This issue finds a Sussex record company recording a Sussex ensemble in music by a Sussex musician—a praiseworthy example of local enterprise, to be sure, but one which deserves nationwide or indeed international dissemination.
John Marsh (1752–1828) was born in Dorking Surrey, but after a period as a young lawyer in Romsey and Salisbury he inherited a family estate near Canterbury. This he sold and spent the remaining 40 years of his life at Chichester in Sussex as an ''amateur of fortune'', becoming prominent in local musical life. He had little musical training but became a highly proficient and quite prolific composer, writing music which frequently contained easy parts for his amateur players and more advanced parts for the professionals. He was sympathetic to both conservative and more modern styles, writing 12 unpublished ''Full Concertoes in the ancient style'', as well as 37 symphonies, of which only nine were published and have survived.
The five symphonies recorded here were written between about 1770 and 1788. The spirit of Handel is apparent, as is the influence of J. C. Bach, and there's little innovative writing. But Marsh was more than a mere provincial amateur. His work has strength and a very pleasant, engaging and individual personality, the quality of invention is high, and the craftsmanship is skilled steady and secure. There is, too, an unmistakable but hard to define quality of 'Englishness' in his writing. Marsh deserves much more than local posthumous esteem, for there were contemporary composers of international fame who wrote much less appealing music than here.
The Chichester Concert, who play on copies of eighteenth-century instruments, are an accomplished group, and Ian Graham-Jones directs stylish, lively performances. The players are recorded in an attractive, quite spacious acoustic and the quality is first rate.'