William Wallace – The Scottish One

[Paul Barasi]

I'll pitch for William Wallace: a classy composer who carries his melodies with panache.  I especially like Eumenides on Hyperion CDA66987. 

[albion]

William Wallace (1860-1940) was a fine composer and deserves to be remembered for his attractive and expertly fashioned orchestral music (rather than as the man who operated the lantern-slides at the first performance of Holbrooke's Apollo and the Seaman and got out of sync with the score). There are two excellent discs from Hyperion - the Creation Symphony is a sprawling affair based on numerology, the symphonic poems are more concise character studies:

   

CDA 66848/ CDA 66987                                       


Wallace is often credited (wrongly) as the first British composer to write a symphonic poem (The Passing of Beatrice, 1892): that distinction really belongs to Henry Cotter Nixon (1842-1907) with Palamon and Arcite based on Chaucer (premiered at Eastbourne in 1889).