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Home , Arthur Bliss, Rae Woodland

SRCD.225 STEREO ADD BlissCONDUCTSBliss SIR (1891 - 1975) 1 Mêlée Fantasque (1921 rev. 1937 & 1965) (13’06”) Mêlée Fantasque 2 Rout for Orchestra and Soprano (1920) (7’24”) Rout - Suite (1946) Adam Zero (Excerpts) 3 II Dance of Spring (2’49”) 4 IV Bridal Ceremony (2’17”) Hymn to Apollo 5 V Dance of Summer (3’48”) Serenade 6 Hymn to Apollo (1928 rev. 1965) (10’23”) (conducted by Brian Priestman) Serenade for Orchestra and Baritone (1929)† (25’52”) The World is charged 7 I Overture: The Serenader (8’30”) with the grandeur of God 8 II ‘Fair is my Love’ (4’52”) (conducted by Philip Ledger) 9 III Idyll (7’24”) 10 IV ‘Tune on my Pipe the praises of my Love’ (5’06”) London Symphony Orchestra The World is charged with the grandeur of God (1969)* (13’31”) LSO Wind and Brass Ensemble 11 I ‘The World is charged with the grandeur of God’ (5’22”) Ambrosian Singers 12 II ‘I have desired to go’ (3’18”) 13 III ‘Look at the Stars’ (4’51”) John Shirley-Quirk (79’13”) Rae Woodland, soprano • John Shirley-Quirk, baritone London Symphony Orchestra LSO Wind and Brass Ensemble • Ambrosian Singers* Sir Arthur Bliss • Brian Priestman† • Philip Ledger*

The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one after the end.

ൿ 1971 The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. This compilation and the digital remastering ൿ 1992 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. © 1992 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Lyrita is a registered trade mark. Made in the UK LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX, UK travinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) is generally thought of as the principal gateway into 20th Because the Holy Ghost over the bent Scentury (tonal) extremism, but in fact Petrushka (1911) reverberated further, wider and World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. longer. Hardly any up-and-coming composer in any country remained untouched by it. England was no exception. Diaghilev brought Petrushka to London, first in February 1913 to II I have desired to go Where springs not fail, House (with Nijinsky dancing the name-part) and again, after the war, in May To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail 1919, to the Alhambra. According to Osbert Sitwell, the first pre-war performance ‘presented And a few lilies blow. the European contemporary generation with a prophetic and dramatised version of the fate And I have asked to be reserved for it . . . the music, traditional yet original, full of fire and genius, complication and Where no storms come, essential simplicity, held up a mirror in which man could see, not only himself, but the angel Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, and ape equally prisoned within his skin’. And out of the swing of the sea. Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, Bax, Ireland, Eugene Goossens, Constant Lambert and all belong to the Petrushka generation in England; they were not all III Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! marked to the same degree, but many did find the Franco-Russian style of orchestration (as The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! represented by Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel and Stravinsky) a seductively spicy and glittery Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! alternative to the Anglo-German tradition which Elgar had been inculcating. It is probably The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! hard for us today to appreciate the extraordinary impact on English audiences of these early Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Diaghilev performances. They thrilled and liberated: nothing of their like had ever been Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! – experienced before, nor would it be again. Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. The young Arthur Bliss, perhaps, fell a more willing victim than anyone inasmuch as his Buy then! bid then!–What?