Peter Sculthorpe, Dorian Le Gallienne

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

With original innersleeve.

A vital artifact of mid-twentieth-century Australian art music, pairing two figures who - from opposite angles - helped articulate what a distinctly antipodean musical voice might sound like. Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014) arrived as Australia's most internationally recognized composer, a figure whose music drew the continent's vast, sun-scorched landscape into a personal sonic language rooted in regional melody, Japanese heterophony, and the drone-sustained time of open space. Dorian Le Gallienne (1915-1963), by contrast, belongs to the earlier Franco-British tradition - an elegant craftsman whose short life yielded orchestral and chamber works of exceptional refinement, closer in temperament to Roussel or Fauré than to the Australiana movement that would follow.

Together on this Odyssey LP they form an instructive counterpoint - the old world and the new, European inheritance and the nascent effort to shed it. A document of transition, and of the diversity of ambition within a still-forming national tradition. Odyssey, 32 16 0150.