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Hard to understand how this American composer remains so unknown. Would love to hear more of his symphonic output.

Beautiful.. So beautiful and so poignant that he gave his life so young for the freedom of mankind.. And poignant also that we believe he was probably gay when it was illegal in England.. He was a creative sensitive man.. You can't help feeding some love and affinity

I discovered Moeran, after hearing 'Whythorne Shadow' on the radio, and recorded it on a Music Cassette. That was 15 years ago. Now I am very familiar with his music. Great!

This is truly fine. Wish there were a video with it so one can see the performers. Do another take some time soon please?

played on radio 3 this week :) some nice passages of music

Strikingly beautiful music. It's equal parts emotional, haunting, and heartfelt. Might as well add stirring, inspirational, and deeply affecting, too, because it's all of that and more. This is so deserving of a wider audience! Liked & subscribed.

A life cut far too short. What might he have given us had he survived that hideous war.

skip at 18:03🤔

Somervell did not compose much music, but EVERY piece by him is a masterpiece realy. This symphony, his piano concerto, violin concerto and Normandy variations are profound pieces, full of vivid imagination and rich in inspiration. They should be recorded more. Especially, in this piece, the second movement shines. It shows off Somervell's gift for melody structure and orchestration. Just move to 18:47 to hear that melody from heaven with polyphonic like sound. and in 17:37 - what a grandiose sound of the orchestra, wow!

Wonderful music, full of interesting melodic ideas. I'm so thankful there was an effort make this symphony "work". Great recording!

A beautiful piece of music. I am so glad to have discovered it. Thank you!

I think the problem is a lack of certainty what Moeran‘s intentions for the structure of his symphony were. A one movement work would have sounded very different, but the material here sounds too discursive for a one movement symphony (like Sibelius‘s seventh?)

I'm real fine with it. Thanks for posting this

En vous baladant dans les prés du présent, vous pouvez cueillir des bouquets de fleurs folles et improbables, revenir avec de somptueux extraits de ce musicien sensible et écorché et vous dire que vous gagnez parfois du temps à ignorer tant de ces musiques contemporaines new age redondantes & futiles pour gagner en force et sérénité !

All the lovely fingerprints of Butterworth are here. I'm tasting once again the wonder of his music first heard in "The Banks of Green Willow". Kudos to Mr. Yates for taking the precious little that Butterworth left behind before going to France to fight...and die, and making these sketches something for the ages.

Mario - we recently made a new video of this work I thought you might be interested in - if you like to watch it, please see th-cam.com/video/raqEd9VVpPs/w-d-xo.html. Begin at 28.00. Also, you might like our educational videos, see our page for two videos on Gipps' works. Wishing you every good thing - thanks for introducing us to the music of this amazing composer!

I had only ever heard this piece with piano accompaniment before! Amazing! It's one of my favourite pieces for contrabassoon! Oh, where could one find the score?

Great!

modern and magnificent masterpiece

Charming and delightful. I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t know of this composer before today. I must also admit to being a composer myself, and also to being half English, although I live in Norway and have done so most of my life. Bless you for posting !

thank you so much for uploading this recording! I've only ever been able to find solo performances before and it really is so much grander with an orchestra!

It's 100% Moeran I hear and what a what a great music it is. Even if Yates used a lot of glue to put things together, the music is glorious. It shows us what Moeran was up to in the final years of his life. Great music was written in Kenmare. And a big praise to the performers and recorders as well.

Yes there's plenty to delight MOERAN and Martin Yates fans here... Why make such a fuss about authenticity etc ? Thank all concerned for their musicology esp. BBC CO !

Echoes of My Bonny Boy throughout....🌷

Ah - new to me; thank you !

Really lovely, just what my heart needs right now. Thank you for posting. Peace and love x

Why is the orchestra and the conductor not stated ?

If you can track down Score magazine published in the 1970's there is an article it one of them on the sketches held at Melbourne. In it the writer explains how they are so fragmentary that the sym could NEVER be completed. I think John Ireland was asked to complete it in the 50's and he likewise said the task was impossible. There was simply not enough material to reconstruct anything.

