Frederick Delius - Double Concerto, RT VII/5

- - - -
Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Orchestra: BBC Symphony Orchestra
Cello: Paul Watkins
Violin: Tasmin Little
- - - -
The Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra by Frederick Delius is a double concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra in C minor, composed between April and June 1915 while Delius lived in Watford, England. The work is dedicated to the sister duo of violinist May Harrison and cellist Beatrice Harrison, who premiered the piece under conductor Henry Wood on February 21, 1920 in Queen's Hall, London.
Delius was inspired to compose the Double Concerto after attending a December 1914 performance of the Hallé Orchestra under conductor Thomas Beecham in Manchester. The concert featured Johannes Brahms's Double Concerto in A minor performed by sisters May and Beatrice Harrison, to whom Delius was introduced after the concert by music critic Samuel Langford. Though his opinion of Brahms's Double Concerto was never recorded, Delius agreed to write a concerto for the Harrison sisters and began work on the composition by April 1915, frequently consulting the sisters during its creation.The piece was completed in June 1915 during a relatively dry creative period for Delius (the only other composition he'd finished in a year's time was Air and Dance for string orchestra). After its completion, Delius, in ailing health, and his wife Jelka returned to Grez-sur-Loing, France. Delius later described any time spent away from his work in Watford as "an unpleasant dream."
- - - -
Frederick Theodore Albert Delius was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation, where he neglected his managerial duties; influenced by African-American music, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived (except during the First World War) for the rest of their lives. Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham staged Delius's opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910 and mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius's works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.