Frederick Delius - Cello Concerto, RT VII/7
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Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Orchestra: BBC Symphony Orchestra
Cello: Paul Watkins
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Frederick Delius's Cello Concerto was composed in 1920–1921. The world premiere was given in January 1923 in Vienna by Alexandre Barjansky. The work was written at the request of the English cellist Beatrice Harrison, who was the soloist at the British premiere in July 1923.
This was the composer's favourite of his concertos. It was first commercially recorded in 1965 and has received further recordings subsequently.
After Delius had composed a Cello Sonata for Beatrice Harrison she urged him to write a concerto for her. He began sketching the work in 1920, completing it in May 1921. Although it was written for Harrison, Delius's publishers arranged a prestigious world premiere in Vienna, by the Russian cellist Alexandre Barjansky, with Ferdinand Löwe conducting. Harrison gave the British premiere on 23 July 1923, in a concert at which she also played the Elgar concerto with the composer conducting. Eugene Goossens conducted the Delius. Harrison gave the American premiere on 28 October 1927, with Fritz Reiner conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
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Frederick Theodore Albert Delius was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation, where he neglected his managerial duties; influenced by African-American music, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived (except during the First World War) for the rest of their lives. Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham staged Delius's opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910 and mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
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