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Tag: reviews1

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Sunday Times 19th June 1983

    Our critics choose the classical records of the month

    DELIUS Cello Concerto, HOLST Invocation, VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes

    Julian Lloyd Webber/Philharmonia/Handley RCA RS 9010 £5.60

    THE Cello Concerto was the last of Delius’s concertos and his own favourite. First performed sixty years ago, it is a rarity in this concert-room, which makes this, only it’s second recording, doubly desirabe. Julian Lloyd Webber threads the golden solo line ‘con amore’ through one of Delius’s loveliest works, tinged with the gentle melancholy of the autumnal harmonies that were his alone. First recordings of both the Holst and Vaughan Williams pieces, and superbly vivid sound, make an important accession to the recorded literature of the cello.

    Felix Aprahamian

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    Classical Music 11th June 1983

    Delius Cello Concerto…

    DELIUS. Cello Concerto. HOLST. Invocation.

    VAUGHAN WILLIAMS. Fantasia on Sussex Folk Tunes. Julian Lloyd Webber, Philharmonia Orch/Vernon Handley. RCA RS 9010.

    JACQUELINE DU PRE’s recording of the Delius is now nearly 20 years, old and there was certainly room for an alternative that would shed a more contemporary light on the piece, temper its lyricism with greater maturity, and be less indulgently and more imaginatively conducted. This is it. No other cellist has championed it so ardently, and this recording has the authority that is born of long experience. Of the companion pieces (both first recordings) the RVW has its moments though is on the whole rather thin, but the lyrical, Planets-influenced Holst is a real find. RCA’s digital sound is beautifully clear and natural.

    LJ

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Oxford Times 20th June 2012

    Philharmonia Orchestra: Sheldonian Theatre 15th June 2012

    Jubilee weekend may be over, but the festive spirit is still very much alive and kicking — as the Philharmonia Orchestra made clear in Friday’s concert at the Sheldonian, which brought the current Music at Oxford season to a suitably glorious finish. Walton’s Crown Imperial was the perfect opener; first performed at the Coronation of George VI, and then in a revised format at the Coronation of Elizabeth II, it has all the regal splendour you would expect from such a piece, and on Friday conductor Martyn Brabbins made sure it provided an exciting and stirring start to the evening.

    Delius may seem a less obvious choice for a Jubilee concert; although born in England, he spent most of his adult life in France, first in Paris and later in Fontainebleau. But his Cello Concerto was written during a brief stay in England in 1921, and its inclusion here was in homage to the composer’s 150th birthday.

    Cello maestro and Delius expert Julian Lloyd Webber conjured up sounds of exquisite sweetness in a performance imbued with tenderness and eloquence, maintaining an emotional intensity throughout this extraordinary, one-movement rhapsody in which melodies pour out like a fast-flowing current before the piece comes to a faltering, uncertain finish. Its pensiveness, beautifully realised here by Lloyd Webber, stems from the composer’s certainty that this would be his final great work as a consequence of his failing health; little could he know then that a young Yorkshire composer, Eric Fenby, would spearhead a late resurgence during the last six years of his life.

    Nicola Lisle

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Guardian 26th April 1983

    DELIUS. Cello Concerto. HOLST. Invocation.

    From the cellist Lloyd Webber comes a most attractive coupling of rarities for cello and orchestra, Delius’s wayward, seamlessly lyrical concerto as well as works by Holst and Vaughan Williams that for a generation and more had been totally forgotten (RCA US 9010): Holst’s Invocation for cello and orchestra has its echoes of Wagner, Strauss and Elgar, but equally it looks forward to the Planets. Its beauty is sensuous with no hint of Holst the ascetic. Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Sussex Folk Times by contrast, written in 1930 for Casals, is not quite the conventional pot-pourri you expect with its occasional spiky hints of Job and the Fourth Symphony and its downbeat ending.

    Lloyd Webber, superbly supported by Vernon Handley and the Philharmonia Orchestra, plays with just the warmth needed, not just here but in the Delius. Nearly 20 years ago this was the first concerto ever recorded by Jacqueline du Pre playing with teenage intensity but with the sound of her cello made thin. Now Lloyd Webber and Handley present a more richly idiomatic view with the surprise of the Alle-gramente last section brought out the more.

    Edward Greenfield

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    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

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Guardian 18th October 1982

    Delius Cello Concerto – Fairfield Hall

    Philharmonia

    FEW cellists have been as enterprising as Julian Lloyd Webber in extending the concerto repertoire beyond the handful of familiar works. Often such labours have to be their own reward. But the Delius Concerto is really worth resurrecting. The first thing, however, is to forget the title. The work should be classified with those reveries, elegies and meditations which French composers love to write for solo strings. There is no dramatic or perceptible constructive development or interaction between soloist and orchestra. Instead, a sustained outpouring of lyrical melody in which closely related themes seek to merge their identities rather than to declare their independence.

