British Tone Poems vol 2 - Bliss, Fogg, Howell, and more

British Tone Poems Volume 2 from Chandos with Rumon Gamba conducting then BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.  The first volume (please seee my review HERE) focussed on some major discoveries, like Ivor Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody. There are treasures to be found in this set, too, such as Eric Fogg's Merok, Arthur Bliss' Mêlée fantastique,  Patrick Hadley's Kinder Scout and Dorothy Howell's Lamia.  

Eric Fogg (1903-1939) was a youthful prodigy, so well regarded that the British Music Society presented 25 of his works in concert when he was just seventeen. Merok (1929, published 1934) proved so popular that it was heard at the Proms several times during his lifetime.  Fogg died young, in circumstances still unclear. Merok is a town at the head of the Gieranger Fjord in Norway.  Rustling strings introduce a simple, melody, defined by oboe. This melody is taken up by flute, then violin, then cor anglais, and oboe once again, each variation flowing lyrically with graceful eddies, before a mysterious, hushed coda. Once more the oboe sings, its timbre now graver and more mysterious. The initial inspiration might have been landscape, but the effect is magical, almost hypnotic. It feels timeless, as eternal and impenetrable as the cliffs and forests looming above the fjord.  Vernon Hadley recorded Fogg's Merok in 2005, but this superlative performance by Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic should put it firmly back on the map. 
Patrick Hadley (1899-1973) was a Cambridge academic, but his Kinder Scout (1923) evokes the Dark Peak,  the highest point in the Peak District, rising above the moors, which affords panoramic views as far as Manchester and Snowdonia, when visibility is good.  Long string lines stretch, setting context for a theme on cor anglais. The probing strings repeat, suggesting endless vistas. A surge wells up in the orchesta, heralded by horns. At the conclusion, a solo violin, leading the strings to soar upward.  Perhaps Hadley's Kinder Scout was influenced by Delius's A Song of the High Hills, which Hadley knew well, though, being the work of a very young man it is far less ambitious. It's moving, nonetheless, and a finely-honed miniature. 

Dorothy Howell (1898-1982)'s Lamia (1918) was premiered at the Proms by Sir Henry Wood in 1919, and repeated several times, as recently as August 2019, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.  In the poem by John Keats, Lamia is a siren, half woman, half serpent, who lives in the ocean.  She falls in love with a mortal, and he with her, but their love is doomed.  The "maritime" character of Lamia is described in swelling lines, which surge and retreat like the tides. There are erotic undertones, too, vide Tristan und Isolde. Sparkling figures - Lamia playing on the waves ? - give way to murkier undercurrents. The second section is more turbulent, underlined by dramatic brass and rumbling percussion.  Then an interlude of delicately scored reverie, winds singing above hushed strings, a brief respite before the full orchestra surges once again - very high timbres in the strings and winds, before a poignant diminuendo, where a violin plays, alone. The pace picks up, drawing together different threads - elusive figures, surging lines, stronger cross currents - before dissipating into gloom, from which the violin plaintively calls.

Fogg, Hadley and Howell were all young when they wrote their respective pieces heard here.  Hadlery went on to write other works such as the cantata The Hills (1934), but Fogg died early and Howells retired from composing.  Given this context, the inclusion of  very early work by Ralph Vaughan Williams gives perspective. Harnham Down, the second of Three Impressions for Orchestra, dates from 1904, but was later withdrawn, receiving its first recording only in 2013, through the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society's specialist label, Albion. As Lewis Foreman notes, this piece contains "the composer's fingerprints, already reecognisable : the spacing of the string orchestras in its earlier   entry, the woodwind solos and the poetuc fade-out at the end".  It's also relevant that  the score was prefaced by a stanza from Mathew Arnold  which would be referred to in An Oxford Elegy, and that the evocation of Wiltshire would find fruit in Vaughan Williams' Symphony no 9.

Also on this recording are three other short tone poems : John Foulds' April-England  Op 48 no 1 (1920, orch. 1932), Eugene Goossens By the Tarn Op 15/1 (1916)  and Frederic Hymen Cowen's Rêverie (1903), but the set concludes with Arthur Bliss Mêlée fantastique (1921, rev. 1937) . In his youth, Bliss was avant garde, responding to the creative liberation of the 1920's and to developments in European music. Please see my article Things to Come - Arthur Bliss and Futurism. The influence of Stravinsky is clear in the rhythmic daring and pounding staccato. This is music meant to be danced to, its energetic verve feels "physical", as if crying to be choreographed. Each section is brief, yet distinctive, as in a ballet, the larger tutti segments suggesting a corps of figures leaping and running. Fanfares and exuberance, contrast with swirling strings.  Low timbred brass and winds introduce darker textures, cut short by forceful single strokes on timpani.  Bliss wrote Mêlée fantastique in memory of his friend Claude Lovat Fisher, a painter and theatre designer, influenced by designers like Leon Bakst and the clean lines of modernism, who died young, hence perhaps the terse ending.  Vivid performances all round from Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic.Orchestra, very much in the innovative spirit of these works from the years of change, around and after the Great War. 

