Lyrita returns July 18 2006
A long-held wish has at last come true for lovers of British music with the reintroduction of the Lyrita Recorded Edition catalogue. Wyastone Estate Ltd, under whose aegis Nimbus Records continues, has reached an agreement with Lyrita to distribute the company's entire catalogue. The first discs to appear will be those CD transfers that had appeared in the 1990s (and which were then distributed via Nimbus); the remaining original analogue masters will subsequently be digitised and transferred to CD, making all of Lyrita's recordings available on CD for the first time.
One of Lyrita's benchmark releases Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage back on the shelves
Lyrita was founded in 1959 with the mission to record unfamiliar and previously unrecorded British music. Bowen, Reizenstein and others performed their own works in an initial piano and chamber music series. During the 1970s the label's repertoire broadened to cover orchestral music performed by the UK's top orchestras and conductors. Alwyn, Arnold, Bliss, Lennox Berkeley and Walton conducted their own music. First recordings were made of music by a host of composers including Finzi, Holst, George Lloyd, Cyril Scott and John Foulds.
Some of these recordings were remastered and appeared on a series of 37 CDs in the 1990s. At the end of that decade, however, Lyrita lost its distribution deal with Nimbus and the discs then became available only through Harold Moores Records in London's West End. Lyrita will be relaunched in the international marketplace with those 37 CDs; the rest of the catalogue, including digital recordings which have never been issued in any format, will follow over the subsequent 18 months, in time for Lyrita's golden jubilee in 2009.
Lyrita founder Richard Itter declares himself 'proud of the Lyrita recordings. I have been privileged to work with the most wonderful orchestras, conductors, soloists and instrumentalists [who] all became deeply involved in this marvellous neglected, forgotten or unknown music and breathed vibrant new life into it. With this new agreement many of you will be able to discover this for yourselves.'
Adrian Farmer and Antony Smith of Wyastone Estate acknowledge that the agreement is 'the fulfilment of a long-held ambition to restore a truly magical catalogue to its rightful place'. Andrew Achenbach will offer his assessment of Lyrita's pioneering recordings in the Awards issue of Gramophone.
David Threasher, Gramophone
