I've heard the new Dutton disc which includes the completions you mention. I found myself caught between two stools. Well played and sung, well engineered and no-one can write as effective completions as Martin Yates. For me the big big "BUT" is whether the project should be done in the first place. The Steersman is a movement RVW wrote for A Sea Symphony and rightly realised it did not need. So as a kind of "appendix" to that work it is certainly of interest to RVW completists (like me!). His realisation occured after writing the short score but before orchestration so Yates' work is really just about writing in the orchestral idiom of the symphony which he does very well.
The Future is a knottier question for me. The work itself is another of RVW's aspirational/visionary "Unknown Region" type works. From the state of the original manuscripts - incomplete/unscored/missing whole sections I get the sense that RVW realised relatively early on that either he was going down an already well-trodden path or he'd already done much the same thing before but better. Hence he set the score aside. This is NOT a Mahler 10 or Bruckner 9 or even Elgar 3 where the composer desperately wanted to complete the work but death intervened. Whether you like the completions of those 3 works or not it can be argued that the composers desire to complete the work is being respected. Here there is no evidence that RVW wanted the work completed. But to reiterate Yates and all the performers do really well. The last nail in this completing coffin for me was when, by chance, I listened to a recording of the Five Tudor Portraits straight after my first listen to The Future. As it happens, the Portraits have never been a particular favourite of mine but in this context the brilliance and novelty of RVW's settings sprang out at me against which the Future sounded like a backward-looking retread of some kind of worthy Victorian cantata - lots of worthy intent and not that much inspiration. It does continue to surprise me a little that the RVW estate seems so willing to allow just about anything by him to be resurrected. Clearly some works like the original London Symphony do deserve to be heard and I personally love the early orchestral works such as the Three Impressions (and especially The Solent) but just because a great composer wrote something does not make it by extension great......
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