RUBBRA. (a) Choral Suite "Inscape" for mixed choir, strings and harp, Op. 122.

STILL. (b) Elegie for baritone, chorus and small orchestra. (c) Concerto for strings. John Carol Case (baritone, b), Renata Scheffelstein (harp, a), Arnbrosian Singers (a and b), Jacques Orchestra conducted by Myer Fredman. Decca Q LXT6281 0 SXL628I (12 in., 32s. 3d. plus 5s. 9d. PT).

"But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling `inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry . . . It is the virtue of design. pattern or inscape to be distinctive". Writing to Robert Bridges in 1879 Gerard Manley Hopkins elucidates the Rubbra title for us. Rubbra has been a lifelong admirer of Hopkins without, I believe, setting his poetry until now. But the culmination of those years now comes with the choice for a choral suite of four of those poems: Pied Beauty ("Glory be to God for dappled things"), The Lantern out of doors ("Sometimes a lantern moves along the night"), Spring ("Nothing is so beautiful as Spring"), God's Grandeur ("The world is charged with the grandeur of God"), and a short epilogue: "All glory be ascribed to the Holy Three in One". This fourfold reflection of the glory of God is itself movingly reflected in Rubbra's music: the chorus bend their voices to the reflections in turn, as the strings regularly propel them, and the harp selects and projects more occasional beauties of the texture. This is a beautiful work; and it is beautifully performed.

There are beauties, too, in Robert Still's Elegie, but they must be sought through a rather relentlessly thick texture. Matthew Arnold's poem A Summer Night has provided the text, one which is dominated by man's worried choice between the freedom of his mind and its enslavement: "Is there no life but these alone-Madman, or Slave, must Man be one?" The worry is hardly reflected in the music, though the yearning to be free of it certainly is. In laying out the yearning for solo baritone (well sung by John Carol Case), chorus and small but very solid orchestra Still constantly calls to mind Delius's corresponding layout of the yearning of Walt Whitman. Goodness knows, there are many worse things in music to be called to mind; yet even so I do not think that this work represents Robert Still at his best or at his most adventurous.

The Concerto for Strings is another matter, though. Here there is daylight again in the music as the Jacques Orchestra go to it. Two energetic outer movements frame a reflective inner one, illuminated by moments of solo string writing which lend a splendid contrast to the sound, agreeable as it is, of a hard-working string tutti.

The disc is well recorded, mono and stereo. The music is well off any beaten track; and as neither composer is at present even nearly adequately represented in the catalogues this new addition to them is very welcome. M.M.