A recording project such as this, notes conductor Rumon Gamba, often begins with a ‘long list’ of potential repertoire. He describes in liner notes how the record company, conductor, producer, orchestra members and ‘academic specialists’ – that is, musicologists – all submit suggestions, making the list very long indeed. In this case the goal was a cross-section of British concert overtures written between 1880 and 1940. The chronological delimitation ensured overall continuity of style while also allowing the project to mine a vast number of independent orchestral works, many of which have never been recorded before. While striking a balance between recognized and lesser-known composers, Gamba specifically avoided the most well-known figures, such as Edward Elgar and William Walton. Because Chandos appended two ‘magic words’ to the record (‘Volume 1’), Gamba wryly noted that there would be opportunities for including them in future iterations of the project. This has already proven to be the case, as Chandos released a second disc of Overtures from the British Isles earlier in 2016 (Chandos 10898) that opens with Walton’s Portsmouth Point overture.

The final tally of composers for vol. 1 comes to nine: Frederic Austin (1872–1952), Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), Samuel Coledrige-Taylor (1875–1912), Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852–1935), Sir Granville Bantock (1868–1946), Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (1847–1935), Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) and Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877–1950). Even among the familiar names, however, the selected repertoire is largely unfamiliar. Such is the case with Sir Arthur Sullivan. Rather than a Savoy Opera overture, Gamba leads a performance of the Overture to Macbeth. Sullivan composed this late in his career for an 1888 production of Shakespeare’s play by Sir Henry Irving. Rather than making much of the Scottish element in ‘the Scottish play’, Sullivan concentrated instead on its inherent drama. Thus, the overture is a restless piece with frequent changes of mood, including suitably ‘spooky’, though brief, music representing the appearance of Banquo’s ghost.

In contrast, Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie’s Overture to The Little Minister positively revels in references to Scottish national musical characteristics. Imitations of bagpipes introduce the work, and a fleet reel closes it. In between is a lyrical, even sentimental melody for strings and the quotation of the folk song ‘Duncan Gray’. These traits all fit the commission: incidental music for an 1897 play by J.M. Barrie, some seven years before he would rise to fame with Peter Pan. The ‘little minister’ of the title inhabits a rural Scottish village, and his trials and triumphs are the subject of the work. Mackenzie himself is best known as the long-time Principal of the Royal Academy of Music from 1888 to 1924, but his music is rarely performed today. On the basis of this overture, this obscurity is undeserved.

Another composer more famous in name than in deed is Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford taught perhaps the most famous generation of English composers, including Ralph Vaughan William and Gustav Holst, at the Royal College of Music. For this he has been inscribed as one of the instigators of the English Musical Renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century – even if largely by inspiring his students to rebel against his own narrow musical judgments. Like his compatriot Hubert Parry, Stanford’s recognition as a teacher has overshadowed his compositions. Stanford’s music has nevertheless achieved something of a renaissance on record in recent years, and the present disc further contributes to this rediscovery. His Overture to Oedipus tyrannus comes from incidental music written in 1887. An opening solo for English horn captures the bleak tone of Sophocles’s tragedy, and Stanford adds a layer of then-fashionable exoticism by writing in the Lydian mode. Afterwards, chromatic harmonies provide a lengthy lyrical melody in the strings with its molto espressivo marking, and a diatonic brass figure represents Oedipus himself as king of Thebes. This is a work with a powerful beginning and end; the heroic music for Oedipus is the most conventional, but a dramatic interruption by timpani clears the stage for the English horn to conclude the overture.

The final piece of incidental music on this disc is rather less successful: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Overture to The Song of Hiawatha. Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer of part Sierra Leone Creole descent whose trilogy of cantatas Scenes from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ were enormously popular with London audiences from the turn of the century until World War Two. The overture was composed in 1899 as an addition to the complete work. Although Coleridge-Taylor based the Song of Hiawatha on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem about Native Americans, his overture develops the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, Lord’. Coleridge-Taylor appears to have been inspired in his choice of material by a performance of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whom he heard in London in the late 1890s. The spiritual is combined with a waltz of Straussian character in an uneasy mix of serious-mindedness and sentimentality. Even more surprising, no references are made to thematic material from The Song of Hiawatha itself, save for fanfares in the overture’s coda. The final result is an unsuccessful hybrid of two strange musical bedfellows.

The remaining selections are more light-hearted independent concert works. Sir Granville Bantock’s Overture to The Frogs, for example, incorporates an off-the-beat ‘hopping’ motif as well as rhythmically repeated dissonances echoing the cry of Aristophanes’s onomatopoeic chorus of frogs: ‘Brekekekèx-koàx-koáx’ (Βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ). This 1935 ‘comedy overture’ is one of a number of pieces Bantock composed in the 1930s inspired by Greek theatre; another is the Overture to a Greek Tragedy, based on Sophocles’s tragedy of Oedipus (like Stanford’s overture).

Similarly inspired by the animal kingdom, but of even lighter weight, is Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen’s concert overture The Butterfly’s Ball. Written in 1901, it was once exceptionally popular, receiving 23 Proms performances alone by 1930. After Cowen’s death five years later it disappeared from the repertoire. Its gossamer light dance is in the manner of Mendelssohn’s elfin music, though it contains some full-throated passages for the brass as well. The title comes from a children’s poem written in 1802 by William Roscoe, describing a gathering attended by members of the insect kingdom lit by a friendly glow-worm.

The closing work on the disk is the least programmatic. Conceived simply as a brilliant orchestral showpiece, Henry Balfour Gardiner’s Overture to a Comedy is high-spirited, with sudden intrusions of dissonance to steer the playful themes in new directions. Its slow middle section features a knowingly sentimental violin solo. The overture dates from 1906; a revision, recorded here, came in 1911. Balfour Gardiner was an intensely self-critical composer who destroyed many of his works after their first performances. He later gave up composition altogether to devote his considerable fortune to the promotion of British music. His activities in this area included sponsoring a concert series in 1912–13 that included works by Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger and Arnold Bax.

Though Bax himself is not represented on this disk, a personal friend of his is: Frederick Austin. Better known as the outstanding baritone singer of his generation, Austin also wrote concert music, including The Sea Venturers presented here, dating from 1934. It owes much to Bax’s example, from its modified tripartite form – climaxing with a restatement of the secondary theme, a hallmark of Bax’s larger works – to its kaleidoscopic orchestration. Austin wrote that he wanted to evoke ‘something of the lives of English seamen … who took peril and pleasure as it came’ (liner notes, p. 8). The Sea Venturers provides a dramatic opening to the disk; it is a striking and effective work with memorable (and frequently pentatonic) thematic material.

The programme as a whole is strong, with a welcome selection of unfamiliar repertoire by composers both known and unknown today. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays very well for Gamba; both orchestra and conductor are veterans of many recording projects devoted to unfamiliar or forgotten British repertoire, including much film music. In addition to contributing the aforementioned ‘long list’ of potential repertoire, the indefatigable British music scholar Lewis Foreman provides detailed liner notes.