Just as our Bicentennial focused attention on American composers, the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebration in England this past year provided an occasion for the rest of the world to sample the works of British composers whose names may be familiar, but whose music is not. One such individual is Herbert Howells (b.1892), who is best known in England for his liturgical music and his lyrical orchestral miniatures. Examples of both genres are now available here, with the first volume of Michael Nicholas's complete set of organ music recordings appearing on Vista (VPS 1031), and HNH providing a collection of three small-scale works, including the puckish, folk song-inspired Merry Eye, played to perfection by Sir Adrian Boult and the New Philharmonia Orchestra (4005).

The powerful effects of the folk song genre are also evident in the works of E. J. Moeran (1894—1950), an individual who, though his catalogue is dotted with large-scale compositions, was, like Howells, primarily a miniaturist. Such influences and characteristics are readily apparent in his Symphony in G Minor (1937), a melodious work that favors the delineation of smaller musical ideas over the development of a symphonic-like cohesiveness. Conductor Boult gives the piece a strong sense of dynamic shape and elicits a convincing performance from the New Philharmonia Orchestra of London (H, NH 4014).

Orchestral miniatures by Sir Arnold Bax (1883—1953) turn up now and again in the United States, but as his seven symphonies seldom receive much attention here, either in concert or on recordings, Raymond Leppard's issue of the Symphony No.7 with the London Philharmonic is a treat (HNH 4010). The Seventh is dedicated "To the People of America" and was premiered at the New York World's Fair of 1939, though its influences and sympathies are anything but American. Opening with a Sibelian seascape, and closing with an English pastoral melody, the Seventh has breadth, beauty, and poetic imagination.

One of Bax's piano works, the impressionistic Burlesque, is among a half dozen neglected early 20th-century English piano pieces expressively interpreted by Richard Deering on a Saga disc (5445) that also contains music by Eugene Goossens, York Bowen, and Cyril Scott, And rounding out this brief survey is "A Contemporary Elizabethan Concert," a collection of ancient and modern works for solo and accompanied recorder, from "Green-sleeves" to Edmund Rubbra's Meditazioni(1949). The inspired presentation is by the Early Music Consort of London, David Munrow directing (Angel S-37263).

"You have only to find a beautiful melody and then build an opera around it", Umberto Giordano was fond of saying. Thus was Andrea Chenier brought forth in 1896, though the relative success of this work is certainly due as much to Luigi Illica's intelligent libretto, which takes in the sweep of, the French Revolution, as to the melodic inventiveness of the score. Domingo, Scotto, and Milnes head up a first-rate cast that is well served by the brisk tempos and sense of momentum provided by James Levine and the National Philharmonic Orchestra (RCA ARL3—2046).

As if rigorous technical demands were not enough, Charles Ives peppered the score for his Piano Sonata No.2 with ambiguous marginalia which exhort performers to, in effect, ignore the printed page and follow their own instincts about the work, a set of four pieces depicting individuals associated with transcendentalism. Like John Kirkpatrick before him, Gilbert Kalish is a pianist who embodies the artistry and strong Ivesian instinct that are necessary to bring the "Concord" to life, as he demonstrates on a recent Nonesuch release which includes