Things to Come - Arthur Bliss and Futurism

What will the next hundred years bring to mankind ?  Time to revisit the British cinema classic Things to Come, based on H G Wells' story The Shape of Things to Come which was a sensation in its time (1936) produced by Alexander Korda, directed by William Cameron Menzies, with music by Arthur Bliss.

In Everytown, which resembles Central London, it's Christmas. Crowds are rushing round fancy shops lit with new-fangled neon lights.  In the sound track, a choir sings the carol "God rest you Merry Gentleman" on the phrase, "May nothing you dismay", the brass fanfares scream and the pace slows to rigid march.  Newspaper headlines warn of war. At a family party, kids play with new toys while their elders discuss progress. "If we don't end war", says young Mr Cabal (Raymond Massey), "war will end us". "War stimulates progress" says his optimistic guest.  Suddenly, bells are heard, ringing.  Not for Christmas, though. Sirens sound, and gunfire. Everytown (and the Battleship Dinosaur) is being bombed.  The country mobilizes for war.  Diagonal shots, people running in different directions, rows of soldiers superimposed on one another.  Nothing new for those used to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927 - please read more here) and other futurist films, German, Russian, French and Italian.  Smoke, explosions, bombs, tanks, more aeroplanes together than could fly safely in formation, and poison gas. For Brits, who came to art film later, this must have been thrilling stuff.  Wonderfully discordant music - not what you'd associate with Arthur Bliss. Here's he's wildly uncompromising.  He had, after all, seen war up close. Bliss made a Suite based on the soundtrack, (see below) which premiered before the film was released. Clearly, he knew he was on to something good.

And so the war continues, (to 1970!) the city in ruins, the people reduced to primitive squalor. A  plague "like the Black Death of the Middle Ages" stalks the land. Fearing infection, the healthy turn on the sick.  A man has a car,  but no petrol. It's pulled by horses. Yet even that technology makes him a Chief  (Ralph Richardson) .  Suddenly, a machine lands, a new kind of aeroplane, manned by a man in a black futuristic costume. It's Mr Cabal. He's come from "Wings Over the World". Decades of war have destroyed civilization but WOTW,  "the Brotherhood of Efficiency, the Freemasonry of Science", technocrats pledged to save the world, based in Basra.  Prophetic yet ironic, since strategic control over oil supplies makes much machine-based technology possible. Think of what's happened to modern Iraq.  "We don't approve of independent sovereign states" says Cabal, though his utopia controls the sky (it builds aeroplanes) and seas.  The Chief plays along, helping Cabal, thinking machines will help him with the war, "The Peace of the Strong Arm.... we are warriors, not mechanics ! we have been trained not to think, but to die". Eventually, Cabal gets word to his people and they invade, using a gas that puts people to sleep without killing them, though the Chief drops dead. Thus the Brave New World of Progress, enforced by benevolent  technocrats.More long sequences of machines, production lines, the building of vast machines. Though it's not on the level of Metropolis, this is one of the best sequences in the film, and Bliss's music rises to the occasion - pounding staccato, wailing winds, ferocious brass. Not quite on the level of, say, Antheil's Ballet mécanique or Mosolov's The Iron Foundry or practically anything Varèse, but still....  Had Bliss done more of the same, one wonders where he could have gone. This would have served him well in the brave new world of the Festival of Britain and 1950's progress.

A hundred years after that fateful Christmas, the people of the world live in idealized luxury, under the ground.  Cabal's great-grandson Oswald now heads the Wings Over the World. In this new art deco Paradise there are plans to explore the Moon, using a "Space Gun" (No rockets on the horizon in 1936)  But some things don't change. "What is the point of progress? " cries a new Chief, the demagogue Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke),  his image emblazoned on gigantic screens, preaching to his followers in a chilling foretaste of modern media maipulation, "We demand a halt - the object of life is "happy living" ! ... Let this be the last day of the scientific age - Destroy it ! NOW!"  Whipped up by fear and strange rhetoric,  the crowd roars in assent. Inflamed, they move upon the Space Gun to destroy it and what it stands for, armed with bars of metal, bent on violence.  As the demagogue screams, the mobs march, swarming over the vast machine, like a horde of maddened hornets.  "Beware of the concussion"!" warns Cabal as the Space Gun is fired, to no avail. The capsule heads off towards the moon, in a beam of light. The will to explore cannot be extinguished, "For Man, no rest, no ending...", says Cabal, "til all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him are conquered. For if we are no more than little animals, we must snatch each scrap of happiness .... it is all, or nothing ! which shall it be?"As the screen fades, an unseen choir echoes his words "Which shall it be!" in ringing affirmation.

