Finzi began work on his Concerto for small orchestra and solo violin in 1925, dedicating it to Sybil Eaton (a talented young violinist and the object of the 24-year-old composer’s unrequited love). He harboured considerable doubts about the opening movement, however, and when Eaton eventually premiered the piece in May 1927 with Sargent and the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra, the Queen’s Hall audience heard only the second and third movements. When Vaughan Williams confirmed that he would programme the concerto at a Bach Choir concert the following year, Finzi penned another first movement. Neither he nor the critics found much to please them, though, and the concerto was not heard again in its entirety until the present artists’ revival in 1999 in Southampton’s Turner Sims Concert Hall. The work’s highlight undoubtedly remains the central, characteristically rapt Molto sereno that Finzi later recast as his Op 6 Introit. Of the two vigorous flanking movements the finale leaves the stronger impression, but the concerto thoroughly deserves its new lease of life, and Little and Hickox’s sparkling and stylish advocacy will win it many new friends.
There’s another first recording in the guise of the song-cycle, In Years Defaced. Only one number, the 1928-32 setting of Hardy’s ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, was actually orchestrated by Finzi, and, in an effort to place it in a more programme-friendly context, the Finzi Trust commissioned five contemporary composers to choose a song that might benefit from the extra colour an orchestral palette can provide. The resulting sequence is a joy from start to finish. Without compromising her own strongly recognisable idiom, Judith Weir sheds new light on Finzi’s bleakly beautiful response to Hardy’s ‘At a lunar eclipse’ (the links with Holst’s Egdon Heath never clearer) – and the same goes for Colin Matthews’ treatment of the cycle’s hauntingly timeless opener, ‘To a poet a thousand years hence’. Elsewhere, Anthony Payne’s exquisitely judged scoring of ‘Proud songsters’ shares stylistic fingerprints with his masterly elaboration of the sketches for Elgar’s Third Symphony; more unexpectedly, Christian Alexander’s arrangement of ‘Tall Nettles’ (written when Finzi was just 19) brings cherishable pre-echoes of VW’s A Pastoral Symphony. Ainsley is a potent, irreproachably sensitive presence throughout this imaginative and rewarding creation which, as Jeremy Dale Roberts (orchestrator of the title song) observes in the booklet, enshrines ‘a coherent work of touching intensity’. Again, Hickox and the City of London Sinfonia accompany to the manner born and are no less responsive to the radiant string textures of the chaste, rather Bachian Prelude and more emotive Romance. Lovely, airy sound and exemplary presentation further enhance the appeal of this most desirable Finzi collection