Gerhard: The Plague, Walton: Façade & Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale

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s[The Gerhard is] tunningly performed and engineered. — BBC Music Magazine, September 2021, 4 out of 5 stars

Release Date: 14th May 2021
Catalogue No: ELQ4842200
Label: Eloquence
Length: 2 hours 22 minutes

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Gerhard: The Plague

Work length44:05

$9.90

$13.50

Alec McCowen (narrator)
National Symphony Orchestra Chorus, National Symphony Orchestra Washington
Antal Dorati
Recorded: 1973-05-11
Recording Venue: Constitution Hall, Washington D.C.

"Oran! Town without any trees or gardens"

Track length3:41

$1.10

$1.50

"They're coming out, good and proper..Next morning, on my round of visits"

Track length2:16

$1.10

$1.50

"On the fourth day"

Track length11:15

$1.10

$1.50

"By dint of perseverance"

Track length2:02

$1.10

$1.50

"So they got alarmed, at last"

Track length5:33

$1.10

$1.50

"The mother greeted me"

Track length3:57

$1.10

$1.50

"During all that summer"

Track length2:37

$1.10

$1.50

"The boy had been put in a small ward"

Track length6:22

$1.10

$1.50

"The're coming out again! The rats!...The official communiqués"

Track length6:22

$1.10

$1.50

Walton: Façade - An Entertainment

Work length38:50

$23.10

$31.50

Peggy Ashcroft (narrator), Paul Scofield (narrator)
London Sinfonietta
Sir William Walton
Recorded: 1969-05
Recording Venue: Abbey Road Studios, London

1. Fanfare; Hornpipe

Track length1:47

$1.10

$1.50

2. En famille

Track length2:57

$1.10

$1.50

3. Mariner Man

Track length0:39

$1.10

$1.50

4. Long Steel Grass

Track length2:21

$1.10

$1.50

5. Through Gilded Trellises

Track length2:26

$1.10

$1.50

6. Tango - Pasadoble

Track length1:55

$1.10

$1.50

7. Lullaby for Jumbo

Track length1:46

$1.10

$1.50

8. Black Mrs. Behemoth

Track length1:09

$1.10

$1.50

9. Tarantella

Track length1:25

$1.10

$1.50

10. A Man from a Far Countree

Track length1:44

$1.10

$1.50

11. By the Lake

Track length1:53

$1.10

$1.50

12. Country Dance

Track length2:01

$1.10

$1.50

13. Polka

Track length1:22

$1.10

$1.50

14. Four in the Morning

Track length2:03

$1.10

$1.50

15. Something Lies Beyond the Scene

Track length1:06

$1.10

$1.50

16. Valse

Track length3:13

$1.10

$1.50

17. Jodelling Song

Track length2:25

$1.10

$1.50

18. Scotch Rhapsody

Track length1:12

$1.10

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19. Popular Song

Track length2:04

$1.10

$1.50

20. Fox-trot "Old Sir Faulk"

Track length2:04

$1.10

$1.50

21. Sir Beelzebub

Track length1:18

$1.10

$1.50

Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat

Work length1:00:01

$29.70

$40.50

Glenda Jackson (narrator), Rudolf Nureyev (narrator), Michael MacLiammoir (narrator), Tristan Fry (percussion), Alfred Flaszynski (trombone), Grahame Whiting (cornet), John Price (bassoon), Gervase de Peyer (clarinet), Erich Gruenberg (violin), Gary Brennan (double bass)
Argo Chamber Ensemble
Gennady Zalkowitsch
Recorded: 1975-09-05
Recording Venue: Tollington Park, London

The Soldier's March - "Through the rugged countryside"

Track length1:45

$1.10

$1.50

"No one about"

Track length1:25

$1.10

$1.50

Music for Scene 1: Airs by a stream - "While the soldier's been playing"

Track length2:32

$1.10

$1.50

"Your violin - give it me"

Track length4:27

$1.10

$1.50

The Soldier's March - "Down the street where he was born"

