Mail on Sunday 5th February 2012
Delius: 150th anniversary concert Royal Festival Hall, London
Delius Gets a Day He Deserves *****
Many concert promoters think Frederick Delius is box-office poison, a myth thankfully exploded by the enthusiastic packed house at the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Several hundred devotees then stayed on to watch Ken Russell’s long-admired Delius film at the adjoining Queen Elizabeth Hall, and to participate in a lively discussion with a panel led by the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, a huge Delius fan, and chaired by myself.
The Philharmonia Orchestra had hedged their bets a bit by including perhaps the two most popular pieces of the English musical renaissance of a century ago: The Lark Ascending and the Enigma Variations. But it was Delius we were there to hear, particularly Lloyd Webber’s eloquently moving performance of the Cello Concerto, which astonishingly he hadn’t been asked to play live for 30 years, a sign of the Bradford-born composer’s relative neglect.
It was moving because, as Julian always points out, this rhapsodic, sprawling, beautiful piece from 1921 was the last music Delius was able to score himself before syphilis robbed him of his sight and most of his movement. This confined the old composer to years of creative silence, broken during a miraculous Indian Summer by the arrival of an amanuensis, the young Eric Fenby, who coaxed several late masterpieces from Delius. This is the period covered by Ken Russell’s film, which 40 years on, still reduced me to tears.
David Mellor
