Delius reviews

Vividly coloured, if rather drawn-out readings, often lacking the special expressive touch that’s needed. A happy exception is North Country Sketches, where Hickox conjures true Delius atmosphere.

Malcolm Hayes

‘Delius in Norway’ is the theme, though the best of this composer’s music always inhabits a country of his own. Deliusland features long wistful sunsets, surprising colours and much chromatic motion. Head to, for instance, this CD’s final track, the evocative Eventyr, inspired by Norwegian folk tales, and succulently performed by Andrew Davis’s Bergen forces, including unnamed voices shouting twice off-stage.

Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus is one of his handful of acknowledged masterpieces, combining plainchant melodies and characteristic irregular metres in a setting of an Apocryphal text in which Christ sings and dances with his disciples before the Crucifixion. The Hallé Choir is energetic in the dance and radiant in ecstatic affirmation, with a strong contribution from the Youth Choir’s semi-chorus. The Hallé plays with precise attacks and perfect blending, and Mark Elder directs with sure control of the episodic structure.

The Danish composer-conductor Bo Holten has already presented his impressive credentials as an interpreter of Delius in discs of music associated with Denmark and Norway. Now he turns to ‘English Masterworks’, an imaginative programme reflecting through texts or subject-matter the country of Delius’s birth 150 years ago.

Thanks to Eric Fenby’s book Delius as I Knew Him and Ken Russell’s film Song of Summer, we tend to think of Delius as he was in his last years, a cantankerous recluse in rural France – forgetting that, right from his student days in Frankfurt, he made numerous close and loyal musical friends. Paul Guinery, well remembered as a genial voice on BBC Radio 3 but also no mean pianist, has assembled this delightful (and well recorded) anthology of music featuring some of those friends on the British musical scene.

The quasi-liturgical title of Delius’s 1905 Eine Messe des Lebens lays down a challenge. The work is a large-scale setting of sections of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, an atheist’s hymn to life, love, the human will and freedom from the fear of death. The music ranges widely from full-blooded choral exultation to noble philosophical meditation, and includes some episodes, such as the drowsy midday idyll in Part 2, which no other composer could have brought off so perfectly.

The first of these two discs (reviewed last October) contained Delius’s settings of English and Norwegian texts, the latter in English translations. This one consists of settings of poems from Delius’s ancestral Germany, his adopted France and his beloved Denmark – though again, the Danish texts are sung, sensibly, in English. This versatility already suggests one reason Delius’s songs aren’t better known: how many German or French singers, planning a programme of Lieder or mélodies, would think immediately of Delius?

With the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth looming next year, the flow of new Delius recordings seems to be accelerating. This is the first in a two-disc set that will, for the first time, cover his entire output of solo songs. It includes two sets, and some single numbers, of Norwegian poems (perhaps originally set in German translation, and all sung here in English versions), interspersed with English settings. A few of the latter, in particular, are rather empty.

The title, Poem of Life and Love, is familiar to anyone who knows Eric Fenby’s account of his years as the elderly Delius’s amanuensis: it’s the work that Delius had put aside when afflicted by blindness and failing health, and Fenby quarried to create the orchestral miniature A Song of Summer. But the original, published in a reconstructed version in 1997, is little known, and it has never before been recorded. It proves to be a big-boned, 17-minute piece of strong contrasts, with, unusually for Delius, the outlines of a Straussian symphonic poem.

 Though we are arguably more used to hearing the two bigger works on this disc sung by tenors, all but the Delius was first performed by a soprano, so it seems entirely apt that Susan Gritton should address them with her light and ethereal voice. 

A problem nevertheless arises when Gritton tries to cut through the orchestral textures. In some places consonants disappear. Clearer highlighting of her voice in the overall sound would have helped.