Symphony & Hiawatha's wedding

"This CD combines two recordings from more or less opposite ends of the Coleridge-Taylor spectrum ... Sargent's reading of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast remains a mainstay of the Coleridge-Taylor catalogue and has hardly been out of circulation since its original appearance sixty years ago ... The stereo remake benefits from the superb singing of the Royal Choral Society in a work that anticipates a large choral body, the excellent and responsive playing of the Philharmonia Orchestra in their prime, and a conductor whose association with the work stretched back to the celebrated balletically staged presentations of the complete Hiawatha trilogy at the Royal Albert Hall in the inter-war years ... The symphony clearly owes a debt to the composer's predecessors and models, Brahms and Dvořák ... An excellent performance which brings out all the joy and ultimate triumph in Coleridge-Taylor's writing".

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