Featuring some ripe, beautifully clean-cut sonics, this collection is a great success for all involved. As the opening, chest-swelling 'Northern March' of the Youthful Suite immediately shows, Hickox draws playing of infectious swagger from the ever-excellent BBC Philharmonic (marvellous brass sounds especially).
The suite boasts some striking invention, not least in the central 'Nordic Dirge' (a hauntingly eloquent processional, incorporating plenty of 'tuneful percussion') and a winsome, at times almost Ivesian 'English Waltz'.
There follow seven of Grainger's most popular miniatures in the orchestrations Gershwin made for Leopold Stokowski. Hickox gives us Grainger's original thoughts and a delectable sequence they comprise, full of truly kaleidoscopic textural and harmonic variety. Hickox's Country Gardens is perhaps marginally lacking in twinkling good humour and entrancing lightness of touch, but his infectious energy and evident affection more than compensate.
Dreamery, described by Grainger as 'Slow Tween-Play' (an epithet which, annotator Barry Peter Ould suggests, 'could be construed as his particular term for an intermezzo'), appears here in the extended orchestral version.
For The Warriors, Hickox uses a new critical edition prepared by the Australian Grainger authority, Alessandro Servadei. Grainger's orchestral palette has never sounded more gloriously extravagant. Then again, this impression is just as much a tribute to Hickox's performance, which is breathtaking in its virtuosic brilliance and stunning co-ordination.