Though it’s not noted
as such on the booklet cover this is
actually the fourth volume in Naxos’s
Ketèlbey series. It’s a collection
I’ve found enormously engaging and it’s
especially good to have the disparate
recordings collated in one authoritative
collection, with well researched notes
by Tom McCanna and good quality originals
used. The present disc is a bit of a
curate’s egg. We have yet another rousing
recording of In a Monastery Garden sung
by a Ketèlbey stalwart, the pocket
battleship contralto Nellie Walker.
But we also have Tangled Tunes – in
four parts (i.e. on two 78s) – which
consists of well known melodies stitched
together in ways either brassy or windy
and which won’t pay much repeated listening.
It may have been another matter in June
1914 however when the composer recorded
them with the Casino Orchestra.
The disc actually opens
with Men of England to words by Thomas
Campbell (text printed in the booklet)
a stirring and patriotic effusion sung
by a hand picked vocal ensemble and
the composer’s own grand-sounding Concert
Orchestra in January 1929. McCanna speculates
that one of the sopranos was none other
than Lillian Stiles-Allen, now best
known for her singing in Serenade to
Music but a significant adornment to
British musical life of the time – and
a distinguished teacher after her retirement
from the concert stage. The three movement
In Holiday Mood (recorded quite late
in 1938 for Bosworth) has caught the
Eric Coates bug in its jaunty opener,
On the Promenade and when we delve back
to 1912 – one of the incidental pleasures
of a series such as this is the delving
back and forth in time the discs engage
in – we reach the composer himself and
cellist Jean Schwiller in The Phantom
Melody. This is van Biene territory
and none the worse for it – and the
recording is strikingly fine. You simply
would not recognise this as a 1912 recording.
Edgar Coyle turns up to do a spot of
balladeering in My Heart Still Clings
To You (Yeuch as Tom Lehrer would
have said) and we have more of Ketèlbey’s
stay-at-home exotica in the shape of
Silver-Cloud, Wildhawk and Wonga (An
Oriental Intermezzo). Whether writing
of tepee, sake or potentate he was reassuringly
the same. The best of such foreign jaunts
is The Vision of Fuji-San with its evocative
orchestral build up of detail and Knights
of the King shows us the fine fanfaring
and ceremonial side of his outlook with
a splendid march section.
The cover states these
recordings were made between 1912 and
1933 but they also claim that In a Holiday
Mood was set down in 1938 so let’s plump
for the latter date. This is less essential
Ketèlbey, with some pot-pourri
and potboilers, but there’s quite enough
to keep addicts encouraged – and grateful.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Ian Lace
Orchestras conducted by Albert Ketèlbey,
Louis Voss, Claude Ivy, Harry Wood, Gustave Cloëtz
and Lt W.J. Dunn 