Frederick Delius

[Leo K.]

Thanks for sharing that John, what an interesting way to find his vocation! I wonder what books are out there of Delius, I thought there was one referenced earlier in this very thread, I will have to go back and see, as well as view that documentary you posted.

Listening now to North Country Sketches.

It sounds a future that is safe, gentle, and consoling. and loving. Delius’ music seeks to reach a promise of a union with some other time and place. Eternity, mountain tops, is not to be believed. Only the time on some other plane is worth attaining; only this distant time is honest or fate, but rather a random, and possibly bitter, give and take of life and death. Time here, as a Now, Delius’ relationship to time is one of mistrust; it’s slippery and fleeting. Time is not sensitive to Man’s ambitions.

[Mirror Image]

Thanks for sharing that John, what an interesting way to find his vocation! I wonder what books are out there of Delius, I thought there was one referenced earlier in this very thread, I will have to go back and see, as well as view that documentary you posted.

Listening now to North Country Sketches.

It sounds a future that is safe, gentle, and consoling. and loving. Delius' music seeks to reach a promise of a union with some other time and place. Eternity, mountain tops, is not to be believed. Only the time on some other plane is worth attaining; only this distant time is honest or fate, but rather a random, and possibly bitter, give and take of life and death. Time here, as a Now, Delius' relationship to time is one of mistrust; it's slippery and fleeting. Time is not sensitive to Man's ambitions.

There's a book written by Eric Fenby called Delius As I Knew Him and it's supposed to reveal a lot about the man in his final years. I haven't read it, but am really anxious to get ahold of a copy. There are some other books as well like the Routledge book that gives a biography, a bibliography, among other things. There's another book called Thomas Beecham and the Music of Frederick Delius that deals with this conductor's relationship with the music and his own experiences getting to know Delius. Thomas Beecham, himself, wrote a biography about Delius, but I'm not sure of it's availability.

Anyway, I like what you wrote about Delius. For me, I think Delius is always trying to grasp a moment in time he never could capture again, but there's always a whole wealth of psychological elements in his music that I think most people aren't aware of, care to acknowledge, or even care one way or another. I don't know if you watched that short documentary with Tasmin Little about the prospect of Delius fathering a child and the heartbreak he dealt with of leaving it behind. You'll just have to watch the documentary to get the full details. I think it was an idea well worth exploring again and even going in more deeper. I think when you have someone trying to prove that something in history happened, it helps if this person is more assertive and persistent in that endeavor. Not to slight Little's research, but I think so much more could have been done.

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I LOVE North Country Sketches! Here's nice write-up about the work:

Delius was a busy man through 1913. As the year began he was at work on a revision of Fennimore and Gerda, interrupted by trips to Munich in January and London in March, both times to hear performances of A Mass of Life. Championship of his work by Beecham over the previous six years established him in England, while Beecham and his mistress, Lady Cunard, introduced Delius to the cream of English high society. After years of struggle and uncertainty, he was fashionable. A tantalizing cul-de-sac, in a letter of May 27 Delius wrote to Stravinsky -- "I am afraid it is quite impossible for me to come to the final rehearsal tomorrow, but I shall certainly come on Thursday as I must insist on hearing your work: only as I haven't a ticket I shall call for you at your hotel and go in with you...." The occasion was the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du printemps -- Delius' opinion of the work is not extant. Stravinsky left this reminiscence -- "I met Frederick Delius. He had come to Covent Garden to attend a performance of our Ballet. Beecham introduced him to me, and he paid me compliments for Petroushka, but, as I spoke almost no English, and he but little French, the conversation did not develop. Thirty-seven years later, I visited his famous orange farm, D.H. Lawrence's would-have-been Utopia in Florida." There is no other mention of Delius and Stravinsky crossing paths. Delius had been approached by Phillip Heseltine to allow Lawrence to establish a commune at Solano Grove, a gambit of which nothing came. To Heseltine, on June 28 Delius wrote from Grez, "...I could not come to England as I was hard at work on something new & did not want to break off." Almost certainly this was North Country Sketches, for the score of which Beecham asked Delius in June of the following year, on the eve of the First World War. Completed between the Two Pieces for Orchestra (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River) and the gracious, charming Air and Dance, the first two movements, "Autumn" and "Winter Landscape," are surprisingly bleak, melding piquancy, and desolation in evocations of the moors surrounding Delius' Yorkshire birthplace. "Dance," the noisy third movement, protests too much, though the final "March of Spring" engagingly teeters between exuberance and ecstasy. Beecham premiered the set with the London Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall on May 10, 1915.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[Leo K.]

