Internal Landscapes : Bax, Vaughan Williams - Brabbins, BBCSO

Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. at the Barbican in Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony no 4 and Arnold Bax November Woods   A good combination which had the potential to yield  interesting insights in musical terms. So why does BBC Radio 3 management need to market this as "Remembering World War I" ? Neither piece has  anything to do with war.  Alas, BBC R3 seems hell bent on prioritizing non-musical agendas over music, to meet non-musical targets. Long term, this policy of dumbing down destroys real musical understanding. Better to treat audiences as adults who aren't afraid to think or listen.

Both Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony and Bax's November Woods are explorations of ideas that aren't so easy to put in prose : "internal landscapes" so to speak, that find expression in sounds and musical form.  November Woods (1917) isn't about forests per se but forests as metaphors for emotion    It's worth quoting Bax's (non-symphonic) poem Amersham, as the programme book does :

Storm, a mad painter's brush, swept sky and land
with burning signs of beauty and despair
And once rain scourged through shrivelling wood and brake,
And in our hearts tears stung, and the old ache
Was more than any God would have us bear. 

Here the musical forces were in the fore, the orchestra voicing whatever inner storm Bax might have sought to address. The introduction seems to surge and strain, driven by fast-flowing strings, lit by flashes of woodwinds and harp, darkened by violas, celli, oboe and bassoons.  A theme energes, first from cor anglais, then more boldly by horn and then oboe and cello : a duality which could suggest many things, but is part of the very conception. Themes cool and warm, creating flux, but there's no easy resolution. The coda was hushed, mysterious, open-ended.  November Woods is much more "modern" than you'd expect, connecting in this sense to other works of the period.

photo : Jules Barbieri

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony no 4 in F minor (1931-4) received an astonishing performance from Brabbins and the BBCSO. In the Barbican Hall, the impact was spectacular. Though BBC broadcasts are usually good, on air this one was lifeless, giving no sense of occasion.  "I don't like the work itself much",  RVW told Sir Henry Wood, but it is undoubtedly a very fine piece. Good music "exists" by its own creative volition : it's not manufactured to preconceived specifications like a consumer product.  As the composer was later to write "I do think it beautiful...because we know that beauty can come from unbeautiful things".  The introduction on this occasion exploded with extreme but controlled force. Although this fanfare is shocking, it does connect to other aspects of the composer’s work.  At times I was reminded of the figure in the Antiphon in Five Mystical Songs which is relevant, since "The Church with psalms must shout....My God and King ". Vaughan Williams, who knew the Bible and Messianic traditions, understood the concept of forces so powerful that they cannot be constrained.  Pounding ostinato, trumpets (with Biblical signifigance) ablaze, trombones and tuba adding depth.  The theme isn't meant to be soothing. It could reflect the "terrible beauty" from the Book of Job Ch 37, 17-22, though there is nothing religious about this symphony. The references merely serve to indicate that a cataclysm of some sort is being unleashed : no other connotations.

More brass in the second movement, marked andante moderato, but this time more restrained, the strings of the BBCSO murmuring en masse, from which the woodwind line rose, moving ever upwards.  A sense of unease : tense pizzicato creating a fragile though regular beat. The flute melody, exquisitely played, had a poignant quality: painfully alone but unbowed.  Wildness returned with the third movement, brass pounding, trombones creating long zig-zag lines. For a moment the tuba leads a trio with grunting bassoons. The term "scherzo" means "joke" but the humour here is darkly ironic. This colours the sprightly theme which follows : it's not escapist.  With the figure I called "My God and King" the overwhelming thrust of the first movement returns, angular dissonances flying in all directions, clod-hopping ostinato suggesting grotesque horror. Again, no resolution, no easy answers. Perhaps we can guess why RVW dedicated it to Bax.

The contrast with the intensity and sheer musical quality of Vaughan Williams's symphony put Cheryl Frances-Hoad's Last Man Standing into place.  This is a big work, running as long as the symphony, and was served up with lighting effects, props and a shower of objects which might be poppies, and co-ordinated dresses for composer and text writer.  The piece was specially commissioned to mark the 1914-1918 war.  But there is a lot more to war than pretty images.  Much of the problem lies in the text, 15 verses on aspects of life in the trenches, by Tamsin Collison.  Frances-Coad's setting illustrates well but is more sound effects than music.  Entertaining enough, and certainly not mentally or emotionally challenging. But war is not entertainment. and never should be trivialized.  We know, or should by now know, what it was like in the trenches, but no sign here of any reflection or personal insight.  The baritone soloist, Marcus Farnsworth, did his best, as did the orchestra, but this piece bore all the signs of music-made-to-order.  Millions died and suffered in the Great War, which re-shaped the whole world.  To what avail ? 

Requiem : The Pity of War - Bostridge Pappano

"Requiem: the Pity of War with Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano.  The inspiration came from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which Bostridge has done numerous times. Britten's War Requiem," he writes "seems to express in art Winston Churchill's notion of the 1914-18 conflict as the initiator of the 20th century's own Thirty Years War" since it spans the First and Second World Wars, blending the poetry of Wilfred Owen, poet of the trenches and the spirit of reconciliation that motivated the commission marking the  rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Thus the quotation from Owen, "My subject is War, and the Pity of War". "How might one reflect the experience and significance of the conflict" writes Bostridge "in a song recital ?". The answer might be this excellent programme, with interesting repertoire choices and approaches to more familiar material. Bostridge and Pappano, whose partnership is long and fruiful, are doing this recital live at the Barbican Hall on December 5th. The recording, from Warner Classics, is now available, well produced with good illustrations.

Bostridge and Pappano begin with George Butterworth's Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, perhaps th best known English song cycle with a connection to war, given that Butterworth  was killed in the Somme in August 1916.  Housman's poems were published in 1896 : the war they pertain to might  be the Boer War, or colonial wars, but the connotations are not specifically military. They deal with more generalized concepts of youth and death, impermanence and loss.  Even though Butterworth collected folk song, a quasi-folk song approach doesn't necessarily apply.  Bostridge and Pappano demonstrate an art song approach, which may at first seem unsettling, but works on a more esoteric level  In "When I was One and Twenty" the last words "'tis true, 'tis true" are held open ended, suggesting possibilities beyond text. If the dynamic lines in "Look not into mine Eyes" are more extreme than usual, this emphasizes the unease that lies behind the poem : the lad "that many loved in vain" does not reveal himself, to anyone. "A Jonquil, not a Grecian Lad". "Is my team ploughing" feels decidedly supernatural.

