Frank Bridge Oration (first public performance) Bridge Cello Concerto (Oration)
“To secure a performance of Oration was a remarkable coup; this imposing 28-minute cello concerto is practically unknown, a situation which will be rectified later this year when a recording by Julian Lloyd Webber, the soloist on this occasion, is issued. His commitment to it was evidenced by playing of superb technical accomplishment and magnificent passion.”
Lyndon Jenkins
Any festival that boasts Boris Johnson as president sounds like a boisterous occasion. Heirs and Rebels, the first English Music Festival to be mounted in and around Dorchester, south Oxfordshire, is devoted to the “diversity, innovation and brilliance” of English composers often neglected in concert programming.
It’s a bold venture. Where else would one bump into the Viola Sonata of Alger- non Ashton, a rhapsody by Elgar’s supporter William Reed, and a suite by Benjamin Dale? Or venture into Lord Berners’ Luna Park, and spot Jeremy Irons narrating Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy?
The five-day festival’s opening concert was given by the BBC Concert Orchestra, which rapidly made its mark with a blistering fanfare — shades of Tippett and Walton, but cleverly original – newly commissioned from Gareth Wood. Stylish and witty, it could win a place in the repertoire.
The chance to hear rare Hoist, scintillatingly played, was welcome. His Walt Whitman Overture of 1899 occupies an attractive netherworld of post-Meistersinger froth; it could have used even more élan than it received here.
Clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 unleashed a shiveringly beautiful performance, revelling in the warmth of the folk song idiom, utterly fresh in its day (1906).
The most bracing work was by Britten’s mentor, Frank Bridge. Oration, his haunting cello concerto, is a passionate outcry against the ravages of the Great War. The inexorable trudge of its dark, passacaglia-like cortege, chromatic and knotty, seemed to sum up the miseries f the Front. Julian Lloyd Webber proved utterly sympathetic to the angst-ridden solo line, as the cello strives to extricate a pained and poignant lyricism from the tensions of the orchestral hinterland.
Lloyd Webber returned for more Holst — his rarely- heard Invocation (1911)— for a memorable second half contribution. Yet it was Sullivan who made the running his Irish Symphony given the full works, setting the pace for the symphonies of Stanford to come. Patently English music, and palpably alive and kicking.
– Roderic Dunnett
Missing out on many good things in Dorchester
English Music Festival, DORCHESTER ABBEY
It would be difficult to imagine a more fragrant spot than Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire for this first English Music Festival, but equally it would be disingenuous to claim that the village is on everyone’s doorstep. Maybe it was the rural seclusion that contributed to the fact that the abbey was hardly heaving with patrons for the flagship inaugural concert on Friday, given by the BBC Concert Orchestra under David Lloyd-Jones.
The modest attendance was a pity, because a great deal of passion had gone in to planning this event, and the programming was out of the ordinary. As Boris Johnson, the festival’s president, said last week, there is no need to apologise for English music when, as we heard here, there are works of strength by the likes of Hoist, Vaughan Williams ad Frank Bridge.
The most familiar item was Sullivan’s “Irish Symphony”, in itself scarcely a core repertoire work, and, it must be said, not the most persuasive either. But two different facets of Holst were more interesting. On the one hand, there was his “Invocation” for cello and orchestra, travelling very much in the same orbit as “Venus” from The Planets. On the other, there was his “Walt Whitman Overture”, in which “The Planets” seemed to be light years away. The overture is an early work, a robust piece in which the German influences of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Strauss are barely concealed, but it had an exhilarating thrust which Lloyd-Jones and the orchestra harnessed spiritedly.
The evening had started with a rousing, celebratory fanfare by Gareth Wood, written for the BBC’s current Listen Up! series embracing a broad spectrum of British orchestras and of which this concert was a part. Vaughan Williams’s “Norfolk Rhapsody” No 1 evoked a quieter, mistier Englishness of the fens, beautifully and supply played and intriguing in the way that its line gusts of woodwind filigree seemed to pre-echo devices that Britten employed to moot the mystery of Suffolk in “Peter Grimes”.
The soloist in Holst’s “Invocation” was Julian Lloyd Webber, who also played Bridge’s “Oration”, a work haunted by memories of the First World War. Darkly rhapsodic, brooding and bitter, the music is intensely reflective, and Lloyd Webber’s performance encompassed a range of affecting emotion that was deeply poignant.