I LOVE North Country Sketches! Here's nice write-up about the work:

Delius was a busy man through 1913. As the year began he was at work on a revision of Fennimore and Gerda, interrupted by trips to Munich in January and London in March, both times to hear performances of A Mass of Life. Championship of his work by Beecham over the previous six years established him in England, while Beecham and his mistress, Lady Cunard, introduced Delius to the cream of English high society. After years of struggle and uncertainty, he was fashionable. A tantalizing cul-de-sac, in a letter of May 27 Delius wrote to Stravinsky -- "I am afraid it is quite impossible for me to come to the final rehearsal tomorrow, but I shall certainly come on Thursday as I must insist on hearing your work: only as I haven't a ticket I shall call for you at your hotel and go in with you...." The occasion was the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du printemps -- Delius' opinion of the work is not extant. Stravinsky left this reminiscence -- "I met Frederick Delius. He had come to Covent Garden to attend a performance of our Ballet. Beecham introduced him to me, and he paid me compliments for Petroushka, but, as I spoke almost no English, and he but little French, the conversation did not develop. Thirty-seven years later, I visited his famous orange farm, D.H. Lawrence's would-have-been Utopia in Florida." There is no other mention of Delius and Stravinsky crossing paths. Delius had been approached by Phillip Heseltine to allow Lawrence to establish a commune at Solano Grove, a gambit of which nothing came. To Heseltine, on June 28 Delius wrote from Grez, "...I could not come to England as I was hard at work on something new & did not want to break off." Almost certainly this was North Country Sketches, for the score of which Beecham asked Delius in June of the following year, on the eve of the First World War. Completed between the Two Pieces for Orchestra (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River) and the gracious, charming Air and Dance, the first two movements, "Autumn" and "Winter Landscape," are surprisingly bleak, melding piquancy, and desolation in evocations of the moors surrounding Delius' Yorkshire birthplace. "Dance," the noisy third movement, protests too much, though the final "March of Spring" engagingly teeters between exuberance and ecstasy. Beecham premiered the set with the London Symphony Orchestra at Queen's Hall on May 10, 1915.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

That is a wonderful read, thanks a million for posting these!

By the way, I have my eye on the Heritage set, there is a great deal at the Amazon Mp3 store, 8.99 for the complete set.





I forgot to include the following set regarding my recent aquisitions (in the above posts):



Delius is a revelation.

I really am surprised, as A Delius newbie, that this thread isn't over 100 pages! I'm surprised fans of Mahler (at least) aren't all over Delius! I'm a Mahler crazy-nut, with 100s of Mahler CDs in my collection, and I can safely say Mahler fans should give Delius a try, or anyone who loves the art of orchestration!

[Mirror Image]

That is a wonderful read, thanks a million for posting these!

By the way, I have my eye on the Heritage set, there is a great deal at the Amazon Mp3 store, 8.99 for the complete set.





I forgot to include the following set regarding my recent aquisitions (in the above posts):



Delius is a revelation.

I really am surprised, as A Delius newbie, that this thread isn't over 100 pages! I'm surprised fans of Mahler (at least) aren't all over Delius! I'm a Mahler crazy-nut, with 100s of Mahler CDs in my collection, and I can safely say Mahler fans should give Delius a try, or anyone who loves the art of orchestration!

Thanks, I plan on posting more of these articles throughout the month of February. Do you like buying Mp3 or do like owning the CDs? I'm not a downloader at all, I prefer the physical discs. Anyway, that Delius Collection is worth owning just for the fact that Eric Fenby conducted so many of those performances. So, in this sense, like Beecham, we get as close to Delius as we can.

