Symphony No. 3 / Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 84 / etc

'Performances and presentation are exemplary: this music seems right up Richard Hickox's street, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales is ideally recorded in the Brangwyn Hall and Anthony Burton's notes are a sensible blend of anecdote and analysis'
International Record Review

This is the second disc in Chandos' Berkeley Edition, a series devoted to the music of Sir Lennox and Michael Berkeley. The first disc received excellent reviews.

This release contains the premiere recording of Michael Berkeley's Secret Garden, and the first digital recordings of two major works by Sir Lennox Berkeley.

Since winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition at eighteen, Nicholas Daniel has performed in recital worldwide and is a founding member of the Haffner Wind Ensemble. He has premiered many new works for the oboe by composers such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Sir John Tavener, Oliver Knussen and Michael Berkeley.

Sir Lennox Berkeley's Third Symphony - a work in one movement - makes intermittent use of twelve-note serial technique, something with which many British composers experimented in the post-war years. Commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival and first performed in 1969, it received its first London performance just over four years later in a 1973 BBC Promenade Concert, celebrating the composer's seventieth birthday.

CHAN 10022

At the same concert his Sinfonia Concertante for oboe and chamber orchestra received its first performance. The piece, scored for a chamber orchestera without oboes but including a prominent piano, bears the title of Sinfonia Concertante, the composer wrote:

because, though the solo instrument has the predominating part throughout, it has neither the character nor the usual form of a concerto. The emphasis is more on the oboe's aptitude for melodic expression and expansion than what it can offer as a vehicle for the display of virtuosity.

Michael Berkeley's Concerto for Oboe and String Orchestra was one of the earliest of his works to win him national attention. The concerto, which was first performed in 1977, is in three movements, arranged in an unusual way with a central Scherzo surrounded by two longer slow movements.

Secret Garden, for large orchestra, is a much more recent addition to Michael Berkeley's catalogue. Composed in 1997, it was his first work for more than a decade for full orchestra without a soloist. It is celebratory in tone, Michael Berkeley describing it as one of a group of works which explore facets of the imagination, that garden in the mind that so thrills and alarms, but, among the workings of human beings, can never be completely conquered or stolen by another.