Eric Fenby's stint as Delius' amanuensis, enabling the blind and paralyzed composer to complete a number of works begun much earlier, is well-known, but his continued involvement with Delius' music has been far less noted. Apart from lecturing on the composer, writing the revealing Delius as I Knew Him, and conducting and recording Delius' works (recordings of unique value, as he was present and a part of their creation), Fenby, with his encyclopedic grasp of the composer's work, made a number of invaluable arrangements that have allowed some of Delius' best music to reach a wider audience. La Calinda, for instance, one of Delius' most immediately fetching pieces, was known only to connoisseurs as part of the seldom-performed Florida Suite before Fenby arranged it as a free-standing work following the richer scoring of its re-use in a crucial scene from Delius' third and all-but-unknown opera Koanga. The choral work Two Songs to Be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water, Fenby arranged for strings as Two Aquarelles. Likewise, Late Swallows for string orchestra was extracted from the uneven and seldom-performed String Quartet No. 2. At all times, quantities of superb music have been marooned, so to speak, in operas whose cumbersome production demands kept it out of earshot. From Rameau's time, at least, clever composers have compiled suites from their operas, allowing the most brilliant, gracious, or affecting numbers to be heard in the concert hall. Fenby's Fennimore and Gerda Intermezzo is surely among the most adroit of these. Delius' final opera, completed in 1913, marked a shift in his view of opera. Dispensing with plot development in favor of "short, strong emotional impressions given in a series of terse scenes," the opera unfolds 11 "Pictures"—crucial moments drawn from Jens Peter Jacobsen's novel Niels Lyhne—linked by atmospheric interludes. In 1936, Thomas Beecham commissioned Fenby to extract and arrange the interludes preceding Pictures 10 and 11 for concert performance, which Fenby accomplished by using music from the end of Scene 10 as a segue and rounding the new work off with the opera's closing bars to make a seamless arch as a long-drawn oboe solo beckons with a promise of happiness just over the horizon. The opera, in fact, has a happy ending made by the expedient of ignoring the novel's tragic concluding chapters. The Intermezzo's premiere seems to have been the recording Beecham made of it with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on September 28, 1936.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide