Maxwell Chan

Chandos' Grainger Edition brings yet another cornucopia of delights delivered with indefatigable dedication and twinkling charisma by Richard Hickox and the BBC Philharmonic. The formula is the same as on this team's first and second volumes of Grainger's orchestral music, with tried-and-trusted nuggets such as Green Bushes and Colonial Song (both given here in particularly lavish orchestrations from 1905-06 and 1919 respectively) sitting cheek by jowl alongside genuine rarities like The Merry King (based on a folk-tune from West Sussex and boasting a seductively ornate piano contribution) and the amazingly colourful English Dance No.1 (a riot of a piece which prompted Gabriel Fauré to exclaim: "It's as if the total population were a-dancing!").

The macabre irony of The Widow’s Party is ghoulishly cheery – the first of six Kipling tracks. They’re not all vocal either. Try the soulful The Running of Shindand and Tiger-Tiger each for five cellos. The sequence concludes with the caramel orient sunset of The Love Song of Har Dyal. Country Gardens plays touchball with Schoenberg in the delightfully grating and ringing Barry Peter Ould-realised version. Scotch Strathspey and Reel is one of Grainger’s most treasurable pieces – about as far away as one could get from the fatuities of tartan culture and pretty sea-shanties. It makes connections far more often with the idiom of The Warriors and of whirlingly possessed dances from the Caledonian highlands.

This disc takes us to the tenor songs sung by Martyn Hill in his best darkly-inflected voice. These include just over half an hour of Kipling songs with an accent adopted reasonably convincingly.

Though Australian, more than any figure in English music Percy Grainger consistently blurred the bounds between folk-music arrangements and original composition. Two arrangements of Danish folk songs on this disc, "The Nightingale" and "The Two Sisters," have never been recorded before, while 13 others of the 23 pieces are, in these versions, premiere recordings. An essential issue for Grainger collectors, the music has broad appeal, conveying a direct emotional intimacy in such pieces as the solo piano version of "The Power of Love," a tune that, Grainger noted, "matched my soul-seared mood" after his mother's death. "Molly on the Shore" is among Grainger's best-known folksong arrangements, though not so many will know this vibrantly performed string quartet version.