–Prayer, patience, alms, vows. interest in the theatre - particularly in ballet - was passionate from the start. He would not Look, look: A May-mess, like on orchard boughs! produce his first formal ballet-score - - for a number of years (1937), but a balletic Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! element (i.e. a Russian-balletic element) is everywhere to be sensed before. The Mêlée These are indeed the barn; withindoors house Fantasque is a case in point. It has no scenario per se, but the implied sequence of the actions The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse and episodes, and the characteristic types of musical gesture by which they are articulated and Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. (Look!) enlivened, all suggest a balletic point de depart, however imaginary. It was composed in memory of Claude Lovat Fraser, ‘a painter passionately devoted to the theatre. Designs for sets www.lyrita.co.uk and costumes, in beautiful colours, poured from his brush.Whenever I visited his studio I found Note © 1992 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England him at work, however many visitors were there, and round the walls were hundreds of his The original recordings of Serenade, Rout, Hymn to Apollo and The World is charged with the grandeur of imaginative sketches. His wife, Grace, was a brilliant and vital personality, overflowing with God were sponsored by The Performing Right Society as a tribute to commemorate the 80th Birthday of exciting ideas and plans for the future, and the possessor of a fine soprano voice…’ (Bliss). He the composer on 2.8.71 when a copy of the LP was presented to Sir Arthur during a was only 32 when he died, the last work for the theatre he designed being a production of Holst’s Promenade Concert at The Royal Albert Hall, London. Savitri which Bliss conducted. Mêlée Fantasque is both a depiction of the theatre Fraser loved Copyright Lyrita photo of Sir Arthur Bliss by DAVID FARRELL - all its brilliance and bustle - and a lament for his loss. Bliss himself conducted the première Design by KEITH HENSBY The poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins are published by Oxford University Press during the 1921 autumn season of Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts. It was Lovat Fraser’s wife, Grace, whose dramatic singing made Rout the success it was; WARNING Copyright subsists in all Lyrita Recordings. Any unauthorised broadcasting. public and Claude himself who provided a striking cover-design (predominantly pink and pale green performance, copying, rental or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an with black background and occasional streaks and dashes of white) which Faber/Curwen infringement of such copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public reproduced in their 1985 reissue of the score. Rout was the last of three ‘experimental’ works performance may be obtained from Phonographic Performance Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London, W1F 9DE 2 7 When I begin to sing, begin to sound, for voice and chamber orchestra, the others being Madame Noy and Rhapsody. In Rout - the Sounds’ loud and shrill, term is used in the sense of popular revelry - Bliss wanted to evoke the sound of a carnival Do make each note unto the skies rebound, overheard at a distance; he gave the soprano (musically just part of the orchestra) a medley of Skies calm and still, made-up words to sing, scraps of song of the kind that might reach a listener watching from an With Daphnis’ praise. open window. And ‘carnival’, for Bliss, evidently meant Petrushka - what else? - his debt to Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night, which, from the first bars, he makes no attempt to conceal. Why should he? The idea, the Night dark and dead, Or as the stars that give the seamen light, concept, of Rout is experimental: not the music itself, the language of which is strongly melodic Light for to lead and colourful. Their wandering ships. The Petrushka connection would scarcely have been lost on Diaghilev, at whose invitation Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye, Bliss rescored the piece for symphony orchestra (as opposed to 10 solo instruments) so that it Scarlet blood-red; could be played as an Interlude during performances of the Russian Ballet. Bliss records this Teeth white as snow which on the hills doth lie, revised version here. Hills overspread Adam Zero (1946) was the third of Bliss’ full-length ballet scores, and scenically the most By winter’s force. ambitious. It was an allegory of the cycle of man’s life: his birth, his passage through the spring, Her skin as soft as is the finest silk, summer, autumn and winter of his existence, and his death. The world in which he lives was Silk soft and fine, represented by a stage on which a ballet was being created. Adam was cast for the principal Of colour like unto the whitest milk, dancer’s role; Omnipotence was represented by the Stage Director, and Adam’s Fates by the Milk of the kine Designer,Wardrobe Mistress and Dresser.The Woman in this allegory, under the symbol of the Of Daphnis’ herd. Choreographer, was both