English String Miniatures

John Rutter : Suite – Charles Wilfrid Orr : A Cotswold Hill Tune – George Melachrino : Les jeux – Peter Dodd : Irish Idyll – Cecil Armstrong Gibbs : Miniature Dance Suite – Frank Cordell : King Charles’s Galliard – David Lyon : Short Suite – Roy Douglas : Cantilena – Philip Lane : Pantomime / Royal Ballet Sinfonia, dir. David Lloyd-Jones
Another attractive addition to the Naxos stable’s commitment to light music, featuring 20th-century repertoire with the majority of the composers still living. The progression through three genres staves off the possibility of string texture fatigue. First up are folk-song arrangements, including the sparkling early Suite by John Rutter, which holds simplicity and inventiveness in an ideal balance, and, in A Cotswold Hill Tune, a rare excursion by C W Orr away from his dedication to writing haunting settings of A E Housman. Then, the sound and style of Peter Warlock’s legendary Capriol Suite finds counterparts in Armstrong Gibbs’s Miniature Dance Suite and Frank Cordell’s King Charles’s Galliard–pastiches of dance forms of earlier centuries. More fibrous fare is then provided by works which, barring the occasional backward glance, could be described as more “original”, including David Lyon’s Short Suite (complete with a haunting, all-too-short Aria) and Roy Douglas’s searching Cantilena, with its echoes of Elgar. The orchestral playing occasionally lacks the last word in polish, but David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia are thoroughly in sympathy with this music. A bargain as an instant spirit-lifter. –Andrew Green