This disc is worth getting, though for a superlative performance of Rudi Stephan’s song cycle Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied. Stephan was an extremely promising composer as his best-known works, the two Musik für Orkester in einem Satz attest, his opera Der ersten Mensch being a prototype of Expressionist music theatre.  The six songs in this cycle, to poems by Gerda von Robertus (1873-1939) inhabit a world much closer to aesthetics of the period when exoticism was heightened  by an awareness of the dangers of the subconcious.  The poems are terse aphorisms, Stephan's settings concise. The nearest equivalent might be Alban Berg's Altenberg-Lieder, also from the same period (1911-12) In "Kythera", "Der Rosen Düfte liebeatmend schwingen in welchen Weilen" while the sound of aoelian harps drifts from afar. The setting floats gently, held sotto voce.  In "Pantherlied" the piano line ripples, suggesting pent-up animal energy.  The text in "Abendfrieden" is little more than a series of broken phrases which Stephan uses to create a song so delicate that it seems to hover in stillness. This oscillation occurs also in individual words like "Sonnenfeuer" which need careful shaping, but Bostridge captures the right vulnerabilty.  "In Nachbars Garten duftet" describes a linden tree, which shivers "dammerlauschig kühl". Yet this is no pastoral. Lovers embrace, but why do the poet's eyes "overflow in burning pain"?  The song is as magical as a song by Hugo Wolf, but with a kick in the tail.  The mood of secrecy continues in "Glück zu Zweien" where "in the hubbub of the crowd, we found the silence of shared feeling".  The vocal line stretches and curls, twining like "Zwei Könige wir, die finden das Reich ihrer Einsamkeiten". Throughout this cycle, tension has been building up, which finds release in the final song "Das Hohelied der Nacht". Yet again Stephan observes the fragmented nature of the phrases,  using them to proceed rapidly to the last line "Du küsst es mir vom Munde", which rises like a cry of sudden triumph.  These songs are miniature masterpieces and are done reasonably often, but Bostridge brings out the inner musical logic better than anyone else, with his intuitive feel for meaning and the curling, curving timbre of his voice.  Incidentally,  Stephan died in strange circumstances. The night before he died, he could not sleep, surrounded by the agonized cries of the wounded all around.  In the early hours of the morning, he stood upright in his trench at Tarnopol in Galicia on the Eastern Front, and shouted  "Ich halte es nicht aus!" and was promptly shot by a sniper.  He was barely 28.  

From the sophistication of Rudi Stephan to the relative straightforwardness of Kurt Weill's Four Walt Whitman Songs.  Bostridge varies the marching rhythms in "Beat ! Beat ! The Drums" with articulation that twists in protest. If  "Captain ! My captain !" is a strophic ballad, "Come up from the Fields, my Father, there's a letter" is dramatic, delivered here with appropriate portent.  The military antecedents of "The Dirge for Two Veterans" are impeccable. Gustav Holst set this text ("The Last Sunbeam") in 1914, and it was also set by Vaughan Williams (in Dona Nobis Pacem).  Weill wrote these songs after Pearl Harbor, when the United States joined the Second World War.  Like Britten's War Requiem, they help this Bostridge and Pappano programme bridge two World Wars.   
Three songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn conclude the programme. Again, these are not folk songs, but art songs.  Significantly, the songs chosen here are ghost songs, which suit a singer who is a superlative Peter Quint. In "Revelge", skeletons march through a town at night, and "Der Tambourg'sell" is a death knell, Pappano's piano "drumming" as Bostridge's voice rises to near-scream before descending to the low rumble of the refrain "Gute Nacht".  Best of all, though, is "Wo die Schöne Trompeten blasen" where Bostridge and Pappano capture the spookiness that pervades the song even before the girl knows what's going on. She, too, will die before the year is over.

Stanford Mass Via Victrix premiere, Partington, BBC NOW.

Charles Villiers Stanford's Mass Via Victrix, resurrected and edited by Jeremy Dibble, with Adrian Partington conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.  This world premiere will get a lot of attention since Stanford has become fashionable in recent years, so it's sure to be well received.   Completed in December 1919, it is  inscribed with the Latin translation of a line from Psalm 66, "Transiverunt per ignem et aquam et eduxsisti in refrigerium",  which means "We went through fire and through water; But You brought us out to rich fulfillment.". Since Stanford and his contemporaries knew their Bible well, it is worth reading the psalm in full. (link here)  because the psalm is not a hymn of mourning but a song of triumph.  

Even more pointedly, the psalm is about power  that cannot be questioned.  "How awesome are Your works! Through the greatness of Your power. Your enemies shall submit themselves to You" And "He rules by His power forever; His eyes observe the nations;Do not let the rebellious exalt themselves".  Which is fair enough as God is omnipotent, but soldiers killed in battle, no matter how heroic they were, are men, not gods : they cannot be conflated in the same terms.  So savage was the 1914-1918 war that everyone had some connection to those who were killed, maimed or bereaved, and by 1919 it would have become obvious that the configuration of Europe was irretrievably changed. Many had been mourning for years. 

It is not enough to take this Mass at face value. The title is explicit "Via Victrix" - the "Way of the Victor".  This is no personal expression, but a public statement  taking pride in the idea that Might is Right.  Perhaps that's why the piece didn't fit the mood of those post-war years, when millions were numb with grief,  with no taste for the bullying belligerence that led to war in the first place.

Stanford's Mass Via Victrix is a Mass, more or less following the format established long before the Reformation.  Religion does not come into it as a means of musical expression : many composers who have written Requiems weren't devout and no doubt a good few were only Christian by social convention.  Stanford would certainly have known  Brahms German Requiem.  Because Msses operate in sequence they provide internal structure and colour.  Introits are processionals,  Dies Iraes are turbulent, Sanctus's are reflective, Pie Jesu's are plaintive.  And the ultimate goal is always the same : redemption.  Thus variations are built into any Mass, obeying the shifting liturgical balance.  Stanford follows the form faithfully, alternating outbursts of volume with moments of restraint.  Each section is elaborately orchestrated, maximizing impact and drama,  making the piece impressive. Ultimately, though, a Requiem recognizes that man is mortal, and that God alone brings victory over death.  Humility is of the essence !  Not that that has hindered some much loved Requiems, full of ego and show.  I don't think we should assume either way that bluster and piety are incompatible.  Stanford must have been very pleased with himself.  The assertive certainities of this Mass are comforting to live with in our modern world, which seems to be growing infinitely more divisve and extreme.  Perhaps the popular mood has shifted again, as it did in the years after 1918, and the time has come for a Mass Via Victrix, as long as you are on the right side.  As music, Stanford's Mass Via Victrix is rousing stuff,  easy to march along with, and should prove popular, triumphalist or not, though one should caution against calling it a major masterpiece.  Certainly, a performance executed with gusto, from Partington, BBC NOW and soloists Kiandra Howarth, Jess Dandy, Ruairi Bowen and Gareth Brynmor John. 



