Delius: A British Music Collection
John Shirley-Quirk, baritone; Julian Lloyd Webber, cello; Bengt Forsberg, piano; Rebecca Evans, soprano; Peter Hoare, tenor; London Symphony Chorus; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Richard Hickox, conductor; London Symphony Orchestra; Anthony Collins, conductor; Orchestra and Chorus of Welsh National Opera; Sir Charles Mackerras, conductor; Academy of St Martin in the Fields; Sir Neville Marriner, conductor.
Decca 470 375–2. Recorded 1953–80, Kingsway Hall, London; St. John’s Smith Square, London. 2 CDs.—Delius is a problem for programmers—always has been. His music resists the obvious categories, floats free of conventional formal argument, and makes demands on listeners that have nothing to do with the usual pleasures of symphonic development. You either surrender to it or you don’t. This Decca anthology, part of the label’s ongoing British Music Collection series, gathers recordings spanning four decades and four conductors, and the result is something genuinely useful, genuinely frustrating, and—in its best moments—genuinely moving.
Start with what works. Anthony Collins, largely forgotten now outside specialist circles, was one of the supreme Delians of the postwar generation, and these 1953 Kingsway Hall sessions with the London Symphony show exactly why. His Paris: The Song of a Great City breathes. That’s not a small thing—the piece is notoriously hard to sustain, its episodic nocturnal wandering demanding a director who can hold the long line while letting individual moments shimmer and dissolve. Collins does precisely that. In a Summer Garden, fifteen minutes of almost uninterrupted quiet, emerges with natural inevitability rather than studied refinement. You sense he knew this music from the inside.
The catch is the sound. These recordings are fifty years old, and they show it—thin, compressed, robbed of the very bloom and luminosity that Delius’s orchestration demands. At climaxes, the strings congeal rather than soar. For a composer whose language is inseparable from orchestral color, this matters enormously. The intrepid collector should proceed with open ears and tempered expectations.
No such reservations attach to the Hickox Sea Drift, recorded at the same Kingsway Hall in April 1980 under considerably more favorable acoustic conditions. John Shirley-Quirk—a Delian of rare authority—shapes the Walt Whitman text with a baritone that was then still at its ripest. The London Symphony Chorus sings with warmth and precision. Hickox, even at this relatively early stage of his career, understood the music’s emotional architecture: the way Delius builds grief not through dramatic confrontation but through a kind of tidal accumulation. The absence of a printed text in the booklet is inexcusable, particularly given how generously the dead space on those pages might have been used. Someone wasn’t paying attention.
Julian Lloyd Webber and Bengt Forsberg give the Cello Sonata a performance of considerable intimacy. Forsberg, seasoned in the Lied repertoire, approaches the piano part with the kind of attentive yielding that most pianists simply don’t manage—he knows when to recede, when to color, when to wait. Lloyd Webber’s tone in the upper register has a slightly reedy quality that suits the music’s autumnal character better than a richer, fuller sound might.
A Song of the High Hills is the disc’s most substantial discovery for listeners who haven’t encountered it. A major score from 1911, it carries the weight of Delius’s lifelong obsession with Norway—those vast, wind-scoured plateaus he had walked as a young man, the silence above the treeline. Mackerras and the Welsh National Opera forces give it the vigorous, wide-ranging performance it needs. Rebecca Evans and Peter Hoare sing the wordless vocal parts—the human voices representing, in Delius’s own account, the smallness of man against the mountains—with genuine beauty. The disc handles the dynamic extremes well enough, though the timpani at the biggest climaxes can sound oddly indistinct, buried rather than grounded.
Marriner and the Academy close things out with a group of orchestral miniatures, and these 1977 St. John’s Smith Square recordings remain among the finest things the ensemble ever committed to disc. “La Calinda” from Koanga has an infectious rhythmic spring—Marriner never lets it drag toward languor—and “A Song before Sunrise” achieves a radiance that seems to come from somewhere beyond mere mastery.
What’s missing matters. Decca’s own archive holds Hickox’s Appalachia and Mackerras’s as well, both magnificent, both previously paired with works included here. Their absence from this compilation is baffling—an editorial decision that looks, in retrospect, like a missed opportunity of the first order.
Still. At budget price, with Collins’s performances alone worth serious attention, and with the Hickox Sea Drift and Marriner miniatures representing some of the finest Delius on record, this set earns its place on the shelf. Just don’t expect consistency, and do expect to want more.
