Just Felt Like Posting Harold Darke's Fantasy in E Major

I am generally not a huge fan of 20th century British tonal composition.  There are some exceptions to that, I love Michael Tippett's music a lot and there are some pieces by Benjamin Britten that I like.  It having been the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI,  I think it's a shame that the recording he conducted of his famous War Requiem has Galina Vishnevskaya singing the soprano part, which makes large stretches of an otherwise great recording unlistenable for me, at least.  I know Britten wrote the piece for her but I have never been able to hear what others heard in her voice.   To tell you the truth, hers is one of the very few highly renowned voices I really can't stand to hear.*  But I digress. 

I have warmed up to an increasing range of compositions that would fall under that category and will be reposting George Dyson's Magnificat in c minor in the coming weeks, as well as some of the settings by other British composers and those who are influenced by that style. 

One composer whose music I have to say I really have come to appreciate is the relatively little known Harold Darke.  I posted a performance of his Fantasy in E Major a few months back but I didn't realize until I read some biographical material that there is a performance available on the very organ he probably composed it for, the one where he was organist, St. Michael's Church, Cornhill played by one of his successors in that post, Jonathan Rennett

Here's an arrangement of it for string orchestra by Clive Jenkins, made to replace one that Darke himself made but which was lost .

Chamber Ensemble of London
Peter Fish, conductor

* You have to wonder what Britten thought when this happened at the first recording of the piece:

When it came to recording the War Requiem the following year, Vishnevskaya at first failed to appreciate that the work is conceived on different planes, and saw her position with the choir in the Kingsway Hall balcony "as a kind of discrimination", the male soloists, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, being at the front, near the conductor, with their own dedicated chamber ensemble.

She insisted that she should be with them. Attempts to explain the nature of the work failed and, as the producer John Culshaw recalled, "she then lost her head, and lay on the floor of the vestry ... and shrieked at the top of her voice. You would really have been excused for thinking that an extremely painful process of torture was in progress." Miraculously, she reappeared the following day, totally transformed, and this iconic recording was able to be completed as planned.

Which is one of my favorite Tales of the Divas. Aren't you glad I mentioned her, now?  I still can't stand her wobbly vibrato.  I never heard a recording of it with Heather Harper, who had to stand in for G. V. at the premier performances because the Soviet government were being the massive assholes they generally were.  I strongly suspect I'd have preferred it.