Anthony Payne, who died three years ago at the age of 84, is likely to be best remembered for his elaboration of the sketches for Elgar’s Third Symphony into an utterly convincing concert work, first performed in 1998, rather than for his own music. The huge success of the symphony kept Payne from producing more of his own music for several years, and the work with which he resumed composition provides the title for this collection of three of his previously unrecorded orchestral scores. Visions and Journeys was first performed at the Proms in 2002, and it’s that premiere, conducted by the much-missed Andrew Davis, that is included here; it’s a 20-minute orchestral poem, a series of crisp vivid musical images inspired by holidays that Payne spent in the Isles of Scilly.
In retrospect, it seems as if working on the Elgar allowed Payne finally to reconcile the modernist world in which he had begun his composing career with the English music of the early 20th century to which he felt so instinctively drawn. The two earlier works on this disc, Half-Heard in the Stillness, from 1987, and the variations The Seeds Long Hidden, completed in 1994 (both conducted by Martyn Brabbins), reveal a sometimes awkward compromise between those two tendencies. In Visions and Journeys, and the pieces that were to follow, that awkwardness has completely disappeared.
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