Ireland: Music for String Orchestra

Raphael Wallfisch (cello)

Orchestra of the Swan, David Curtis

A Downland Suite
In a May Morning
Sarnia
Soliloquy
Sonata in G minor for cello & piano

John Ireland’s music is often a response to landscape and romantic sensitivities.

With its significant musical clues, broad, songlike melodies and turbulent finale, the Sonata in G minor is one of his most expressive and passionate works. A Downland Suite is one of Ireland’s most attractive compositions, especially its exquisite Elegy and popular Minuet made familiar through its use in radio and television. Ireland’s evocative piano works lend themselves well to string orchestra arrangements. They include the exquisite miniature Soliloquy and In a May Morning, the second movement of Sarnia, inspired by spring on Guernsey.

June 2016

[A Downland Suite is] felicitously served on this latest anthology from Warwickshire’s Orchestra of the Swan under David Curtis…I love the thrusting vigour of Curtis’s Prelude…and his shapely and infectiously spirited account overall is a most winning one…that tireless champion of British music Raphael Wallfisch plays with full-throated eloquence

June 2016

Will appeal strongly to John Ireland admirers

10th April 2016

[the Sonata is] played here with arresting vigour by Raphael Wallfisch in an arrangement for strings by Matthew Forbes...but it is perhaps the wistful Soliloquy, a piano piece from 1922 arranged for cello and strings by Graham Parlett, that most intrigues in a collection that charms but rarely excites.