While not a great lover of Delius’s music, I have thoroughly enjoyed this new, themed issue from Chandos. As Andrew Burn writes at the start of the booklet-note, ‘Norway was the spiritual home’ of Delius. He knew many Norwegians, Grieg not least, married a Norwegian painter, Jelka Rosen, visited the country frequently and maintained a summer house there after the Great War.

The impact of Norwegian music on Delius’s own works is also a touch deeper than I, for one, had given credit to – not least in one of his most iconic, ‘English’ works, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, which quotes a folksong previously set for chorus by Grieg. The Norse connections and atmosphere of Paa vidderne (‘On the mountains’, after Ibsen’s poem) and Eventyr are well attested although the latter’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ subtitle is more suggestive of fairy-tale and children’s stories. It is anything but and provides a fine climax to a programme that opens with Delius’s charming 1889 orchestration of Grieg’s Norwegian Bridal Procession (1872).

The programme is filled by orchestral versions of two of his Songs from the Norwegian, sung radiantly by Ann-Helen Moen (the disc’s high spot, for me), the popular Sleigh Ride, officially titled Winter Night, and incidental music to Gunnar Heiberg’s satirical play Folkeraadet (‘The People’s Parliament’, 1897). The use in the last of pre-independent Norway’s ‘national anthem’ was hugely controversial and led to the music’s withdrawal (although it was recycled later in the Norwegian Suite). The Bergen Philharmonic play with élan, Davis clearly knows his Delius and Chandos’s sound is superb. Recommended.