COMPOSERS: Lord Berners
LABELS: Marco Polo
WORKS: Les sirènes; Caprice péruvien; Cupid and Psyche Suite
PERFORMER: Miriam Blennerhassett (contralto); RTE Sinfonietta/David Lloyd-Jones
CATALOGUE NO: 8.223780 DDD
One of Marco Polo’s most rewarding forays into the hinterland of British music. Lord Berners’s reputation as a ballet composer can only be enhanced by these premiere recordings of two works for Frederick Ashton, crisply scored and irresistibly tuneful in Berners’s ironic, Franco-Stravinskian manner. The Caprice péruvien, an entertaining potpourri on themes from his only opera, fills out this disc. Lloyd-Jones secures excellent playing, both tender and wittily pointed, in vivid, slightly cavernous sound. Calum MacDonald
Lord Berners: Les sirènes; Caprice péruvien; Cupid and Psyche Suite
One of Marco Polo’s most rewarding forays into the hinterland of British music. Lord Berners’s reputation as a ballet composer can only be enhanced by these premiere recordings of two works for Frederick Ashton, crisply scored and irresistibly tuneful in Berners’s ironic, Franco-Stravinskian manner. The Caprice péruvien, an entertaining potpourri on themes from his only opera, fills out this disc. Lloyd-Jones secures excellent playing, both tender and wittily pointed, in vivid, slightly cavernous sound. Calum MacDonald
Published: January 20, 2012 at 3:08 pm