Sir Hubert Parry - Symphonic Variations (1897) {Live}

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, 1st Baronet (27 February 1848 – 7 October 1918) was an English composer, teacher and historian of music. He was also an enthusiastic cruising sailor and owned successively the yawl The Latois and the ketch The Wanderer. In 1908 he was elected as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the only composer so honored.

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Symphonic Variations in E minor (1897)

Ulster Orchestra conducted by Paul Watkins
Live recording

Between 1889, when his Third and Fourth Symphonies were premièred, and 1897 Parry wrote only one other large-scale orchestral work, the Overture to an Unwritten Tragedy (1893), preferring instead to focus on such huge works for solo voices, chorus and orchestra as The Lotos-Eaters and Invocation to Music. In 1897, the year of Brahms’s death, he then composed the Symphonic Variations and an unpublished Elegy for Brahms for orchestra.
The eminent composer and connoisseur Bernard Benoliel (b. 1943) wrote the following words on the Symphonic Variations in the CD booklet to the complete recording of Parry’s symphonies (Chandos CD CHA 9120-22): "For several decades Parry’s set of 27 'symphonic' variations remained his only orchestral work to be given the occasional performance. Greatly admired by Donald Francis Tovey, Joseph Joachim and Edward Elgar, it remains an effective orchestral tour-de-force […] The first performance was given under the composer’s baton at a Philharmonic Concert on 3 June 1897 [in London]. 'The band played up like bricks and it went capitally.' Novello published the full score [score and parts were printed in 1908] and it was soon taken up in America under Theodore Thomas and in Europe were performances continued into the 1920s."
Readers interested in Parry are strongly urged to consult Bernard Benoliel’s Parry before Jerusalem (Aldershot, UK, 1997; ISBN 0 85967 927 6).
Translation: Bradford Robinson, 2004 from Christoph Schlüren, 2004.