Customer Reviews

Boughton: Symphony No. 2- Deirdre: A Celtic Symphony / Symphony No. 3

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I doubt that anyone considering the purchase of this disc at the current price ($[...] at this writing) needs convincing of the value of Boughton's music. The second symphony will not disappoint anyone susceptible to the unique magic of this composer's exercise of a basically pre-WWI musical idiom.

This listener finds this particular piece lacking the musical coherence of Boughton's first and third symphonies. The reason is perhaps to be found in the fact that it began life as a ballet score for Ninette de Valois, which was rejected and subsequently performed as "Deirdre: a Celtic Symphony" with very little modification. It is not worth quibbling about genres, however. Nearly all of Boughton's music is dramatic, even the concertos, string quartets and symphonies. Like Boughton's other works, it yields new felicities with repeated hearings.

Edward Downes and the BBC Philharmonic make a compelling case for the piece in this 1985 broadcast recording. The same forces' 1983 performance of the Third Symphony makes, for my money, an even stronger stronger case for that work than Vernon Handley's 1988 recording for Hyperion with the same forces.

One can only hope that, barring a new recording of the second symphony, this BBC Radio Classics disc will be reissued.