There's a powerful, brooding melancholy pervading every bar of Patrick Hadley's 1931 symphonic ballad, The Trees so High; indeed, the music conveys a wistful, often disturbing intensity unusual for an English work of the period. In his excellent booklet-notes Bernard Benoliel speaks of the work's ''gentle pessimism''. For me, there are numerous moments here which far transcend that description: take that passage in the Andante tranquillo second section when lower strings, pushed to the very limits of their upper range, despairingly a intone a stark threnody—the effect is overwhelmingly painful; later, in the finale, when the chorus takes up the same idea against a doom-laden background of insistent, tolling bells, the tragic implications are inescapable. The kindly presence of Vaughan Williams dominates Hadley's musical landscape, whilst much of the tricky high divisi string writing betrays the influence of Delius's Song of the High Hills. Incidentally, Hadley's penchant for harmonically tangy melodic chains of thirds reminds me of another English composer with Irish ancestry as well as roots in East Anglia—E. J. Moeran.
Matthias Bamert directs sensitively, if without quite the same flexibility and feeling for climax that Vernon Handley displayed on his pioneering Lyrita version (3/79—nla). However, Bamert undoubtedly secures the more cultivated orchestral and choral response, though his baritone soloist, David Wilson-Johnson, is not quite as outstandingly eloquent as was Thomas Allen for Handley. This new Chandos production has fine bloom and detail, even if I personally would have preferred a sharper focus on the excellent Philharmonia Chorus.
The Hadley is prefaced here by a decent first recording for Philip Sainton's 1942 tone-poem, The Island. A composition pupil of Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy of Music, Sainton is perhaps best known today for his fine score for John Huston's 1956 film, Moby Dick. According to the composer, The Island ''depicts, in orchestral colours, the impression made upon me by a lovely seascape where fir trees come down to the rocks in Spring, Summer and Winter''. Baxian territory, this: Sainton's expert orchestration shimmers enticingly (though the imposing All Saints' Church, Tooting acoustic tends to over-ripen textures somewhat) and there are strong echoes of Delius and VW (especially those works dating from just after his studies with Ravel). There's no lack of memorable invention throughout (the trumpet calls at the start are indeed striking), even if things tend to sprawl a bit uncomfortably in the later stages. No matter, this is headily evocative stuff, and Anglophiles everywhere will surely want to add this sumptuous-sounding CD to their collections.'