CLASSICAL

Harty "Orchestral Works' Ralph Holmes (violin), Malcolm Binns (piano), Heather Harper (soprano), Ul1ster Orchestra/Bryden Thomson. Chandos, CHAN 7035 (3 CDs, 225 mins)

Dial-a-track code 1641

It was the series of Hamilton Harty recordings, begun in the centenary year of 1979, which helped put the Ulster Orchestra on the international map and Chandos have now fitted the bulk of the original five LPs on to three well filled mid price CDs. Harty is today celebrated in concert mainly through a handful of songs while his orchestral music has made international headway on CD, at home it seems to have become largely the province of amateur performers. It's not hard to imagine that orchestral managements North and South might experience a certain reticence towards the finale of An Irish Symphony, which celebrates "The Twelfth of July". Certainly, in Dublin, separate performances of some of the other movements have been heard more often in recent years than the whole piece. And the symphony has been affected in contemporary perception by later developments RTE's creatively wasteful obsession with the probation of orchestral arrangements of traditional Irish material (paid for by the bar!), and the filmic use of similar music in mood setting for scenes of stage Irishness.

During his lifetime, Harty was more celebrated as, a performer than as, a composer, firstly as an accompanist and, later as a conductor. During his period in charge of the Halle' Orchestra, from 1920 to 1933, it was widely held to be the finest in Britain. The busyness of his conducting career is said to have impinged on his composing. His two longest, works, the concertos for violin and piano, display a lack of individuality which, in combination, with echoes, of better known music, make for difficulties with the half hour plus spans of the pieces. Two works for voice and orchestra the late Children Of Lir with a wordless soprano hauntingly embedded in the orchestra) and the early Ode To A Nightingale, both show Harty at his finest. These two pieces, sung here by Heather Harper, deserve far wider currency than is currently their lot. Perhaps the reissue of the Ulster Orchestra's strongly played, vividly and resonantly recorded performances under the late Bryden Thomson will create a further surge of interest.

These discs, of course, count also as a remarkable testimonial to the development of the Ulster Orchestra Thomson's guidance. How sad it is, that RTE has chosen to sit on an RTESO tape of Bruckner's Symphony No "0", which was given a studio recording with commercial issue in, mind. Even at this late stage, it would surely be welcome on CD as a testimonial of the conductor's work in Dublin.

The Young Arturo Benedetti

Michelangeli "The Beginning of a Legend"

Teldec, 0630-13303-2, (2 CDs, 97' mins)

Dial-a- track code 1751

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays, Debussy

DG, 449 438-2, (2 CDs, 128 mins)

Dial-a-track code 1861

The aura that surrounded the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli extended beyond his pianism to the unpredictability (or, rather, frequency) of his cancellations. "These stemmed from his worries about not giving of his best, and he worried, too, about the condition of his piano, to the point of once keeping a Berlin audience waiting for two hours while the instrument was prepared to his satisfaction.

Michelangeli's fastidiousness was a feature of his art which on occasion led him towards mannerism, particularly near the end of his life (he died last year),, when sometimes his playing had a pointedness close to pedantry. Happily, there are no such problems in the Debussy recordings made between 1,971 and 1978 for DG. Here, his playing of the two sets of Preludes and Images, as well as Children's Corner brings to the music a rare interior clarity. This, if you like, is Debussy unveiled, with the impressionist haze lifted. Yet every twist and turn of harmonic movement is. weighted with such miraculous precision that nothing is lost in atmosphere. The Teldec set has the Grieg and Schumann concertos and a handful of shorter pieces, all recorded in the early 1940s in a memorably beguiling style of ruminative, soft hued music making.