Delphian Records

Elena Fischer-Dieskau – Schumann: Kreisleriana – Brahms: Two Rhapsodies, Seven Fantasies (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

January 13, 2024 0 Comment

Clara Wieck, who in 1840 was to become Clara Schumann, was a significant figure in the lives both of her husband Robert and of Johannes Brahms, to whom the Schumanns became mentors. The double inspirations of Clara and of the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fictional Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler are the connecting threads on this debut recording by pianist Elena Fischer-Dieskau, in which Robert’s capricious, moody Kreisleriana is joined by two sets of piano pieces by Brahms.

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Ensemble Pro Victoria – Robert Fayrfax (1464-1521): Music for Tudor Kings and Queens (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

January 12, 2024 0 Comment

In that golden age of British choral music half a millennium ago, when polyphonic voices soared in the vaulting of the great late-Gothic churches and chapels that seemed to have been built for them to fill, one composer was in especial favour with the royal family: Robert Fayrfax. A newly reconstructed movement from a mass for the private wedding of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, later treasured in darker times by the recusant gentry for its Catholic associations, sits here alongside exuberant masterpieces from the Eton Choirbook and, in intimate contrast, Fayrfax’s seven surviving courtly songs, brought together on a single recording for the first time.

An exciting new signing for Delphian, Ensemble Pro Victoria’s young professionals bring both freshness and individuality to Fayrfax’s music in the five hundredth anniversary year of his death.

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Elgan Llŷr Thomas – Unveiled: Britten | Tippett | Gipps | Browne | Thomas (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

January 10, 2024 0 Comment

In Jeremy Sams’ new English-language singing version of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the passionate sentiments are liberated from the safe historical distance of the Italian Renaissance and unveiled in a way that was not possible in 1940, when Britten wrote the cycle – his first for his partner Peter Pears.

Tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas presents it alongside Michael Tippett’s equally ardent Songs for Achilles and a short item by W. Denis Browne, a close friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, as well as premiere recordings of four Brooke settings by Ruth Gipps and a new song-cycle by Thomas himself, to poems by Andrew McMillan.

Tackling themes of love, shame, acceptance, war and death, the programme traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present.

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Choir of Merton College, Oxford, Benjamin Nicholas – Ian Venables: Requiem, Herbert Howells: Anthems for Choir & Orchestra (2022) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

December 19, 2023 0 Comment

Conductor Benjamin Nicholas draws parallels between the familiar English choral sound of Howells and that of contemporary composer Ian Venables. Venables’ Requiem has already been warmly received by critics in a 2020 recording with just organ accompaniment. Now, Nicholas and his Merton College choir present it in an orchestrated version made specially for this recording. The Howells items here are also premiere recordings: new instrumental accompaniments to two of his Four Anthems, in arrangements by Howells scholars Howard Eckdahl and Jonathan Clinch, illuminate and intensify his rich choral writing like back-lighting on a stained-glass window, and they are complemented by the first recording of Howells’ original orchestration of The House of the Mind – a chance to hear one of his major underperformed works, introspective yet dramatic.

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Choir of the Chapel Royal, Joseph McHardy – Humfrey: Sacred Choral Music (2021) [FLAC 24 bit, 44,1 kHz]

December 18, 2023 0 Comment

A protege of Henry Cooke, first director of the choir of the Chapel Royal after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Pelham Humfrey was part of a generation of musicians who enriched the musical life of their native England with influences drawn from continental Europe – from France, where Humfrey had studied between 1664 and 1667, and from the Italian musicians at work in the London to which he returned, succeeding Cooke in 1672.

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Choir of Merton College Oxford, Benjamin Nicholas, Britten Sinfonia – Orchestral Anthems: Elgar | Finzi | Dyson | Howells (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

December 18, 2023 0 Comment

For the Choir of Merton College, Oxford’s first collaboration with Britten Sinfonia, Benjamin Nicholas has brought together a collection of sacred works from the first half of the twentieth century.A little-known fact is that these stalwarts of the English repertory were either originally intended to be heard with orchestra, or subsequently orchestrated by their composer or a close colleague.

Written for enthronements, coronations and the nation’s grandest choral festivals, these national ‘standards’ arehere brought back to life, their orchestral accompaniments affording them the richness, pomp and majesty associated with that epoch.

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Bojan Čičić – Bach: Partitas & Sonatas BWV 1001 — 1006 (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 96 kHz]

December 9, 2023 0 Comment

Hearing guitarist Sean Shibes Bach recital, recorded in Delphians fifteenth-century Scottish venue, Baroque violinist Bojan Cicic was inspired during the first lockdown to begin recording Bachs iconic Partitas and Sonatas. Amid the gloom of the pandemic and restrictions on performances, Cicic travelled north when allowed to explore the intense rigours of Bachs fugues and shining virtuosity of the Partitas fast movements. Dedicated to his late violin professor and with a booklet essay written by Mahan Esfahani, for Bojan Cicic the making of this recording in the snowbound Scottish countryside has been his greatest career highlight a journey for him from darkness into light.