the creator and destroyer of Adam: his first love, his wife, his As swift of foot as is the pretty roe, mistress, and finally the figure of beneficent Death. Adam was danced by Helpmann, but an Roe swift of pace, When yelping hounds pursue her to and fro, early injury forced him - and, thereby, the ballet - off the stage. A composer is unlucky in that Hounds fierce in chase, if a film or ballet fails his music is somehow perceived as a failure as well. In the case of Adam To reave her life. Zero this is patently unjust. Bliss himself considered it his ‘most varied and exciting’ ballet Cease tongues to tell of any more compares, score, and the listener should know that the three excerpts recorded here are fully Compares too rude, representative of the remainder. Daphnis’ deserts and beauty are too rare: The Hymn to Apollo is another piece with an implied programmatic donnée. However Then here conclude Bliss revealed little of what it was apart from the fact that this - his - Apollo was ‘the God of the Fair Daphnis’ praise. healing art - Apollo Latromantis, physician and seer’.There is, perhaps, one further clue. Lady I The World is charged with the grandeur of God, Bliss tells us that across the first page of the manuscript Bliss wrote in Greek the following It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; quotation from the Phaedrus: It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.Why do men then now not reck his rod? But he who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the same man disappears And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the inspired madman. And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. Has, we wonder, some breath of the ‘Muses’ madness’ blown across this strange work? And for all this, nature is never spent; Bliss called it a ‘short invocation’: but the climax comes in a blaze of such dramatic power that There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; ‘apotheosis’ might be a better term. The form is that of a slow processional in which we may And though the last lights off the black West went well hear expressed - eloquently - the succeeding emotions of suffering and supplication, Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – strength and nobility dispensed, gratitude and peace-of-mind restored. 6 3 Written in 1926, it was first given in that year by and the Concertgebouw The first, titled “Musica Juventutis:The Teenager”, had music by Mozart, Schubert, Oliver Orchestra of Amsterdam. In 1964 Bliss rescored and otherwise revised it, and this is the version Knussen, Britten, and Mendelssohn; the other, “Musica Senectutis: that he recorded. The Over-Seventies”, brought together works by Haydn, Schutz, Faure and Verdi, whose The official designation of the Serenade is not ‘for baritone and orchestra’ but ‘for orchestra illustrious company Bliss was asked to join by contributing a work using the forces available for and baritone’; and the fact is that the orchestra is the protagonist in a work to which the vocal the programme. The words for the , by Gerard Manley Hopkins, were chosen by Peter soloist makes an important contribution. Bliss was not by nature a ‘vocal’ composer in the Pears, to whom it is dedicated. The first and third sections (‘The World is charged with the sense of having grown up within the English choral tradition: which means, as often as not, grandeur of God’ and ‘Look at the stars!’) are set for mixed chorus and brass choir of three starting musical life in an organ loft or in quires and places where they sing. His choral and trumpets and four trombones; while the middle section (‘I have desired to go’) is for women’s vocal writing tends to be instrumental in character - which doesn’t mean that it sounds un- voices only, accompanied by two flutes. vocal, any more than the instrumental writing of composers like Howells and Vaughan Philip Ledger conducted the Instrumental and Choral Ensembles at the Williams, which is derived from voices, sounds un - instrumental! first performance, which took place on 27 June at Blythburgh Church, because of the disastrous However we (or the composer) decide to categorize it, the Serenade is one of Bliss’ happiest fire, which had gutted the Maltings on the first night of the Festival. inspirations. By now (1929) it is ‘pure’ Bliss, all traces of models and influences perfectly assimilated. We know this Bliss very well- the orchestra flashes and crackles, rhythms dance and leap (tranquillity never absolute); chords, in avoiding the bland or commonplace, ‘Fair is my Love’ (Sonnet LXXXI Amoretti: Edmund Spenser) continually (and congenially) confound