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"the enterprising label, DELPHIAN"     - BBC Radio 3

- Exon Singers premier Victoria
- Dallapiccola surveyed
- Kitchen records Usher Hall organ
- Applause from Gramophone

On the 31st of December the Exon Singers broadcast Choral Evensong live on BBC Radio 3, to much acclaim, from Tewkesbury Abbey. From there the choir travelled to the Chapel of Giggleswick School, North Yorkshire where they were met by the engineers from Delphian. The repertoire recorded comprises music for use at the Second Vespers of the Feast of the Annunciation - a complete disc of Tomás Luis De Victoria's settings - the first recording of this, reconstruction. Jon Dixon, the researcher and editor for the project, writes:

"Given the existence of this group of large scale and impressive compositions published within a few years of each other, I have thought it useful to put together the present collection to draw attention to these fine works and to illustrate the possible order that a festal monastic service might take making the fullest use of this music."
 

Victoria scholar, Noel O'Regan's authoritative writings, will accompany the recording.

This landmark recording marks the beginning of a new relationship between the Exon Singers under their conductor, Matthew Owens, and Delphian Records.

The Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola [1904-1979]was born in Istria, and is regarded as one of the most outstanding composers of the 20th century. His music has an intimate intensity ranging from the tenderly lyrical to the shatteringly dramatic. Although he became fascinated by the 12 tone music of Schönberg and his ‘2nd Viennese School’, he was never doctrinaire and used such techniques at his own discretion to enhance his deeply felt personal style.
 

Wilde follows the score during playback

Delphian’s centenary project encompasses a wide ranging selection of his songs and instrumental music, including the complete original piano works, played by David Wilde, who was invited to play them in the composer’s birthplace in 2002, and recorded them for the BBC’s 75th birthday tribute. In a letter to the producer Dallapiccola expressed himself delighted with Wilde’s performance, and they later met. Amongst these works is the ‘Musical Notebook of Annalibera’, written in 1953 as an eighth birthday present for his daughter, who was born on the day of the liberation of Italy, [hence her name] which is the main inspiration of these pieces. Annalibera Dallapiccola is now Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Edinburgh.

Soprano Susan Hamilton, partners with Wilde in a recording of the beautiful settings of poems by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Amongst other repertoire on the disc Clea Friend, ‘cellist daughter of the distinguished conductor plays Ciaconna, Intermezzo E Adagio.

On the 21st of January John Kitchen recorded a disc of works whose repertoire demostrates the variety of colour embodied within the recently-restored Norman and Beard Organ at Edinburgh's Usher Hall.

Kitchen, renowned for his programming of music appropriate to the instrument on which he is performing, has chosen pieces comprising Liszt's Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen; Hollins' Triumphal March; Walton's Popular Song; a set of Handel Marches amongst others. This, the first recording of the organ, will be available in March this year (2004).

Usher Hall Organ
John Kitchen (DCD34022)
Release date: March 2004

Hear the Usher Hall organ here: sample (size: 1.11 MB)

Ascension (DCD34017) The Choir of St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh / Matthew Owens Gramophone, February 2004 A shining service of contemporary works

The striking geometrics of this disc’s cover set the visionary tone to a tee. Segments of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s stained glass Millennium window (installed in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh, and dedicated in 2002), match perfectly this Ascension-themed programme. It consists of a complete Choral Evensong of contemporary works associated with St Mary’s, rounded off with Messiaen’s L’Ascension, played by the cathedral’s organist, Matthew Owens.

The choir sing with tremendous fervour, clarity and power, coping assuredly with a wide range of choral textures and techniques, including some improvisation in James MacMillan’s unaccompanied motet Tremunt videntes angeli (the disc’s highlight). I particularly liked the slightly raw and edgy tone of the mixed-sex top line. Equally enjoyable were the Kenneth Leighton Preces and Responses which sound as harmonically audacious as when they first appeared in 1964. Patrick Gowers’ exotic anthem Viri Galiliaei also bears repeated listening. Plaudits, too, to the assistant organist, Simon Nieminski, who accompanies throughout with flair and good taste. With his support the two office hymns stride along vigorously and simply.

Interest slackens with the two Psalms which are sung to plainsong and Richard Allain’s cluttered 1997 setting of the Evensong Canticles drifts perilously towards the cacophonous.

Although not the ideal vehicle for Messiaen’s early (1932) mediation, the Cathedral’s four-manual Father Willis copes well, particularly in the best-known movement , ‘Transports de joie’.

An occasional faint rumble of traffic does nothing to detract from the superb recording quality. This is a disc worth buying for the MacMillan alone.

Malcolm Riley

La Paix du Parnasse (DCD34012) Lucy Carolan and John Kitchen (harpsichords) Gramophone, February 2004 Fine rapport between this duo produces a disc that cannot fail to give pleasure

Lucy Carolan and John Kitchen exercise Couperin’s licence to play three- and four-part music on two harpsichords, using Taskins from the Russell Collection in Edinburgh. It was a practice Couperin indulged in at home in Paris with students and he commended the practice to others in the preface to his programmatic L.Apothéose de Lully (1725). With three-part works such as trio sonatas or his own pieces de clavecin embellished with contreparties between the hands, the two harpsichords double on the bass while one plays the first of the upper parts and the other the second.

Couperin’s only published pièce specifically for two harpsichords opens this CD. The luxirant texture of the ‘Allemande à deux clavecins’, much the most sophisticated of the items included here, deserves to be revisited after listening to the whole of the disc. If only Couperin had published more such works! Of the transcriptions, the fugal tracks (7 and 27) and fanfare (tracks 9, 21, 28) movements are the most successful, while the droning parade of musettes palls (three on one disc is two too many).

To fill out the disc, Carolan cleverly chooses a selection of solo harpsichord pieces that by their textures and complexity sound almost as if played on two instruments rather than one. In the whimsical ‘Evaporée’ and the ‘Drôle de corps’, melodic motifs are playfully tossed from hand to hand. The much-loved ‘Dodo, ou l’amour au berceau’ and the ethereal ‘Carillon de Cithére’ are in truth the most refined musettes ever composed.

Carolan’s ornamentation in the solo pièces is exquisitely subtle, the rhetoric and the pacing of ‘La Distraite’ masterful, and the registration in ‘Le Rossignol’ throws the birdsong into clear relief. The rapport between Carolan and Kitchen is sure, and never more so than in the Air (track 25) and Lentement (track 29) of the quartet La Steinquerque. My pleasure in this recording, enhanced by the evident acuity of the tuner of the two instruments, is only slightly dimmed by the close miking of the harpsichord action in ‘La Juillet’ and the ‘Muzete’ (track 18).