-known in Britain. The youngest of the four composers here, he was born in Yorkshire in 1882 but raised on the Isle of Man. He enrolled as a scholarship student at Royal College of Music in London at the age of 15 and progressed so swiftly that soon thereafter his abilities as a violinist impressed such visiting luminary virtuosi as Pablo de Sarasate and Joseph Joachim. He also studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, as did Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Wood composed large-scale orchestral and chamber works, but switched focus to lighter fare following his marriage to the soprano Dorothy Court in 1909. He and Court toured music halls together – she’d already established her reputation singing Gilbert and Sullivan roles with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy – and Wood composed sentimental ballads for their performances. Songs such as Roses of Picardy became enormously successful and made the Woods a small fortune. Today, Wood is remembered primarily as one of the foremost composers of a genre known as “British Light Music” (alongside Eric Coates, Albert Ketèlbey, Robert Farnon and Ronald Binge), and his orchestral miniatures such as Joyousness, Serenade to Youth and Sketch of a Dandy are as finely wrought as they are breezily tuneful.