Of the present four British works from around 1930 – two of them (the Bax and the Moeran) not otherwise available on disc at the present time – these were, in each case, the first commercial recordings: the word 'commercial' has to be included because the recording of the Delius Sonata (on Symposium, 12/90) by May Harrison and Arnold Bax, the artists who gave the first performance, was a private one. Every bit as enticing as the works, however, is the constellation of top chamber players of the late 1930s and early 1940s whose names have become almost legendary. The Griller Quartet (which had been founded in 1928 and survived with the same personnel for 33 years) forms the nucleus of the two large-scale pieces, surrounded by luminaries like Thurston, Goossens, that great lady Korchinska and the 22-year-old Dennis Brain.
Oddly enough, both these works were recastings of smaller-scale originals. The Bax Nonet had started life as a violin sonata, difficult as this is to credit from the emotionally rhapsodic, luxuriant textures of the first movement or the more direct style of the subsequent Allegro (whose closing pages take on a lovely nostalgic poetry). Howard Ferguson's Octet had a more complex genesis, first as a clarinet quintet (whose traces can be detected in the clarinet's privileged position in the Octet), then as a septet. The work contains subtle inner thematic connections: the lyric beauty of the Andantino is countered by the skittishness of the scherzo (in which high unisons of the two violins are the one technically weak spot in the performance) and by the demonic finale.
Albert Sammons's deeply committed interpretation – including the omnipresent portamentos – of the ecstatic Delius Sonata (which owed much to Eric Fenby's collaboration) is all the more worth study in that Delius wrote the work immediately after hearing a performance by him of the Violin Concerto, which had been dedicated to him and which he had consistently championed. The mellifluous charm of Moeran's String Trio is fully brought out by one of the finest combinations of string players this country has ever produced. 'Masterly' is the only appropriate word for Michael Dutton's remastering (using the Cedar process) of all these 78rpm shellacs.
'