Frederick Septimus Kelly's Elegy for Strings, In Memoriam Rupert Brooke provided an interesting counterpoint : achingly poignant and sincere, the smaller ensemble and tight orchestration allowing  intimacy.   Although Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin may have been included in this programme to extend the war memorial aspect to France, the piece is more than a set oif portraits of departed friends.  It is every bit as much a homage to French style, and to the vigour of the dance forms defining it.  The programme began with Ernest Farrar's Rhapsody No 1 "The Open Road" , Op 9 (1908). Ostensibly the connection is that Farrar, who was killed in the Somme after having survived Gallipolli, was a student of Stanford, but so was practically everyone else. Farrar's piece is very original,  imbued with a free-wheeling spirit.Vaguely  Scottish cadences suggest wide open spaces,  away from constrained civilization.  What might Farrar have gone on to had he lived ? Would he, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, have continued his musical adventures exposed to the brave new world of Ravel et al ?

Wilfred Owen, Dunsden Green - a personal memoir

Wilfred Owen died 100 years ago, but his poetry has made him immortal.  But what shaped Owen's personality, and his singular art ? Unlike Siegfried Sassoon, who recognized Owen's potential when Owen was a gauche nobody, Owen didn't come from an elite background.  Owen's parents were not well off, not poor but not secure. After many years moving from place to place they ended up in a two-up two-down Victorian terrace, now facing a downmarket shopping mall on a rough estate.  Nonetheless, for years the tenants hung hanging baskets outside, a display so colourful that the houses were a local landmark.  Owen's parents and sister are buried in All Saints Church in Dunsden Green, (pictured above) a few miles away, where Owen served as lay assistant to the Vicar from 1911 to February 1913.  That connection must have meant a lot to them.  Inside the Church, there's a memorial plaque on the wall in Wilfred's honour. 

Owen himself might not have been quite so genteel. Though the Vicarage where he stayed was luxurious (it's a local landmark, too), many of the people of the parish were desperately poor, living in overcrowded hovels, employed seasonally, often insecure. Disease speads quickly when people are overworked and underfed.   Owen used to visit  these tenements and must have been well aware of the contrasts between the Vicar's life and the lives of those in his parish.  Whenver he had the opportunity, he'd walk miles into town, visiting a bookshop for "modern" literature, different fare no doubt to what was in the vicar's library.  The route he walked is pretty much as it was then, despite the traffic. Until recently, you could still see painted signs on buildings advertising hay and coal.  The hovels are now renovated,  some of them weekend homes for the rich from London. The thatched pub at Binfield Heath, which Owen would have known, but was probably not allowed to visit, dates from 1300 and served travellers taking sheep and cattle to market. 

On 15th October 1912, one of the villagers, John Allen, set off to a new job in Maidenhead :  a  step up in the world, away from rural slums.   Full of hope and anticipation, the family loaded up a horse cart with their belongings and set off to their new life.   On the way to Playhatch, the road becomes extremely steep : even in a modern car, you notice the gears change.  A huge sofa - a status symbol - shifted and tipped the cart over, killing Mrs Allen and her daughter. The Allens are buried in the chucrhyard at All Saint's, too. Owen assisted at the funeral. This shook whatever faith Owen might have felt in the church, and in the social order.  It compounded an emotional crisis, which he resolved by getting as far away as possible, to France, where he had no connections.  And so,Owen's distinctive personality was moulded, long before the trenches and the Somme.  Below, the  poem he wrote about the Allens's tragedy,  Deep Under Turfy Grass. 

Deep under turfy grass and heavy clay 

They laid her bruisèd body, and the child 

Poor victims of a swift mischance were they, 

Adown Death’s trapdoor suddenly beguiled.

I, weeping not, as others, but heart-wild, 

Affirmed to Heaven that even Love’s fierce flame 

Must fail beneath the chill of this cold shame. 

So I rebelled, scorning and mocking such 

As had the ignorant callousness to wed 

On altar steps long frozen by the touch 

Of stretcher after stretcher of our dead. 

Love’s blindness is too terrible, I said; 

I will go counsel men, and show what bin

The harvest of their homes is gathered in.

But as I spoke, came many children nigh, 

Hurrying lightly o’er the village green; 

Methought too lightly, for they came to spy

Into their playmate’s bed terrene. 

They clustered round; some wondered what might mean 

Rich-odoured flowers so whelmed in fetid earth; 

While some Death’s riddle guessed ere that of Birth. 

And there stood one Child with them, whose pale brows 

Wore beauty like our mother Eve’s;whom seeing, 

I could not choose but undo all my vows,

And cry that it were well that human

 Being
And Birth and Death should be, just for the freeing 

Of one such face from Chaos’ murky womb, 

For Hell’s reprieve is worth not this one bloom.
 

SOMM Remembrance - Choral music by Ireland Holst Parry Elgar

From SOMM, In remembrance, marking the end of the 1914-1918 war, choral music with organ accompaniment by Ireland, Holst, Parry, Elgar, Fauré and Venables  with the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, conducted by William Vann. In pride of place, Sir C Hubert Parry's Jerusalem, so deeply embedded in the British national consciousness that it has taken on new life as an icon of popular culture, adopted and adapted to many different situations. The text, by William Blake, is visionary, but its meaning is subtle "And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?". For Blake, writing in the Industrial Revolution, the answer was "not yet". "I shall not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem in Englsnd's green & pleasant land".  The piece was commissioned by an organization set up in 1915 to raise morale.   The version on this reciording is Parry's original, premiered at Queen's Hall in March 1916, with 300 volunteer singers accompanied by organ, (here played by Hugh Rowlands), not the more famous orchestration made by Sir Edward Elgar in 1922.  The emphasis in this version is on the unison choir, and the balance of male and female voices, an important consideration given that Parry was soon disillusioned by the growing jingoism of the Fight for Right movement and pointedly withdrew his support.  By then the song had been taken up by the Women's Suffrage movement, of which Maude Parry was a member. Parry was delighted, "I wish indeed that it might become Women Voter's Hymn", he wrote, "......and having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy, too."


