Samuel West, BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra & Andrew Davis - Bliss: Morning Heroes & Hymn to Apollo (2015) [Hi-Res]

  • 13 Jan, 15:53
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Artist:
Title: Bliss: Morning Heroes & Hymn to Apollo
Year Of Release: 2015
Label: Chandos
Genre: Classical
Quality: flac 24bits - 96.0kHz
Total Time: 01:05:06
Total Size: 1.1 gb
WebSite:

Tracklist
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01. Morning Heroes: I. Hector's Farewell to Andromache
02. Morning Heroes: II. The City Arming
03. Morning Heroes: IIIa. Vigil
04. Morning Heroes: IIIb. The Bivouac's Flame
05. Morning Heroes: IVa. Achilles Goes Forth to Battle
06. Morning Heroes: IVb. The Heroes
07. Morning Heroes: Va. Now, Trumpeter, for Thy Close-Vb. Spring Offensive
08. Morning Heroes: Vc. Dawn on the Somme
09. Hymn to Apollo

Sir Andrew Davis here conducts the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in works by Sir Arthur Bliss, with Samuel West as orator.

The album was recorded after a remarkable performance of Morning Heroes at the Barbican in May 2015, The Guardian praising the ‘excellent’ Samuel West, and Davis who ‘got [the] mood exactly right, and both the orchestra and chorus did everything that he asked of them… [producing] a convincingly symphonic shape’. ‘One of the finest British choral works of its time,’ it concluded, this work is ‘now not heard as often as it deserves.’

The piece is coupled with the Hymn to Apollo, recorded here for the first time in its original 1926 version. Bliss said that this work of wistful sadness, anguish, and anger ‘moves like a procession of supplicants’. Like many of his works, Morning Heroes and Hymn to Apollo were composed as a tribute to his brother Kennard who had died on the front during WWI. Both works were premiered in the 30’s to immediate success but have been rather neglected since then.

“ Sir Andrew Davis’s performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus surpasses Sir Charles Groves’s fine 1974 RMI Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra account with urgent tempos, choral singing of full tone and incisive attack, eloquent orchestral playing, and an excellent, open recording (with surround-sound option)" (Anthony Burton, BBC Music magazine)