expectation. And though the idea of the Serenade came Fair is my Love, when her fair golden hairs to Bliss as he sat in a gallery looking at a picture (a Fragonard?) in which a pleasure-loving With the loose wind ye waving chance to mark; group frolicked in a romantic 18th-century garden with temples and grottoes; though he found Fair, when the rose in her red cheeks appears; his texts in 16th and 17th-century poetry; yet, beyond the flick of a dance-rhythm here and the Or in her eyes the fire of love does spark. ghost of an old-time cadence there, the world of Bliss’ lovers is the world of today. Or rather - Fair, when her breast, like a rich-laden bark, and here lies the particular charm and magic of the Serenade - it is a world of any time, With precious merchandise she forth doth lay; anywhere. Where there are words the music fits them like a glove and creates a pervasive Fair, when that cloud of pride, which oft doth dark Her goodly light; with smiles she drives away. atmosphere of happiness and harmony. The two instrumental movements, the Overture ‘The Gallant’, and the ‘Idyll’ - both of But fairest she, when so she doth display The gate with pearls and rubies richly dight, elaborate and exquisite workmanship - depict, respectively, the lover and his beloved. The Through which her words so wise do make their way former, says Bliss - the Serenader - is a ‘somewhat swashbuckling and cocksure fellow’; perhaps To bear the message of her gentle sprite. Bliss himself as an ardent young man was something like this. If he was, we could readily The rest be works of nature’s wonderment: assume the third movement, the ‘Idyll’ - But this the work of hearts’ astonishment. ‘Tune on my pipe the praises of my Love’ (Sir J.Wotton) And thus our delightful hours Tune on my pipe the praises of my Love, Full of waking dreams shall pass Love fair and bright; - to be a portrait of the dedicatee of the Serenade, his wife.The two vocal movements speak or Fill earth with sound, and airy heavens above, rather sing for themselves; but notice the suggestion of strumming, serenading guitars in the Heavens Jove’s delight, first, and, in the second, fair Daphnis depicted (according to ancient classical tradition) as a With Daphnis’ praise. virtuoso flautist. To pleasant Tempe groves and plains about, Of The World is charged with the grandeur of God Lady Bliss writes that ‘it was Plains shepherds’ pride, commissioned by for one of two contrasted concerts planned for the 1969 Resounding echoes of her praise ring out, Aldeburgh Festival. Ring far and wide My Daphnis’ praise.

4 5 BLISS: MÊLÉE FANTASQUE • ROUT SOLOISTS • AMBROSIAN • LSO LYRITA HYMN TO APOLLO • SERENADE BLISS • PRIESTMAN • LEDGER SRCD.225 after the end. (7’24”) (10’23”) (13’31”) (25’52”) (13’06”) SRCD.225 (79’13”) STEREO ADD * (1969) (1891 - 1975) (1891 • Philip Ledger* † (1929)† (1920) (1946) 1992 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Edition, Recorded 1992 Lyrita (1921 rev. 1937 & 1965) (1921 rev. London Symphony Orchestra London Symphony (1928 rev. 1965) (1928 rev. ൿ SIR ARTHUR BLISS Sir Arthur Bliss • BrianSir Priestman LSO Wind and Brass Ensemble • Ambrosian Singers* • and Brass Ensemble Wind LSO Rae Woodland, Shirley-Quirk,Rae • John soprano baritone Mêlée Fantasque Mêlée Fantasque II Ceremony Dance of Spring IV Bridal V Dance of Summer (2’17”) (2’49”) (3’48”) The World is charged with the grandeur of God is charged The World Rout for Orchestra and Soprano and Soprano Rout for Orchestra - Suite Adam Zero Hymn to Apollo and Baritone for Orchestra Serenade I II grandeur of God’ is charged with the ‘The World to go’ ‘I have desired III ‘Look at the Stars’ (5’22”) (3’18”) (4’51”) III The Serenader Overture: ‘Fair is my Love’ III Idyll IV of my Love’ on my Pipe the praises ‘Tune (5’06”) (8’30”) (4’52”) (7’24”) 7 8 9 2 3 4 5 6 1 10 11 12 13 1971 The copyright in these sound recordings is owned 1971 The copyright in these sound recordings 1992 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Lyrita is a registered trade mark. Made in the UK is a registered Edition, England. Lyrita Recorded 1992 Lyrita ൿ © The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one before The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Edition, Recorded by Lyrita This compilation and the digital remastering LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita Lyrita under an exclusive license from RECORDED EDITION. Produced LYRITA UK by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX,

BLISS: MÊLÉE FANTASQUE • ROUT SOLOISTS • AMBROSIAN • LSO LYRITA HYMN TO APOLLO • SERENADE BLISS • PRIESTMAN • LEDGER SRCD.225