Page 430 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

You get most VW you will want, even Sir John in Love, a negligible work with
a great cast (ask yourself, when did you last listen to it all the way
through?). Hugh the Drover is a much better work and Charles Groves
conducts it marvellously. About The Pilgrim’s Progress I have always been
something of an agnostic, but I concede its spiritual power and its command.
EMI went a bit gung-ho with the wind machine in Riders to the Sea – it’s a
depressing enough narrative without underlining nature’s implacable and
relentless force in this way. Meredith Davies directs incisively, though, and
there’s fine singing, especially by Helen Watts.

If you want three versions of the Serenade to Music, here they are – the full
choral one, the one for 16 vocal soloists and the orchestral version (this last
seems to defeat the point). There is only one version of the Tallis
Fantasia but thankfully it’s Silvestri’s – gloriously red-bloodied. You’ll have
Barbirolli’s anyway. Dives and Lazarus is in the safe, sympathetic hands of
David Willcocks, and it’s hardly Warner’s fault that they don’t have access to
Marriner’s Decca recording. Flos Campi (Aronowitz/Willcocks) was selected in
preference to Handley’s recording with Christopher Balmer, which was part of
his symphonic recordings, as it gave renewed airing to that series of
recordings Willcocks directed, which included An Oxford Elegy (with the
wonderful John Westbrook as speaker) the Mass in G (a must-have
account), Hodie and Sancta Civitas.

The chamber music is spearheaded by the venerable but long-lasting virtues
of The Music Group of London, who perform the Second Quartet; the First is
played by the Britten Quartet. On Wenlock Edge is represented by two
versions. Firstly, there is Ian Patridge and The Music Group of London, and
second, in the orchestral version, there’s Robert Tear with Rattle and the City
of Birmingham. Most listeners would much prefer Partridge, a master of the
idiom, as they would Rolfe-Johnson and Willison in Songs of Travel over
Thomas Allen – fine as he is – in the orchestral version, again with Rattle.
But at least this way you get both. If you’ve never heard Heddle
Nash’s Linden Lea you might be happy with Bostridge’s recording here but I
have and I’m not.

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Is this the best way for Warner to mark the 150 anniversary of the
composer’s birth? Or is it better to invest time, labour and money in
presenting unusual, overlooked repertoire, such as, for example, Albion has
done in releasing, for the first time, the complete folk songs and other
material? Which makes a greater claim on your wallet? The canonic
recordings or the novelties? The bulk or the niche? Is the answer to keep
reissuing the same old items?

When all’s said and done this is a necessary reissue, I suppose, if you want a
‘as much as you can eat’ VW buffet solution and haven’t already got the
previous box or possibly the much earlier 9-CD box. However, for its cost
cutting booklet and its lack of imagination in exploring beyond its initial remit
– and for the ambiguity of its title - I’m going to give it something of a
grudging, guarded welcome.