Serenade für Streicher

Nimbus founder Numa Labinsky heard William Boughton play by chance in 1982 and invited him to visit Nimbus. Labinsky had monitored the quality of the LPs coming from the factory. One of them particularly pleased him: a recording of the newly founded Vivaldi Ensemble with William Boughton. A meeting took place, the discussions went very well and the orchestra, which now called itself the English String Orchestra, made its first recording for Nimbus on 31 May 1983. It was a potpourri with harpist Susan Drake titled "Music for Harp and Strings". Unfortunately, this recording, a pioneering work of digital technology, was irreparably damaged. This was followed by two extremely successful albums with English repertoire (Elgar on one hand and Butterworth and Parry on the other). The English recordings of the English String Orchestra were particularly popular with American radio stations. It might therefore have seemed inappropriate to release these recordings of works by Czech masters Josef Suk, Antonin Dvorak and Leos Janacek, which had been produced in the meantime. They fell into oblivion and were only recently rediscovered in the archives. Now, after a delay of more than 40 years, they are being released for the first time.