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- Composer: Frederick Theodore Albert Delius (29 January 1862 -- 10 June 1934) - Orchestra: Royal Scottish National Orchestra - Conductor: David Lloyd-Jones - Year of recording: 2004 Painting: Pont de Moret-sur-Loing (Alfred Sisley, 1885) Summer Night on the River, tone poem for orchestra (Pieces for small orchestra, No. 2), RT vi/19/2, written in 1911. Together with “On Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring“ it is part of the set “Two pieces for small Summer Night on the River is the second of the Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the first of which is the celebrated “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.“ [uploaded on this channel]. The river in question is the Loing, upon which the wildly blossoming garden of Delius' villa, in the French village of Grez, near Fontainebleau, faced; this distilled tone poem -- playing between six and seven minutes -- is the upshot of many meditative hours spent there. Delius' friend, the Italian composer, pianist, and philosopher of music, Ferruccio Busoni, described his own goal in composition as “dissolving the form into the feeling.“ Similarly, in performance he sought to achieve a state of Auflösung -- or “dematerialization“ -- in which music should transcend mere notes and register as a direct spiritual prehension. To the predominantly intellectual Busoni, these qualities were ever elusive and consistently achieved only at the end of his life. For Delius it all came quite naturally, and perhaps nowhere else is more concentrated form than in Summer Night on the River. How atmospheric Delius' mature art became may be gauged by comparison with, say, the orchestral piece Summer Evening, of two decades before, which essays similar emotions. The latter is far closer to textbook procedure in having a recognizable, even effusive, melody worked by rule of thumb to an effect of great charm and conviction. Close examination of Summer Night on the River, on the other hand, reveals the musical materials to be of the most rudimentary sort -- mere fragments of melody, scalar sliding, a muted two-note call, an impassioned viola arabesque, and so on. Delius' model is probably the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan, or any of a number of brief, mosaic-like passages in Parsifal, but instead of the erotically overheated, sickly ambience of those works, Delius evokes a blithesome rapport verging on the mystical, an audible “dematerialization“ in which Summer Night's alleged formlessness wings into -- coheres in -- a feeling of compelling magic. Summer Night on the River was given its premiere, with its companion piece, in Leipzig, 23 October 1913, under the baton of the legendary Artur Nikisch. After rehearsal, Delius wrote to his wife that “First Cuckoo“ had been “rather too slow,“ but Summer Night on the River “He played most beautifully -- perfect....“
