Our January Recording of the Month is a probing new account of Benjamin Britten’s wickedly neglected ballet The Prince of the Pagodas performed by Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra under their new Principal Conductor Kahchun Wong (Hallé CDHLD7565). 

Wong’s first recording on the orchestra’s in-house label plays into the composer’s East-West enthusiasms and the Singapore-born conductor’s reputation for late-Romantic and early 20th-century Expressionism and Impressionism.

Part King Lear and part Beauty and the Beast, it’s a work full of fun, fantasy and, dare one say it, memorable tunes. Wong is especially strong at bringing tonal variety and atmosphere to some of the more formal elements of 19th-century classical ballet. But it’s the music for the Salamander Prince and the twirling pagodas where he really scores, ensuring these extraordinary sounds register as the beating heart of the piece. A revelatory reading.

February’s Recording of the Month is the third in an auspicious series of music by rediscovered British composer Ruth Gipps played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and scrupulously conducted by Rumon Gamba (Chandos CHAN20284W).

It kicks off with Gipps’s lively Coronation Procession (curiously first performed in September 1954 in Melbourne). There...