Britten: The World Of The Spirit / King Arthur Suite / American Overture

"Hickox's performance of the Coplandesque An American Overture has exemplary polish, commitment and dash. The remaining items owe their revival to the efforts of Paul Hindmarsh.
Britten wrote his incidental music for a BBC radio dramatisation of the King Arthur legend in 1937. It was the first of his 28 radio commissions and contains much high-quality invention.
Hindmarsh has fashioned the 23-year-old composer's inventive inspiration into a terrific fourmovement orchestral suite lasting some 25 minutes, which Hickox and the BBC PO devour with audible relish.
The 'radio cantata' The World of the Spirit dates from May 1938. Commissioned by the BBC as a successor to The Company of Heaven (1937), it intersperses sung and spoken texts chosen by R Ellis Roberts. Again, Britten's fertile compositional powers are much in evidence.
The work contains a whole string of memorable numbers, from the lilting barcarolle- like treatment of Emily Brontë's 'With wide-embracing love', via the joyful strut and swagger of Part-2's concluding 'The Spirit of the Lord' with its unmistakable echoes of Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, to a strikingly imaginative setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins's God'sGrandeur. Framing the 42-minute edifice are two radiant settings of the Whitsuntide plainsong, Veni Creator Spiritus - an idea possibly inspired by a recent encounter with Mahler's Eighth Symphony at the Queen's Hall under Sir Henry Wood.
The recording is superbly wide in its range and offers a realistic quality." Gramophone