Bliss: Meditations on a Theme by John Blow; Metamorphic Variations

Bournemouth SO/David Lloyd-Jones Naxos 8.572316 ***

You could spend a long time without meeting anything by Arthur Bliss in a concert programme. The NSO last programmed his work in a 1991, in a concert that was cancelled. The lost performances was of his Meditations on a themeby John Blow, a piece which Bliss declared to be one of those he would be happy to "represent my life's music". It's a set of free and developing variations (the actual theme held until the end), programmatically governed by the contrasting implications of lines from Psalm 23. David Lloyd-Jones is a responsive guide to the music's always orchestrally attractive shifting moods, as he is also in the much later Metamorphic Variations, written in 1973, two years before Bliss's death at the age of 84. An attractive coupling by a minor British master. See url.ie/57c6