wimpel69
11-15-2016, 05:06 PM
Please request the FLAC links (including the covers
and individual booklets, where available) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
These are my own rips. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971) was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, and only considered music as a profession after
abortive starts at careers in dentistry and architecture. At 19, he enrolled in the Royal Manchester College of Music,
studying under Frank Merrick and Carl Fuchs, and he later studied piano under Egon Petri in Berlin. He subsequently joined
the faculty at Dartington Hall School and served as a composer for its School of Dance Mime. His first critical recognition
came with the Theme and Variations for two violins, which was premiered at the 1938 London Festival of the International
Society of Contemporary Music. At the next festival, held in Warsaw, Rawsthorne debuted his first major orchestral work,
the Symphonic Studies, and his First Piano Concerto (which he later rescored) was premiered later that same year.
The composer served in the British Army during World War II, a period in which he completed the Street Corner and
Corteges overtures. With the coming of peace, Rawsthorne, now in his forties, entered the prime of his career and
exclusively devoted his time to composing. Over the next 25 years, he wrote three symphonies; two concertos for
violin; a second piano concerto and a cello concerto; a brace of choral works, including cantatas and songs; the song
cycle Practical Cats (set to T.S. Eliot) for speaker and orchestra; and numerous chamber works, as well as writing the
music for four plays. He also wrote music for 27 movies, including such distinguished postwar productions as
The Captive Heart, Saraband for Dead Lovers, The Cruel Sea, West of Zanzibar, and Lease of Life. The most obvious
influences on Rawsthorne's early work were Hindemith and Walton, with a similarly lean, neo-Classical feel that is
modernistic without being dissonant; not surprisingly, however -- given his relatively late entry into music --
his music's characteristics are all his own. From the early 1950s onward, he devoted even more energy to vocal
music (even his Symphony No. 2 included a part for soprano in its last movement) and beginning in the early '60s,
Rawsthorne's music embraced atonalism in a more obvious way. His music was always respected, sufficiently so
that he was able to survive (with help from the film work) on a steady stream of commissioned pieces from
1946 onward, though some works were criticized on an aesthetic level for their brittle textures and, occasionally,
a narrow expressive range.
Ernest John Moeran's (1894-1950) father was an Anglican clergyman born in Ireland and his mother was from
the eastern part of England. When he was still a young boy, his father was transferred to Bacton, on the coast near
Norfolk. Ernest's early exposure to music was largely through hymn singing and folk songs, and he taught himself to
read music from the hymnals. When he was enrolled in Uppingham School near Cromer, he learned the violin. His music
master there was Robert Sterndale Bennett, grandson of Sir William Sterndale Bennett, one of the few notable English
composers of the generation preceding Elgar. In 1913, he entered the Royal College of Music to study with Stanford.
When war broke out in 1914, he became a dispatch rider and a year later, earned the rank of a commissioned officer.
He was severely wounded in the head and posted to non-combatant duties. In 1919 was hired as music master of his
old school, Uppingham. In 1920, he decided to continue his musical training, becoming a private pupil of composer John
Ireland until 1923. During his studies with Ireland, he began to publish his music (mainly songs and other smaller pieces)
and a collection of East Anglian folk songs.
He became known in the 1920s mainly for shorter works, but during this time also composed more substantial
compositions. His strongest melodic influences were the East Anglian folk songs from his youth. In the harmonies
and other elements of his music, there was an immediate influence of Frederick Delius. As time passed, this influence
grew less as Moeran absorbed aspects of style from Ireland, Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Bax. He became a well-
known figure on the London musical scene, becoming friends with, and living with for a few years, Philip Heseltine
(Peter Warlock) and the artist Hal Collins. It is believed that his problems with alcoholism began during this period.
He was impelled, in the early '30s, to retire to the Cotswalds to reconsider his style, particularly to strengthen his
command of counterpoint and work out a broader type of harmonic thinking. Now he began cultivating larger-scale
musical forms. One of the first fruits of this introspective period was his only symphony, in G minor. Even though it still
reflects the scenery of the British Isles, Moeran said it was inspired by "mountains and seaboard of County Kerry" and
"the sand dunes and rushes of East Anglia." It no longer sounds like a typical work of the "English pastoralist" school.
It is a "struggle symphony," and it pretty clearly shows that the struggle was for his own individuality. The symphony
was accounted a great success after its premiere in 1938. An increased sense of energy is typical of the music
written after his stay in the Cotswalds. A more lean though not quite neo-Classical sound appears in his Sinfonietta (1944).
