Arnicans Liepaja Symphony Orchestra Gibbons - Orchestral Music 3 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

These two works present two sharply contrasting sides of Malcolm Arnold his limitless resources of knockabout fun, and a sense of existential tragedy. But each score presents it's own surprises the jocularity of the Grand Concerto Gastronomique for Eater, Waiter, Food and Orchestra, Op. 76-written for a Hoffnung Festival concert -conceals some seriously good (though not seriously serious) music; and the delicately scored Ninth Symphony, written after five years when it's composer had, in his own words, 'been through hell', irradiates it's emotional restraint and elegiac tone with moments of light and warmth. This is the first recording of the Grand Concerto Gastronomique.

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as an historian of the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment. But he is an outstanding composer in his own right - a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humour, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal. Although the works recorded here represent his most recent harvest of orchestral music, for many of them he revisited material composed earlier in his career, using it as the basis for a series of new scores, some exhibiting a very English sense of whimsy, others concerned with deeper matters - one, indeed, inspired by the war in Ukraine.

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as an historian of the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment. But he is an outstanding composer in his own right, his music treading a fine line between a very English whimsy and a profoundly felt and natural response to his (often Celtic) subject matter. These works reveal a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humor, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal. His two symphonies - originally written for brass band - embody a return to the formal, Classical clarity of Haydn, though expressed with the satisfyingly beefy textures of the modern orchestra. He lists among his influences Shostakovich and Sibelius and, less predictably, The Beatles and The Kinks.