Written quickly over the summer of 1908 and premièred at that year's Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, Bantock's comedy overture Pierrot of the Minute enjoyed much success before the First World War. It's a charming work, and Vernon Handley and the RPO deliver a performance of atmospheric delicacy and wit. Three years later Worcester also played host to the first performance of the Overture to a Greek Tragedy, an imposing curtain- raiser. Handley extracts every ounce of drama and lyricism from Bantock's ripely colourful inspiration; the majestically paced reading attains a moving nobility in the radiant, rather Straussian peroration.
From Bantock's two-and-a-half-hour setting of The Song of Songs (1912-26) come excerpts from three of the five scenes (or 'Days'). The Second Day and love duet from the Fifth Day are thematically related, and frame a purely orchestral sequence from the Third Day. In their respective roles of the Shulamite and her Shepherd lover, Elizabeth Connell and Kim Begley rise admirably to the wide-ranging vocal challenges. Connell also makes an affectionate showing in 'The Wilderness and the Solitary Place', a pretty, gently exotic six-minute aria from the 1907 oratorio Christin the Wilderness. Excellent sound.