His next major work was a cello concerto, written for Peers Coetmore in 1945. He married Coetmore the same year.
In 1950, he was found floating, dead, in the River Kenmare, having suffered a heart attack and fallen in. Sketches for a
second symphony show that he was again broadening his harmonic thinking to include an increased use of bitonality.
From the beginning, his compositional skill and technique were of a very high order, and works were meticulously re-
written, accounting for his relatively small output. What he did accomplish causes him to be ranked highly among
British composers.
George Walter Selwyn Lloyd's (1913-1998) career was completely destroyed by ill health and a shift in critical favor, but was revived
again when audiences, that had by then had enough sterile modernism, happily embraced him as "the modern composer who writes tunes."
His formal school studies were seriously interrupted by rheumatic fever, but he did receive composition lessons from Harry Farjeon. At 19 he
heard his First Symphony premiered, leading to two more symphonies and two operas produced in the 1930s. He received acclaim as one of
the most promising young British composers.
With the outbreak of World War II Lloyd enlisted in the Royal Marines. A gunner, he served on a cruiser on the Murmansk convoy route.
In 1942 a faulty torpedo reversed directions and blew up his ship. He was below decks at the time, and witnessed his mates drown in oil.
He was rescued from the frigid Arctic waters. "My whole nervous system seemed burned out," he said, describing his post-traumatic shock
syndrome. He recovered his health slowly in Switzerland after the war. He wrote music, with difficulty, coming to terms with his wartime
experiences in his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The former is a kind of portrayal of denial: After a grim symphonic journey, the final
movement is a succession of trivial marches. "When the funeral is over the band plays quick cheerful tunes," he said of its forced
cheerfulness.
He wrote an opera, John Socman, whose hero is a soldier at the battle of Agincourt. The opera foundered on backstage battles among
the opera company. And in the twelve-tone dominated world of new music, Lloyd's tonal, melodic music had, as Lloyd was told to his
face, "no contemporary significance." "My health went skew-whiff again," Lloyd said, as he realized nobody wanted to play his music.
He quit music and started raising produce (first carnations, then mushrooms). Music emerged again in his life as a compulsive habit.
In this non-pressured context, Lloyd looked forward to rising at 4:30 to compose for three hours before work. As he and his wife Nancy
built a successful business, he began to amass a catalog of new music. However, he continued to reject twelve-tone music. "I did study
the blessed thing in the Thirties. I thought it was a cock-eyed idea that produced horrible sounds. It made composers forget how to
sing." The BBC returned his music unread.
In the 1970s Gavin Henderson, administrator of the Philharmonia Orchestra, began to take interest in his music and talked it up.
The BBC in 1969 accepted Lloyd's Eighth Symphony for performance, although they didn't get around to actually playing the thing
for eight years. Audiences sat up and took notice on that evening in 1977: here was a modern composer, clearly British and clearly
speaking of modern times, but in an entirely tonal style and with good, understandable tunes.
All around the world, composers were returning to tonality after the 30-year detour down the twelve-tone road. A large audience
appreciated his steady adherence to his musical principles. Three of his symphonies were recorded on the British Lyrita label after
his Sixth Symphony was premiered at the Proms of 1981.
Peter Kermani, a New York music lover, then interested the Albany Symphony Orchestra in New York in Lloyd's music. The orchestra
commissioned Lloyd's last two symphonies. The Albany Record label ultimately recorded the opera Iernin, Lloyd's remaining
symphonies and concertos, other major works, and his late masterpiece, Symphonic Mass. After suffering heart trouble, Lloyd
wrote a Requiem in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. Like Mozart's Requiem, it proved to be his final work, completed
three weeks before his death.
Music Composed by
Alan Rawsthorne
Ernest John (E.J.) Moeran
George Lloyd
Played by the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Albany Symphony Orchestra
Ulster Orchestra
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
With
Peter Donohoe (piano)
Kathryn Stott (piano)
Guy Johnston (cello)
Benjamin Frith (piano)
Alexander Baillie (cello)
St�phane Rancourt (oboe)
Conducted by
David Lloyd-Jones
JoAnn Falletta
Takuo Yuasa
George Lloyd
Sources: Naxos & Albany Records CDs (My rips!)
