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Heritage & Legacy 2 Music by Elgar, MacCunn, Austin and Bliss

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As with our highly successful album Heritage & Legacy 1 we place our world-premiere recording of music by Liverpool born composer Frederic Austin in the company of his more famous contemporaries Sir Edward Elgar and others.

The composer's grandson Martin Lee-Browne has worked tirelessly to bring the music to the light of day, and writes:

“Frederic Austin was an extremely versatile musician and musical administrator. He was brought up in Birkenhead, and by the time he was 20 he was a well-known organist in the area, and a teacher of counterpoint and harmony at the Liverpool College of Music. Another member of the staff there was Cyril Scott, and through him Austin met Balfour Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Bax, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst and many other musicians who became Austin's lifelong friends, as did Thomas Beecham, who had been one of his pupils in Liverpool.

Austin became a professional singer, and between 1906 and 1920 he was perhaps the finest baritone in the country, both on concert platforms and in opera houses, very often working with Beecham. He gave the first English performances of Delius’s Sea Drift, was celebrated in most of the big Wagner roles, and made a particular name for himself in the ‘difficult’ modern music of the time, such as Richard Strauss’s operas and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

As if his teaching, singing and administrative careers were not enough, Austin also composed. His choral work, Pervigilium Veneris, was performed at the 1931 Leeds Festival; he also wrote songs, instrumental and chamber music, incidental music, a concertino for piano and orchestra and some film scores.

His most important works, however, are two overtures, Richard II and The Sea Venturers; a symphonic poem Isabella, two other orchestral pieces, Symphonic Rhapsody: Spring and Palsgaard; Danish Sketches; and the present Symphony."

After its 1913 premieres the score was lost for nearly 90 years - the story of its rediscovery is included in the CD booklet, full of Lewis Foreman's scholarship!

Sir Arthur Bliss' Pyanepsion is the original version of the finale of the Colour Symphony - much more dramatic in its harmony and orchestration it brings Heritage & Legacy 2 to a dynamic conclusion.