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"C’est d’abord par l’art si suggestif de Simon Callaghan et d’Hiroaki Takenouchi, si sensibles aux couleurs de l’harmonie dans les accords, que cet espace, cette aération du texte musical parvient à la fin à évoquer le cosmos de l’orchestre."

I am so grateful to Jean-Charles Hoffelé for the excellent review of my two CDs of Delius with Hiro Takenouchi! It has been a few years since we recorded these so I'm happy they are still being enjoyed. Full review translation to follow soon!

Read full review (in French) here.

My translation into English:

It is strange to hear the orchestral masterpiece, Eventyr, without what is his principal object, the orchestra, and without the exclamations that Delius twice expressly asks of the instrumentalists. But this adventurous treasure is so well rendered in the two-piano transcription of Benjamin Dale, himself the author of one of the finest sonatas written for the instrument in England during the first half of the twentieth century, that I could hear through the piano all this orchestra that sings like Grieg but speaks like Debussy.

The pearl of these two records on which Simon Callaghan and Hiroaki Takenouchi gathered everything transcribed from Delius's orchestral poems for two pianos, is the brilliant and much more pianistic transcription for the piano of the Song of the High Hills by Percy Grainger- not to mention the rather dizzying First Dance Rhapsody.

Certain challenges seem sometimes impossible, as in the vast symphony of Paris that nevertheless Julius Buths accords with a certain imagination to the keyboards or in Brigg Fair - but here, the genius of Philip Heseltine, the alias of Peter Warlock , shines through in a decisive way - but still, the idea of the wondrous sonorities of Delius appears through the keyboards: flutes, clarinets, violins.

It is first of all through the suggestive art of Simon Callaghan and Hiroaki Takenouchi , so sensitive to the colors of harmony in the chords, that this space, this aeration of the musical text, finally evokes the cosmos of the orchestra. Another marvel, the Poem of Life and Love that Balfour Gardiner began to reduce and which Eric Fenby finally realized - a true small drama with two keyboards. For convinced Delius fans? Not only.

Jean-Charles Hoffelé