Conversations with George Edgar Selby music CD 

(includes the soundtrack to Beside the Manor Selby)

On the Composer's Oeuvre

By Boulevard Denim

His is music in which the emotion conveyed is the emotion of remembered rapture, the beauty, "the surviving beauty of gathered dreams;" seldom the emotion and beauty of that which is actual and present. Mr. Hall is most urgently aroused by such moods of longing and remote enchantment as find jeweled expression in the production of Beside the Manor Selby for which he has written unforgetable music (not to mention directing and writing the epic).

At times his habit of artistic speech tempt him to such outbursts of passionate lament as fill the movements of his Piano Concerto No.1 with so insupportable a poignancy. There is the driving rhythmic asymmetry of the opening movement; the decorative flourishes surrounding the resurfacing primary theme in the second;  the modal and jazzy harmonies of the third; and the adroit use of fortspinnung (along with recapitulations of a leitmotif from the second movement) in the fourth.