The reason a lot of people aren't into Delius is like I've been saying: they think he's boring and the music meanders too much. They never actually listen to the music, because if they did, they would find wonderful nuances and harmonic color that they've never heard before.

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I revisited Hassan the other night and what a magical work this is. It contains a cornucopia of Delian melodies, harmonies, rhythms with some sections of the work hinting at exotica. Here's a write-up on it:

When Hassan reached the stage of His Majesty's Theatre, London, on September 20, 1923, it arrived out of a web of destinies almost as quixotic as the spectacle itself. The play's author, James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), had been dead eight years. Its champion, producer Basil Dean, had seen the work through a series of revisions and postponements from before the Great War and had considered a number of composers -- including Ravel -- for the copious amount of incidental music it would require. A chance hearing of A Village Romeo and Juliet in the spring of 1920 persuaded him that Delius was his man. Delius, in failing health, was ever more dependent on royalties from the sale of his scores. Once his enthusiasm had been sparked, work proceeded rapidly, with Philip Heseltine writing the composer's pencilled drafts into full score, and the original version of the music was completed before year's end. Despite Flecker's modest success while he lived, Hassan had generated a large posthumous interest, and further delays handed the premiere, in German translation and employing Delius' original score, to Darmstadt, at the Hessische Landes-Theater on June 1, 1923. Meanwhile, for the London production, more music was required, and Delius, now firmly in the grip of the syphilitic infection, working against time and unable to hold a pencil, dictated the new pieces to his wife. When Percy Grainger dropped by on a chance visit, he was pressed into service to compose, anonymously, a brief section of the Act II ballet. The London production of Hassan proved a considerable success, opening before a distinguished audience and running for a respectable 281 performances to glowing critical notices. Delius was able to attend the last rehearsals and the virtuosic first night, with Eugene Goosens conducting.

Hassan is a curiously distinguished item in that seemingly inexhaustible vogue for orientalia which includes, among hundreds of ephemeral oddments, Gilbert and Sullivan's surefire Mikado (1885), Edward Knoblock's wildly successful play, Kismet (1911), the phenomenally long-running Asche/Norton musical, Chu Chin Chow (l916), and Puccini's enduring Turandot (1926). Though minor, Flecker's vein of poetry was genuine. Said to have been inspired by a volume of farcical plays which he read in Turkish, Flecker's verse nevertheless owes everything to Edwardian notions of "elevated" language, while its "orientalism" harks back to Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat. Thus, a banal tale of intrigue, betrayal, romance, and sudden shifts of fortune is given dignity by a languorous beauty and mild satire highlighting an inevitable disillusionment. And it was, no doubt, this eloquence born of deep disenchantment which led Delius to compose some of his most straightforwardly enchanting music.

The numbers range from fanfares, melodramas, choruses, interludes -- some of them snippets but a few bars long -- and brief atmospheric preludes to the celebrated, wordlessly vocalized, Serenade (heard thrice) and an elaborate ballet sequence (choreographed for the lavish London production by no less than Michel Fokine). Despite his discomfiture by the limitations of a 26-instrument theater orchestra, nearly everything he composed for Hassan is rife with Delian touches -- meltingly evocative choral apostrophes, some preludes so imbued with Delian nostalgia as to be abbreviated tone poems, and the final superbly moving chorus, "We take the golden road to Samarkand." The upshot was an aureate, slightly bittersweet, post-Romantic confection wholly out of touch with the Jazz Age antics which surrounded it.

parts / movements -

Prelude
No. 2, Interludes between Scenes 1 and 2
No. 3, Scene 2: Moonlight - The Street of Felicity
No. 4, Serenade (violin solo)
No. 5, Hassan falls under the sahdow of the fountain
No. 6, Chorus behind the scene
No. 7, Serenade (tenor solo)
No. 8, Prelude to Scene 1
No. 9a, Fanfare preceding the Ballet
No. 9b, Ballet - Dance of the Beggars
No. 10, Chorus of Women
No. 11, Divertissement
No. 12, General Dance
No. 13, Chorus of Beggars and Dancing Girls
No. 14, Scene 2: The Street of Felicity
No. 15, Music accompanying Ishak' poem
No. 16, Prelude to Scene 1
No. 17, Scene 1: Curtain
No. 18, Interludes between Scenes 1 and 2
No. 19, Scene 2: The War Song of the Saracens
No. 20, Fanfares - Entry of the Caliph
No. 21, Prelude to Scene 1
No. 22, Interlude between Scenes 1 and 2
No. 23a, Prelude
No. 23b, The Garden o the Caliph's palace
No. 23c, Sunset
No. 23d, The Song of the Muezzin at Sunset
No. 24, Procession of Protracted Death
No. 25, Prelude to the last scene
No. 26, Closing scene: We take the Golden Road to Samarkand

