Violin Concerto for Chandos, on a disc that includes his other string concertos. But the work that forms the centrepiece of her latest collection of British so-called concertos is the Suite for Violin and Orchestra that Delius composed around 1890. It’s an odd mix of movements, three looking forward to the music that would come a few years later while the fourth seems to have strayed in from from some forgotten work by Mendelssohn or Max Bruch. Little pays it just as much careful attention as the other two equally unfamiliar works on her disc, though, both of them composed significantly later than the Suite.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Concerto dates from 1912, the year of his premature death, and more than a decade after he had earned the undying gratitude of choral societies around the country with his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. It’s a patchy but striking work – with echoes of Elgar and (in the slow movement) even Puccini, as well as the more predictable Dvořák – which probably deserves to be heard more often than it is. I’m not sure the same can be said for Haydn Wood’s 1928 Concerto, with its overblown medley of hand-me-down romantic styles – a bit of brash Rachmaninov here, a mellow Elgarian tune there – though as always Little and Andrew Davis and the BBC Philharmonic try hard to make it all seem convincing.
