The remastered recordings on this album are taken from early recordings and film soundtracks. The music ranges from ballets (Holst’s The Perfect Fool and Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo), through incidental music for a play (Delius’s Hassan), to films, with music by Vaughan Williams, Walton, Alwyn, Parker, Boughton and Bliss.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s great theme for the wartime film 49th Parallel has reappeared in many guises, but is still popular in its original form; Muir Mathieson, who recorded the soundtrack, made this early recording in 1948. A composer himself, Mathieson conducted music for many films and commissioned film scores from others, including several on this recording.

Gustav Holst’s ballet The Perfect Fool was first performed in 1923, but the recording presented here is Sir Adrian Boult’s first recording, from 1954. The theatre producer Basil Dean commissioned music for James Elroy Flecker’s play Hassan, first performed in 1923. Excerpts from the recording made in that year include the ‘Serenade’, sung as a wordless tenor solo, and the evocative final chorus - ‘The Golden Road to Samarkand’.

Manuel de Falla’s ballet El Amor Brujo was written in 1914 and was an important feature of the 1958 film ‘Honeymoon’. This recording, with Beecham conducting, was taken from the soundtrack. Beecham did not make a commercial recording of the work, so this recording is especially valuable. Rutland Boughton’s Lorna’s Song from the film Lorna Doone brings back to circulation a delightful recording not heard since the days of 78s, and sung by the star of the film, Victoria Hopper, who is featured on the cover image.