First recorded digitally in the late '80s for Chandos with Vernon Handley leading the Ulster Orchestra, C.V. Stanford's symphonies were recorded again in the late 2000s for Naxos by David Lloyd-Jones leading the Bournemouth Symphony. The first disc in the series is this coupling of the Symphony No. 4 in F major and the Symphony No. 7 in D minor. Lloyd-Jones, the conductor who has made so many fine Naxos recordings of English modernist music for Naxos -- one thinks of his recordings of Alwyn, Bax, and Rawsthorne -- proves ...
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First recorded digitally in the late '80s for Chandos with Vernon Handley leading the Ulster Orchestra, C.V. Stanford's symphonies were recorded again in the late 2000s for Naxos by David Lloyd-Jones leading the Bournemouth Symphony. The first disc in the series is this coupling of the Symphony No. 4 in F major and the Symphony No. 7 in D minor. Lloyd-Jones, the conductor who has made so many fine Naxos recordings of English modernist music for Naxos -- one thinks of his recordings of Alwyn, Bax, and Rawsthorne -- proves equally adept at English romantic music. While he can do nothing to excise the echoes of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and above all Brahms from these scores, Lloyd-Jones and the Bournemouth make the best possible case for Stanford's integrity, sincerity, and obvious compositional skill. Here, the large-scale Fourth from 1888 is a masterfully written work that comes close to profundity in the Andante molto moderato, while the lighter Seventh from 1911 is an almost neo-Classical work of...
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