Firm enjoyment from start to finish. Marriner and the Academy recorded two of these pieces (namely the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Little Music) in the early 1970s for Argo – a much-loved collection, currently unavailable (it was last reissued within Decca’s mid-price British Collection series – 8/89, and the coupling was the glorious Fantasia concertante on a theme of Corelli). So how do these new accounts measure up to those distinguished predecessors? Very well indeed, I can report. There is the same combination of stunning discipline and joyous swagger on show, whilst Marriner’s purposeful, clear-headed direction once again betokens considerable affection as well as commitment to the cause. If the central Adagio cantabile of the concerto now emerges in marginally less rapt fashion than before, it still sounds surpassingly beautiful, and surely no one could resist the stirring passion behind the big-hearted C major home-coming in the finale (just listen to the cellos tuck into their ‘Scotch snap’ rhythms in the closing bars).
A similar sense of dedication informs Marriner’s crisply poised performance of the Divertimento on Sellinger’s Round. This engaging work grew out of a commission for the 1953 Aldeburgh Festival for a composite work based around the traditional tune, Sellinger’s Round (the other composers involved were Britten, Walton, Lennox Berkeley, Humphrey Searle and Arthur Oldham). Tippett’s contribution was an eloquently searching Andante espressivo entitled “A Lament”, and the following year he incorporated this same movement into the present Divertimento. It is a sparkling, richly inventive creation, its beguiling grace and bubbling, at times anarchic wit extremely well conveyed here. That just leaves the Sonata for four horns of 1955, a pithy, concentrated offering which well repays repeated hearings (the slow movement is particularly haunting), and whose technical demands hold no terrors for the four superbly assured principals who comprise the Michael Thompson Horn Quartet.
The engineering throughout is ideally ripe and realistic; SJ’s booklet-notes are admirable. Strongly recommended.'