Delius in NorwayChandos
English music breeds unequal pairs. Frederick Delius can no more be equated with his contemporary Edward Elgar than Michael Tippett can with Benjamin Britten. Yet such is the delightful diversity (or perversity) of musical taste that there will always be devotees who declare Delius and Tippett to be the more interesting composers.Delius is a taste not easily acquired. Lacking Elgar’s grand gestures and memorably coherent melodies, he writes in wispy strands, too disparate for comfort. This album comfortably opens with concise miniatures from a land he considered his spiritual home. Norwegian Bridal Procession is an orchestral delight, anticipating in gentle celebration the Peter Maxwell Davies masterpiece Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.Two soprano folksongs are sumptuously delivered by Ann-Helen Moen and the familiar On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring is languor incarnate, so timeless in its bird-watching patience it can soak your socks off.The weaker pieces here are the longer ones – a 25-minute suite for a theatre play satirising Norwegian politics (how amusing) and the interminable Eventyr, actually only 15 minutes long. Even the title sounds like eternity.Both suites were edited by Delius’s champion, the conductor Thomas Beecham, and you wish he had been more ruthless with the blue pencil. Still, as a sampler of Delius at his best and his worst, this compilation does the job more trenchantly than any critic can. Use it on friends to demonstrate Elgar’s exceptionality. Andrew Davies conducts the excellent Bergen Philharmonic. In Norway, needless to add.___Norman Lebrecht is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other publications. He has written 12 books about music, the most recent being Why Mahler? He hosts the blog Slipped Disc.
