ERNEST JOHN MOERAN

Chandos’ recordings of works by E.J. Moeran are now available on its mid-price Classics label.

Moeran was an English composer of Irish descent. A pupil of John Ireland and friend of Peter Warlock, he composed music which displays the influences of Delius, Vaughan Williams, and of course his love of landscape.

Moeran’s Violin Concerto is a beautiful work, lyrical and full of atmosphere and colour. The Cello Concerto is more pastoral in nature, often elegiac in tone, with some highly attractive folk-like elements, which all go to make this concerto’s neglect regrettable.

Distinguished soloists Lydia Mordkovitch and Raphael Wallfisch, and conductors Norman Del Mar and Vernon Handley, are all artists famous for their performances of British music.


Moeran was strongly influenced by landscape, and in his later life Ireland had a great pull, to the extent that he could only write music while he was there. Though his Violin Concerto (1942) is not in the least programmatic, Kenmare, where he would later die, inspired the outer movements: the first reflects the calm of Kenmare Bay in fine weather; the last, autumn along the Kenmare river. The middle movement features a succession of Irish dancing rhythms, and might almost be called ‘scenes at the fair’.

The atmosphere of Lonely Waters (1931) takes us back to Moeran’s Norfolk boyhood, as well as his folksong collecting in East Anglia during the 1920s. In an introductory note the composer tells us that this work is ‘based on a fragment of song still frequently heard on Saturday nights at certain inns in the Broads district of East Norfolk’.

Whythorne’s Shadow is based on an Elizabethan tune, written while Moeran was living in a village with his friend, Peter Warlock. Warlock was at the time transcribing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century songs, and no doubt trying out his latest discoveries on his friend. The music of Thomas Whythorne was completely unknown before Peter Warlock discovered it, yet Whythorne is of particular interest as the composer of the earliest surviving book of English secular songs. Among these is ‘As Thy Shadow Itself Apply’th’, which forms the basis of Moeran’s piece.

The Cello Concerto was one of Moeran’s last big works. In conventional sonata form, it is one continuous paean in which the cello sings through the expert orchestration, and it has been described as the ultimate expression of all that Moeran had strived to say throughout his life.

'The Cello Concerto was written for Peers Coetmore who was to become his wife. Raphael Wallfisch's playing makes the neglect of this glorious piece all the more astonishing.'
Lydia Mordkovitch is a superb violinist who merely lacks the name recognition of a superstar.
The Cello Concerto was written for Peers Coetmore who was to become his wife. Raphael Wallfischs playing makes the neglect of this glorious piece all the more astonishing.


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