Sullivan - Haddon Hall [CD]

The opera comes vividly to life in this excellent recording.. will give much pleasure. PENGUIN GUIDE ROSETTE WINNER

Another winner….not to be missed.

This is a set that will give pleasure for years to come.. a most welcome addition to the Sullivan discography.

Gilbert and Sullivan without Gilbert! After a disagreement between the two, Sullivan wrote this absolutely wonderful light opera to a (not very good) libretto by Sidney Grundy. This is the only complete recording (dialogue is omitted but printed in the book). What is special about Haddon Hall is that apart form possible being Sullivan's best stage music of all, it is based on a true story, and is set in a real country house in Derbyshire, England, which is open to the public.

THE PRINCE CONSORT was formed in 1972 by a group of semi-professional musicians, with the specific purpose of presenting a Victorian and Edwardian musical evening as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The group consisted of four or five singers and a pianist, and for the 21 years of its existence it was always one of the first fringe shows to be sold out. In the mid-1980s the group was expanded and augmented, in collaboration with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Edinburgh, with the specific purpose of recording the non-Gilbert operas of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and commercial recordings of The Beauty Stone, The Rose of Persia and The Emerald Isle culminated in a complete recording of Ivanhoe which won the Music Retailers Association award for the most impressive opera recording of the year (joint equal with Jessye Norman's Carmen!!). The group also recorded Sullivan's The Contrabandista and The Chieftain, for private release. Because of the existence of a recording of Haddon Hall by another group the opera remained the only non-Gilbert opera of Sullivan's that The Prince Consort had not recorded, and when the opportunity arose earlier this year to commit this charming opera to disc it was immediately seized with enthusiasm. And so, after eight years of silence, The Prince Consort members gathered together again in Portobello Town Hall, Edinburgh, on a sunny day in June, 2000, to sing and play this relatively unknown score by Sir Arthur Sullivan and to honour one of Britain's greatest composers in this the centenary year of his death.

The soloists on the Haddon Hall recording are

David Faulds, Steven Griffin, Mary Timmons, Peter Thomson, Heather Boyd, Alan Borthwick, Fiona Main, Pat McKerrow, Ian Lawson, Caroline Kerr, Liz Landsman, Maxwell Smart, Ross Main, Harry Payne, Roland York. Conducted by David Lyle.