Classical

Krumpholtz: Harp music. Jan Walters (ASV Gaudeamus)

The best-known harp piece of the late 18th century - Mozart's Concerto for flute and harp - dates from 1778, the year Jan Krumpholtz (1747-1790) made his debut in Paris. This Czech harpist and composer also impacted on the development of the harp through his contact with instrument makers, one of whose daughters, Anne-Marie Steckler, became his pupil and wife, and eventually surpassed him as a player. It would be idle to claim Krumpholtz as a composer of any great significance, but he did engage meaningfully with the expanding technical possibilities of the harp. Jan Walters's collection - recorded on a light-toned, clear-voiced Erard single-action pedal harp dating from around 1800 - includes two of his 40 sonatas, the Symphony, Op. 11, and a set of variations. An intriguing illumination of a little-known byway of musical history.

- Michael Dervan

Chausson: Symphony; Poeme; Poeme d l'amour et de la mer. Montreal SO/Charles Dutoit (Decca)

This disc brings together the three best-known orchestral works of Ernest Chausson, a composer whose life was cut tragically short at the age of 44 in a cycling accident in 1899. The influences of his teacher, Cesar Franck, and Wagner are evident in the largest of the three pieces, the Symphony in B flat. But the Poeme for violin (Chantal Juillet) and orchestra has a highly-charged emotionality all its own. Written in unshowy style for the great Ysaye, it is, and by quite a distance, the most individual of the works collected here. The rarest offering of this new Decca collection is the Poeme de l'amour et de la mer, a work long colonised by mezzo sopranos, but here given to a male voice, the very able baritone of Francois Le Roux.

- Michael Dervan

Delius: Orchestral Works Vols 1 & 2. Thomas Beecham (Naxos Historical)

Thomas Beecham, backed by a Beecham's Powders fortune, was in a unique position to support his musical whims and fancies in the concert hall and opera house, and one of his great enthusiasms was for the music of Frederick Delius, a composer whose high standing in the early years of the century (admired, even, by the likes of Bartok) is not that easy to fathom today. His loose and impressionistic art has a harmonic fluidity that's short on focus, and he favoured a rhythmic variety that undermined any sense of long-term direction. But Beecham, heard here in pioneering recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, knew how to make the most of Delius's atmospheric conjurings, though, be warned, the digital transfers are highly sanitised. The major works included are Paris (Vol 1) and Sea Drift (Vol 2).

- Michael Dervan