    The work, which calls for the smoothest and sweetest playing, suits Lloyd Webber well. The cellist-poet wanders through a forest of lush sounds and becomes part of the landscape. There are many passages where orchestra leads, with cello supplying melodic arabesques, the equivalent of passages in conventional concertos where the orchestra plays the tunes while the soloist, shows off in elaborate figurations. Take a slice of the Delius Concerto anywhere and you will get a fair sample of the whole. Rearrange your slices in random order and I doubt if most of us would be any the wiser. But Delius’s ability to sustain the mood for 20 minutes ensures that we are drawn in by the spell of the music.

    Hugo Cole

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    Classical Source January 2012

    Philharmonia Orchestra/Andrew Davis – Delius 150th-Anniversary Concert with Julian Lloyd Webber

    The Cello Concerto (1921) may be something of an acquired taste. It may not be instantly appealing to the unfamiliar ear, containing no ‘obvious’ melodies within its single movement structure (lasting just over 20 minutes). Instead the emphasis is on mood and feeling, a sense of wistfulness and resignation. The continuous stream of consciousness reveals itself subtly and without fanfare – exactly what Julian Lloyd Webber conveyed and with no lack of feeling, Davis the perfect partner, cushioning the long, flowing cello line on a soft bed of supple strings and delicate woodwinds.

    Andrew Maisel

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Guardian Newspaper 31st January 2012

    Philharmonia/Davis – review

    Royal Festival Hall, London

    The two performances of Delius’ music under Sir Andrew Davis were so fine. Davis has an unequalled sensitivity among modern conductors to the Delius sound world, and also knows how to give these works a momentum they need. Add to that the intensely committed and occasionally rather freewheeling playing of Julian Lloyd Webber, a lifelong Delius advocate, and the result was a truly persuasive case for the composer’s Cello Concerto.

    Martin Kettle

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    The Independent Newspaper 30th January 2012

    Philharmonia Orchestra/ Davis, Royal Festival Hall

    Delius’ rarely heard Cello Concerto brought us rapidly back to earth, the double-stopped gestures of the opening pages (to say nothing of the swinging main theme) fleetingly alluding to the Elgar concerto but imbued with darkening harmonic twists. The music seems to unfold in the playing of it, a “ramble” (as Percy Grainger might have had it) to a place which if not the “Paradise Garden” then at least somewhere touched with enchantment.

    Julian Lloyd Webber made it feel personal, a modest voice with a quiet intensity eschewing the temptation towards showy or extravagant gesture but rather projecting a solo presence which had more to do with a sense of the cello as first among equals – more obbligato than main protagonist. And he’s right – this is essentially a chamber piece in manner and attitude.

    Edward Seckerson

  • Delius Cello Concerto

    Musical Opinion April 2010

    JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER: ROMANTIC CELLO CONCERTOS

    Rodrigo: Concierto como un divertimento; Delius: Concerto for cello and orchestra+;

    Lalo: Cello Concerto in D minor

    Julian Lloyd Webber, cello; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, conductor; +Philharmonia Orchestra, Vernon Handley, conductor

    Sony Music 88697570022

    1 hour 17 minutes

    This welcome reissue contains three of the soloists best concerto performances, especially the Delius (which is inspired). The work that Rodrigo wrote for Lloyd Webber, with its arresting bolero opening and sustained melodic interest, was first heard in 1982; the Sunday Times verdict of sumptuously listenable-to’ remains the most apt epithet The Lalo has always been a valuable contribution to the restricted cello repertoire with its appealing blend of strength and fancy all clothed in highly effective writing for the instrument, one wonders why it is not heard more. Both these concertos need a conductor who is thoroughly at home in the Spanish idiom and can bring his own flair to the proceedings (just as Pedro de Freitas Branco did in the case of the Lalo on the old Decca 78s with the legendary Suggia). López-Cobos is ideally cast here in support of his flamboyant soloist, and the extremely happy results carry to the listener.

    The Cello Concerto was Delius’s favourite among his three string concertos, admired not only by Percy Grainger and others in his immediate circle but (perhaps a little surprisingly) by Elgar, who said he yearned to conduct it. Delius’s amanuensis Eric Fenby attributed its relative neglect to its difficulty and its rhapsodic form, though this particular recording has shown ever since its first incarnation on LP that the two essential requirements are a cellist and a conductor who thoroughly understand Delius’s idiom and can get inside his sound-world: in other words, two Delians through and through. Lloyd Webber and Vernon Handley both on top form and in perfect harmony of understanding, fully meet these requirements in this finely- tuned conception: with the newly-remastered recording sounding better than ever, this performance maintains its position as first choice.

    Lyndon Jenkins