Search - Brian Rayner Cook, Havergal Brian, Roger Vignoles :: Brian: The Soul of Steel; Legend

"For the first time on CD, magisterial accounts of Brian songs? Approximately one quarter of Havergal Brian?s song output features on this superbly remastered issue, sung vividly in the Wigmore Hall by Brian Rayner Cook, alive to all the moods and colours of this unfamiliar repertoire, accompanied to perfection by Roger Vignoles? Warmly recommended." - GRAMOPHONE Havergal Brian (1876?1972) is renowned as the composer of thirty-two powerful symphonies (then the largest symphonic cycle since Haydn), twenty-one of them composed after his eightieth birthday; his First Symphony, "The Gothic," is reputed to be the largest ever composed. But in the first part of his career, Brian was also active on a smaller scale, his songs attracting the advocacy of singers as prominent as John McCormack and John Coates. The range of emotion in these songs is nonetheless vast, from folky innocence via Shakespearean irony to deep tragedy. Brian Rayner Cook?s performances can be taken as authoritative: he studied the songs with the composer. The CD is completed by the Legend, Brian?s only surviving piece of chamber music.