If one imagined a more sensuous Elgar, a more vigorous Delius, a less rigorous Wagner, or a less morbid Mahler, one would have imagined the music of Granville Bantock, the fin de siècle English composer who contrived to continue composing late Romantic music straight through to his death in 1946. But if these admittedly invidious comparisons don't suffice, you can always listen to this magnificently played and conducted six-disc set of Bantock's major orchestral works recorded for Hyperion by Vernon Handley and the Royal ...
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If one imagined a more sensuous Elgar, a more vigorous Delius, a less rigorous Wagner, or a less morbid Mahler, one would have imagined the music of Granville Bantock, the fin de siècle English composer who contrived to continue composing late Romantic music straight through to his death in 1946. But if these admittedly invidious comparisons don't suffice, you can always listen to this magnificently played and conducted six-disc set of Bantock's major orchestral works recorded for Hyperion by Vernon Handley and the Royal Philharmonic. Many of his best-known works are included: A Celtic Symphony, A Herbidean Symphony, and the Pagan Symphony, as well as excerpts from his mammoth setting of the complete The Song of Songs and his even more mammoth setting of the complete Omar Khayyám. Sumptuous, salacious, superficially chromatic but fundamentally tonal, easily roused, and just as easily distracted, Bantock's music is not for the prim, the pedantic, or the faint of heart. But in these dedicated...
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