British Music for Strings III

ETHEL SMYTH (1858-1944): Suite, Op. 1A, SUSAN SPAIN-DUNK (1880-1962): Suite, Lament, CONSTANCE WARREN (1905-1984): Heather Hill, RUTH GIPPS (1921-1999): Gringlemire Garden: An Impression, Op. 39.

Description: Smyth arranged her 1883 string quintet for string orchestra and this was published in 1891. The score being apparently lost, conductor Bostock edited the piano duo version for this recording. Half the length of Smyth’s work, Spain-Dunk’s suite comes from 1920 during a happy period when she was able to conduct three of her works in consecutive years at the Queen’s Hall Proms at the invitation of the conductor Sir Henry Wood. Warren gives us a short pastoral evocation (no Vaughan Williams influence here) from c. 1930 and Gipps’s equally brief (six minutes) piece uses a fragment of folk song to evoke an arboreal museum in the Lake District. Southwest German Chamber Orchestra Pforzheim; Douglas Bostock.