British Classical Music: The Land of Lost Content

Further to my short post about composer Frank Bridge’s tribute to Charles Villiers Stanford in the Music and Letters Journal, I found anothe...

Thirteen years have flown since I evaluated the British Music Society’s British Composer Profiles for MusicWeb International. I remember c...

How does a musical revolutionary remember a traditionalist? In July 1924, a few months after the death of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, his...

I was always envious of my aunt who had flown out to Mallorca (or as we called it then Majorca) in the late 1950s with her girlfriend. Altho...

I was introduced to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs through the legendary recording by John Shirley-Quirk, with the King’s Col...

Percy Whitlock’s Holiday Suite (1939) is one of my favourite pieces of ‘light music.’ The titles of its three movements express the sentime...

Werther was the tragic hero of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) who became a crucial figure in German cultural lore. He was a...

One of my favourite films from “back in the day” is Three Men in a Boat , made seventy years ago this year. This realisation of Jerome K. Je...

This new release from Gramola couples two important orchestral works of the 20th century. The recordings date from the time when Herbert von...

The first thing to consider is whether it is right that these twelve preludes should be played as a cycle or whether they can be excerpted. ...

Best remembered for his grand choral canvases, Sir George Dyson’s modest output for the organ reveals a composer of remarkable poise and pra...

On the evening of Friday, 17 July, the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of Anthony Hedges’s Scenes from the Humber...

The introduction to the liner notes for this latest disc from the Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford explains that it continues the choir’...

The Trees so High was completed during 1931. This was shortly after Hadley had withdrawn his application for a lectureship at Armstrong Col...

In his thesis, Jonathan Daniel Strommen Campbell (2015, p.9) suggests that the impact of Delius on the music of Patrick Hadley “is more ofte...