La Belle Dame

Works by Delius, Holst, C Scott, Brian et al

Roderick Williams (baritone), Rupert Marshall-luck (violin); BBC Concert Orchestra/john Andrews

EM Records EMR CD085 61:21 mins

Two cheers for the repertoire, but a resounding three cheers for the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor John Andrews for exploring the hinterland of British music as the 19th century slid into the 20th. Quilter and Holst we know – but Cyril Scott, Alexander Mackenzie and Norman O’neill, whose setting of Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci gives the CD its title, are rarely if ever played today.

There’s Havergal Brian too: his Legend, orchestrated and played with devotion by the violinist

Rupert Marshall-luck; music that deserves to be better known. Delius too: the Petite Suite d’orchestre from the late 1880s, while not exactly an apprentice work, is from a composer who has not yet quite found his own distinctive lyric voice, though the Berceuse has a Delian lilt to it that the BBC Concert Orchestra strings relish. And there’s a zippy piccolo running through the Scherzo.

Roderick Williams is in fine voice as the stern-toned soloist in Holst’s Ornulf’s Drapa, a granite-like monologue hewn from one of Ibsen’s early poetic dramas that is suffused with Wagnerian echoes.

Williams even brandishes a Scottish accent for Cyril Scott’s ballad The Fair Maid of Kirconnel, but he’s at his most characterful in O’neill’s setting of Keats’s ballads. This is music that reminds us how European late-romantic British music was. Scott, O’neill and

Quilter all studied in Frankfurt. Delius went to Germany too.

But through their music runs a preoccupation with Englishness. That’s what drives the most satisfying track here, Roger Quilter’s ‘The Faithless Shepherdess’ from Seven Elizabethan Lyrics – and Williams makes the most of it. Christopher Cook

PERFORMANCE

RECORDING