It is a delight to welcome performances of two of Delius’s
American-inspired works by forces from Florida, where Delius
lived from 1892 to 1895. Although Sea Drift, a setting
of a poem by Whitman, is overtly about an American subject,
the music is more universal than specifically American. While
the initial drafts of Appalachia were made in Paris the
year after Delius left Florida - Marco Polo, Naxos’s sister
label, once had a recording (8.220452) of this earlier version
in their catalogues under the title of American Rhapsody
- the work was very substantially expanded to the form we have
it here some eight years later, long after Delius had returned
to Europe.
I first heard Sea Drift in the original Beecham recording
issued on a limited edition Delius Society release of four 78s
(now on Naxos)
- I still have them. Beecham’s account of the score remains
a marvel of sympathetic identification with the spirits of both
Whitman and Delius. Unfortunately all of his recordings - and
there are a good many of them, from studio and live broadcasts,
not all currently available - are in mono. This is a score which
absolutely demands the atmosphere of stereophonic sound. Similarly
Beecham never recorded Appalachia in stereo, and his
last (mono) LP (reissued by Sony)
suffered from a baritone who had seemingly been chosen for his
ability to sing Danish for the coupled recording of the Arabesque
rather than any ability to sing sympathetically in English for
the closing ‘negro spiritual’ section of Appalachia.
One cannot possibly accuse Leon Williams of sounding un-American,
but the tone of his voice is nevertheless rather English and
rather too polite. He is not helped by the rather close proximity
of the microphone, which brings him closer than the rest of
the performers rather than blending him into the whole. Bryn
Terfel, in his Chandos
recording of Sea Drift with Richard Hickox (coupled with
the Songs of Sunset and Songs of Farewell), digs
far more deeply into the meaning of the words than Williams
does here. The emotion of the latter is too generalised, and
his voice lacks the light and shade of Terfel or John Shirley-Quirk
on Hickox’s earlier Decca
recording.
Appalachia fares rather better in this reading. The orchestra
relishes the contrasts in Delius’s set of variations,
with a nicely winsome touch in passages such as the waltz variation
at 19.57; Beecham allowed a very gusty breath of the ballroom
to intrude here. Earlier they are beautifully atmospheric in
the passage from 17.01 which recalls Delius’s Florida
opera The magic fountain. The chorus is nicely distanced
in their brief interjections in the earlier variations, and
come into their own with the own variation at 27.50, when they
appear to move closer. Unfortunately the close microphone placement
given to Williams at 31.52 serves only to emphasise how precisely
English is his diction, and the choir are now very far forward
indeed, which brings a sense of stridency which is entirely
foreign to the Delius idiom. The passage at 33.28 sounds uncomfortably
like the closing titles for a Hollywood Western - not at all
the area of America that Delius had in mind.
This Naxos disc duplicates exactly the contents of one of Richard
Hickox’s earliest recordings of British music, issued
originally on an Argo LP in 1980, with Shirley-Quirk at the
peak of his form in the baritone solos, which is certainly a
reading which deserves to be in any Delius collection - it remains
available from Arkiv
Music . The Naxos recording is more immediate in general
sound than the analogue Hickox, but the latter has plenty of
atmosphere and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - many of whose
members must have played this music under Beecham - respond
with affection to Hickox’s somewhat slower tempos. Indeed
Sanderling could sometimes be accused of hurrying, as at the
baritone entry at 2.58 where the soloist sounds a bit hustled.
It is important to keep Delius’s music moving, not allowing
it to stagnate, but the flow can be maintained without undue
haste; Sanderling shaves nearly four minutes off Hickox’s
speeds in his earlier recording, almost a fifth of the whole
duration of a fairly short work. Beecham, even with the constraint
of 78 sides, was slower than this, and Delius always expressed
his conviction that this conductor understood his music better
than anyone else.
It is always a suspicion that when one knows a particular performance
well one might be allowing nostalgia to colour reactions to
a performance. To test this I played the recording of Sea
Drift to a friend of mine who, although he knew and loved
the poem, did not previously know the music at all. He like
me vastly preferred Hickox, observing that although that performance
was noticeably slower, it at the same time had a sense of purposeful
motion that Sanderling lacked. He also actually preferred the
more integrated sound of the older recording.
Naxos’s cover photograph by Giorgio Fochesato is particularly
beautiful and appropriate, and the booklet commendably includes
the complete texts of both works. The orchestra and chorus both
perform superbly; it is nice to hear a really big choir sing
this music - 137 singers are listed - as Delius would have expected
in his earlier performances. They maintain pitch even in the
most exposed passages of Sea Drift.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Reviews of Delius on Naxos
Leon Williams (baritone) 