This Jerusalem is thus positioned between the words from the Bible, and a text associated with the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war.   In Greater Love Hath No Man, Johnn Ireland sets the crucial phrase for solo baritone (Gareth Brynmor John), "that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness". Ireland was writing in 1912, before the onset of war, when the sacrifice meant Christian sacrifice. Jesus died for all men (and women) regardless of place and time.  For the Fallen, reflects the way the message adapted after the impact of war.  The piece was written in 1971 by Dougas Guest (born 1916).  Though much of Laurence Binyon's original is belligerent, Guest, who served in the Second World War, sets only one verse, placing emphasis on the sombre, humbling line the words "We shall we remember them".

Sir Edward Elgar's setting of They are at Rest, to a text by John Henry Newman, is an elegy marking the ninth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria, while O Valiant Hearts by Charles Harris, a friend of Elgar, is a postwar reflection on loss. I Vow to thee, My country is Gustav Holst's adaptation of Jupiter in The Planets as the anthem. Its serenity links earthly death with concepts of eternal life, on another plane.  Holst's Ode to Death is heard here transcribed for choir and organ (James Orford), as is Gabriel Fauré's Requiem in D minor arranged by Iain Farrington.   Ian Venables's Requiem Aeternum  (2017) completes the set, a timely reminder that death is a part of the cycle of life.
Please also see my review of Earth & Sky - choral works by Ralph Vaughan Willaims, also conducted by William Vann, for Albion Records.

Andrew Davis - Elgar Spirit of England, Raymond Yiu The World Was Once All Miracle.

When Sir Andrew Davis conducts Elgar, it's always an occasion, but this concert  at the Barbican, London, was much more special than most.  Davis conducted the BBCSO in Elgar's Spirit of England, op 80  (1916), which captures the exuberant spirit of England at the start of the First World War.  This was the highlight of a well-conceived programme where the multiple connections between the pieces enhanced the whole. Spirit of England was preceded by Lilian Elkington's Out of the Mist (1921), a bleak reminder of what war really means.  The programme began with Elgar's Starlight Express (1916) a jolly jaunt for children, which may parallel the high spirits of adults who didn't realize where the war would lead, but also worked well with Raymond Yiu's The World Was Once all Miracle, bringing out its inventive personality, while anchoring it in tradition.   A hundred years separate Elgar and Raymond Yiu, but the spirit of creativity shines bright and true.

Elgar's Spirit of England is so powerful that it draws you into its glorious self confidence  even though we now know where jingoistic bluster can lead.  But for a moment we're spellbound by the sheer extravagance of the piece.  Drums roll, strings surge and the BBC Symphony Chorus explode.  Andrew Staples's voice rose heroically above the wall of sound. "Spirit of England, go before us !"    The orchestral writing sets a pulse which supports the chorus, where male and female voices sing alternating lines. This creates an interflow suggesting vast, turbulent forces. Staples shaped the magnificent line "We step from days/ of sour divison/ into the grandeur of our Fate", each key word meticulously articulated, the last word "Fate" ringing out like a clarion.  Staples’s enunciation was sharp, consonants crisp, much more idiomatic than the other three tenors I've heard in this piece in recent years. The English tenor style, at its best, brings out the edge in the language hinting at hidden undercurrents : what really is the unshakeable soul of "divinely suffering man"?   This does matter, since Elgar may well have seen the circumstances more acutely than did the populist poet.

In contrast to the first section "The Fourth of August", the second section "ToWomen" is more restrained.  While the tenor line was integrated with chorus and orchestra, it now stands almost alone.  Phrases like "like a flame" and "boundless night" fly upward from the line, Staples emphasizing them with flourish.  A melancholy violin passage introduces a much darker mood.   "For the Fallen" is funeral ,procession but proceeds forward with relentless surge, Davis marking the throbbing undertow in the orchestra. The choral line with its clipped, almost staccato tension, evoked, perhaps gunfire.  The woodwind figure, followed by low-timbred strings, was particularly moving.  "We shall remember them", sang Staples, his voice carrying above the chorus and orchestra.  "To the end, to the end, they remain".  Hearing Lilian Elkington's Out of the Mist before Spirit of England  intensified the sombre mood with which "For the Fallen" ends.

The title Out of the Mist refers to the heavy fog that hung over the Channel when the ship carrying the body of the Unknown Soldier arrived back in England.  Lilian Elkington's response in music, was dignified and elegaic.  The piece runs just under 8 minutes, but is ambitiously scored for large ensemble . It begins mysteriously : one can imagine the ship materializing in port, out of the mists, docking and unloading the coffin,which was then taken to Westminster Abbey, where it remains today. The Unknown Soldier is "home" at last, carrying with him , symbolically, the memory of millions of others who would never return.  Thus, Out of the Mist ends with transcendent brightness, as if the Unknown Soldier and the men and women he stands for are bathed in glory.  The BBC SO recorded this piece some years ago, but this performance with Andrew Davis was far more,powerful. (For more about Lilian Elkington, please read HERE)

Elgar's Starlight Express was written in the midst of war, but is cheerfully escapist. Life goes on and morale needs boosting.  The extracts chosen for this performance displays the liveliness of Elgar's writing. The music is genuinely free spirited, with no trace of condescension towards a youthful audience.  Elgar even quotes the Christmas carol, The First Noel, decorating it with bells and cymbalds. The soloists were Roderick Williams and Emma Tring.  Incidentally, I have never seen so many kids in an evening performance before, several as young as 7 or 8.  I counted more than 20, and that was just around me.

Elgar is the biggest gun in British music. That Raymond Yiu's The World Was Once all Miracle was able to stand up to such competition says something.  Perhaps that's because Yiu's musical personality is highly individual.  The World Was Once all Miracle unfolds in six sections like a puzzle book, each piece reflecting a different aspect of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.  Yiu's settings are delightfully perverse. "Sick ! Sick ! Sick !" sang Roderick Williams "sick of sycophantic singing".   Jerky, quirky staccato in the orchestra, percussion like exclamation points, almost lyrical flights of fancy, tiny sparkling figures and exceptionally witty writing for voice.  Williams has an unequalled gift for singing with a naturalness thatn communicates like conversation, yet can also shape phrases and colour words bringing out their intrinsic musical character.  Spooky chords in the strings set the mood for the song "For we were all caught in the shame of sleep".  Williams curled his tongue round words, relishing their flavour as sound.  "Forgive us untempered for the day", a play on prayer, against a backdrop of hollow metallic bells.  

