Description
The 1910s were a period of extraordinary
turbulence and change. Revolutions and war
left monarchies and empires fallen and the
social order irreversibly altered. The music on
this album emerges from various points in
that eventful decade, but all of it records
vividly a world that was shortly to vanish
forever – a world to which the year 1919 was
already a coda.
Indeed, the pieces chosen by Benjamin Baker
and Daniel Lebhardt for their second Delphian
recording also speak from a decade of musical
endings. Claude Debussy and Lili Boulanger
both died in 1918, two extraordinary careers
cut short early; Baker and Lebhardt’s
programme includes some of their last works.
Edward Elgar lived on for another fifteen years,
but wrote little more to match the four major
compositions which emerged from his pen in
1918 and 1919.
Leoš Janácek, by contrast, was about to enter
an astonishing Indian summer of creativity; his
violin sonata stands on the cusp, inspired by
Janácek’s hopes that the war might lead to
independence for his beloved Czech lands.