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BBC Singers, Hallé Choirs, BBC Philharmonic, Ben Gernon, Vimbayi Kaziboni – Emily Howard: The Anvil (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

December 8, 2023 0 Comment

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.

To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day?

A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope will survive.

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Benjamin Baker, Daniel Lebhardt – 1942: Prokofiev, Copland & Poulenc (2021) [FLAC 24bit, 44,1 kHz]

December 7, 2023 0 Comment

Since winning First Prize at the 2016 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York, New Zealand-born violinist Benjamin Baker has established a strong presence across the globe, with acclaimed solo, chamber and concerto appearances on five continents. His Delphian recording debut sees him joined by regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt in a programme of three powerful works which were all begun in 1942. Each marked in its own way by a world at war, these three Sonatas – by Aaron Copland, Francis Poulenc and Sergei Prokofiev – show three of the twentieth century’s most individual and admired composers engaging themes of private loss, political uncertainty and music’s enduring ability both to reflect and to transcend circumstance.

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Bojan Čičić – Bojan Cicic : Carbonelli: Sonate da camera, Nos. 1-6 (2017) [FLAC 24bit, 48 kHz]

December 5, 2023 0 Comment

In certain respects, Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli does not quite fit the eighteenth-century mould. For a neo-Corellian, he is unusually fond of complexity, both technical and compositional, and also unusually open to other contemporary influences, such as those of Handel and Vivaldi. But the quality of his music speaks for itself virtuosic and joyously melodic, these six chamber sonatas had a huge impact on Delphian producer Paul Baxter.Carbonelli’s difficulty has ensured that his work is seldom played, but early-music rising star Bojan Cicic makes sure we have no sense of that as he and his Illyria Consort colleagues champion these groundbreaking compositions with exuberant confidence. Bojan Cicic is leader of Floreligium and frequently guest directs the Academy of Ancient Music and European Union Baroque Orchestra. He founded The Illyria Consort to explore rare repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is their first recording.

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Alex Woolf, Nicky Spence, Iain Burnside, Philip Higham, Anthony Gray – Alex Woolf: Requiem (2020) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]

December 2, 2023 0 Comment

A major statement by a composer still in his mid-twenties, Alex Woolfs Requiem, composed in 2018, combines powerful expressive immediacy with an impressive ability to synthesize the diverse traditions that have grown up around the requiem genre in the past two hundred years, as it has moved from the church into the concert hall. As in Brittens War Requiem, the traditional Latin texts are brought into dialogue with modern-day poetry here, three poems by the Welsh writer Gillian Clarke (who was National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016). Initially these exist in the separate sound-world of a solo tenor and piano, with a solo cello creating the bridge to the liturgical sphere of choir and organ. Yet ultimately, Clarkes very human concerns focus and inflect Woolfs approach to the religious texts, confirming the works trajectory from despair into consolation. Nicky Spence, fresh from his triumph at the 2020 BBC Music Magazine Awards, is the solo tenor, joined by Delphian artists Iain Burnside and Philip Higham; and Woolf conducts his own choir Vox Luna in this strikingly personal work.

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Alex Paxton – Alex Paxton: Happy Music for Orchestra (2023) [FLAC 24 bit, 48 kHz]

December 2, 2023 0 Comment

‘In every moment of the piece’, says Alex Paxton, ‘I’m asking myself what is the most sonically sensual thing that can happen here, and here, and here.’ The result, from a multi-award-winning composer described as ‘unique, inventive, brave and arresting’, is an album of joyful music performed by orchestra, ensemble and improvisers.

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Alexandra Whittingham – My European Journey (2021) [FLAC 24bit, 96 kHz]

December 2, 2023 0 Comment

Over the last four years, guitarist Alexandra Whittingham has reached listeners worldwide, not only through concerts and competition successes but above all online, where her video performances of classical guitar repertoire have gained over 25 million YouTube views. Now she brings all of her freshness, charm, curiosity and determination to bear on her first studio album. Recorded in a year when the relationship between musicians and audiences has never been more topical, My European Journey is a testament to what the imagination can achieve in a time of unprecedented physical barriers.

In this heartfelt, enchanting exploration of the guitar’s great coming of age in nineteenth-century Europe, staple works by Napoléon Coste, Giulio Regondi and Luigi Legnani give a warm Romantic embrace to a clutch of lesser-known miniatures – brimming with character and local colour from Vienna, London, Copenhagen and beyond. All are given vivid new life here, by an artist for whom connecting with audiences is second nature.