Peter Racine Fricker, Lennox Berkeley, Martin Dalby, John McCabe

condition (record/cover): NM / EX 

Four British composers across three generations, gathered on an L'Oiseau-Lyre LP that functions as a compressed survey of British new music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Peter Racine Fricker (1920-1990) had been among the most celebrated young British composers of the late 1940s - his First Symphony winning the Koussevitzky Prize in 1948 and placing him briefly at the center of a musical culture searching for its post-war identity - before emigrating to California and gradually fading from the domestic conversation. Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989), formed in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, brought a Franco-British elegance to whatever he wrote that had few parallels in the native tradition; his vocal and chamber music of this period is among the most refined British music of its era.

Martin Dalby (1942-2021) and John McCabe (1939-2015) represent the younger generation that would carry British composition into the following decades: Dalby developing a highly individual language rooted in the Scottish landscape and folk tradition without ever becoming conventionally nationalist; McCabe bringing to his prolific output a command of the orchestral and chamber medium that made him one of the most reliable and versatile British composers of his generation. L'Oiseau-Lyre, DSLO 18.