Most notable is the interview with James MacMillan on his project of establishing a new festival in Cumnock, Ayrshire in October in the tradition of Britten's Aldeburgh and Maxwell-Davies' Orkney festivals. There is also great encouragement to buy new discs of Haydn's Seven Last Words and the String Quartets of Arriaga, who was born on what would have been Mozart's 50th birthday but who died aged 19.
Less convincing is Stewart Copeland's selection of 'music that changed him' where he includes Bob Marley's Natty Dread and recalls punk's relationship with reggae, claiming that it didn't work for The Clash on their Police and Thieves but it felt natural to him in The Police. Well, it didn't sound like it to me. The Clash was a fair effort but The Police don't sound like reggae at all any more and in retrospect it might have been better if white boys had left well alone.
But the disc is the main area of interest and a rare thing for me to buy anything that commemorates World War 1. I've recently put Ivor Gurney in my Top 100 Poets, admittedly as an act of sympathy with him and Gloucestershire rather than in admiration of his poetic achievement. He was more highly regarded as a composer and, generally, I believe it is his songs that are most remembered. But here is his War Elegy with the premiere recording of the recently put together edition of A Gloucesterhire Rhapsody. It is worth having as a rarity that describes the much-loved landscape of Gloucestershire in all its shifting, rolling beauty. It is easy to make comparisons with the better-known names who made similar music like Elgar, Vaughan-Williams and Delius and it is to be regretted that there isn't more Gurney orchestral music for those who would like this.
The Frank Bridge Oration is darker, and closer to, say, Shostakovich in its startker moments. Stephen Isserlis takes a striking cello part that explores some disturbed feelings, an introspective and discomfiting exploration of some restlessness. Without the focus on the cello, the orchestra surges less purposefully and I'm personally happy to be back with Gurney on track 3 which climaxes before receding to an elegiac rest.
Last month I found a loose CD from the previous month's magazine and pointed out to the customer service desk that they couldn't sell it without the magazine and so I would take it off their hands which they allowed me to do for a donation to their charity box. And my just desserts for such helpfulness was a fine slow movement in the Schumann Piano Quartet. So, well done, Sainsbury's.