Burgess's texts, with their oddball wordgames and images, lend themselves well to Yiu's style. The vocal line curves and meanders in "You were there, and nothing was said" where wooden percussion suddenly gives way to deep booming sound. The next song "I have raised and poised a fiddle" writhes, jokily mocking  the phrase "the music of the spheres". The orchestra then sounds at once exotic (like gamelan) and sleazy, like jazz.  "One looks for Eden in history, best left unvisited", sang Williams, "While the delicate filthy hand dabbles and dabbles, but leaves the river clean, heartbreakingly clean". The last song "Useless to hope to hold off" mimics nonchalant nightclub patter - echoes of bongo drums - then suddenly breaks off into tantalizing silence.  Raymond Yiu's music defies stereotypes, always playful, always elusive.  The World Was Once all Miracle has the advantage of being as concise as haiku, tightly constructed but hinting at greater mysteries.  Please read my piece Why I couldn't write up Raymond Yiu's Symphony til now here).

Photo: Roger Thomas

Decode this pic

This year Easter coincides with April Fool.  Who are these babes who've popped out of the Easter Egg, on the battlefront in 1918? Alsace and Lorraine.  And what's the significance of the Fish ?

Christ and chocolate in the Trenches

The Ghosts of Christmases Past

Joan of Arc, they are calling you !

Today marks the 586th anniversary of the death of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake. This year also marks the centenary of the song Joan of Arc, They are Calling You, used in a Broadway musical. Presumably the show was patriotic, since the United States entered the First World War, on the side of the French, in April 1917.

The composer was Jack Wells, also known as John Barnes Wells (1880-1935), a tenor who appeared in music hall and on early recordings.  He was involved with the famous 1903 production of The Wizard of Oz, though in what capacity, I don't know. A composite recording is available on the market.  This Wizard of Oz is apparently a lot closer to the original L Frank Baum novel than the Hollywood movie with Judy Garland (one of my favourite films of all time).  As music, the song has references to the Marsellaise but sugared up. The song is too naive to represent the fearless Marianne.  Listen to that refrain "Joan of Arc ! Joan of Arc! ".As if she were a boulevardier ! The words are by Alfred Bryan and Willie Weston. The text is such doggerel, it would be offensive if the reality had not been so serious.  But then, that sort of sentimentality was popular taste 100 years ago, and the intentions were sincere.. Please see my numerous other posts on Joan of Arc  (Braunfels, Honneger, Dreyer etc) by clicking on the label Joan of Arc below.

While you are sleeping
Your France is weeping
Wake from your dreams, Maid of France !
Her heart is bleeding, are you unheeding,
Come with the flame in your glance !
Through the gates of heaven, with your sword in hand,
Come your legions to command.

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Do your eyes, from the skies, see the foe?
Don't you see the drooping fleur-de-lis
Can't you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Let your spirit guide us through.
Come lead your France to victory;
Joan of Arc, they are calling you !

Alsace is sighing, Lorraine is crying,
Their Mother France looks to you
Persons at Verdun, bearing the burden
Pray for your coming anew
At the gates of heaven, do they bar your way?
Those that passed through yesterday.

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc........

"

Chandos British Tone Poems Vol 1 - Rumon Gamba Gurney Gardiner

First in a new series of recordings of British orchestral repertoire, British Tone Poems vol 1 from Chandos, featuring Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire Rhapsody, with Rumon Gamba conducting the BBC Nationl Orchestra of Wales."What Gurney orchestral music?" one might have asked some years ago, since until only very recently, Gurney was primarily known for his songs for voice and piano  Fortunately, from manuscripts in the Gurney archives, three "new" pieces have been prepared for performance, the Gloucestershire Rhapsody, The Trumpet and the superlative War Elegy, which received its BBC Proms premiere in 2014 (Please read what I wrote about that here).

Gurney's Gloucestershire Rhapsody was written between 1919, on Gurney's return fro 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.  This new recording for Chandos with Rumon Gamba and the BBC NOW is significant because it's the first formal recording, recorded  in Cardiff in September 2016. It's much more polished than the earlier recording on the BBC's own budget label of a Glasgow concert in 2012, with David Parry and the BBC NOW. Gamba lets the music breathe: 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.

This disc also features new recordings of Frederic Austin's Spring, William Alwyn's Blackdown, Granville Bantock's The Witch of Atlas  and Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Solent  – refreshing readings that do not duplicate previous versions, and together form a very useful, coherent collection: a traverse through the British landscape, in sound.  Also included is the world premiere recording of Henry Balfour Gardiner's A Berkshire Idyll.  A sparkling Adagio lit by harps leads to a woodwind melody developed further by violins, with expansive legato.  The second section is tranquil yet agile. Firm, exuberant chords dance confidently into an andante where a solo violin takes up the melody, which is then shadowed by darkness, from which the theme re-emerges. into an adagio quasi andante,  resolving opposing moods in peaceful harmony. The piece was inspired by Ashampstead, which is still rural, though it's just north of the M4 and just south of the main road from Reading to Oxford.  Perhaps the terrain preserves it. As music, A Berkshire Idyll preserves a dream of peace, which was to be shattered the year after it was written by the declaration of war. Gardiner had studied in Frankfurt, so possibly was more affected than might be obvious. He ceased writing music in 1925, though he lived happily thereafter - no tragic Gurney, he.  A Berkshire Idyll is beautiful and will live on.  Gardiner died only in 1950 : his grand nephew is Sir John Eliot Gardiner. 

Nodding and Laughing....Not !

photo: Phillip Halling

His thoughts dropped back Through eighteen years, and he again saw Jack 

At the old home beneath the Malvern hills, A little fellow plucking daffodils,

A little fellow who could scarcely walk, Yet chuckling as he snapped each juicy stalk

And held up every yellow bloom to smell, Poking his tiny nose into the bell

And sniffing the fresh scent, and chuckling still As though he'd secrets with each daffodil.

Ay, he could see again the little fellow In his blue frock among that laughing yellow,

And plovers in their sheeny black and white Flirting and tumbling in the morning light

About his curly head: he still could see, Shutting his eyes, as plain as plain could be,

Drift upon drift those long-dead daffodils Against the far green of the Malvern hills,

Nodding and laughing round his little lad, As if to see him happy made them glad

— Nodding and laughing ...

