This CD features three different works by three very different 20th century British composers, while two orchestras who have established strong links to the Dutton Epoch label the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra are on hand to interpret the scores with all their customary panache and virtuosity. The Scottish composer Erik Chisholm was one of those who, because he went to live abroad at a crucial phase in his career, have tended to be forgotten in the country of their birth. His Second Symphony (subtitled Ossian) dates from 1939 but was never performed as such. Instead it was quarried by the composer for his wartime ballet The Earth-Shapers' (a symphonic ballet in a prologue and one act'). It would be easy to relate this music to the times in which it was composed, as a metaphor for the struggle with Nazism. But Chisholm has left us no such allusion. In contrast, Trevor Hold's song cycle, The Unreturning Spring, though written between 1961 and 1963 very much reflects issues of the war in setting the airman James Farrar's poems. Eric Fogg, the son of the organist to the Hallé Orchestra, was a child prodigy composer whose youthful output was considerable. Known for his work as an accompanist for the BBC in Manchester during the '20s/'30s and later as BBC Empire Director of Music in London, much of Fogg's orchestral output is now lost. His evocative musical picture of the sea at dusk, Sea-Sheen, was published when Fogg was only seventeen. Eric Fogg's orchestral evocation Merok is dated June 1929, and was published in 1934. Merok is a tiny village in Norway, situated at the head of the Geiranger Fjord, and Fogg's musical picture takes the form of variations on a Norwegian folk song.

ERIK CHISHOLM
Symphony no.2 Ossian' (1939)

ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA
William Chandler (Associate leader)
Martin Yates (conductor)

Recorded at Henry Wood Hall, Glasgow, 16 May 2007

TREVOR HOLD
The Unreturning Spring a song cycle to poems by James Farrar op.3 (1961-63)

Ailish Tynan (soprano)
Roderick Williams (baritone)

BBC CONCERT ORCHESTRA
Martin Yates (conductor)

Recorded at The Colosseum, Town Hall, Watford, 5-6 June 2007

ERIC FOGG
Sea-Sheen: an idyll op.17 (1920)

BBC CONCERT ORCHESTRA
Gavin Sutherland (conductor)

Recorded at The Colosseum, Town Hall, Watford, 4 August 2005

Merok (1929)

BBC CONCERT ORCHESTRA
Vernon Handley CBE (conductor)

Recorded at The Colosseum, Town Hall, Watford, 6 December 2005

CDLX 7196

“... the BBC Concert Orchestra presents the instrumental colours of these works sensitively, in a pleasantly warm recorded ambience. All the performances sound completely authoritative.” Calum MacDonald, International Record Review, February 2008