PERCY GRAINGER

SYDNEY CHAMBER CHOIR / MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS / DAVIS

This recording complements the mammoth Chandos project, dating back over a twenty-year period, and re-issued in a nineteen-disc box set last year, devoted to the music by Percy Grainger. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chorus are joined by the Sydney Chamber Choir under Sir Andrew Davis in works requiring large choral forces. Perhaps the best known of them is the Tribute to Foster. In what he called a ‘musical extravaganza’ Grainger uses the theme and words from Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races, which he remembered his mother singing to him when he was a child. The Thanksgiving Song is, as Grainger writes, ‘honour-tokened to all my life’s sweethearts – to those I have loved long and fully, but also to those I merely looked at but never spoke to’. The work uses the choral forces to vocalise rather than sing a specific text. Kipling’s works were a significant influence on Grainger, particularly in his student days in Frankfurt. Danny Deever sets a poem from Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. King Solomon’s Espousals derives from the Song of Solomon. Also recorded are The Wraith of Odin, The Bride’s Tragedy, The Hunter in His Career, The Lads of Wamphray, Sir Eglamore, and Marching Song of Democracy