The ART of Imagination

Works for Flute & Harp from Great Britain & Germany by Bax, Hilse, Doppler/Zamara, Scott

The program of this CD is a compilation of select compositions for flute and harp from the English and German-speaking worlds, the composers of which deliberately explored the pictorial nature of music. Every single one of them has his own pictorial musical language, corresponding to his temporal context and his life’s story. This CD presents a colorful bouquet of emotions with works that were consciously or unconsciously inspired by poetry, theater and the opera. 

Fantasy is the creative ability of man making the creation of inner images and thus of an “inner world” possible. It is the human senses that stimulate our fantasy, and hearing is one of the ?rst senses that develop in the womb. Hearing and listening does not only mean understanding consecutive words and their meaning, but moreover grasping the emotions of what is being said that are expressed through the articulation and the intonation.

The same thing happens when we listen to music. Since its beginnings, music has often been closely connected to dance, theater and poetry, and makes it possible to “paint” reality outside of music, i.e. nature or human emotions. The fact that these are not real pictures from the area of art, but images that originate solely in our fantasy and our subconscious even increases the stimulation of our imaginative and emoti nal lives. The reason for this is that the listener’s fantasy is not bound but rather only stimulated in a certain way and is able to unfold freely.

ENGLISH Landscapes

The latest addition to Mark Elder and the Hallé's steadily expanding survey of English music from the first half of the 20th century is a delectable collection of tone poems and illustrative pieces. The selection is carefully varied. Some of it is familiar enough, with the impressionist seascapes of Arnold Bax's Tintagel, moving via Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending (with the Hallé's leader Lyn Fletcher as the aerial soloist) and his First Norfolk Rhapsody to Delius's Summer Night on the River and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. But there's also Finzi's less often played elegy for orchestra, The Fall of the Leaf, all that survives of a projected triptych begun in the 1920s.

Also included are two pieces that give the Hallé Choir their moment in the spotlight - an extract from Elgar's neglected cantata King Olaf and John Ireland's setting of James Kirkup's The Hills. All of the performances are perfectly judged and the orchestral playing is predictably first rate. --The Guardian, 29th September 2006