Quality: FLAC 16-44 files (incl. cover & booklet, where available)
File Sizes: 184 MB / 241 MB / 260 MB / 252 MB / 214 MB / 249 MB / 313 MB / 210 MB / 282 MB
Total Size: 2.2 GB
Please request the FLAC links (including the covers
and individual booklets, where available) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
These are my own rips. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
and individual booklets, where available) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
These are my own rips. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971) was born in Haslingden, Lancashire, and only considered music as a profession after
abortive starts at careers in dentistry and architecture. At 19, he enrolled in the Royal Manchester College of Music,
studying under Frank Merrick and Carl Fuchs, and he later studied piano under Egon Petri in Berlin. He subsequently joined
the faculty at Dartington Hall School and served as a composer for its School of Dance Mime. His first critical recognition
came with the Theme and Variations for two violins, which was premiered at the 1938 London Festival of the International
Society of Contemporary Music. At the next festival, held in Warsaw, Rawsthorne debuted his first major orchestral work,
the Symphonic Studies, and his First Piano Concerto (which he later rescored) was premiered later that same year.
The composer served in the British Army during World War II, a period in which he completed the Street Corner and
Corteges overtures. With the coming of peace, Rawsthorne, now in his forties, entered the prime of his career and
exclusively devoted his time to composing. Over the next 25 years, he wrote three symphonies; two concertos for
violin; a second piano concerto and a cello concerto; a brace of choral works, including cantatas and songs; the song
cycle Practical Cats (set to T.S. Eliot) for speaker and orchestra; and numerous chamber works, as well as writing the
music for four plays. He also wrote music for 27 movies, including such distinguished postwar productions as
The Captive Heart, Saraband for Dead Lovers, The Cruel Sea, West of Zanzibar, and Lease of Life. The most obvious
influences on Rawsthorne's early work were Hindemith and Walton, with a similarly lean, neo-Classical feel that is
modernistic without being dissonant; not surprisingly, however -- given his relatively late entry into music --
his music's characteristics are all his own. From the early 1950s onward, he devoted even more energy to vocal
music (even his Symphony No. 2 included a part for soprano in its last movement) and beginning in the early '60s,
Rawsthorne's music embraced atonalism in a more obvious way. His music was always respected, sufficiently so
that he was able to survive (with help from the film work) on a steady stream of commissioned pieces from
1946 onward, though some works were criticized on an aesthetic level for their brittle textures and, occasionally,
a narrow expressive range.
Ernest John Moeran's (1894-1950) father was an Anglican clergyman born in Ireland and his mother was from
the eastern part of England. When he was still a young boy, his father was transferred to Bacton, on the coast near
Norfolk. Ernest's early exposure to music was largely through hymn singing and folk songs, and he taught himself to
read music from the hymnals. When he was enrolled in Uppingham School near Cromer, he learned the violin. His music
master there was Robert Sterndale Bennett, grandson of Sir William Sterndale Bennett, one of the few notable English
composers of the generation preceding Elgar. In 1913, he entered the Royal College of Music to study with Stanford.
When war broke out in 1914, he became a dispatch rider and a year later, earned the rank of a commissioned officer.
He was severely wounded in the head and posted to non-combatant duties. In 1919 was hired as music master of his
old school, Uppingham. In 1920, he decided to continue his musical training, becoming a private pupil of composer John
Ireland until 1923. During his studies with Ireland, he began to publish his music (mainly songs and other smaller pieces)
and a collection of East Anglian folk songs.
He became known in the 1920s mainly for shorter works, but during this time also composed more substantial
compositions. His strongest melodic influences were the East Anglian folk songs from his youth. In the harmonies
and other elements of his music, there was an immediate influence of Frederick Delius. As time passed, this influence
grew less as Moeran absorbed aspects of style from Ireland, Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Bax. He became a well-
known figure on the London musical scene, becoming friends with, and living with for a few years, Philip Heseltine
(Peter Warlock) and the artist Hal Collins. It is believed that his problems with alcoholism began during this period.
He was impelled, in the early '30s, to retire to the Cotswalds to reconsider his style, particularly to strengthen his
command of counterpoint and work out a broader type of harmonic thinking. Now he began cultivating larger-scale
musical forms. One of the first fruits of this introspective period was his only symphony, in G minor. Even though it still
reflects the scenery of the British Isles, Moeran said it was inspired by "mountains and seaboard of County Kerry" and
"the sand dunes and rushes of East Anglia." It no longer sounds like a typical work of the "English pastoralist" school.
It is a "struggle symphony," and it pretty clearly shows that the struggle was for his own individuality. The symphony
was accounted a great success after its premiere in 1938. An increased sense of energy is typical of the music
written after his stay in the Cotswalds. A more lean though not quite neo-Classical sound appears in his Sinfonietta (1944).
