''A boxed set, with individual CDs in pasteboard sleeves, this richly serviceable trove embraces the major works of Delius. The early operas, Irmelin and The Magic Fountain , are absent, as is Margot la rouge , an unsuccessful potboiler whose music Delius adapted to make the Idyll (“Once I Passed Though a Populous City”), which is included. Two substantial recent rescues— Hiawatha , an early tone poem in the vein of the Florida Suite (Dutton 7226, Fanfare 33:3) and the late Poem of Life and Love (Dutton 7264)—are, unavoidably, the only other considerable omissions. The first disc is a nod to Beecham in lollipops mode, with his salubrious but long-available 1950s recordings of Winter Night (“Sleigh Ride”), Marche Caprice, Over the Hills and Far Away, the two Dance Rhapsodies , and the 1946 go at Paa vidderne , rounded off by an October 1948 talk on Delius with a harrumphing Sir Thomas in an expansive mood in which more is less. Veddy British and rather fun the first time. A token disc of songs reaches back to 1929 for three tracks of Beecham at the piano accompanying Dora Labette, and others from 1949 with the RPO featuring Labette, Marjorie Thomas, and Elsie Suddaby. Labette and Gerald Moore from 1938, and Moore with Heddle Nash in 1934, beef up the antiquarian interest, though perhaps the one real rarity is a 1930 track of the young Eric Fenby conducting a pickup orchestra with Delius’s close friend, renowned cellist Beatrice Harrison, in the Caprice and Elegy. 

For the rest, we have stereo takes, most immediately glowing, marching through the decades from the 1960s—Malcolm Sargent’s 1964 go at Songs of Farewell with the Royal Choral Society and the RPO—into the 21st century, for example Tasmin Little with John Lenehan in the Légende . Given Delius’s sybaritic love of orchestral color, this is a wise choice as well as an expedient mining of EMI’s extensive catalog. We might have been given Beecham’s 1948 Village Romeo or his 1960 Florida Suite , both rife with felicities, but at the cost of missing the ebullience Davies brought to Village Romeo and the menace of Shirley-Quirk’s Dark Fiddler, to say nothing of the exuberance with which the late, lamented Richard Hickox awakened the Florida Suite . Collectors will encounter many old friends … Barbirolli in the Walk to the Paradise Garden with the LPO in 1965, and with the Hallé Orchestra, in Appalachia , in 1970 (with an instructive rehearsal snippet); Handley in the complete incidental music from Hassan , with Martyn Hill, Brian Rayner Cook, and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, in 1979; Menuhin and Tortelier in the Double Concerto, with Meredith Davies and the RPO, in 1976; the absolute classic go at Songs of Sunset with Janet Baker and John Shirley-Quirk, with Charles Groves and the Liverpool Philharmonic, from 1968. Fittingly, most of Disc 7 is given to a handful of Fenby arrangements, allowing us to hear cheek-by-jowl, for instance, the Sonata for String Orchestra and its original, the String Quartet. Disc 17 concludes with a substantial talk by Fenby, illustrated by seven cuts from the collection. 

Nominally priced—a true bargain—this cornucopia entails the trade-off of omitting the liner copy of the originals while making the sung texts, with translations, available in PDF format. Savoring the collection disc-by-disc, one might reread Fenby’s page-turner, Delius As I Knew Him , and go through the late Christopher Palmer’s Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan , which is not only the finest of all books about the music, but a conspectus whose resonance awakens not only Grieg and Debussy and Richard Strauss—the usual suspects—but MacDowell, Grainger, Lambert, and Warlock, among others, and the pervasive, if elusive, influence of black music. Recommendation is superfluous. Grab this collection while you can.'' Fanfare