They were nodding now, The daffodils, and laughing — yet somehow

They didn't seem so merry now
 ... And he

Was fighting in a bloody trench maybe
 For very life this minute

... They missed Jack, And he would give them all to have him back.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962)  "Daffodils"

photo : Roger Thomas

1916 Hanukkah Germans, Armenian Christians

German troops at the front 1916

Armenian Christians, Christmas 1916, in the midst of the Armenian Genocide
Read more HERE

Berge in Flammen : Mountains in flames

Berge in Flammen, Mountains on Fire -  Bergfilm, art film, and war film, conceived and directed By Luis Trenker (1892-1990).  You'd think, from English language media, that 1914-1918 happened only on the western front. Not so! Millions died on the eastern front and in the south, in the Alps. All the more reason for watching Berge in Flammen, set in the Dolomites during the war of attrition that ran almost non stop from 1915 to 1917.  Imagine, trenches in mountains way above the snowline,dug into permafrost, cut off from supply lines.

Largely filmed on location,  the camera crew were themselves  skilled mountaineers - some of these shots would have been technically difficult to carry off.  Yet Berge in Flammen is an astonishingly beautiful film, a symphony of high peaks, snowfields and rockwalls,  shot from dizzying, expressionist angles.  Nature as poetry, dwarfing the silly battles below.  Global warming and safety regulations probably mean that films like this can't be made again. In any case, the South Tyrol depicted here is largely memory, but that, too, is a reason for seeing this film and appreciating its message. Not for nothing is this film bilingual, and those involved in the making thereof, a mix of Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen and Italians. Very much the "can do" camaraderie of the mountains. Some of the camera crew were not only climbers but also actors.

An idyllic beginning. Florian Dimal (Luis Trenker) and Arthur Franchini (Luigi Serventi) help each other up a rockstack.  They're free climbing, using only ropes, no helmets, no fancy modern gear.  But in the valley below, the church bells ring, It's August 1914. Franz Josef, the Emperor, has announced war. Florian and Arthur end up on different sides. Fantastic shots of life in underground caves and trenches tunneled through metres of snow.  Rickety ladders up steep slopes. Constant bombardment and with that, rock falls. Not many "special effects" in this filming. When the men trek through snow up to their hips, they're not acting. Bergfilme audiences knew about mountains and the technical aspects of climbing . 

Machine guns on precipices, hand grenades thrown by men clinging to ledges. Barbed wire and frozen bodies.  A sentry goes snow blind in a storm, frozen to the sandbags he was guarding. At one stage an officer with binoculars watches the action. The man at his shoulder is shot by a sniper. The officer keeps talking, unaware that his companion is dead.  Soldiers scale vertical cliffs, using mechanical drills to place explosives or maximum damage.  It doesn't take much to set off an  avalanches .And avalanches happen all the time. Most Bergfilme include shots of skiers in mass formation, but those here are particularly impressive because the men wear white coats with hoods, moving like apparitions.  The snowfields on glaciers are as spectacular as the cliffs and peaks.

Meanwhile, Florian's village has been occupied by the Italians.  Florian's home is billeted but the soldiers friendly. "Farina!"  says an Italian. "Mehl" says Pia, Florian's wife.  Florian is sent out alone, in secret on reconnaissance.  But he can't stay.  Crawling back up to the summit, during an enemy barrage, he's shot at by his own men, though is saved. The fortress is dynamited :  the whole peak explodes.  Twenty years later, Florian and Arthur (from Rome) ascend the mountains again, over the old battlefield. A vista of the Twin peaks of the Dolomites. They sit happily, together, no need for words.  The soundtrack, incidentally is very good, as modern as the cinematography.  The composer was Giuseppe Becci.

BBC on the Somme Delius Requiem, In Parenthesis and more

Like poppies sprouting from ravaged farmland, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme  has yielded a crop of music.  Some healthy plants,  some weeds. Frederick Delius's Requiem was the culminating point of last night's commemorative concert with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Adrian Partington.  Delius's Requiem was dismissed in its own time, even by his strongest advocates. We can hear why: it's not pastoral, not Requiem-like  and quite un-English. In the triumphant confidence that followed Britain's victory over Germany, Delius's vision of Nietzsche must have seemed a bizarre anachronism.  Perhaps now we've seen what happened to Europe, and to Britain, in the century that followed, we can better appreciate its quirky iconoclasm.  Partington let the piece unfold on its own terms. The Mass of Life fits more easily into grand choral tradition, but the Requiem is wilder and crazier, less prolix and more focused.  Although there are several classic recordings of Delius's Requiem, this one comes at a time when we can better appreciate its context, and value its individuality. Mark Stone sang with forceful conviction, yet also managed to suggest the wayward edginess that makes this piece so individual.  With its shimmering chromatics, the finale suggests a Debussy New Dawn, reminding us how cosmopolitan Delius really was.  Even the instrumentation harks forward - celeste, harp and glockenspiel.   Perfectly appropriate, given that this Requiem is more about the future than the past.  Incidentally, check out Mark Stone's recordings of the complete songs for voice and piano HERE  and HERE.

Also on Partington's BBC NOW concert, Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody,  Albert Roussel  Pour une fête de printemps, Herbert Howells' beautiful Elegy for String quartet, Viola and Orchestra.  (Philip Dukes, soloist). and the slow second movement of Gordon Jacob's First Symphony, written in memory of his brother, killed in 1916.  Jacob (1895-1984) conducted this movement himself at the Three Choirs Festival in 1934. It's hard to judge anything by a fragment like this, but the piece is worth hearing  as part of a wider programme in memorial.   Howells'Elegy, for example, sounds even more distinctive in comparison. 

Also yesterday a concert of choral songs by Parry, Gurney, Holst, W Denis Browne, Cras  and Reger with the BBC Singers conducted by Paul Brough. Two new pieces too, Colin Skinner's Before Action, setting a poem by William Noel Hodgson,who was killed on the first day of the battle of the Somme, and David Bednall's Three Songs of Remembrance.   The BBC also re-broadcast earler concerts such as Arthur Bliss Morning Heroes -with Andrew Davis (my review here) and Cecil Coles Behind the Lines  with Martyn Brabbins (my review here) 

Tonight the BBC broadcasts Iain Bell's In Parenthesis.  You can watch the full video here on Opera Platform.  Everything about this new opera presses the right buttons - it's topical,  it's patriotic, since it sets a poem by the Welsh composer  David Jones who fought in the First World War, and it's non-demanding, despite the subject.  Guaranteed to attract funding and commissions.  Except that, as music and as drama it's not very good.  Jones's poem is mystical and elegaic . Could one do justice setting The Waste Land as narrative?  The opera doesn't much engage with insight, but unfolds in a series of numbers, much like a musical. A bit like Oh what a Lovely War without  punch.  It does  however do what it says in the title "in parenthesis" , nice punctuation but blank between the brackets.
 