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

[Leo K.]

Thanks John for the article on Hassan, of which I've heard some of the pieces now, I must seek a full recording of it all.

As for collecting, I generally prefer MP3s, for reasons practical and monetary. If the mastering of the recording is good I find the digital files sound good too (and my hearing is not what it used to be, so I find the MP3 sounds good enough). I used to collect LPs (vinyl) and physical CDs but storage is now an issue   However, I will still buy CDs time to time.


Interesting thoughts from Dereck Cooke, excerpted from his article (I found on JSTOR): "Delius the Unknown."

"I would like now to suggest the general lines along which the difficult task of understanding Delius might be approached. In the first place Delius, like Wagner, Debussy and Mahler, is one of those composers whom we first have to understand as men and artists, before we can appreciate the full significance of their art. And with Delius, as with Wagner, there is a curious contradiction between the man and the artist: if it is difficult to understand how the far from wise and genial Wagner could have created a character like Hans Sachs, it is even harder to comprehend how the tough-grained Delius could have composed music of such melting intangibility and fluidity of outline.

We have on the one hand a ruthlessly anti-mystical personality for, as Fenby's book makes clear, Delius was a ferocious, hard-headed materialist of the late nineteenth- century 'rationalist' type, and on the other hand a sensitive, poetic, mystical communer with nature. Again, we have on the one hand a proud atheist, who was utterly unafraid of the decay and death which he regarded as personal extinction, and on the other hand a single-minded explorer of the heart- ache induced by transience, and of the essentially religious experience of longing for absorption into the infinite.

What we sadly need is a close study of Delius's method of composing, and especially his way of beginning a composition by conceiving the overall harmonic scheme, as described by Eric Fenby in the most fascinating chapter of his book. When Delius dictated the second of the Songs of Farewell to Fenby, he had the poem read aloud, and then began by dictating the harmonic flow, indicating changes of chord at certain crucial words; only afterwards did he dictate the choral parts and the melismata for strings, wind and horns, to be superimposed on the harmonic stream. This utterly revolutionary method is so far removed from all current notions of composition as to appear like the crudest improvisation; yet it is in fact the essence of Delius's unique art. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: the Songs of Farewell, far from being one of Delius's weaker effusions, is one of his strongest works-as is shown by the fact that at the Bradford Festival it proved to be the one item which surprised nearly all the critics by its power, and received almost unanimous praise from them. Only when we study Delius's iconoclastic harmonic approach to composition, and its source in the highly significant experience he was intent on communicating, shall we begin to realize what a profoundly original genius he was.

We also lack a study of Delius's style, which I saw described recently as 'derivative'. Derivative it certainly is—what composer's is not ?—but it derives from so many different sources and fuses them in such an all-absorbing way, as to be one of the most personal styles ever created. The sources themselves have often been pointed out—Chopin, Grieg, Wagner, Debussy, American Negro music, English folk music—but the way in which they interact on one another to produce the characteristic Delian utterance has never been investigated. To take only a single example, the influence of the Negro slave song on which Appalachia is based is not confined to that composition; its cadence recurs throughout Delius's work, one surprising case being the Intermezzo in the Scandinavian opera Fennimore and Gerda, where it appears in conjunction with harmonies which clearly have their roots in Grieg.

