REVIEWS:

Wilson is relishing every second of the music. The BBC Phil is in great nick, and Stephen Rinker’s engineering brings sound of clarity and fidelity, every detail, dynamic, and subtlety captured perfectly.

– ClassicalSource.com

Volume 1 implies we are to get more like this and they can’t come soon enough. Eric Coates is surprisingly undervalued, even with the resurgence of interest in light music. There are some very familiar pieces here – The Merrymakers, By a Sleepy Lagoon, London Suite – alongside the ballet The Jester at the Wedding and two symphonic rhapsodies. All engaging and here splendidly played by the BBC Phil under one of the real champions of light music, John Wilson.

– Lark Reviews2b:T5fd,

In this fourth volume in their Richard Rodney Bennett series, John Wilson and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra turn to his Piano Concerto, commissioned by the John Feeney Trust for the CBSO and written in 1968. A chance meeting with Stephen Kovacevich provided Bennett with a willing soloist, and the work was premiered in Birmingham in September that year. The fellow composer Anthony Payne’s judgment was unequivocal: ‘It’s a bloody good work.’ The soloist here, Michael McHale, gives a virtuosic performance which certainly lives up to that judgment. Commissioned in 1982 for the sixtieth anniversary of the BBC, Anniversaries is the other major work on this recording. A brilliantly virtuosic concerto for orchestra, the eleven-section work loosely follows the form of a theme and variations, although it also shows glimpses of a symphonic structure. Dedicated to his close friend Irwin Bazelon who was also sixty that year, the score is a playful and joyous celebration, as well as an orchestral tour de force. In the 1990s, his decision to quit smoking led Bennett to experience a serious creative block. He found a route out of this by immersing himself in English baroque and mediaeval music. The Country Dances (Book 1) are based on folk dances fr

On Cold Mountain

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