His next major work was a cello concerto, written for Peers Coetmore in 1945. He married Coetmore the same year.
In 1950, he was found floating, dead, in the River Kenmare, having suffered a heart attack and fallen in. Sketches for a
second symphony show that he was again broadening his harmonic thinking to include an increased use of bitonality.
From the beginning, his compositional skill and technique were of a very high order, and works were meticulously re-
written, accounting for his relatively small output. What he did accomplish causes him to be ranked highly among
British composers.
George Walter Selwyn Lloyd's (1913-1998) career was completely destroyed by ill health and a shift in critical favor, but was revived
again when audiences, that had by then had enough sterile modernism, happily embraced him as "the modern composer who writes tunes."
His formal school studies were seriously interrupted by rheumatic fever, but he did receive composition lessons from Harry Farjeon. At 19 he
heard his First Symphony premiered, leading to two more symphonies and two operas produced in the 1930s. He received acclaim as one of
the most promising young British composers.
With the outbreak of World War II Lloyd enlisted in the Royal Marines. A gunner, he served on a cruiser on the Murmansk convoy route.
In 1942 a faulty torpedo reversed directions and blew up his ship. He was below decks at the time, and witnessed his mates drown in oil.
He was rescued from the frigid Arctic waters. "My whole nervous system seemed burned out," he said, describing his post-traumatic shock
syndrome. He recovered his health slowly in Switzerland after the war. He wrote music, with difficulty, coming to terms with his wartime
experiences in his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The former is a kind of portrayal of denial: After a grim symphonic journey, the final
movement is a succession of trivial marches. "When the funeral is over the band plays quick cheerful tunes," he said of its forced
cheerfulness.
He wrote an opera, John Socman, whose hero is a soldier at the battle of Agincourt. The opera foundered on backstage battles among
the opera company. And in the twelve-tone dominated world of new music, Lloyd's tonal, melodic music had, as Lloyd was told to his
face, "no contemporary significance." "My health went skew-whiff again," Lloyd said, as he realized nobody wanted to play his music.
He quit music and started raising produce (first carnations, then mushrooms). Music emerged again in his life as a compulsive habit.
In this non-pressured context, Lloyd looked forward to rising at 4:30 to compose for three hours before work. As he and his wife Nancy
built a successful business, he began to amass a catalog of new music. However, he continued to reject twelve-tone music. "I did study
the blessed thing in the Thirties. I thought it was a cock-eyed idea that produced horrible sounds. It made composers forget how to
sing." The BBC returned his music unread.
In the 1970s Gavin Henderson, administrator of the Philharmonia Orchestra, began to take interest in his music and talked it up.
The BBC in 1969 accepted Lloyd's Eighth Symphony for performance, although they didn't get around to actually playing the thing
for eight years. Audiences sat up and took notice on that evening in 1977: here was a modern composer, clearly British and clearly
speaking of modern times, but in an entirely tonal style and with good, understandable tunes.
All around the world, composers were returning to tonality after the 30-year detour down the twelve-tone road. A large audience
appreciated his steady adherence to his musical principles. Three of his symphonies were recorded on the British Lyrita label after
his Sixth Symphony was premiered at the Proms of 1981.
Peter Kermani, a New York music lover, then interested the Albany Symphony Orchestra in New York in Lloyd's music. The orchestra
commissioned Lloyd's last two symphonies. The Albany Record label ultimately recorded the opera Iernin, Lloyd's remaining
symphonies and concertos, other major works, and his late masterpiece, Symphonic Mass. After suffering heart trouble, Lloyd
wrote a Requiem in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. Like Mozart's Requiem, it proved to be his final work, completed
three weeks before his death.
Music Composed by
Alan Rawsthorne
Ernest John (E.J.) Moeran
George Lloyd
Played by the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Albany Symphony Orchestra
Ulster Orchestra
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
With
Peter Donohoe (piano)
Kathryn Stott (piano)
Guy Johnston (cello)
Benjamin Frith (piano)
Alexander Baillie (cello)
St�phane Rancourt (oboe)
Conducted by
David Lloyd-Jones
JoAnn Falletta
Takuo Yuasa
George Lloyd
Sources: Naxos & Albany Records CDs (My rips!)
Quality: FLAC 16-44 files (incl. cover & booklet, where available)
File Sizes: 184 MB / 241 MB / 260 MB / 252 MB / 214 MB / 249 MB / 313 MB / 210 MB / 282 MB
Total Size: 2.2 GB
Please request the FLAC links (including the covers
and individual booklets, where available) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
These are my own rips. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!