One might question the reviewing of what is, to all intents and purposes, a compilation album, especially given our editor's recent rantings in this journal. I tried to poke a bit of fun at him, but he brought me fairly and squarely back to earth with the comment, it's got educational value! I hate to agree with him, but he's right. Firstly, let me say that I am getting a bit fed up with providing CDs for the classroom, and the flood I had in that room at the end of last term managed to destroy the liner notes for at least six of my most cherished albums. But what else can I do? Building a comprehensive collection of discs is well beyond my department's budget, but with this submission from Nimbus Records, I have a collection of excerpts from a number of composers, of which most are well played and of enormous value when considering that the (albeit chocolate-box) title, Meditations for Autumn, predetermines an excellent listening topic. I don't have to leave it there either, since most of the tracks also give a fairly good representation of what I consider to be the best of English composers; five of the nine tracks are by home-grown talent, and each uses very different resources.

Don't be put off if you are not a classroom teacher, since many of its tracks are finely played by some very good performers. The English String Orchestra's contributions-under the baton of William Boughton-are played well. The reserved sensuality of Vaughan Williams' Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus' is a simple and effortless performance: zealot-like conductors often raise tempi and unwittingly add a rough edge to VW's music, where often a sense of dignity and detachment is preferable. The listener does not need to be swept up in readily contrivable artifice but instead should to listen as if from a distance, a feature that is clearly the case here. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the rather flat and boring performance of the second movement from Brahms's Clarinet Quintet. This is a rhapsody and despite its pi

Janet McClintock