‘I don’t claim to be a British composer,”
commented Frederick Delius. Christopher Palmer confirmed this
assertion in the title of his book, Delius - Portrait of
a Cosmopolitan (Duckworth, 1976) for me still one of the
best books ever written about the composer. This new Bo Holten
recording, his third of compositions by Delius, with his Danish
performers, confirms - if ever that was necessary - the true
cosmopolitan nature and appeal of Delius’s music.
Songs of Sunset
“…But the spring of the soul, the spring of the
soul,
Cometh no more for you or for me…”
Songs of Sunset wasn’t premiered until 7 March
1914 in Elberfeld, Germany just months before the opening of
one of the bloodiest conflagrations in the history of mankind.
Its theme is the beauty and the agony of love - of love lost
or on the wane. Delius takes Ernest Dowson’s extravagant
texts and heightens them with almost unbearable emotional intensity
and beauty. As a young man it was this Delius work that appealed
to me most. Maybe I was more impressionable in my 20s, but it
pierced me then; and it can pierce me still. Only the stoniest
of hearts, I feel, could be impervious to its emotional pinnacles
such as at the lines quoted below the subheading above, and
at “Our love, a twilight of the heart Eludes a little
time’s deceit” so affectingly delivered by the Liverpool
Philharmonic Choir in Sir Charles Groves 1968 recording with
Janet Baker and John Shirley-Quirk with the touching fiddle
solo ending that second chorus. Yet Holten’s voices are
almost equally affecting here. Janet Baker touches the heart
in her ‘Exceeding Sorrow’ solo; she feels this most
forlorn of texts exquisitely, “Be no word spoken; weep
nothing…” Despite something of a quiver, Henriette
Bonde-Hansen responds well to the sentiments of this solo too.
Just listen to how her voice droops dejectedly, so pregnant
with meaning at the closing words “Let us forget tomorrow
This one day!”. Oh, how achingly beautiful is Holten’s
cellist rounding off this haunting movement. Throughout this
Sunset Holten’s orchestra hardly puts a foot wrong
through Delius’s sweetly melancholy and evocative score.
Shirley-Quirk steals a march on Reuter in both of his solos.
How Shirley-Quirk feels so dejected at ‘”No man
knoweth our desolation, Memory pales of the old delight...”;
one really empathises with his hunger for his departed love,
leaving him with “all my memories that could not sleep”.
With North Country Sketches, Delius returns to
his English beginnings, to the Yorkshire moors for these evocative
pictures of their austere beauty through the seasons. As a boy,
Delius had escaped there from the gloomy black atmosphere of
industrial Bradford. Holten’s performers paint most realistic
nature pictures: Autumn winds softly soughing in the
trees in an almost empty landscape disturbed only by the occasional
bird call; an iron chill gripping the Winter Landscape,
one can imagine trees painted white, icicles draped over isolated
buildings; then with Dance and the ebullient The March
of Spring Delius joyfully acknowledges life eternally renewing
and reaffirming - a major Delian motif.
“A Late Lark - twitters from the
quiet skies...”. So begins W.E. Henley’s lovely
poem of a lark’s serenade to a radiant sunset over “an
old grey city”. So it continues until there approaches
“Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep…”.
This peaceful beauty is then likened to the poet’s wish
for an equally serene closing to his life - “So be my
passing!” Clearly this imagery would have appealed greatly
to Delius. So it was that he was inspired to set this tranquil
scene to music with the aid of his amanuensis, Eric Fenby some
nine years before he died. Holten captures the roseate and sylvan
atmosphere beguilingly. Henriette Bonde-Hansen captures its
sentiments admirably although I would have liked to have heard
a little more emotional response to the lines “…in
my heart Some late lark singing, let me be gathered to the quiet
west…”
The Shelley settings that comprise the Three Songs
were originally for just voice and piano. Bo Holten has sympathetically
orchestrated them in the Delius idiom for this recording. Shelley’s
well-loved Love’s Philosophy has a rapturous orchestral
outpouring with Bonde-Hansen passionately pleading “What
are all these kisses worth If thou kiss me not?” Indian
Love Song pulses languidly, voluptuously, with the soprano
fervently pleading for her lover to press her close, heart to
heart: “… again Where it will break at last.”
To the Queen of My Heart has her ardently intimating
that her love will endure serenity and strife and her eagerness
to roam “In the cool night air…” so that she
can murmur “What I dare not in broad daylight.”
Despite my lingering and greater affection for the Groves -
Janet Baker - Shirley-Quirk EMI Classics recording of Songs
of Sunset, this new recording offers so many riches. This
and the fact that Danish, Bo Holten continues to impress with
his commitment to Delius means that I must offer this disc ‘Recording
of the Month’ status.
Ian Lace
Detailed contents list
Songs of Sunset (settings of poems by Edward
Dowson) (1906/08) [32:18]:-
A Song of the Setting Sun! [3:03]; Cease Smiling,
Dear! A Little While Be Sad [4:31];
Pale Amber Sunlight Falls [4:33]; Exceeding Sorrow
Consumeth My Sad Heart [4:55];
By the Sad Waters of Separation [4:34]; See How the
Trees and the Osiers Lithe [3:19]; I Was Sorrowful, I
Could Not Weep [4:24]; They Are Not long, the Weeping
and the Laughter [2:59]
Three Songs to poems by Shelley (1891) orchestrated
by Bo Holten: Love’s Philosophy [2:35]; Indian
Love Song [3:33]; To the Queen of My Heart
[4:04]
North Country Sketches (1913/14) [26:33]: Autumn
(The wind soughs in the trees) [8:03]; Winter Landscape
[4:06]; Dance [6:10]; The March of Spring (Woodlands,
Meadows and Silent Moors) [8:14]
A Late Lark (1925) [5:23]
Henriette Bonde-Hansen (soprano); Johan Reuter (baritone) 