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Lord Berners was long a fascinating maverick in the history of British music, yet a composer without whom we would be very much the poorer, as the Marco Polo series of orchestral CDs has made clear. Although the one British composer with a technique directly touched by Stravinsky and Casella during the First World War (Berners - or Tyrwhitt as he was then - spent the war in the British Embassy in Rome), and contacts with the Diaghilev circle, yet he remains a composer with a wholly English sense of the ridiculous. |