This album represents the culmination of what leading British baritone Roderick Williams described as ‘a dream come true’. It features premiere recordings of his orchestrations of songs by Vaughan Williams and other composers associated with him and is released to commemorate those who perished in WWI.

This album marks the culmination of two special Hallé collaborations and includes four major pieces from one of the most distinctive of current British compositional voices.

Despite a career spanning more than 50 years and a gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition (among others), pianist John Lill may be an artist sadly missing from many CD collections. Heralded as an intellectual musician, his approach to the instrument is decidedly academic and straightforward. This is not to say that his music-making is not impassioned or thoughtful anymore than the same could be said of Starker or Gingold simply because they are master technicians at their instruments.

"Barbirolli's famous 1969 version on any count is one of the greatest, most warmly affecting performances ever committed to disc, expansive, yet concentrated in feeling: the Adagietto is very moving… A classic version." The Penguin Guide to Classical Music about the 5th Symphony

Edmund Rubbra established his reputation with his first four Symphonies. But in many ways, Rubbra’s Fifth Symphony may be considered his most immediately attractive. It was premiered on 26 January, 1949 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Albert Hall, but it was Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra’s recording of the work under the auspices of the British Council – the first recording of any Symphony by Rubbra – which had a notable impact and substantially reinforced the composer’s name internationally.

Saluting an extraordinary composer-conductor relationship, this collection presents almost all Elgar's major orchestral works and the Sea Pictures in the classic recordings made by Sir John Barbirolli towards the end of his life. Barbirolli began as an orchestral cellist, and played under Elgar's baton in the première of the Cello Concerto. Encouraged by Elgar, he moved into conducting and made his mark with the composer's Second Symphony in 1927. Elgar's music was to remain a talisman for the rest of Barbirolli's life.

Hailing from Mansfield, Missouri, Michael Sypres originally set out to pursue a career in musicals before singing opera. He comes from a family of musicians who run an opera company in Springfield MO, and after studying in the US, travelled to Europe to complete his studies in Vienna. He has rapidly established a formidable reputation for his sensitive singing and astonishing vocal range, with leading roles a the Royal Opera House Coven Garden, Lyric Theatre Chicago, Opéra de Paris and Aix-en-Provence Festival. In 2017, he appeared as Don José in Carmen in Paris and sang Enée, opposite Joyce DiDonato in Berlioz's Les Troyens in Strasbourg.