Certain other points arise concerning Delius's style, which affect English music in general. For instance, we often hear that Delius drew on the idiom of the English folk song school. One of the main features of this style is the block movement of triads, creating a pseudo-modal effect, and this occurs at the beginning of In a Summer Garden. But the work was composed in 1908, and first performed in London in 1909, whereas the first notable achievement of the English folk song school—Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis—did not appear until 1910. Could Delius, on one of his rare visits to London, have heard some of Vaughan Williams's earlier music, or did he create this English idiom himself? This question has an important bearing on the development of English music in the early years of this century, yet no attempt has been made to investigate it. To listen to the opening of In a Summer Garden is to receive the irresistible impression of hearing music touching on the style of Vaughan Williams before Vaughan Williams had actually found his own style."

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I completely understand your situation, Leo. Not everyone wants/needs the actual CDs anymore. I'm just somebody who likes having the CDs, artwork, liner notes, etc. It feels more like a complete experience for me to have them, but, to each his own.

Thanks for that article written by Cooke. Very interesting read for sure. I think Cooke touched on what needed to be said about Delius' music for a long time that, in a nutshell, it's worth exploring and being heard. He is an important composer no question about it, but, as I mentioned, people tend to snub him for one reason or another. Delius created his own idiom, his own way of presenting and expressing himself through music, but what we so often get from the naysayers are comments that he wasn't an important figure in music when there is evidence that points directly to him giving the opposite impression. For example, who created the first all-Black opera? Delius did and it's called Koanga and it predates Gershwin's Porgy & Bess by 30 something years. Who was using jazz harmonic progressions in classical music before jazz was an accepted art form? None other than Delius. And with Cooke's article there, it points out that he had yet another innovation: the usage of English folk music in a classical context.

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I've been revisiting Appalachia and playing many different recordings I own each night. What a great work. Here's a little write-up about it:

Frederick Delius first composed Appalachia, subtitled "Variations on an Old Slave Song with final chorus," in 1896. He returned to the work six years later and recomposed, enlarged, and expanded it. The second version was premiered by Hans Haym at the 1904 Elberfeld Festival, and the work was published in this version. In his twenties, Delius had been sent to Florida by his father to manage an orange plantation. Although he failed as a farmer, Delius loved the folk songs of the blacks working with him. He later used these songs as the basis of some of the themes of his Florida Suite and elaborated them most fully and evocatively in Appalachia. With its long Molto moderato Tranquillo introduction, its languorous Misterioso and Lento variations, and its climatic closing Lento chorus, the work's tempos are slow and its mood is dreamy. Appalachia's colors are soft and warm and its textures are humid and turgid and the addition of the chorus only deepens the voluptuous sensuality of the work. As always in Delius' music, faster tempos are often clumsy and never sustained for very long. But also as always in Delius' music, when Appalachia is at its warmest and most humid, it is unequaled for creating a mood of overwhelming sexual nostalgia.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

The only part of this article I disagree with is the blurb about Delius' swifter rhythms being "clumsy." One listen to the Poco piu section towards the beginning of the work will reveal someone who could handle faster tempi with no problems. It's just that his style is much more rhapsodic.

[Leo K.]

I've been revisiting Appalachia and playing many different recordings I own each night. What a great work. Here's a little write-up about it:

Frederick Delius first composed Appalachia, subtitled "Variations on an Old Slave Song with final chorus," in 1896. He returned to the work six years later and recomposed, enlarged, and expanded it. The second version was premiered by Hans Haym at the 1904 Elberfeld Festival, and the work was published in this version. In his twenties, Delius had been sent to Florida by his father to manage an orange plantation. Although he failed as a farmer, Delius loved the folk songs of the blacks working with him. He later used these songs as the basis of some of the themes of his Florida Suite and elaborated them most fully and evocatively in Appalachia. With its long Molto moderato Tranquillo introduction, its languorous Misterioso and Lento variations, and its climatic closing Lento chorus, the work's tempos are slow and its mood is dreamy. Appalachia's colors are soft and warm and its textures are humid and turgid and the addition of the chorus only deepens the voluptuous sensuality of the work. As always in Delius' music, faster tempos are often clumsy and never sustained for very long. But also as always in Delius' music, when Appalachia is at its warmest and most humid, it is unequaled for creating a mood of overwhelming sexual nostalgia.

