From time to time, East European orchestras seem to play British music better than their UK rivals, but maybe that's to be expected when a conductor of Adrian Leaper's proven ability is in charge. He already has a fine roster of recordings of English music to his credit, and on this 1989 Marco Polo production, now reissued at budget price on Naxos, Leaper directs an assured and strongly idiomatic account of Granville Bantock's rarely played "Hebridean" Symphony of 1915. It's a strongly colored, impetuous work, deeply imbued with the spirit of Scottish folk music, and Leaper's Czech band sounds entirely at home with it. The only other performance in the catalog is Hyperion's version in which Vernon Handley conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a slightly better-engineered recording made two years after Leaper's.


Of the two, Leaper delivers the music with greater impact (the rhetorical power of the work is considerable, and you'll be amazed by how much this sounds like Sibelius), securing a wider range of depth and sonority from the already more characterful (especially in its wind and brass sections) Czecho-Slovak State Philharmonic. At often slower tempos, Handley doesn't achieve such a richly varied orchestral response from an occasionally tired-sounding RPO, plainly heard on an off day. Bantock's Old English Suite (exactly what its title suggests) and imaginatively-crafted Russian Scenes make attractive fillers, but the Hebridean Symphony goes especially well here. The recording is brightly lit, credibly balanced, and just a little crude-sounding at major climactic points.
--Michael Jameson, ClassicsToday.com