British Music Information Centre, 15 March 2001
Reviewed in Delius Society Journal 130, pp36-37

Introduction and thanks by Paul Guinery
(with music examples at the piano)

This fascinating talk by Alan Rowlands (1929-2012) shows his enthusiasm and deep insight into – and love of – Delius’s music, especially his chordal harmony.  He plays several of his own transcriptions of Delius’s works, as well as two pieces by John Ireland with whom he studied.  Rowlands, who studied the piano at the Royal College of Music under Angus Morrison, was later a professor of the piano there.  He first met John Ireland in 1947 when the composer was 78, and he studied with him at his home in Sussex, and it was Alan who first recorded the composer’s piano music for Lyrita on LP.  He also recorded all the songs with different singers.  But before his love of John Ireland there came a near obsession with the music of Delius.  Because piano scores of Delius’s orchestral works were in those days so difficult to obtain Alan made his own transcriptions of several of them.  He bought scores of A Song of Summer and Caprice and Elegy and arranged both for two pianos so that he could play them at home with his father, and when he found a piano duet version of Brigg Fair he made his own version for solo piano because he couldn’t rest until he could play ‘these wonderful chords’ himself and ‘find out exactly what these chords were and what made them so wonderful’.  The next discovery was The Song of the High Hills which he heard broadcast at the Proms in July 1946 conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, who kindly lent him his own miniature score.  Alan, then at Oxford, sat up for three days and nights – with no piano – transcribing it.

Alan Rowlands recalled one occasion at John Ireland’s windmill home when he was playing his transcription of Brigg Fair, not realising that Ireland had come downstairs and was listening in the doorway.  When Alan had finished John Ireland said with great reverence in his voice, ‘I could never have written anything like that.’ Rowlands released a CD entitled While Spring and Summer Sang with his own transcriptions of Brigg Fair, In a Summer Garden and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, together with nine John Ireland pieces, but parts of his own transcription of The Song of the High Hills performed here are not available elsewhere.

Part 1: 51′ 24″

Listen to Alan Rowlands – on his enthusiasm for Delius – Part 1

The music examples for the first half of the talk are:

Folk-song In Ola Valley	3’21”
Grieg’s Norwegian folk-song In Ola Valley	3’52”
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring transcribed by Rowlands	6’34”
Prelude No 1	13’40”
Brigg Fair – extracts	16’05”
The Song of the High Hills – extracts from Rowlands’ transcription	19’30”
To Daffodils – extract	29’00”
Cello Sonata – extracts	30’05”
Dance for Harpsichord	33’26”
It was a lover and his lass – extracts	35’20”
In a Summer Garden – transcribed by Rowlands	37’28”

Part 2: 40′ 00″

Listen to Alan Rowlands – on his enthusiasm for Delius – Part 2

The music examples for the first half of the talk are:

John Ireland Month’s Mind	1’55”
John Ireland April	6’30”
First Cuckoo – brief extract	10’35”
Brigg Fair – brief extracts	15’40”
Brigg Fair – folk song sung by Joseph Taylor	18’04”
Grainger Brigg Fair, sung by Ian Bostridge	18’35”
Delius Brigg Fair, transcribed by Rowlands	21’06”