Andrew Haveron and John Wilson deliver a fresh and intensely idiomatic reading of Korngolds Violin Concerto, coupled with the formidable String Sextet. One of the most sought-after violinists of his generation and a laureate of some of the most prestigious international violin competitions, Andrew Haveron studied in London at the Purcell School and the Royal College of Music. As a soloist, he has collaborated with conductors such as Jií Blohlávek, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Roger Norrington, David Robertson, Stanisaw Skrowaczewski, and John Wilson, performing a broad range of well-known and less familiar concertos with many of the finest orchestras in the UK. In 1999 he was appointed first violinist of the internationally acclaimed Brodsky Quartet.

John Wilson and Sinfonia of London release their second album, following widespread and universal critical acclaim for their first recording, of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp. This new recording explores the unique sound world of French orchestral music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The programme juxtaposes well-known favourites, such as Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Massenet’s ‘Méditation’ from Thaïs, with pieces far more rarely heard, for example Duruflé’s Trois Danses and Saint-Saëns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale. Many of these works evoke the ‘exoticism’ of Spain or North Africa (as was the fashion in French music of this era), and all share the intricate, detailed orchestration that defines the ‘Impressionist’ style.

After a decade of success in Hollywood, Erich Korngold returned to concert music during the last decade of his life. The works he wrote did not fit the heady postwar atmosphere, when the avant-garde, strengthened by its distance from the aesthetics of Hitler, ruled the scene. However, more recently the Symphony in F sharp major has had its champions, Andre Previn among them, and it's showing signs of reaching everyday-repertory status. This is all to the good, for the work is enormously enjoyable. Unlike other composers who adopted a kind of diglossia between their concert works and their film scores, Korngold devises an effective fusion where passages that could have come out of Captain Blood are built into larger structures. Sample the first movement.

Following the success of their previous album, English Music for Strings, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London turn their attention to the music of Henri Dutilleux. His ballet Le Loup was composed as a commission for Roland Petit’s dance company and premièred in Paris in March 1953. Rarely recorded – this is the first recording by a non-French orchestra – the work unfolds in three tableaux and tells a convoluted tale of a bridegroom who jilts his bride (to run away with a gypsy) by persuading her that he has been changed into a wolf. Over time she discovers that the wolf is real, but her feelings turn from terror to love and when the alarmed villagers hunt the wolf, she defends him and dies at his side.

For the second volume of the music of Eric Coates, John Wilson has built his programme around three contrasting ‘major’ works. The Suite Summer Days was premiered in October 1919, shortly after Henry Wood had fired Coates from his position as lead viola in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. An immediate hit, the suite received rave reviews and many more performances. It was recorded in 1926, Sir Edward Elgar telling Coates that he had played it so often that he had worn out the disc!