I’ve always shied away from Falstaff because I found it too diffuse to be an effective character study, unlike Strauss’s Don Quixote. Andrew Constantine and the BBC Welsh Orchestra changed all that: the playing is lustrous with the more intimate wistful scenes beautifully caressed and the heraldic episodes truly refulgent.

The Chadwick is played wittily and brilliantly and the picaresque flavour of the score is perfectly captured: I kept thinking of Malcolm Arnold helter-skelter mixed with Berliozian diablerie in the witches’ sequence. The CD has been superbly engineered and conducted. Constantine is a fine Elgarian. Buy it for the orchestral playing.

Andrew Constantine has announced the extension of his contract for 5 years as the Music Director of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic until 2025 and 3 years as the Music Director at the Reading Symphony Orchestra (RSO) until 2022. In addition, the British conductor will join the roster of Kanzen Arts, managed by Earl Blackburn.

Upon the conclusion of the 2018-19 season, Constantine will have led Indiana’s Fort Wayne Philharmonic for 10 years, during which time he has raised the orchestra’s international profile. In 2018, Constantine led the orchestra in its first commercial recording and in 2015, instigated the Fort Wayne Philharmonic’s International Conductors’ Workshop.

Walter Bricht (1904-70) is one of thousands of Austrian musicians who fled Hitler and found oblivion in America. After 1940, Bricht stopped composing. A premiere recording of his orchestral works reveals a young composer at ease with the entire palette of symphonic sound, a man with something to say, albeit in his own time. Like Franz Schmidt, to whom he has been compared, Bricht lacks a certain urgency, but there is post-Mahlerian largesse in abundance and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic give full value under conductor Andrew Constantine. Definitely one for the reference shelves (Toccata ****).