Please also see my Gunshots fired at the Royal Albert Hall which shows how different Bliss's achievemnt was from "ordinary" music written for film.  In Things to Come, Bliss's music was part of the concept : it was more than music created to provide a soundtrack

Britten Ballad for Heroes, Gurney Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Bliss Morning Heroes

W H Auden and Benjamin Britten

 Benjamin Britten Ballad for Heroes, Ivor Gurney Gloucestershire Rhapsody and Arthur Bliss Morning Heroes with David Temple conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Hertfordshire Chorus in Watford last week, broadcast on BBC Radio 3. An excellent programme since these pieces aren't as well known as they should be, though they are hardly unknown.

Britten's Ballad for Heroes Op 14, 1939  for example. When I first heard the piece seven years ago (Ilan Volkov BBCSO, Barbican) I didn't understand it, but gradually it's grown on me. The disparity between the poetry of W H Auden and the doggerel of Randall Swingler is a problem, but Britten uses it with a certain degree of irony. Auden is an intellectual : Swingler a man of action (a Communist) but not so good with words. Auden opposes fascism, while Swingler's solution is to fight with more violence. Yet they trundle along together, with unison chorus and marching orchestra  The contradictions in the piece provoke, just as the situation did. Therefore the piece is about a lot more than a simplistic conflict between pro and anti war. It should be noted that the Spanish Civil War ended in April 1939, with the triumph of the fascists and their Nazi allies, so the piece (which premiered at the end of April 1939) isn't about going to war so much as a realization that war alone cannot defeat the forces of evil.  The title is "Ballad for Heroes", not "Ballad of Heroes", for the cause the heroes fought for had been crushed so cruelly that  it was hard not to envisage the eventual triumph of Hitler, who enjoyed a lot more support, even in Britain, than some will now admit.  Despite the annexation of Czechslovakia, and the Nuremberg Race Laws,  Britain supported a policy of Appeasement.  When Chamberlain announced "Peace in Our Time"  there were many for whom the slogan rang false.  Appeasement, for better or worse, encouraged Hitler rather than curbed him, which is why so many despaired. It is unfair to fault Britten for leaving in April 1939 since Britain was at peace.  There are many ways of opposing war and the mentality behind it. War was only declared on 3rd September 1939 because Germany invaded Poland, not because of the regime itself. 

Thus the funeral march which runs through the Ballad for Heroes, with a solemn relentless tread. The chorus intones brief lines, alternating with the orchestra, replicating again the idea of  different forces being yoked together in common cause.  A mood of greater urgency and alarm is introduced by dizzy  figures in the orchestra (wonderful writing for winds) replicated in the wayward vocal line, Strident machine gun staccato, wild dissonance, surging lines lit by flashes of woodwind light.  "A world of horror!" Then suddenly the tenor (Ben Johnson)  emerges, uncovered and alone.  His lines curl and snarl with menace.  ""....and the guns can be heard across the hills like wa-a-aves at night". You could imagine his face contorting when he sings of "the stench of violence".   The vocal writing here is sophisticated, spiralling diminuendos, words stretched and twisted in a style Britten would use later, in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and much more.  "Hear, you numberless Englishmen, to remind you of the greatness here among you, ......to fight for peace and for truth!" words rather cogent given the context of the those months between the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria, and the outbreak of war.  

Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire Rhapsody was written between 1919, on Gurney's return from the battlefield, and 1920, shortly before he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he died 15 years later.   Although  it was generally assumed that Gurney's late works were incoherent and unplayable,  Gurney scholars Philip Lancaster and Ian Venables have edited them for performance, revealing their true value.  The expansive lines soar, with an almost Elgarian spirit. One might imagine Gurney inhaling the fresh, pure air of Gloucestershire,  and the exhilaration of being able to roam in his beloved countryside. So very different from the horrors of the trenches!  Gurney's doctors believed that he was better off in hospital, but, when a friend smuggled in a copy of a map, Gurney traced his old hiking routes with  his fingers, as if re-living what he had lost. This background is relevant, for this performance seems infused with a spirit of freedom, of endless open horizons and limitless possibilities.

