Delius is not for everyone, and he would have been the first to admit it. His music asks you to surrender — to give yourself over to a world of hovering chromatic harmonies, of landscape so evocative it almost embarrasses the ear, of emotion worn so openly on the sleeve that the unsympathetic listener reaches for the word “sentimental” before the first phrase has resolved. That word, I’ve always thought, says more about the listener’s defenses than about the music.
Bo Holten understands this.
What Holten brings to Appalachia — Delius’s great Mississippi meditation, composed in the years straddling the turn of the last century — is not the grand rhetorical sweep of a maestro trying to prove something. It’s something quieter and, in the end, more devastating. The opening pages, where brass calls drift across the orchestra like voices heard across still water, are genuinely atmospheric in a way that eludes many conductors who try too hard to manufacture the effect. Holten simply lets the music breathe, and the mist rises on its own.
The biographical undertow here matters. Delius spent time in Florida in the 1880s — ostensibly cultivating oranges on a plantation near the St. Johns River, actually doing almost nothing of the sort. What he was doing was listening. Sitting on the porch in the subtropical dark, he absorbed the harmonies of Black laborers singing in the distance, harmonies that worked themselves so deeply into his musical imagination that they never fully left. Tasmin Little, who knew the Delius world as well as anyone, believed he fell in love there — with a Black woman, with whom he may have had a child. The relationship didn’t survive. Neither, in any conventional sense, did the memory — but it echoes through Appalachia, through Koanga, through much of what he wrote about America, with a grief too particular to be purely abstract.
Appalachia carries its subtitle — “Variations on an Old Slave Song” — without apology. The theme, that modal, aching melody, arrives first in the strings with something like the sound of banjos being half-remembered rather than directly quoted. Then the cor anglais takes it up, alone, and you understand immediately why this instrument was Delius’s instrument — its reedy, slightly hollow tone carries exactly the kind of longing that sits just this side of despair. Holten’s cor anglais player shapes the line with admirable restraint. The subsequent horn variation, shifted to the minor, deepens the shadow without melodrama.
The choral finale is where this music either breaks your resistance entirely or doesn’t. It broke mine, here. The text — slaves singing of being sold down the river, of families severed, of lives that belonged to other people — is set by Delius with a simplicity that is almost unbearable precisely because it doesn’t reach for the unbearable. The chorus under Holten sings with warmth and clarity, the consonants clean, the long lines sustained without effortfulness.
Compare this with Sir Andrew Davis’s 2010 Chandos recording, which is the obvious point of reference — Davis brings more outward confidence, a broader dynamic canvas, and an orchestral finish that is frankly hard to beat. But Holten’s version has something Davis’s occasionally lacks: the sense that the music is being discovered rather than delivered. There are moments in this disc where you feel the genuine strangeness of what Delius was doing — an English composer, syphilitic, ultimately blind and paralyzed, writing from memory about a Florida riverbank he’d left behind decades before, channeling through a European late-Romantic idiom the music of enslaved people whose suffering he had witnessed without fully comprehending.
The excerpts from Koanga add necessary context. The opera — drawn from George Washington Cable’s novel The Grandissimes, set among the Creole and enslaved populations of colonial Louisiana — is unjustly neglected even by Delians. “Palmyra’s aria” is a gorgeous, heartbreaking piece, and it receives a interpretation here that honors its chromatic suppleness without smearing the lines into impressionistic blur. The famous “La Calinda,” that irresistible dance that Delius later extracted for concert use, has real rhythmic lift — not something you can take for granted.
This is serious work, seriously done. Holten’s Delius series for Danacord has been building, disc by disc, into something that deserves a place alongside the best of Beecham, Hickox, and Davis. Beecham remains the god of this repertoire — there are phrases in his old recordings that no one has touched — but Holten is in the conversation now. Unambiguously recommended.
