Richard Hickox

London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Hickox – Carl Orff: Carmina Burana (2008) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 22, 2023 · Comments off

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.

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Richard Hickox – Finzi: Violin Concerto, In Years Defaced, Prelude & Romance (2001/2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 22, 2023 · Comments off

Tasmin Little is the soloist in a premiere recording of Finzi. This exciting release features the premiere recording of Finzi’s Concerto for Small Orchestra and Violin.

Finzi, one of the subtlest and most seductive of the English elegists, will no doubt be celebrated widely in this his centenary year. But few tributes will match this one for sheer creativity and quality of performance. The disc not only boasts the first recording of the enchanting Concerto for Small Orchestra and Solo Violin, but some new orchestrations of his songs by living British composers, thoroughly in tune with his idiom. The Finzi Trust invited five composers to select and orchestrate a song each, including Jeremy Dale Roberts, who supervised the project. They took as their cue Finzi’s own deft orchestration of the brisk, swinging song ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, building around it a circle of more introspective gems. There is Colin Matthews’s visionary response to ‘To a poet a thousand years hence’ and hypnotic bass harp chords give Judith Weir’s ‘At a lunar eclipse’ an apt nocturnal strangeness, while Anthony Payne’s ‘Proud Songsters’ takes flight with ravishing strings and tambourine. Most of Finzi’s songs were written for the baritone voice; here tenor John Mark Ainsley brings an exquisite darkness to these persuasive readings.

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Richard Hickox – Rubbra: Choral Works (2000/2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 31, 2023 · Comments off

Throughout his long composing career, Edmund Rubbra (1901–1986) had always been concerned with writing for voice. Indeed, his earliest acknowledged pieces were all vocal. His exquisite Christmas carol Dormi Jesu written for the Oxford Book of Christmas Carols in 1922 pointed the way to a whole series of wonderful works for choir which extends to his last composition, an unassuming setting of Psalm 122 (1984). Most of these choral works are unaccompanied and include five settings of the Mass, plus many motets and anthems. However, there is also a series of short cantata-like pieces, three of which are included on this album.

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Collegium Musicum 90, Richard Hickox – Haydn: London Symphonies, Vol. 2 (2000) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · March 5, 2023 · Comments off

One of the most striking features of the twelve symphonies that Haydn composed for London between 1791 and 1795 is the strong sense of rapport between the composer and the intended audience. It was a popularity that he nurtured so that the tastes and enthusiasm of his audience were gradually developed. – for Haydn, popularity went hand in hand with artistic integrity. The three symphonies recorded here were all premiered in different seasons and reveal these qualities to the full.

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Richard Hickox – Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 6, Nocturne & Symphony No. 8 (2003/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · December 18, 2022 · Comments off

Don’t start up with all that “there’ve been no good Vaughan Williams recordings since Sir Adrian and Sir John died” stuff. Or course, Boult’s and Barbirolli’s recordings of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies are authoritative since they gave so many of the works their premieres. But authoritative does not mean definitive, it does not preclude other possibilities, and it surely does not preclude later conductors from giving equally convincing interpretations. As Richard Hickox has demonstrated again and again in his series of recordings of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra, his interpretations are just as convincing as Boult’s and Barbirolli’s.

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London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Hickox – Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (2001) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 24, 2022 · Comments off

“It was during the summer of 1911 that George Butterworth, whose enchanting 1913 idyll, The Banks of Green Willow, comprises the achingly poignant curtainraiser here, first suggested to Vaughan Williams that he should write a purely orchestral symphony.

VW dug out some sketches h’d made for a symphonic poem about London, while at the same time deriving fruitful inspiration from HG Wells’s 1908 novel, Tono-Bungay. Geoffrey Toye gave the successful Queen’s Hall premiere in March 1914, and VW subsequently dedicated the score to Butterworth’s memory.

Over the next two decades or so, the work underwent three revisions (including much judicious pruning) and was published twice (in 1920 and 1936). In his compelling 1941 recording with the Cincinnati SO, Eugene Goossens employed the 1920 version, which adds about three minutes of music to that definitive 1936 ‘revised edition’. Now Richard Hickox at long last gives us the chance to hear VW’s original, hour-long canvas – and riveting listening it makes too! Whereas the opening movement is as we know it today, the ensuing, expanded Lento acquires an intriguingly mournful, even worldweary demeanour. Unnervingly, the ecstatic full flowering of that glorious E major Largamente idea, first heard at fig F in the final revision, never materialises, and the skies glower menacingly thereafter. Towards the end of the Scherzo comes a haunting episode that Arnold Bax was particularly sad to see cut (‘a mysterious passage of strange and fascinating cacophony’ was how he described it). The finale, too, contains a wealth of additional material, most strikingly a liturgical theme of wondrous lyrical beauty, and, in the epilogue, a gripping paragraph that looks back to the work’s introduction as well as forward to the first movement of A Pastoral Symphony. Sprawling it may be, but this epic conception evinces a prodigal inventiveness, poetry, mystery and vitality that do not pall with repeated hearings. Hickox and the LSO respond with an unquenchable spirit, generous flexibility and tender affection that suit VW’s ambitious inspiration to a T, and Chandos’s sound is big and bold to match. An essential purchase for anyone remotely interested in British music.” ~~ Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010

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BBC National Chorus & Orchestra of Wales, Richard Hickox – Quo Vadis (2003) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 25, 2022 · Comments off

BBC National Chorus & Orchestra of Wales, Richard Hickox - Quo Vadis (2003) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

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.
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Richard Hickox, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales – Bliss – A Colour Symphony: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2006) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 8, 2022 · Comments off

Richard Hickox, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales – Bliss – A Colour Symphony: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2006)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:40 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

This release follows the recent Stanford Songs of the Sea release (CHSA 5043) 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. This is the only available recording of the Violin Concerto, uniquely coupling with A Colour Symphony. A Colour Symphony illustrates four heraldic colours by means of striking ideas and original orchestral effects. Hickox and the BBC NOW provide a refined and idiomatic reading, confirming this as one of Bliss’s most inventive, striking scores, neglected in recent years.

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London Symphony Orchestra & Richard Hickox – Vaughan Williams: Overture to The Wasps & A Sea Symphony (2007/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 21, 2022 · Comments off

London Symphony Orchestra & Richard Hickox – Vaughan Williams: Overture to The Wasps & A Sea Symphony (2007/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:16:19 minutes | 663 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos Records

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.

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