Robert Salter: Guildhall Strings
Release Date: 01 July 2004
Label: Hyperion Records Ltd
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 034571174440
Genres: Classical Chamber Music
Description
Robin Milford is one of those distinctive English composers who proliferated between the wars, but whose reputation suffered in the face of the avant garde establishment in vogue during the 1950s and â60s. Milford composed a range of music, from short practical works for children or amateurs to large-scale works including oratorios, an opera and a symphony.
This delightful disc presents Milfordâs music at its most quintessential and endearing. During the war Milford lost his six-year-old son to a road accident, a shattering personal catastrophe that blighted the remaining eighteen years of his life. Milfordâs idiom deepened and matured, and his ability to distil a mood or atmosphere into surprisingly simplelooking textures is his most rewarding trait. The music on this disc ranges from the soaring intensity of the Elegiac Meditation for viola and string orchestra of 1946â7 (a meditation on the losses of six years of war, or perhaps Milford was thinking of his dead son Barnaby), to the spirited and easy-going Festival Suite, written in 1950 to mark the Festival of Britain the following year. Milfordâs most famous work, Fishing by Moonlight, opens the disc, and is ravishingly performed by Guildhall Strings, with the composerâs grand-nephew Julian Milford at the piano.
Once again, Guildhall Strings perform unduly neglected British music with refinement and a rare sense of shared enjoyment.
Tracklisting
Roberto Prosseda, London Philharmonic Orchestra / Nir Kabaretti
The Brabant Ensemble / Stephen Rice
Steven Isserlis
The Nash Ensemble
MultiPiano Ensemble, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin / Ivor Bolton
Marc-Andre Hamelin
Marc-Andre Hamelin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Andrew Litton
Gothic Voices / Christopher Page
Robert Salter: Guildhall Strings
