Moeran: Symphony In G Minor / Sinfonietta

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Cat No: 8555837

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Release Date: 08 January 2002

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313583720

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MOERAN

Description
Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950)Symphony in G minor • SinfoniettaThe 1920s and 1930s saw in England a remarkable flowering of symphonies by the then leading younger composers. After the war, Bax, Bliss and Vaughan Williams soon all emerged as composers of symphonies which have lasted, reaching a full flowering in the 1930s. Briefly Bax was considered as the leading British composer of symphonies, but his position was soon challenged by Walton and Vaughan Williams’s angry Fourth, both immediately recorded. In the English-speaking world at this time the example of Sibelius, was all embracing and commanded a wide audience. It was in this climate that E. J. Moeran long grappled with writing a symphony. Ernest John Moeran had been born in Isleworth, Middlesex, the son of an Irish protestant clergyman, but he spent his impressionable early years on the Norfolk coast, where his father became Rector of the remote village of Bacton. Moeran’s was a middle-class background, even if it was not a wealthy one. After prep school in Cromer he went to Uppingham, where the music master was Robert Sterndale Bennett, grandson of the composer William Sterndale Bennett, under whose influence Moeran played the violin and composed. In 1913 Moeran went to the Royal College of Music and became a composition student of Stanford, but on the outbreak of war he became an army motor cycle despatch rider and was later commissioned. In 1917 he suffered a head wound, when shrapnel became lodged too near the brain for its removal, an injury that, until his death, had the unfortunate effect of making him appear drunk after even very small quantities of alcohol. He was demobilised and soon after met the composer Arnold Bax who later recalled him as ‘as charming and good looking a young officer as one could hope to meet’. Moeran was one of the last mainstream British composers to be influenced by folk-song. An early hearing of Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody came with the force of a revelation. During his early years in the army, when posted to Norfolk, Moeran began collecting such songs, and continued in the 1920s. Their flavour permeates his music. In his twenties he was prolific, and although initially still studying, now with the composer John Ireland, he produced three orchestral quasi-folk-song rhapsodies, emulating Vaughan Williams’s example. In In the Mountain Country, and the first two numbered rhapsodies, Moeran invented the ‘folk-songs’ used. All three were heard in 1924. In the Mountain Country was dedicated to and conducted by Hamilton Harty, who, himself also the composer of an Irish Symphony, commissioned a symphony from Moeran. Although Moeran several times reported himself working on it, he found it difficult to complete and fourteen years passed before it was heard. Always the countryman, Moeran was long-associated with Norfolk, later with Herefordshire, and for the last thirty years of his life with rura
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