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Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Frederick
Delius was born in Bradford into a prosperous woolen mill owning
family. He resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to
Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation,
where he neglected his managerial duties; influenced by
African-American music, he began composing. After a brief period of
formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a
full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby
Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived (except during the
First World War) for the rest of their lives.
In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular
appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up.
Beecham staged Delius's opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent
Garden in 1910 and mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929,
as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works.
After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted
during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but
completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of
an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
As his skills matured, he developed a style uniquely his own,
characterised by his individual orchestration and his uses of chromatic
harmony. Delius's music has been only intermittently popular, and often
subject to critical attacks.
Sir Thomas Beecham on Delius
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Compact Discs and iTunes
The follwing are availbale as
compact discs and downloads at iTunes
1PD26 Collins Conducts British Music
Anthony Collins Conducts
- Sullivan Overture di ballo [Listen]
- Gardiner Shepherd Fennell Dance [Listen]
- Grainger Shepherd's Hey [Listen]
- Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis
[Listen]
- Vaughan Williams Fantasia on "Greensleeves" [Listen]
- Delius A walk to the Paradise Garden [Listen]
- Delius A Song of Summer [Listen]
John France at Music
Web International writes of 1PD26 Collins conducts British Music;
Firstly, the programme of this CD is a near
perfect introduction to the pleasures of British music - counting
Grainger as an honorary countryman - and secondly, the performance of
some of these works is eye-opening to say the least.
sons.
For me, the Delius pieces are old friends. I recall an old LP from the
1950s that I found somewhere - probably the school music library. It
was Collins version of The Walk to Paradise Garden and The
Song of Summer with which I first discovered Delius. And I guess
that it is this sound-scape that I have carried with me in my musical
mind ever since: it is my touchstone for all subsequent recordings that
I have heard of these pieces. In fact it was not until a wee while
after hearing these recordings that I discovered the wonderful Tommy
Beecham records. Yet even these did not usurp what I had heard of
Collins and the LSO. The Song of Summer is one of the pieces
that Delius's amanuensis, Eric Fenby, helped set down on manuscript
paper. And it is surely a well-known tale that the elder composer asked
the young Fenby to imagine the view from the sea-cliffs of Yorkshire on
a hot summer's day. To my ear this is one of the best 'landscape'
tone-poems in the literature and certainly deserves its place in many
an anthology of English music. Collins version is totally convincing,
in both its intimate moments and the huge, almost overpowering climaxes.
This is a fine CD that would make a good introduction to English music
for anyone who had yet to make that step. The sound is not perfect -
but yet again I am just a little younger than these recordings and
neither am I! However, what makes it a fantastic disc is the sheer
beauty of the sound, the attention to detail and the depth of
engendered emotion - especially in the Delius.
Robert Cowen writes in Gramophone for December 2008:
Beulah's star release has Anthony Collins
conduct a programme of "British" music. Rarely have I encountered a
more sensitively nuanced reading of Vaughan Williams Tallis
Fantasia, with some beautifully judged perspectives, or more luminously
played Delius (the "Walk" from Romeo and Juliet and A Song
of Summer). The transfers are first rate.
or phone Priory Records 01525 377566
More Anthony
Collins
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Extra Tracks
Below are tracks from our library that never
made it onto one of our compact discs. They can be downloaded here as
high quality 320kbs AAC encoded (MP3) files.
Purchasers of tracks have unlimted personal use but
must not pass or sell on to third parties nor broadcast without prior
permission from PPL
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1st movement
2nd and 3rd movements
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1 Autumn
2 Winter landscapes
3 Dance
4 March of spring
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" Beecham’s Delius has even more classic
status, as evidenced by this mono recording of North Country Sketches,
originally recorded on 78s (Columbia LX1399-41), and sounding every bit
of it on LP as I recall, despite Trevor Harvey’s comments to the
contrary when the Philips LP was released in 1964. I wouldn’t have
recognised the glowing Beulah transfer as the same recording – either
the Columbia original was better than the Philips reissue or Barry
Coward has worked magic on it, as he so often does. The new reissue
makes a welcome supplement to the mono and stereo recordings of
Beecham’s Delius included in the recent 6-CD anthology of British music
from EMI. An earlier (1945) recording of the Sketches with the LPO
features in an all-Delius programme on Somm, but includes Autumn and
Winter only, so the Beulah version is all the more welcome. There are
too few recordings of this work to ignore either of these Beecham
versions and, in any case, his way with Delius is unbeatable. " Brian
Wilson at Music
Web International
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