Ireland - Music for String Orchestra

"Graham Parlett's credentials as a lover and champion of British music (especially that of Bax) is well known. His arrangements of Ireland's piano pieces here are most appealing. His Summer Evening is a languid and drowsy pastoral evocation, his In A May Morning lyrical and tender and very much in the mood of Ireland's central 'Elegy' of his A Downland Suite - gorgeous. Soliloquy gently meditates and the allusion to Butterworth's setting has one mindful of the rueful, ghostly Housman poem, Is my team ploughing. The remaining three little pieces are melodic and charming gems; composed in pre-Great War days, they would have been termed then as salon music: the jaunty cheerful Bagatelle, the nostalgic, introspective Berceuse and the lyrical, sentimentally romantic Cavatina." (MusicWeb June 2016)

"[the Sonata is] played here with arresting vigour by Raphael Wallfisch in an arrangement for strings by Matthew Forbes...but it is perhaps the wistful Soliloquy, a piano piece from 1922 arranged for cello and strings by Graham Parlett, that most intrigues in a collection that charms but rarely excites." (The Observer)

"[A Downland Suite is] felicitously served on this latest anthology from Warwickshire's Orchestra of the Swan under David Curtis…I love the thrusting vigour of Curtis's Prelude…and his shapely and infectiously spirited account overall is a most winning one…that tireless champion of British music Raphael Wallfisch plays with full-throated eloquence"
(Gramophone)