Recorded live at the Barbican Centre in November 2007, Richard Hickox conducts Carl Orff’s immensely popular dramatic cantata Carmina Burana with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and soloists, Barry Banks, Laura Claycomb and Christopher Maltman. The score’s combination of gloriously infectious vulgarity interspersed with moments of genuine beauty has assured it an unquestionable position as one of the most popular of all twentieth-century choral works.

This release follows the recent Stanford Songs of the Sea release from Hickox and the BBC NOW, which was ‘Recording of the Month’ in Gramophone magazine and ‘Classical CD of the Week’ in both The Times and The Daily Telegraph. In this new recording of Bliss’s Violin Concerto, Lydia Mordkovitch, famous for her readings of British music, offers her own personal interpretation of the part made famous by Alfredo Campoli, for whom the work was commissioned. Mordkovitch wonderfully conveys the romance and beauty of this concerto, as well as the fiery nature of the gypsy theme prominent in the finale.

Sea Symphony is Vaughan Williams’s response to Walt Whitman’s inspirational, visionary verse. It is recorded here from the June 2006 highly-praised performance by London Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Chorus with soloists Gerald Finley and Susan Gritton, and Richard Hickox at the helm. The symphony is coupled with his much-loved overture to The Wasps and the dynamism of the concert performance is preserved in high-resolution audio.

Like so many British composers Dyson, even before he died in 1962, suffered neglect through writing in a conservative idiom that critics were all too ready to label 'out of date'. Originally written for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1939, its first performance was-cancelled because of the outbreak of war, and it was only given its premiere in Hereford a decade later.