Lets not try and pick the bones out of this. It sounds so Moeran, you could bet your house on it that he wrote it. Even if the talented Martin Yates tinkered with it slightly, so what. Just think ourselves lucky that we can now hear the masterpiece Moeran never heard. I think he'd be delighted with it.

The Malta recording is excellent and in good modern sound, but in fairness to the Ulster Orchestra and Adrian Leaper it should be known that this performance is from a radio studio broadcast - I remember taking an off-air recording at the time and being disappointed by the quality of sound, more the fault of the engineers (or the acoustic) than the players, I suspect. For anyone interested in music of this genre I commend the various Cameo Classics CDs. See www.wyastone.co.uk/all-labels/cameo-classics.html for details. The Scott reference is interesting, in that 35 years later Somervell's grand-daughter, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, married Peter Scott, son of Robert Falcon Scott! The slow movement of this symphony was often played on occasions of national mourning, notably at the laying to rest of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920.

This lovely symphony deserves a better recording!

he did a piano piece called Firle Beacon which he played one night for Vaughan Williams ,and according to R.V.W. it was a masterpiece !......I have never heard it played and don't know if the music still MS form is in existence !......a pity if not !

Writing in the Forum here at The Worldwide Moeran Database, Barry Marsh noted "Sadly there can be no 'realisation' or 'completion', whatever the word for it these days. 550 bars of music exists in short score, but after only 9 pages the sketches become disjointed with little or no fragments to point a further way. The MSS that is now in the Victorian College of Arts, Melbourne arrived there after a series of blunders and misfortunes...". And so it seems we will never hear the music which, for a while at least, so enthused and fired Jack and Lionel up all those years ago.

Great piece. Would say that Yates captured the British pastoral feel that Butterworth was aiming at.

This symphony has been made to suffer from from the 'curse of British music', "it's British so it must be inferior although I havn't heard it". A sentiment that's total rubbish. This symphony, and a huge amount of British music is first rate. I would hope that this prejudice would have stopped by the 21st century, but sadly it hasn't.

A music full of hope...

This is a really beautiful addition to the Butterworth canon - thank you so much for posting!

Nice enough, but there really is not enough to make a performing version out of. The total length of the remaining score is about 90 bars, which takes about 3' 30" to play. The last 12 bars are Vivace (you'd never guess that from this piece, would you?). From this, Martin Yates has constructed a piece of 16' 38". That alone tells you how much added stuff there is. It would be so much better to here the unrecorded Suite for String Quartet, which also exists in a decent arrangement for small orchestra.

This is the first time I am hearing this, and to my ears it sounds like pretty authentic Moeran. The handling of the strings is immediately reminiscent of passages in the G-minor symphony. If the effort needed to complete these sketches was relatively minimal, then most of what we're hearing is Moeran himself. My God, what a find!

A great "maritime" symphony with beautiful themes. Far enough from his first "Symphony in G minor" (1937), very pastoral. More similar to Frederic Austin's "Symphony in E major" (1913), "The Sea Adventurers Overture" (1935) or these beautiful soundtracks of films of 40's. Excellent work and perfect performance of Martin Yates. Thank you Mario for this gift. Corentin Boissier (collectionCB, collectionCB2, collectionCB3 & collectionCB4)

Lovely

Somewhere between Hamilton Harty and the best of Arnold Bax. Do not forget to listen to his masterpiece : "A Shropshire Lad", version for orchestra (1915). Corentin Boissier (collectionCB, collectionCB2, collectionCB3 & collectionCB4)

yea i did some research. He did kind of sketch most of it out and then yea Yates mainly finished the orchestration and the few pieces that were missing He didn't know how he was going to structure it so I think it was John Ireland ( his teacher)who advised him to make it into one long movement . looking forward to listening to it another 20 times or so,

is this Sketches for symphony no 2 ,by John Ireland. Wonder how much makes up the sketches and how much was finished off. Thanks for uploading. I have also contributed an Moeran upload