CLASSICAL

English Music For Strings Sinfonia of London, conducted by John Wilson Chandos, out January 29 ★★★★★

This enterprising album of English music for strings from the 1930s embraces some of the finest string playing ever put on disc by a British orchestra.

Listening to the final fugue from Benjamin Britten’s Variations On A Theme Of Frank Bridge, played at the speed the composer noted in the score, is an exhilarating experience and perhaps explains why, 30 years later, Britten’s own recording is much slower; more likely to be a technical decision based on what his orchestra could manage than an artistic one.

In this work, commissioned by the English conductor Boyd Neel for a 1937 Salzburg Festival concert, the 23-year-old Britten revealed the genius that was to take him to the very pinnacle of his profession. No one else, save for Neel in his 1938 recording, has sought to stand up Britten’s ultra-challenging tempi markings, and this dazzling listen is alone well worth the price of this CD.

But there’s more. Frank Bridge, Britten’s teacher, is represented by a haunting four-minute tribute to nine-year-old Catherine Crompton, who perished with her parents and five siblings on board the Lusitania, torpedoed off southern Ireland in May 1915, with huge loss of life. Lennox Berkeley’s 1938-39 Serenade For Strings, begun while he was sharing a house with Britten, has great charm. And its finale, a slow movement, is full of foreboding about what is to happen in the wider world.

The final piece, Arthur Bliss’s Music For Strings, was coincidentally also premiered at Salzburg, this time in 1935 in front of a glittering audience led by Arturo Toscanini.

Bliss wrote this accomplished piece of pure music as an antidote to his labours on the music for the H.G. Wells film Things To Come.

Sadly, Music For Strings has never really flourished because it lacks the killer tunes that the score for Things To Come has in such abundance.