[Article taken from All Music Guide]

The only part of this article I disagree with is the blurb about Delius' swifter rhythms being "clumsy." One listen to the Poco piu section towards the beginning of the work will reveal someone who could handle faster tempi with no problems. It's just that his style is much more rhapsodic.

I haven't heard Appalachia or the Florida Suite, I will listen to the Florida Suite first, it's been on my mind to try it very soon, I hope I have Appalachia amidst my new recordings.

Thanks for posting the article above!

[Leo K.]

Delius' piano concerto was calling out to be heard today, and I'm listening to it now. I'm quite enchanted. It sounds very refined, constructed with care. I now wonder how the later revised version (with help from Szanto/Beecham) sounds. My purist self is glad to have the original version, with the original piano writing intact, as it appears to capture a special time in Delius' life, perhaps in memory of Florida.

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I haven't heard Appalachia or the Florida Suite, I will listen to the Florida Suite first, it's been on my mind to try it very soon, I hope I have Appalachia amidst my new recordings.

Thanks for posting the article above!

Appalachia is a wondrous piece of music. There's several beautiful moments. Two movements, in particular, I'm think are Variations 6 & 8. There are such tender moments in these variations. I think you will enjoy Appalachia. Barbirolli's account is solid, but I love Hickox's and Mackerras' both on Decca. I'm planning on revisiting Andrew Davis' recent performance on Chandos. I remember this one being quite good as well.

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Delius' piano concerto was calling out to be heard today, and I'm listening to it now. I'm quite enchanted. It sounds very refined, constructed with care. I now wonder how the later revised version (with help from Szanto/Beecham) sounds. My purist self is glad to have the original version, with the original piano writing intact, as it appears to capture a special time in Delius' life, perhaps in memory of Florida.

I think it's great to have many performances available of the Piano Concerto. There are two of the original version that I know of: the one you own and Howard Shelley/A. Davis on Chandos. There are also several great performances of the revised version. For me, it doesn't get much better than Lane/Handley on EMI. This is the performance I continue to come back to, but I've really enjoyed them all. One of the key aspects of Delius' music is subtlety. It's these subdued moments which offer profundity and, for me, represent musical "tears" if you will or sighs.

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One of the first Delius works I heard that made a strong impression on me was In A Summer Garden. The opening of this work still lingers in my memory (in fact I'm hearing that entire introduction in my mind right now ). Here's a nice write-up about it from Wikipedia:

In a Summer Garden is a fantasy for orchestra composed in 1908 by Frederick Delius; it was first performed in London under the composer's baton on December 11 of that year. The piece is built around several distinct themes. The first appears in the woodwinds and strings; the second is presented by the English horn, while the third is scored for violas against figures and chords in the woodwinds and lower strings. This is worked out vigorously before the piece is concluded by a new theme, first from the violins and repeated by the woodwinds.

The published score of the fantasy contains two quotations which provide some clue as to its emotional content. The first is a couplet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love.
To thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang.

The origin of the second quote is unknown. It reads:

Roses, lilies, and a thousand scented flowers. Bright butterflies, flitting from petal to petal. Beneath the shade of ancient trees, a quiet river with water lilies. In a boat, almost hidden, two people. A thrush is singing in the distance.

Philip Heseltine has made a piano solo transcription in 1921, published only in 1982.

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I've been revisiting Lloyd-Jones' recordings on Naxos:



Two very fine recordings. It just makes me thirst for more Lloyd-Jones Delius recordings. He has recorded some Delius on the Dutton label where he premiered the lovely tone poem Hiawatha. In these Naxos recordings, the playing is so fantastic. Lloyd-Jones handles each nuance and textural detail with authority. I'd love to hear him tackle some of the larger works like A Mass of Life, Appalachia, the concerti, and even the operas like A Village Romeo & Juliet and Koanga.

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Now I'm giving this disc a spin:



Absolutely stunning recording! Leo, Johan, cligwyn, et al check out this recording as soon as you can.

[Leo K.]

John, great posts and writings! Thank you! I am going to grab those other accounts of Delius' piano concerto, this work is haunting, and although Grieg is an influence, Delius comes up with such a unique piano concerto, where the piano is in delicate conversation with the orchestra, it is really fascinating.

