The favourites plus less well known pieces, excellently performed and recorded.

The guiding hand of Richard Hickox and his fellow conductors more or less guarantees high quality and that is what we get. The cheerfulness is never overdone and the Irish Tune from County Derry (popularly known as the Londonderry Air) receives an affecting but not over-sentimental performance. This is far removed from the overdone renditions by the likes of Josef Locke that my father and grandfather revelled in.

The recordings are in Chandos’s best manner: bright but not over-bright. Despite having been made on several different occasions - and in several locations? - there is never any sense of having to adjust aurally between tracks.

It is to be hoped that purchasers will be inspired by this introduction to experiment further with Chandos’s excellent range of Percy Grainger recordings. There are only three vocal items here, but they are just enough to remind us that not all of his output was orchestral: the Chandos catalogue contains both vocal, chamber, instrumental solo and orchestral pieces.

Most of the Grainger here is fun music – this is, after all, the work of the composer seen leaping around fey-like in the classic Ken Russell Delius film – but there is a serious side, too. Listen to his arrangement of Early one morning for the other side of the coin. Even the jolly music is well crafted – clearly, Grainger spent at least some of his time in more serious pursuits. You’ll see from the dates in the headings how often and over how long a period Grainger reworked his music – further details in the Chandos booklet. There is a strong case for placing his arrangements of British folk song on a par with those of Delius – and who else could have taken a tune from Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith and turned it into that jazzy and un-Handel-like piece Handel in the Strand? It takes the likeable cheek of a Mr Toad to do that.

The wind-band writing in the Lincolnshire Posy suite is fully the equal of Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’ and the performance by the Royal Northern College Wind Orchestra every bit as good as that on my favourite recording of the Holst and V-W (London Wind Orchestra/Denis Wick at budget price on ASV Resonance CDRSN3006).

For low-price introductions, the presentation of these CDs has not been skimped, apart from the lack of detail about where and exactly when the recordings were made. Both the Grainger and VW booklets contain helpful information – I hadn’t realised the full story behind the several versions of Country Gardens, for example – with catalogue numbers from the British Folk Music Society, etc., for Grainger and within attractive covers. Is the bicycle on the cover of the Grainger not a little too modern, though, with its plastic reflectors?

At this price, the only serious rival is Chandos’s own even cheaper but shorter 1978 collection from the Bournemouth Sinfonietta and Kenneth Montgomery on CHAN6542 (CD and mp3).

-- Brian Wilson, MusicWeb International