Frederick Delius: On Hearing The First Cuckoo In Spring/Summer Evening etc. (Naxos Audio CD)

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
David Lloyd-Jones, conductor


The ten short orchestral works on this recording span the whole of Delius’ creative life, illustrating his love of the four countries that most inspired him – England, America, Norway and France – and his love of nature in all its bittersweet transience. Displaying to the full Delius’ late Romantic mastery of chromatic harmony and orchestration, they constitute a perfect distillation of his very personal kind of genius.

The chronologically programmed disc includes such popular works as ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’ from the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, A Song before Sunrise, the last of Delius’ orchestral studies inspired by the natural world, On hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring, and Summer Night on the River.

A relative rarity is an early version of Appalachia, the American Rhapsody, composed in 1896 but not given its first performance until 1986. The programme is completed by three small tone poems (Summer Evening, Winter Night and Spring Morning).