Witold Lutoslawski, Lennox Berkeley, David Bedford

Featuring: Peter Pears

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (corner crease and import sticker on back)
Insert included.

The first volume in Decca's HEAD series - and one of the most important documents of new vocal music to emerge from Britain in the 1960s. Three works for tenor, three entirely different compositional territories, and one performer - Peter Pears - whose singular voice and interpretive intelligence gave each work its ideal realization. Witold Lutosławski's Paroles Tissées (1965), commissioned for Pears and premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival, is among the most concentrated and beautiful works the Polish composer ever wrote: a setting of Jean-François Chabrun's poetry in which Lutosławski's distinctive harmonic language - its controlled aleatoricism, its exquisitely weighted timbres - wraps around the solo voice in layers of orchestral color that are at once precise and luminous.

Lennox Berkeley's Four Ronsard Sonnets and David Bedford's Tentacles of the Dark Nebula complete a programme of extraordinary range: Berkeley's refined Franco-British elegance against Bedford's more radical engagement with the psychedelic energies of the late 1960s, both framing the Lutosławski with the care it deserves. Conducted by Benjamin Britten, with the English Chamber Orchestra. Decca, HEAD 3.