557143 bk Delius US 10/12/2003 12:33 am Page 4 Royal Scottish National Orchestra DDD Formed in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, in 1951 the now full-time ensemble took the name of the Scottish National DELIUS 8.557143 Orchestra, later assuming the title Royal in recognition of its importance in the musical life of Scotland. Distinguished conductors who have worked with the orchestra include Sir John Barbirolli, Karl Rankl, Hans Swarowsky, Walter Susskind, Sir Alexander Gibson, the first Scottish-born Principal Conductor, Bryden Thomson and Neeme Järvi. Walter Weller, now Conductor Emeritus, served as Music Director and Principal Conductor from On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring 1992 to 1997, when he was succeeded by Alexander Lazarev. As well as recording a series for Naxos devoted to the orchestral music of Samuel Barber with recent Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop, the orchestra also made an The Walk to the Paradise Garden • Spring Morning important contribution to the authoritative Naxos series of Bruckner Symphonies under the late Georg Tintner, and has added significantly to the stock of recordings of film music, with award-winning releases in London and in Germany. A busy schedule in Scotland brings regular seasons in its home-town of Glasgow, annual appearances at Royal Scottish National Orchestra • David Lloyd-Jones the Edinburgh Festival and regular performances in the BBC Promenade Concerts in London. In addition to concerts in England, the orchestra has travelled to other countries, with tours of North America and Japan, and throughout Europe. In 2002 the orchestra was given a Classic FM ‘Red F’ award for its outstanding contribution to classical music, through recording, performance, education and outreach work. David Lloyd-Jones David Lloyd–Jones began his professional career in 1959 on the music staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and soon became much in demand as a freelance conductor for orchestral and choral concerts, BBC broadcasts and TV studio opera productions. He has appeared at the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera and the Wexford, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and Leeds Festivals. In 1972 he was appointed Assistant Music Director at English National Opera, and during his time in that position conducted an extensive repertory which included the first British performance of Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In 1978, at the invitation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, he founded a new full-time opera company, Opera North, with its new orchestra, the English Northern Philharmonia, of which he became Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. During his twelve seasons with the company he conducted fifty different new productions, including The Trojans, Die Meistersinger and the British stage première of Strauss’s Daphne, as well as numerous orchestral concerts, including festival appearances in France and Germany. He has made a number of very successful recordings of British and Russian music and has a busy career as a conductor in the concert-hall and the opera-house that takes him to leading musical centres throughout Central Europe and to Scandinavia, Russia, Israel, Australia, Japan, Canada and the Americas. His highly acclaimed cycle of Bax’s symphonies and tone poems (Gramophone Award) was completed in autumn 2003. 8.557143 4 557143 bk Delius US 10/12/2003 12:33 am Page 2 Frederick Delius (1862-1934) latent love they have for each other, and the music studies inspired by the natural world, is one of his more On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and other orchestral works becomes passionate and ecstatic, only to subside bracing miniatures. The outer panels, marked Freshly, gradually in a poignant dying fall. In his biography of enclose a slower, more reflective, middle section. The The ten orchestral works by Frederick Delius that are Negro workers in both places were a lasting influence on the composer, Sir Thomas Beecham quotes a only oddity is the title; a song at sunrise would be performed in chronological order on this disc span the his art. American Rhapsody of 1896 is an early, much distinguished colleague’s apt comment on the opera and understandable, but before is more puzzling. One whole of his creative life. They also illustrate the shorter, version of the extended orchestral and choral perhaps this interlude in particular: ‘This is the most possible explanation is to be found in Nietzsche’s Thus cosmopolitan aspect of his art and his love of the four work that in 1902 became Appalachia, and features the heartbreaking music in the world’. Spake Zarathustra, that Delius loved and drew on for countries that most inspired him, England, America, haunting old Negro slave song which served as the