4 February 2019

Eureka! I’ve found my CD of Berio’s A-Ronne and Cries of London sung by Swingle II (see my blog post of 20 January 2019)! I owe it to Delius… Here’s the story: I was again buying tons of CDs on eBay and the 5-CD set of Beecham’s Delius recordings from the early 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on Sony came up. I couldn’t remember if I had this set already, or just a few individual CDs from it. But my Delius CDs are in a drawer nearby, so I moved my butt and opened it to check. Sure enough, I have the set, so the eBay offer is one I’ve refused and I’ve made a small saving. But in the same drawer – eureka! A box of CDs neatly stacked, with a lot of classical-inspired jazz (the Bach derivations of Jacques Loussier and John Lewis), my Lambert-Hendricks-Ross and Double Six of Paris CDs which I had been looking for in the wake of my transfers of reviews and discography of the Swingle Singers and puzzled not to find, and a few other related things. And, yes, it makes sense, there’s a coherence to all that and I remember having wanted to review or listen again to all these CDs. It’s a terrible mistake to neatly put up your mess, you can be sure you won’t find it.

Thanks again, Delius and Beecham! And so now I’ve reviewed Berio’s A-Ronne and Cries of London on Decca / London “Entreprise” 425 620-2 (1990), two major works in contemporary vocal techniques.

Comments are welcome