This "open vista" approach to the Gloucestershire Rhapsody may connect to Gurney's own hopes for the future. Significantly, the piece starts with the same first bars as Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra -  a dramatic opening, but with a twist.  Gurney deliberately wanted to counteract "The Prussians" and what they stood for. Understandable for a man who served throughout the war, though Strauss wasn't fond of “Prussians" either, being Bavarian. The horns give way to a pastorale evoking the Gloucestershire countryside, with its rolling hills and spacious panoramas.  To Gurney, past and present connected in seamless flow. The ghosts of prehistoric hunters, Romans, medieval farmers, depicted in a bucolic dance theme. "Two thousand centuries of change, and strange people".  An ostinato section suggests both the heavy march of Time and the men of Gloucestershire marching innocently to slaughter on the Somme.  Gurney said that what kept him going in the trenches was the thought of commemorating these men in poetry and music.  A short, chaotic "war" section then gives way to a beautifully expansive theme, which might evoke a glorious dawn after a night of horror. It's Elgarian in its glory, but also Gurneyesque.  In this new dawn, though time moves on, Nature returns, and possibly heals.  The recommended recording is on Chandos's CD British Tone Poems, conducted by Rumon Gamba.

Arthur and Kennard Bliss

Morning Heroes (1930) isn't neglected but performances are rare because it’s hard to pull off a symphony on this scale. Much depends on the narrator, who has almost as much to do as the orchestra. Fortunately  the narrator here was Samuel West who narrates on Andrew Davis' s recording with the BBC SO for Chandos. The title "Morning Heroes" comes from  the final movement where three different poems are quoted, Now, Trumpeter, For Thy Close (Robert Nichols), Spring Offensive (Wilfred Owen) and Dawn on the Somme (also Robert Nichols), which graphically describe the landscape of a battlefield, specifically the slaughter of the First World War in which Bliss and his brother Kennard served. Kennard, like millions of others, East as well as West, perished. Morning Heroes isn't a requiem in the religious sense but describes the experience of war in a direct and unsentimental way. War isn't a game, it's not “entertainment".  In these poems there's enough inherent drama to make a point without theatrical excess.

Morning Heroes starts with the Iliad, where the Trojan hero Hector returns as a ghost. The symphony begins with a long quotation describing Hector taking leave of Andromache, his wife. "Would you leave your children orphans, your wife a widow". The refrain in the chorus acts as a whip, goading the heroes to further sacrifice. Bliss follows this first movement with the turbulent "The City Arming". Are the populace so caught up in bloodlust that they forget
the human toll ? The third movement, "The Vigil", is based on Walt Whitman's  Vigil Strange I Kept of the Field One Night and his By the Bivouac's  Fitful Flame. Whitman's verse isn't easy to set as its flow doesn't lend itself to music. Wisely,  Bliss uses spoken narration, augmented by chorus, singing the lines so they seem to sweep like flames whipped by wind. Orchestrally, this is perhaps the most expressive moment. The brief return to the Iliad, which follows, is thus put into context, like a look back on values one might no longer share. When the final movement returns to graphic depictions of the Somme, the connection is made between wars long past and more recent. Resolution, of a sort comes, where the chorus sings, followed by a wonderful but brief figure for oboe, and a brief resurgence of the pounding motif from the beginning. Muffled percussion, muted brass, the mens' voices singing with restraint, as if heard from afar, the women's voices almost spectral.  Yet again the orchestra up, martial music cloaked with menace. Yet a wayward melody emerges and the voices grow stronger and at last, a measure of serenity at the end.    

 

Elgar, Bliss The Beatitudes Andrew Davis BBCSO Barbican

At the Barbican, London, Andrew Davis conducted the BBCSO in Elgar Enigma Variations and Arthur Bliss The Beatitudes.  A red-letter day for British music fans, because Davis  is a superb conductor of British repertoire.  His insights into Bliss's Beatitudes were thus eagerly anticipated. If anyone can make a case for the piece, it is he.  After an expansive performance of the Enigma Variations, I was expecting great things.  The Beatitudes is an ambitious work,  scored for large orchestra, soloists, choir and cathedral-scale organ, so an expansive approach would, in theory, breathe life into the piece. The background to the piece and its reception has been repeated so  many times that you could fill an entire review regurgitating the details without having to mention too much about the music.  In short, The Beatitudes was commissioned for the consecration of the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962 and given top billing over and above Britten's War Requiem, the "other" commission.  For reasons still unexplained, it was discreetly shunted aside. The premiere took place in a nearby theatre and was not well received.

