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Zeb Soanes, Britten Sinfonia Voices, Britten Sinfonia & Jamie Phillips – Delius: Hassan – complete incidental music (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:25 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Although he had initially declined the commission, Delius was persuaded to write the incidental music for Hassan by the actor and director Basil Dean, in July 1920, for performances he was planning for His Majesty’s Theatre, London, the following year. Much of the music was drafted within a few weeks, and the score would eventually prove one of the greatest successes of Delius’s career. Dean’s plans for the project encountered significant obstacles and delays, however, and he had to commission additional music from Delius to cover the production’s complex scene changes. The London première eventually took place on 20 September 1923 and was a critical sensation. Flecker’s play is a sinuous double-narrative that intertwines the twin stories of the lovelorn but worldly wise Hassan, confectioner at the court of the cruel and vindictive Caliph Haroun al Rashid (called Haroun ar Rashid in Flecker’s play), and the young lovers Pervaneh and Rafi, caught up in the aftermath of a failed uprising and condemned to a terrifying and brutally protracted death. In tone and setting, Flecker’s text drew on nineteenth-century English translations of One Thousand and One Nights as well as other heavily fictionalised accounts and travel literature. Very much a product of the racial and class-based attitudes of its time, the play revels in imaginary scenes of a despotic Eastern.
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Timothy Ridout, Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne & Jamie Phillips – Music for Viola & Chamber Orchestra: Vaughan Williams, Martinů, Hindemith & Britten (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:25 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Claves Records
The wealth of music composed for the viola in the 20th century almost lets one forget the dearth of it in the 19th, which brought forth only two solo works of note: Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, a concerto commissioned by Paganini that sidelines the viola so much he refused to play it; and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, in which the solo viola is relegated to the part of the Don’s sidekick Sancho Panza. Sidelined and sidekicked – the viola’s fate seemed a fulfilment of the oft-quoted line from Quantz’s sometime flute treatise that “the viola is largely regarded among musicians as being of little significance”. It was only really in the 20th century that composers realised that the viola’s status of an in-between instrument could actually be to its advantage. It’s bigger than a violin, but tuned like a cello, and is both warmer in tone than the former, and much more agile than the latter. The viola then had the good fortune to become the preferred instrument of several important composers. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) briefly toyed with going professional on it; Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) went the whole hog and made a living from it in the Amar Quartet and as a soloist; and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) too was a violist, though he kept his public performing activities to the piano and the podium.
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