Delius: Walk to the Paradise Garden; La Calinda; Irmelin Prelude; Hassan Serenade; Two Aquarelles; Sleigh Ride. Murray: Homage to Delius; A Song Before Sunrise. Whitlock: Carol from Four Extemporisations.
Michael Stairs, organ; Robert Hebble, arr.
Priory PRCD 377. Longwood Gardens Organ, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. CD.
There is a question that hovers over this entire disc before a single note sounds: did Delius, who spent his formative years in Florida and his mature ones in France, who wrote music that seems to dissolve into mist and river-light and the particular quality of northern English air at dusk—did he have anything to do with the organ? The answer, bluntly, is no. And the instrument’s associations, Anglican, ecclesiastical, faintly self-righteous, sit uneasily with a composer whose pantheism was of the thoroughly pagan variety.
Michael Stairs is a capable advocate, and he plays the Longwood Gardens instrument with evident affection for the music. That counts for something.
But the organ—and I want to be careful here, because this is not merely a comment on this particular instrument—tends to impose its own personality. The sustained tones that made Delius’s orchestral writing so distinctive, those long-breathed string lines that seem to hang in the air like smoke, become something more rigid on the organ, more architectural than atmospheric. The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet fares reasonably well—Stairs paces it with patience, and Robert Hebble’s arrangement is sensible enough—but the ineffable quality of the original, that sense of two young people walking toward their deaths with something very like joy, simply doesn’t survive the translation intact.
The Hassan Serenade is rushed. There, I’ve said it. Stairs moves through it as though he has an appointment, and the music’s particular kind of erotic languor—Delius at his most nakedly Romantic—needs room to breathe.
On the other hand, La Calinda, in Michael Stairs’s own arrangement, actually works. The piece’s rhythmic vitality, its Caribbean origins still audible beneath the orchestral surface, gives the organ something to grip. The lively pulse cuts through the instrument’s tendency toward the devotional.
The Two Aquarelles are pleasant. Eric Fenby’s arrangement of the Irmelin Prelude is tasteful—Fenby, who knew Delius’s music from the inside as nobody else did, understood which elements could survive transplantation. The Sleigh Ride, with its obbligato of actual jingling sleigh bells (the arrangement drawn directly from the Beecham recording, we’re told), is a curiosity. Charming, perhaps. A little odd.
Dom Gregory Murray, who spent decades as organist at Downside, contributed the “Homage to Delius” that opens the disc alongside “A Song Before Sunrise.” It’s a pious tribute in the literal sense—which is precisely the problem.
Percy Whitlock’s “Carol from Four Extemporisations” closes the program and is, frankly, the piece that fits the medium best. Whitlock wrote for the organ; he understood it. The carol has a pensive quality that suits both instrument and venue.
The booklet notes by Bill Marsh are helpful. The recorded sound is clean.
Is this worth your time? If you are an organist with a Delius fixation, perhaps. If you want Delius, play the orchestral recordings—Beecham’s, Hickox’s, Mackerras’s. The organ, for all its resources, cannot replicate what Delius actually needed: the orchestra’s capacity for infinite gradation of color and dynamic, that shimmer between one harmony and the next that makes his best music feel less like music than like weather. This disc is a curiosity, occasionally a pleasant one, but ultimately a reminder that some composers are simply inseparable from the sounds they imagined.
