Bantock - Omar Khayyam; Sappho

The Guardian 60

Peters/Walker/Rolfe Johnson/Rayner Cook/BBC SO/BBC Scottish SO/Del Mar
(Lyrita, four CDs)

As far as 20th-century British music was concerned, Lyrita was one of one of the most significant record labels of the 1960s and 70s. It made available, in immaculately performed and engineered recordings, a huge range of works, many of which have never been recorded since. When CDs superseded vinyl in the 1980s, Lyrita was slow to respond. The company’s founder, recording engineer Richard Itter, regarded the sound quality of the digital format as markedly inferior to analogue, and the company went into eclipse. Only over the past decade or so have many of its most important recordings finally been issued on disc.

Since Itter died two years ago, there has been a resurgence of interest in the label, too, as it has begun to explore the wealth of high-quality private tapes, mostly of music by British composers, that Itter assembled over half a century from BBC broadcasts. Many document works that have never been available commercially. Phyllis Tate’s opera The Lodger, choral pieces such as Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes and Peter Racine Fricker’s The Vision of Judgement, and symphonies by Arnold Cooke, William Wordsworth and Arthur Butterworth, have already been painstakingly transferred to disc in the Itter Broadcast Collection.