Etruscan Concerto
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476 3222 PEGGY GLANVILLE-HICKS etruscan concerto TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA As a still relatively young nation, Australia could composing that they had no option but to go be considered fortunate to have collected so away. Equally true, relatively few of our few notable dead composers! For most of the composing women flourished ‘abroad’ for long, 20th century, almost every composer we could though Tasmanian Katharine Parker (Longford- claim was very much alive. Yet, sadly, this did born and Grainger protégée) did, and Melburnian not stop us from losing track of some of our Peggy Glanville-Hicks is the notable other. Peggy Glanville-Hicks 1912-1990 most talented, who went away and stayed Indeed, Edward Cole’s notes for the 1956 away, as did Percy Grainger and Arthur Benjamin American first recording of her Etruscan Etruscan Concerto [15’17] (the only Australian composer blacklisted by Concerto make the unique claim: ‘Peggy 1 I. Promenade 4’05 Goebbels), or returned too late, like Don Banks. Glanville-Hicks is the exception to the rule that 2 II. Meditation 7’26 And we are now rediscovering many other women composers do not measure up to the 3 III. Scherzo 3’46 interesting stay-aways, like George Clutsam (not standards set in the field by men.’ Caroline Almonte piano just the arranger of Lilac Time), Ernest Hutchinson, John Gough (Launceston-born, like Talented Australian women of Glanville-Hicks’ 4 Sappho – Final Scene 7’42 Peter Sculthorpe) and Hubert Clifford. generation hardly lacked precedent for going Deborah Riedel soprano Meanwhile, among those who valiantly toiled abroad, as Sutherland, Rofe and Hyde all did for away at home, we are at last realising that a while, with such exemplars as Nellie Melba 5 Tragic Celebration 15’34 names like Roy Agnew, John Antill and David and Florence Austral! Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ Letters from Morocco [14’16] Ahern might not just be of local interest, but piano teacher was former Melba accompanist 6 I. Wind, water, birds and animals 3’19 reasonably take their place at the head of any Leonora Amadio, first wife of the flautist John. 7 II. Man is hated in the Sahara 1’23 roster of composing ‘dead white males’. And when John’s second wife Florence Austral 8 III. There are concerts here 2’54 returned in triumph from Europe in June 1930, Even more so than for men, settler Australia’s 9 IV. I have found a new candy 1’39 The Argus listed the 17-year-old Peggy among short musical past is remarkable for its roll-call 0 V. The streets smell of orange-blossom 1’53 the students of Fritz Hart’s Albert Street of significant females: Margaret Sutherland ! VI. Sometimes at that hour there are drums 2’04 Conservatorium at her welcome-home concert. (perhaps our greatest deceased composer of @ VII. Toward sundown 1’04 either sex), Miriam Hyde, Dulcie Holland, Iris de Two years later, on 2 June 1932, as The Argus Gerald English tenor LIVE RECORDING Cairos-Rego, Esther Rofe, Marjorie Hesse, Linda reported the next day, ‘the friends of Miss Total Playing Time 52’57 Phillips, Ina Mornement, Phyllis Batchelor... The Peggy Glanville Hicks arranged a complimentary list goes on, and on. It’s been argued, of course, concert for her before her departure for Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra that women were left to do the hard yards at England.’ These friends included Bernard Heinze Richard Mills conductor home between the wars, precisely because and Fritz Hart, the latter conducting the yet-to-be 6 @ Antony Walker conductor - Australia so actively discouraged its men from hyphenated Peggy and the Melbourne 2 3 Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s D-minor Piano unperformed opera Caedmon (1933-36) and the Through a new friend, poet–composer Paul from the texts as to stand in high relief from the Concerto. The anonymous reviewer praised her orchestral Prelude based upon it, a lost piano Bowles, she was eventually appointed deputy to accompaniment. She drew the words from ‘graceful musical sense’ and equivocated concerto (1936), and a Spanish Suite (1935) music reviewer Virgil Thomson on The Herald letters written to her by Bowles, now living in judiciously that ‘if her compositions appeared to later reworked as the exquisite Three Tribune. For the next two decades she was a Morocco, arranged into the six songs she set, lack any pronounced feeling for either rhythmical Gymnopédies (1953). fixture in New York’s new music scene. As and a seventh that she found ‘too beautiful, so or thematic development, they were pleasantly Thomson recalled: ‘She managed concerts; she Later, on a travelling scholarship shared with near to music in itself that it resented the atmospheric,’ the first of a set of three piano ran everybody’s errands; she went on lecture fellow composer and future husband Stanley addition of notes.’ They were premiered by preludes especially showing ‘a well-developed tours...she made her own clothes’! He also Bate, she went to Vienna, only to bail out of the William Hess with Leopold Stokowski grasp of the Debussy idiom’. claimed she wrote ‘a great deal of music’, but composition lessons Vaughan Williams wanted conducting, on 22 February 1953 at the her frantic schedule meant that she seldom Her supporter late in life, and author of one of her to take with Egon Wellesz (later Sculthorpe’s Museum of Modern Art. The waspish Olin completed more than one work a year. Her three (soon to be four) published Peggy teacher). Most of 1937-38 they spent in Paris Downes called the music ‘conventionally first really important American score was the Glanville-Hicks biographies, James Murdoch studying with Nadia Boulanger. She also oriental’; but Richard RePass, writing later in Concertino da Camera (1946); of its believed her family’s genteel poverty resumed contact there with expat Melbourne performance at the 1948 ISCM Amsterdam the UK Musical Times, noted more helpfully predisposed the socially mobile Peggy to take socialite Louise Hanson-Dyer, whose Lyrebird Festival, Humphrey Searle noted it was that Glanville-Hicks had set Bowles’ ‘florid ‘the common escape – to eccentricity’ and Press published a quartet of Glanville-Hicks’ ‘charming and expertly written’. It was followed descriptions of Moroccan nights to a composing. Luckily, her English-born teacher early songs, including her lovely setting of by the luminous Sonata for Harp (1950) – correspondingly florid, melismatic vocal line, Fritz Hart, friend of Holst and Coleridge-Taylor Fletcher’s Come Sleep. At Dyer’s prompting, in according to Marshall McGuire, ‘one of the while the accompaniment throbs with bizarre (both represented on her 1930 farewell program) 1932 Glanville-Hicks had made some choral outstanding works of its genre of the 20th rhythms and rich instrumental effects.’ was as ‘real’ a composer as she could have settings of poems by Sydney Bulletin journalist century’ – and the concerto-like Sonata for encountered anywhere, let alone Melbourne. David McKee Wright, but she returned to Perhaps the one major Peggy Glanville-Hicks Fletcher texts for her Choral Suite of 1937. The Piano and Percussion (1951). Later in London, Glanville-Hicks’ instructors at work that could be described as truly Australian BBC Singers performed it at the 1938 London the Royal College of Music included Constant Decades earlier, Fritz Hart had instilled in was the Sinfonia da Pacifica, which she began ISCM Festival (Dyer later issued a recording Lambert (son of the Australian painter George) Glanville-Hicks the craft of vital word setting. writing on board ship when she paid a visit conducted by Adrian Boult), though reviewer and Malcolm Sargent, and for piano, Arthur Already in 1930, the reviewer at her Melbourne home in 1952, and completed the following year Alan Frank realised that the settings were ‘so Benjamin, who began teaching Benjamin Britten farewell singled out the vocal items, ‘in each while staying in Jamaica, befriended there by slight that it would be unfair to judge this young in the same year. (Britten, said Glanville-Hicks, case interestingly conceived’, as possibly too Australian’s talent from them.’ the Australian biologist Theo Flynn, former introduced her to the music of Stravinsky.) In confronting and modern in this respect, Hobart professor and father of actor Errol. 1933, on a college scholarship, she began After war was declared in 1939, Glanville-Hicks ‘lack[ing] emotional co-ordination between the It was intended for the Australian symphony composition lessons with the teacher she later returned to Australia, but the almost total lack of melodic line...and the curiously perfunctory orchestras and conductor Bernard Heinze, who remembered most fondly, Ralph Vaughan professional opportunities for composers forced piano accompaniments.’ In her Letters from often called on Glanville-Hicks when he was in Williams. Her works of these years include a her and Bate, by 1941, to move on to the United Morocco (1952) for tenor and small orchestra, New York. It was finally recorded by the Symphonietta (1934) for small orchestra, an States. The couple separated in New York. the vocal line seems to emanate so directly Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in 1993. 4 5 The Sinfonia da Pacifica was followed by the Thereafter Glanville-Hicks developed further her choreographed by John Butler, broadcast finally only through the generosity of friends like Anaïs Concertino antico (1955) for solo harp and string musical interest in exotic places. In 1956 she by CBS on 6 November 1966 (with Glenn Tetley Nin that she could afford major surgery to quartet, and the Concerto romantico (1956) for composed music for a United Nations film, as Jephthah). Butler was by then one of remove a brain tumour early in 1967. As viola player Walter Trampler; the Concerto’s African Story (1956), and in 1957 two works that Glanville-Hicks’ closest friends; they’d first biographer James Murdoch reflected: ‘And so elegiac slow movement is one of the most reveal her fascination with pre-Columbian worked together on a ballet for the 1958 Spoleto Peggy lived.