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John, great posts and writings! Thank you! I am going to grab those other accounts of Delius' piano concerto, this work is haunting, and although Grieg is an influence, Delius comes up with such a unique piano concerto, where the piano is in delicate conversation with the orchestra, it is really fascinating.

You're welcome, Leo! I think one of the more interesting aspects of Delius' concerti is the fact that the solo instrument part isn't used as a tool for virtuosity, although there are moments that, technically speaking, had my head spinning, but, rather, it's about an ongoing musical narrative between the solo instrument and the orchestra. The Piano Concerto is certainly a great work. I think I'll listen to it once again tonight.

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A little write-up about the Piano Concerto from AMG:

This inspired but seldom performed work was originally written in 1897-1904, in a conventional piano concerto format, but when it was revised in 1907 Delius dropped the third movement in favor of a new movement which is in fact a re-statement of the themes of the first two movements. The first movement, greatly influenced by Grieg, is filled with typical gestures - crashing chords, scale runs, broken octaves, etc. - but introduces some strong thematic material - a peculiar forte theme built of descending chromatic phrases, and an interesting secondary theme in running triplets. However, when we get to the second movement, the sound of the Delius of the later years starts to shine forth (after an almost sentimental start), and beautiful transcendent textures built on simple melodies start to appear, together with breathtaking, sweeping orchestral passages filled with high strings and rich brass colors like Richard Strauss. Delius' particular sense of modal harmony, akin to but different from Grieg's, provides many surprises. At the end, we realize that the "concerto" has instead been in the form of an English "fantasy" - for example, passages that seem to be concluding lead to soft solos in another key, the piano is suddenly accompaniment to solo violin or to a group of unison cellos, the strings descend in soft shimmers in the middle of a piano solo - the "form" is a poetic wandering.

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Another write-up on another Delius masterwork, A Song of the High Hills:

Young Delius was his father's despair: dreamer, dilettante, school washout. In an attempt to inure him to the family wool business, he sent the 20 year old as a commercial traveler to Scandinavia in 1882, where Fritz effortlessly absorbed its languages while imbibing northern culture. Norway, in particular, awakened him, drawing from him a deep desire to compose. Mountain climbing in Norway exerted an appeal akin to religious experience, expressed in the term frilustsliv, whose literal translation as "open air life" scarcely registers the ecstatic oneness with nature that it came to represent after its first use in Ibsen's poem "Paa Vidderne" (On the Heights) in 1859. In 1888 Delius set it for reciter and orchestra -- "Well, then, come! In wind and rain across the highlands' rolling heather..." -- transformed over 1890-1892 into an ambitious tone poem of the same title. The Scandinavian experience gave birth to one vital pole of Delius' creativity. The other came in 1884 when, as master of an orange plantation in Florida, the singing of African Americans came as a revelation from which he extrapolated such works as the Florida Suite and Appalachia. Composed in 1911, A Song of the High Hills joins his final opera Fennimore and Gerda (1909-1910), An Arabesk (1911), and Eventyr (1917) in essaying an astringently bracing manner, complemented by a new concern with large-scale form, in which Scandinavian inspiration purges and invigorates the sprawling, rhapsodic lushness of his most opulent period in such works as Paris (1899) and Brigg Fair (1907). Delius marks the opening of A Song of the High Hills "With quiet easy movement" as the climber's exhilaration waxes. Attainment of the summit is marked by a much slower gait and the hushed, rapt entry of the wordless, eerily serene chorus, an extended passage marked "The wide, far distance -- the great solitude...." swelling in unearthly radiance to sustain an hypnotic glow to the end. Albert Coates led the Queen's Hall, London, premiere on February 26, 1920. At the home of John Singer Sargent in April 1907, Delius met Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger, 20 years his junior, a kindred spirit also preternaturally enamored of Norwegian mountains, both close friends of the Griegs. In July 1923, Grainger and a friend helped the partially blind and paralyzed Delius to relive his Song of the High Hills by carrying him (with poles strapped to a chair) to the top of Hovdalien, where Delius witnessed his final Norwegian sunset of the "far wide distance."