Whatever may have happened in Coventry in 1962, it simply isn't true that The Beatitudes was forgotten.  Shortly afterwards, it was performed in a proper Cathedral setting at Gloucester during the Three Choirs Festival, which alone should have ensured its reputation. Bliss conducted and the singing, being the Three Choirs Festival, must have been good.  Bliss also  conducted it himself at the Proms in 1964, another ultra high profile event, with no expense spared.  The BBC SO performed with the immortal Heather Harper, a host of choirs and of course the formidable Royal Albert Hall organ. This was commercially  released five years ago.  There have been other performances, including one at Coventry Cathedral a few years ago conducted by Paul Daniel.   The piece isn't a mystery waiting to be discovered.  Unfortunately, British music is schismatic. Many still can't forgive Britten for being an outsider.  All the more reasons then to engage with The Beatitudes  on its own merits, rather than just blaming its lack of success on fashion and taste.  Sixty years later, we should be mature enough to evaluate the piece on its own terms without pettiness and special pleading.  Bliss is an important composer, who created masterpieces like Morning Heroes. Read more about that HERE when Andrew Davis conducted it with the BBCSO at the Barbican.    

Coventry Cathedral was bombed during the wear, so it's rebuilding was a symbolic act of hope. Memories of the war were still fresh, so Britten was taking risks by not condemning Germans. But perhaps people then knew about war first hand, they realized that working towards peace is a much greater challenge.  The Beatitudes of Jesus, as recounted in the New Testament, address the basic concepts of Christianity. Tonight, the Pope reiterated these fundamentals at Fatima:  "Mercy, not judgement".  Fundamentalists who misconstrue "Blessed are the poor", maybe aren't Christian.  Bliss's Beatitudes presents texts arranged by Christopher Hassell interspersed with settings of seven poems, from the  Prophet Isaiah to 17th century poets like George Herbert to Dylan Thomas. This allows him to expand the scope, making more of the idea of conflict implicit in the Ninth Beatitude, "Blessed are you when men shall revile you", which could be interpreted as relevant to the idea of war though it in fact refers to persecution of the apostles and those faithful to a radical new faith.  Bliss connects the Sermon on the Mount to the Mount of Olives to Easter and to the Crucifixion.   Bliss's Beatitudes are thus a mediation on struggle, illustrated by the strident, almost dissonant music in the Prelude and the Voices of the Mob.  Contrasts are violently dramatic. Loud tutti climaxes but tiny figures (often strings or woodwind) flit past. The soloists (Emily Birsan and Ben Johnson) rise from the massed forces behind them.  The BBC Chorus in good form.  The Beatitudes has the ambience of a great epic saga, with a cast of thousands - what great film music this could have been, with moral absolutes in clear black and white!

Superb performances all round, good enough that it wasn't such a loss that the Barbican organ isn't as huge as, say, Coventry Cathedral's, But, in a way, I was glad that Davies focussed on the music itself, rather than going in for histrionic effects,  He's conducted another Beatitudes - Elgar's The Apostles.  That, too, was conceived on a grand scale with over a hundred choristers, many soloists and a big orchestra.  But perhaps the key to The Apostles (and to The Kingdom) lies in its connection to The Dream of Gerontius.which follows one man's journey from physical life to the life everlasting. In The Apostles the followers of Jesus are about to go into the world, alone, spreading the new gospel in hostile situations.  Hence the inherent contradiction  between their mission, and overblown Edwardian public declarations of Christianity.  Elgar is a master of large form, but his faith, in a loose, non-denominational sense, is fundamentally personal and humanistic.  Not for nothing did he write the Enigma Variations, with its cryptic humour and deliberately non-dogmatic warmth of spirit.  Please read what I wrote about Davis's Elgar Apostles with the BBC SO at the Barbican with Jacques Imbrailo in 2014.  Part of the reason The Apostles and The Kingdom aren't programmed non-stop is because their charms lie not in bombast, but in humility.

Bliss's competition wasn't Britten, but Elgar, and Elgar wins hands down.  The Beatitudes has good moments but it's no masterpiece. Jesus's Beatitudes stress simplicity and the meekness which comes from genuine humility.  The apostles got their reward in heaven, but earned it.  No sense of entitlement, nor self pity, victimhood, or bitterness. Resentments  are values of self, not selflessness.  Tonight, the Pope, who probably has more status than any of us, spoke of respect and compassion.  Though surrounded by thousands, with a big organization behind him,  he cut a frail, humble figure. Now there's a man who knows what The Beatitudes of Jesus mean.  

"Humility and tenderness are not virtues of the weak but of the strong, who need not treat others poorly in order to feel important themselves"  Full text of the Pope's speech at Fatima HERE