Great Recordings of the Century - Delius: Brigg Fair And Other Orchestral Works

Thomas Beecham made these recordings a few years before he died in 1961. He had known Delius personally, and gave early performances of several works, including the London premiere of Brigg Fair in 1908. His feeling for Delius’ idiom is still widely thought to be unsurpassed, and these interpretations show why. The music owes something to Wagner’s expressive harmony and Debussy’s sensuality, but it sounds quite unlike anyone else’s, and can come across as shapeless in the wrong hands. Beecham was able to conjure a kind of keening intensity of focused orchestral tone that suited it perfectly—as in Brigg Fair, a dreamily beautiful set of variations on the English folk tune. Other highlights are the two exquisite miniature tone poems—On Hearing the first cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River—and the rapturous Prelude to Delius’s early opera Irmelin.