John Foulds - Mirage; Three Mantras; Lyra Celtica; Apotheosis (Sakari Oramo)

Information

Composer: John Foulds

• (01-03) Three Mantras from Avatara, Op. 61b
• (04-05) Lyra Celtica - Concerto for voice & orchestra, Op. 50
• (06-09) Apotheosis (Elegy), Op. 18 (Music Poem No. 4, for violin & orchestra)
• (10-15) Mirage, Op. 20 (Music Poem No. 5, for orchestra)

Susan Bickley, mezzo soprano (04-05)
Daniel Hope, violin (06-09)
City of Birmingham Symphony Youth Chorus
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo, conductor

Date: 2004
Label: Warner Classics

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Review

A fascinating portrait of a colourful, restless personality

Sakari Oramo has been programming plenty of 20th-century British music during his Birmingham tenure, a policy which now bears spectacular fruit with this generous and enterprising disc devoted to Manchester-born John Foulds (1880-1939). A self-taught figure, Foulds won some measure of fame in his lifetime with his light music and World Requiem (1919-21); later in his career, he developed an interest in theosophy and all things Eastern, and had spells in Paris and India (where he died of cholera).

The extraordinary Three Mantras (1919-30) originally served as the preludes to the three acts of Foulds’s abandoned Sanskrit opera, Avatara. In the opening ‘Mantra of Activity’ Oramo daringly sets an even more propulsive tempo than does Barry Wordsworth on his pioneering Lyrita recording, yet with no loss of composure. A wordless female chorus intensifes the atmosphere of mystic awe that permeates the succeeding ‘Mantra of Bliss’. The concluding ‘Mantra of Will’ strictly employs the seven-note modal scale of a South Indian raga. A daring, extended pause ushers in a flamboyantly savage pay-off (here rather more transparent and tidier in execution than under Wordsworth).

Next comes Lyra Celtica, a concerto for wordless voice and orchestra written between 1917 and the mid-1920s for his wife, the soprano Maud McCarthy. In the event Foulds completed only two of the three movements (the finale remains a 150-bar fragment). It’s an alluring discovery, which deploys both microtones and quarter-tones (a Foulds trademark). Mezzo Susan Bickley rises valiantly to the challenge.

By comparison, Apotheosis (1909) and Mirage (1910) strike a rather more conventional note, though Daniel Hope’s contribution in the former locates the lyrical beauty in this heartfelt elegy in memory of Joachim. Richard Strauss looms large in Mirage an opulent 23-minute tone-poem with much arresting incident, which Oramo and the CBSO do proud.

The sound is hugely vivid and Calum MacDonald’s annotation a model of its kind. Don’t miss this gem of a release.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 9
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: ***** / SOUND: *****
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/Nov04/Foulds_Mantras.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/dec04/Foulds_Mantras.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/oct/22/classicalmusicandopera.shopping4
https://www.allmusic.com/album/john-foulds-orchestral-works-mw0001944087
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mirage-Three-Mantras-Celtica-Oramo/dp/B0002VE20G
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Mantras-Celtica-Apotheosis-Mirage/dp/B0002VE20G

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John Foulds (2 November 1880 – 25 April 1939) was an English composer of classical music. Foulds was an adventurous figure of great innate musicality and superb technical skill. He was largely self-taught as a composer, and belongs to the figures of the English Musical Renaissance. A successful composer of light music and theatre scores, his principal creative energies went into more ambitious and exploratory works that were particularly influenced by Indian music. Foulds' most substantial compositions include string quartets, symphonic poems, concertos, piano pieces, as well as a series of "Music-Pictures".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foulds

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Sakari Oramo (born October 26, 1965 in Helsinki) is a Finnish conductor. He started his career as a violinist and concertmaster of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO), and studied conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy. From 1998 to 2008, Oramo was Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with which he championed the music of John Foulds in concerts and recordings. He was Principal Conductor of the FRSO (2003-2012), and is currently Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (since 2008) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (since 2013).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakari_Oramo

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