William Lloyd Weber (1914-1982)
"Invocation", pour harpe et orchestre
Sérénade pour cordes

Herbert Norman Howells (1892-1983)
Elégie pour alto, quatuor à cordes et orchestre à cordes, op. 15

Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1954)
Canto popolare "In Moonlight" (arr. D. Ogden)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Concerto grosso
Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus

Philip Dukes, alto
Jean Kelly, harpe
Section des cordes du National Symphony Orchestra
Rimma Sushanskaya, direction

That there is indeed something of the ethereal, of the timeless, and of the indefinable pervading all of the music heard on this CD instantly calls into question our shared notions of what the term Elegy actually signifies. Here the listener will encounter none of the unutterable despair of, for example, Samuel Barber’s great Adagio for Strings, or the tortured valediction of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, but rather an introspection and wistfulness of an altogether gentler sort. As the poet Thomas Gray expressed it in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.” The CD includes an introduction by Julian Lloyd Webber.