By the second decade of the twentieth century A Mass of Life, which contains a chapter-heading Before Norway and France. theme for variations in that work. Scored for a large Delius had produced a succession of large-scale Sunrise. Marche Caprice, which can now be heard with its orchestra, it opens in typically ruminative Delian masterworks but, almost ironically, the appearance of Finally, the last piece that Delius ever wrote. As is extra flute and cornet parts, was composed in Paris in fashion. The Negro theme is then announced in a dance- the Two Pieces for Small Orchestra of 1911-12 were to well known, the few works dating from the last years of 1889 when Delius was 27, and revised in the following like section over a lively banjo (harp and pizzicato cello) set the seal on his fame. On Hearing the First Cuckoo in the blind and paralyzed composer’s life (1929-34) were year. Although clearly influenced by such works as accompaniment, and then restated in a slower tempo in Spring develops in typically rhapsodic style a laboriously dictated to his young amanuensis, the Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, its middle section already shows the minor by strings and wind in the most expressive Norwegian folk-song (also used by Grieg in his Op. 66) Yorkshire organist Eric Fenby. For Fantastic Dance, some typically Delian characteristics, with its wistful chromatic harmonization. Soon the minstrel-show song that he had come to know through Percy Grainger. It cast in A-B-A form, Delius was able to draw on a short, harmonies and haunting oboe solo. After side-tracking Dixie and Yankee Doodle make their appearance, and achieved an instant success owing to the powerful fully orchestrated fragment (A) and a sketch of some himself, Delius remembers just in time that he is writing suddenly it seems as if we are watching and hearing a combination of a haunting tune and the harmonic contrasting material (B). It is not known when the a march, however capricious it may be. procession of American marching bands in all their mastery with which Delius treats it. Marked In a flowing second section was composed, but its treatment seems to It would seem logical that the Three Small Tone raucous glory, complete with random thwacks on the tempo it displays, right from its magical opening chord, hark back to the dance-like music of the fair scene in Poems (1888-90), presented here as a group for the first bass drum. There is a wistful, poetic coda. American the pantheistic identification with nature that lies at the A Village Romeo and Juliet. The ‘fantastic’ element of time, were originally four in number. Three of the four Rhapsody was first performed as recently as 1986. core of this composer’s art. Much the same goes for the the title may refer to the whole-tone scale heard in the seasons are represented and there is documentation to Although Delius composed his fourth opera even more exquisite Summer Night on the River, though opening bars, a feature that is not otherwise confirm that a piece called Autumn (Tone Poem) once A Village Romeo and Juliet during the years 1899-1901, here the focus is more specifically on the river Loing at characteristic of Delius. Appropriately dedicated to the existed, though this has yet to be found. All three pieces the extended entr’acte played between the last two the end of Delius’s garden near Fontainebleau where, in long-suffering Fenby, the work was first performed in display Delius’s instinctive affinity with nature and the scenes, later known as The Walk to the Paradise the failing light, the fireflies and gnats skim the surface London in January 1934. Delius listened to the broadcast open air. Summer Evening breathes the requisite relaxed Garden, was not composed until the rehearsal period of the slowly flowing water. This is the exact musical in France; it was to be his last première, for the totally sensuousness, though towards the end it reaches a before the opera’s staged première in Berlin in February equivalent of a nature painting by Monet, Pissarro or incapacitated but stoic 72-year-old composer died four surprisingly full and impassioned climax. Winter Night, 1907. Delius originally wrote a relatively short Sisley. months later. which is also known under its original title Sleigh Ride, orchestral interlude, which started with the first fifteen Another work scored for chamber orchestra, A Song originated as a piano piece that Delius composed in bars of the present version. He extended and greatly before Sunrise (1918), the last of Delius’s orchestral Hugh Priory 1887 while a student at Leipzig and first played at a enriched his score when he was required to supply extra party on Christmas Eve given by Grieg. The jingles of music to cover the scene change from the Fair to the the sleigh are characterful and the music crisp, but one country inn known as ‘ The Paradise Garden’.