A Colour Symphony was Bliss's first essay in writing a big work for full orchestra, yet it has a remarkably assured, confident quality. Each of its four movements evokes the heraldic and symbolical associations of a given colour—purple, red, blue and green—and the scoring is rich and imaginative. Already the work has the composer's unmistakable orchestral fingerprints, and a youthful vitality of spirit. Bliss himself conducted the first performance at the 1922 Three Choirs Festival: it was very much a composition of its time, with nods in the direction of Stravinsky and aggressive 'dissonances' which mightily disturbed Elgar and other elder statesmen. Sixty-five years on those modernisms in fact seem less significant than its warm-hearted links with the romantic past; it's an impressive score which appeals the more you listen to it.
Vernon Handley has an intimate knowledge of Bliss's music since he worked with the composer: there's not a great deal I need to say about the performance, except that it is a quite-excellent realization of the score; it is objective yet compelling and completely satisfying. I wondered whether the Ulster Orchestra would provide quite enough tonal weight, but they came through triumphantly.
Handley has recorded the Checkmate suite before, with the Royal Liverpool orchestra (EMI ASD3687, 6/79—nla). That was a good performance, but the players did not seem quite inside the music. Working now with his own orchestra Handley obtains a dramatic, exceedingly well-played account of the suite from a ballet score which depicts the very human emotions of chess-board figures as a game between those representing Love and Death progresses towards its tragic climax.
The acoustic is slightly over-reverberant, but the recording quality is otherwise very good: this issue is much recommended.'