Delius: Sea Drift, La Calinda – Hickox and Marriner

Fog is the medium Delius composed in — not weather exactly, more a state of harmonic suspension where chords drift past like riverbank scenery seen from a slow boat. Get the fog wrong and the music turns to mush. Get it right and you understand why Beecham spent a lifetime evangelizing for a composer most of his English contemporaries regarded with polite bewilderment.

This reissue pairs two conductors who approached that fog very differently. The disc is more interesting for the collision.

Marriner takes the two shorter pieces — “A Song before Sunrise” and “La Calinda” — and refuses to loiter. His account of the “Song” moves with a brisk, almost matutinal energy; those cuckoo calls come through with real assertion, not the drowsy murmur one usually gets. This is dawn as event, not mood. Some listeners raised on the langourous Beecham manner may find it brusque. I found it a tonic. Marriner has never been much of a mystic. Here that’s a virtue — the piece doesn’t wallow, it wakes up.

“La Calinda” dances rather than sways. The tambourine sits at a slight remove in the mix, glinting rather than clattering, and there’s a passage of trumpet writing around the two-minute mark that snaps into focus with startling clarity. Textures do crowd a bit at the climaxes; the strings occasionally lose definition when the whole orchestra leans in. But the rhythmic lift, the sheer physical spring in the step, is genuine achievement. It made me want to go back and hear what else Marriner has done with this repertoire. His Bax and Bridge disc from the late nineties left me cold, frankly, so this was something of a surprise.

The two big pieces belong to Richard Hickox, recorded in that fertile stretch after his earliest sessions — those Rubbra Masses for RCA — but before Chandos claimed him more or less exclusively.

Sea Drift is the more successful of the pair, though not without a caveat. The choral sound is deliberately veiled, almost gauze-covered, and the price of that beauty is intelligibility. Whitman’s words disappear into the texture more often than one would like. Whether this is interpretive choice or simply the acoustic Hickox was handed, I can’t say for certain. But there’s compensation: at the score’s most anguished moments, phrases surface out of that haze with sudden, aching clarity, as though the mist has briefly parted. John Shirley-Quirk, recording this fairly late in a distinguished career, sounds carefully contained early on — some listeners may want more immediate anguish — but he warms audibly as the piece unfolds, and by the final pages he’s fully inhabiting the old sailor’s grief.

Appalachia is the tougher listen to place. Hickox gets the architecture: the sheer breadth of the thing, the grandeur of Delius’s variation structure unfolding over that spiritual-derived theme. What’s missing, at least next to Barbirolli’s old recording, or Mackerras, or Beecham’s final Sony/CBS remake, is the give in the phrasing, the sense of the music breathing rather than being conducted. Those three found a tenderness in the work’s quieter variations that Hickox doesn’t quite locate. He’s not wrong about the piece. He’s just hearing a different piece, one of statement rather than confession.

Sonically this is a big, room-filling disc, particularly on the Hickox tracks. Put it through a decent system and the choral climaxes in Sea Drift have real weight and bloom. Full texts are included, which matters for these vocal-orchestral works, and Christopher Palmer’s notes, lifted from the original LP, are typically literate. The Marriner items get no commentary at all, an odd omission, and nowhere does the booklet tell you where or exactly when any of this was recorded — a small discourtesy to anyone doing serious comparative listening.

Still: at budget price, with playing this vivid and a Marriner rediscovery thrown into the bargain, this disc earns its place. Not a first choice for Appalachia — Beecham remains indispensable there — but a genuinely rewarding way to spend an evening in Delius’s fog.