Track length1:44

$1.10

$1.50

"It's over, at last I'm home"

Track length2:50

$1.10

$1.50

Music for Scene 2: Pastorale

Track length2:30

$1.10

$1.50

"Ah, villain, black-hearted knave"

Track length1:59

$1.10

$1.50

Music for the end of Scene 2

Track length0:36

$1.10

$1.50

"He set about reading the book"

Track length2:42

$1.10

$1.50

Airs by a stream - "The things of summer"

Track length0:50

$1.10

$1.50

"The poor have everything"

Track length4:26

$1.10

$1.50

Music for Scene 3: Airs by a stream

Track length0:54

$1.10

$1.50

The Soldier's March - "Through the rugged countryside"

Track length1:44

$1.10

$1.50

"Now the scene changes to another country full of strangers"

Track length2:42

$1.10

$1.50

The Royal March

Track length2:35

$1.10

$1.50

"The music struck up, the king himself received me"

Track length5:53

$1.10

$1.50

The Little Concert - "Princess, now please rest assured"

Track length2:53

$1.10

$1.50

"The bedchamber, where the Princess lies pale and unmoving" - Tango - "The Princess opens her eyes"

Track length2:12

$1.10

$1.50

"The Princess dances" - Valse

Track length2:00

$1.10

$1.50

"The Princess smiles" - Ragtime

Track length2:13

$1.10

$1.50

"The Devil himself has entered"

Track length0:21

$1.10

$1.50

The Devil's Dance - "The Devil dances"

Track length1:22

$1.10

$1.50

Little Chorale

Track length0:38

$1.10

$1.50

The Devil's song - "You may think that you have won"

Track length0:37

$1.10

$1.50

Great Chorale - "Don't try to add to what you now have"

Track length4:05

$1.10

$1.50

Triumphal March of the Devil - "You can't have everything"

Track length2:06

$1.10

$1.50

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About

A trio of twentieth-century classics, sardonic and timely tales, in long-unavailable Decca/Argo recordings from the 1970s.

Roberto Gerhard’s imagination was immediately fired by reading Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, La Peste, about a French-Algerian town in the sudden grip of bubonic plague. He determined to make a musical setting (The Plague), and after its premiere in 1964 few were left unmoved, or in any doubt about the work’s significance as a bitter, retrospective allegory on the evils of Nazism so recently extinguished.

Now that Gerhard’s score has taken on a new and unwonted relevance, this reissue of its first recording on Argo should win new converts to his music. It is led with remarkable sympathy by Antal Doráti, the Hungarian-born conductor who had become a friend of the composer as well as a mainstay of the Decca and Mercury catalogues. It was through Gerhard that Doráti met William Glock, who engaged him as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Also originally issued by Argo, the 1972 recording of Walton’s Façade enjoys a unique authority as the composer’s only stereo version of the score, featuring Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield as narrators. Though Walton arranged and revised the score many times after its scandalous premiere in 1922, for the Argo recording he returned to his 1951 version scored for the original combination of six instruments. Ashcroft – in the tradition of Façade’s author and first narrator, Edith Sitwell – and Scofield declaim the absurdist texts with all their famed resources of nuance, timing and eloquence.

To record The Soldier’s Tale in 1975, Decca acquired the services of Glenda Jackson, known worldwide at the time for her Oscar-winning performance in Women in Love (1969) and Ken Russell’s next film, The Music Lovers (1970), in which she played the unfortunate wife of Tchaikovsky. She was joined in Decca’s Hampstead studios by the Irish actor and founder of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, Micheál Mac Liammóir, and none other than Rudolf Nureyev, who gave a somewhat stilted, authentically arch performance as the Soldier of the tale. They were backed by a small ensemble of expert London-based musicians, headed by the former leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, Erich Gruenberg, in a rare, complete recording of Stravinsky’s original version of the score, with a new translation of the narrative.

Reviews

September 2021

s[The Gerhard is] tunningly performed and engineered.

Offer,Gerhard: The Plague, Walton: Façade & Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale

2 CDs

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