The Battle of the Somme - was it in vain ?

The Battle of the Somme began one hundred years ago today. An offensive that destroyed more than a million men, not counting other lives blighted by their loss., sacrificed for six miles of ruined farmland.  And what have we learned ?  The French and Germans took heed. The European Union is an unprecedented symbol that there could be alternatives to war.  Of course it's not perfect. But consider what might happen if it is torn apart ?  Extremists, whether ISIS or Neo Nazi have plenty to look forward to if the EU collapses.  So much for "taking control". By whom, how and for what purpose ? Hstory will repeat, lest we forget.

Read THIS TOO   !Nationalism is once again stalking Europe, there is no shortage of potential flashpoints, and the safety net is fraying"

C H Sorley A Swift Radiant Morning - Roderick Williams

Roderick Williams and Susie Allan  gave the world premiere of A Swift Radiant Morning commissioned for theThree Choirs Festival. Listen here, because it's an interesting work that extends the canon of British song. "A swift radiant morning" aptly describes Charles Hamilton Sorley, a young man of outstanding promise, killed by a sniper at Loos, seven months short of his 21st birthday.  At that age, few fulfil their potential, but  C H Sorley must have been quite a personality.  In this photo he stares at the camera without flinching, unfazed by the knowledge that he was going to war.  We can see why Sorley's father said "he looked upon the world with clear eyes , and the surface did not deceive him".
 
Sorley was in Trier when war was declared in 1914. On his return to England, he did his duty and joined the Suffolk Regiment . Yet in his poem To Germany, he writes of war with maturity way beyond his years. The poem is worth reading because it shows his inner strength. He could resist the hate games around him.  This lucid intelligence marks him out as a person with vision. Notice too his direct, yet highly distinctive, way with words. How he would have relished the freedoms of the 1920's and 1930's. Many good poets were destroyed by war - Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney, but John Masefield said that Sorley was the greatest loss.

In A Swift Radiant Morning, Rhian Samuel (b 1944) sets two poems and four texts by Sorley, which has a bearing on her musical conception. Sorley left only 37 complete poems, but a large body of letters. They make fascinating reading, since Sorley was an acute observer and processed ideas with great originality.  Here's a link to the full collection of letters published in 1916. Letters are like a conversation, where one party speaks and the other responds. The voice leads, but the piano comments, unobtrusively. Sorley's texts are so expressive that the piano can't quite compete, but that's no demerit.  Samuel respects Sorley's syntax and turns of phrase, editing the longer texts with sensitivity.    Roderick Williams is an ideal interpreter, since he has the uncanny ability to make what he sings feel personal and direct. A natural match for CH Sorley !  At times, Samuel forces the voice above its natural range. Williams manages extremely well, but I wonder if this cycle could be transposed for tenor.  A Swift Radiant Morning is a well-crafted, sensitive work which deserves attention, and not just because the subject himself was so singular. I've subscribed to a source which features a lot of Rhian Samuel's work. Lots worth listening to.

At Hereford, Roderick Williams and Susie Allan also did Tim Torry's The Face of Grief (2003) to poems by Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) but the setting is minimal and the poems not  in the same league as Sorley's.  Please also read my piece on the rest of Roderick Williams's  recital, which highlighted Elgar's Sea Pictures, in the piano version, transposed for baritone. 

Male Elgar Sea Pictures : Roderick Williams Three Choirs Festival

At the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford last year,  Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but with typical flair, Roderick Williams and Susie Allan  presented them with a difference.  Listen here on BBC Radio 3

Williams started with RVW Four Last Songs. Divest oneself of notions of  Richard Strauss.  RVW's songs aren't nearly such masterpieces,  but a loose compilation of ideas left unfinished upon the composer's death. Procris is based on a poem by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Menelaus on the Odyssey. The last two last poems are more personal .The contemplative mood of Tired suggests a man assessing his past without rancour, and Hands, eyes and heart suggests inward, private emotions. Stylistically, they connect more to very early RVW, even pre-Ravel RVW, than to his finest works, but are still worth hearing, especially for English song specialists. I first heard them from the Ludlow English Song Weekend in May 2015.

Elgar is an essential feature of the Three Choirs Festival, which this year takes place in Gloucester.  But large-scale Elgar, rarely Elgar piano song.  Again, Roderick Williams to the rescue ! Elgar's  Sea Pictures  is usually heard with full orchestra, though Elgar himself transcribed the piano song version, and played it privately.  Elgar's art songs  are somewhat eclipsed by the fame of RVW, Quilter, Butterworth et al,  for in many ways they hark back to an earlier era.

Sea Pictures, however, was conceived with grand orchestral flourish, so this version is rather more than Elgar's other songs for voice and piano. Sea Pictures is also mezzo and contralto territory, so hearing it with a baritone makes it even more unusual.  Most of us are imprinted with memories of Janet Baker singing  "Yet, I the mother mild, hush thee, O my child" but the mother figure in the poem fades as the vision of Elfin Land emerges. The lower tessitura suits the last strophes, where  "Sea sounds, like violins"  lead the descent into slumber.  The maritime references in Sabbath Morning at Sea become more prominent: most sailors in Elgar's time were male, after all. The piano part in this song is distinctively Elgarian.  When RW sings "He shall assist me to look higher", you can almost feel the ship's sails billow in the wind.  A male voice works best with The Swimmer and its muscular, athletic swagger: very macho.  A pity that the BBC miked the piano too closely. When I heard Williams sing Sea Pictures in recital at the Oxford Lieder Festival with  Andrew West  five years ago, the balance was much more natural.

Coming up soon, from the same concert last year, two settings of texts by lesser-known poets of the First World War.  Rhian Samuel's A Swift Radiant Morning, (2015)  a setting of five poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Marlborough man who died, aged only 20, at the Battle of Loos in October 1915 and Tim Torry's The Voice of Grief (2003), settings of Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

Hubert Parry and the Battle of Jutland

Commemorations this weekend for the Battle of Jutland, which took place 100 years ago this week.  The British navy seemed invincible, Admiral Jellicoe tipped to become the Nelson of his age.  The Dreadnoughts were the largest warships ever built, and the Battle of Jutland was the biggest  naval skirmish in European history. With the Army bogged down in the Somme, the Royal Navy was to claim spectacular victory.  Above, the warships sailing in neat, textbook formation., guns blazing. What went wrong ? So much had been invested in superstructure that simple, human procedures were overlooked.  Below decks, the men loading the guns had so little space to manoeuvre that they cut corners.  When the munitions stores ignited, the ships exploded and sank rapidly.  In the midst of war, the government had to maintain that Jutland was a victory. This week, the Royal Navy announced the building of vast new aircraft carriers that "will make enemies think twice about starting war". (more here)  But the very nature of warfare has changed, as the Russians discovered in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam.  We only need to follow the news. On the open seas, where there is no cover and no fallback position, it might not be a good idea to concentrate resources in one place.  On the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, should we reflect ?

Charles Hubert Parry's The Chivalry of the Sea - a Naval Ode, was written for a concert on December 12th 1916, commemorating the 6,000 men who died on the night of 31st May and 1st June. The text, by Robert Bridges, is dedicated to Charles Fisher, a graduate of and don at Christ Church, Oxford, a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who went down with HMS Invincible when it blew up. The photo below shows the Invincible as it sank, with Fisher and 1,025 men. We don't see the massive plume of smoke, captured in other photos. The ship is already part submerged.

Bridges' text might glorify sacrifice. But as Lewis Foreman has said, Parry was a born sailor, "never happier than when running before a prevailing wind", sailing in his small two-master even to Ireland.  A sailor knows the sea and has no illusions about its power.  Parry's Chivalry of  the Sea begins in the depths with a sonorous undertow from which the brighter "chivalry" theme emerges for a moment, soon dissipating like foam on waves, whose strong undercurrents emerge again in a long passage in the midst of the verse.  The orchestral surge continues behind the lines "Over the warring waters".  No question here who's really boss.

The second verse, in which Bridges describes the "staunch and valiant hearted" who eagerly rush to war, is set with conventional brightness,  bright and eager, but Parry repeats the word "war" three times to Bridges' single instance, lest we think the men are off on jolly jaunts.  In the final verse, Parry has the measure of the occasion. The "surging waves" in the orchestra return, and the mood is more doleful.   "in the storm of battle, fast-thundering upon the foe, ye add your kindred names  to the heroes of long ago, and mid the blasting wrack, in the glad sudden death  of the brave....ye lie in your unvisited graves".   Although the choral setting is lush - the voice of the masses - Parry sets the word "sudden" with a chill. Perhaps he intuited the horror of Jutland. At least those blown to atoms at Jutland didn't suffer long.  But some of them were little more than children. Please read the comment below - Parry's godson was one of the only 6 survivors of The Invincible.  The young man's other godfather was Richard Wagner, no less !

Another Unknown Soldier - Lilian Elkington

For my review of the Andrew Davis BBC SO concert featuring Elgar, Lilian Elkington and Raymond Yiu, please see HERE. On International Women's Day, I'd like to remember another Unknown Soldier, Lillian Elkington (1901-69), of whose music so little is known that even her own daughter didn't know she was a composer until an interviewer contacted her.  Perhaps more can be traced through Census information. I'll leave that to intrepid archivists. There's bound to be something.

What little we do know about her comes from Lewis Foreman, who wrote the notes for the first recording of Elkington's Out of the Mist (1921), the score of which was discovered in a second-hand shop in Worthing, presumably inadvertently dispersed with her effects after her death. Elkington studied with Granville Bantock in Birmingham, and some of her works were heard in recital at the time. On her marriage (unknown date and place) she gave up her career altogether: unfortunately not such an unusual situation in those days.  Alma Mahler apologists should take note. All the more respect to the many women who did continue their careers, and to those who couldn't and are forgotten.

The title Out of the Mist refers to the heavy mist that hung over the Channel when the ship carrying the body of the Unknown Soldier arrived back in England.  I have no idea whether Elkington saw the event, or whether she read about it in the papers or saw newsreels. Her response, in this music, was dignified and elegaic.  The piece runs just under 8 minutes, but is ambitiously scored for large ensemble . It begins mysteriously : one can imagine the ship materializing in port, out of the mists, docking and unloading the coffin,which was then ceremoniously taken, by carriage, to rest in Westminster Abbey, as seen in the photo above. The Unknown Soldier is "home" at last, carrying with him , symbolically, the memory of millions of other who would never return.  Thus,Out of the Mist ends with transcendent brightness, as if the Unknown Soldier and the men and women he stands for are bathed in glory.

Although we only know Elkington through this one piece, it, too, stands symbolically, for the work she might have done had she lived in a different era, and for the works other women may have written which have been forgotten,  and for those who,like the soldiers of 1914-1918, were never able to fulfil their potential.  Fortunately for us, Out of the Mist is preserved on the seminally important recording on Dutton, where top billing goes to a superb Elgar Spirit of England.. in the first recording of the version for twovoices. This CD also includes the first recording of Philip Lancaster's performing edition of Ivor Gurney's War Elegy (1921) and also F S Kelly's Elegy for Strings  In Memoriam Rupert Brooke and Charles Hubert Parry's The Chivalry of the Sea.  I've written about Elgar's Spirit of England HERE and HERE and about Gurney's War Elegy HERE. 

The information above comes from Lewis Foreman's notes to the 2006 Dutton recording.  As I thought, there's more recent research, from Pam Blevins'  Maud Powell website on women in music :

"There is an excellent article in the Maud Powell Signature mag on Lilian Elkington by David Brown (the guy who found her stuff in the Worthing bookshop). This fills in a lot of the gaps you refer to and means they are not gaps. Seems she definitely did compose at least a bit after her marriage. And we only have the word of her daughter that she stopped (the daughter who didn't even realise she had composed at all so how would she know? Other works might have gone missing)."

http://www.maudpowell.org/signature/Portals/0/pdfs/signature/Signature_Autumn_2008.pdf

The article is at page 45 of this PDF:

From a reader of mine 
 "Daughter also says, though, that Lilian born in 1900 not the widely said 1901. Daughter says Sep 15 1900. I can confirm from BMD records that birth was registered in the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter of 1900 (in Birmingham).I have also found her in 1911 census aged 10 (which would be right cos her 11th birthday is after the April census day) Her father was a "coffin furniture manufacturer". Interesting! "