Geoffrey Norris
“Lloyd Webber and McCabe give what seems to me an ideal performance, for they pursue it with great flair, imagination and strength. I recommend this disc unreservedly.”
– Alan Saunders
“Put simply, this is just marvellous cello playing. The expansiveness of the music draws passionate but beautifully shaded playing from Lloyd Webber.”
– Annette Morreau
BRIDGE: Oration – Concerto Elegiaco for cello and orchestra (F105). Two Poems after Richard Jefferies (F126).
Allegro Moderato for string orchestra (F162). Julian Lloyd Webber (cello), London Philharmonic Orchestra/Nicholas Braithwaite.
Lyrita SRCS 104. £4.42.
RICHARD D CNOBLE
This exceptionally interesting and important record provides a fitting climax to Frank Bridge’s centenary year. It also fills an important gap in the Frank Bridge discography that would scarcely have been visible only a short while ago. Thanks to Lyrita’s enterprise in recording the major portion of his orchestral work (with a little help from elsewhere) it would seem that only two very early works – the substantial Symphonic Poem Isabella and the tiny Berceuse for violin and orchestra and one very late but not very important one, the Vignettes de Danse for small orchestra of 1940 remain unrecorded although, of course, there still remain. some early but important chamber works to be done, notably the first two String Quartets and the String Sextet. All this has happened within the space of the last two or three years. After so long a time in the wilderness, Bridge’s rehabilitation has been a unique phenomenon and there is every indication that it may be permanent. The record companies deserve a good deal of the credit for this.
The three works recorded here represent three different aspects of Bridge. Two have long been known, but rarely played. One will be new to almost everybody. Perhaps we should deal with them chronologically. The Two Poems after Richard Jeffenes date from 1915 and were published by Augener in 1923. They have at least enjoyed the occasional performance over the years. The two poems which inspired Bridge were The Open Air and The Story of my Heart When we think of the time at which these two short and beautiful pastoral pieces were written it may come as a surprise to find in them an unruffled calm and serenity, as if Bridge was painting a golden sunset to a vanishing world which was never to return. The first piece is a gentle idyll whose pastel shades remind one of Delius while the second is a gay and lively dance of life. These untroubled little works may perhaps have been written before the full impact of the war had registered on Bridge – a war which in 1914 was a local affair that was all going to be over by Christmas.
The Cello Concerto, Oration is a very different work which dates from 1930, long after Bridge had thrown off any notions of an idyllic life and had faced up to the stark reality and disillusionment of the world as it really was. Arch-typical of Bridge’s late manner, it is one of his finest, most deeply felt works. It is quite unlike a cello concerto in the traditional sense, the solo instrument being a vehicle to underpin Bridge’s deeper emotional feelings, clouded by inner grief and despair. The oration is a public eulogy for all who were lost in the great conflict, not without dignity and grandeur as a public utterance of grief and like any well-thought-out eulogy, it has substance and form a one movement arch structure on the concept of the Phantasie framed by an extended introduction full of forboding and a withdrawn, introspective epilogue. In between Bridge evokes many changing, shirting moods but its central march-like section with its insistent four-in-a bar beat on the timpani, heard from afar as if of a distant memory, Mr Payne in his sleeve-note identifies as an evocation of the platoons of the dead marching past. A tone picture, but not a tone poem, there are fleeting moments of happier times recalled but they are of short duration. Bridge’s personal inner conflict is not easily shared with a distracted outside world, especially at this distance in time. Even if the work had been long published and accessible instead of the other way round, it is doubtful that it could ever achieve universal popularity, but it is a key work in our understanding of Bridge and in our own uncertain world it can perhaps serve as a warning not to make the same mistakes as our fathers and grandfathers did. With the cello as the orator, the orchestra as his vocabulary, this remarkable work crystalises feelings that were to be declared in more forceful dramatic form by Bridge’s pupil, Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem of 1962, affected as he so clearly was by Bridge’s philosophy in his formative years and re-enforced by his own experience of yet another human castastrophe that Bridge did not live to see run its course.
Julian Lloyd Webber generates impressive energy and nervous tension in the Concerto Elegiaco which I would judge to be a very difficult work to interpret and possibly open to more than one valid reading, but I think we have everything to admire here in a pioneer recording of impressive strength and conviction. Nicholas Braithwaite, who seems to have special empathy for a British repertoire of the kind Lyrita have for so long promoted, is a conductor of wide experience and growing stature not only in the concert hall, but also in the opera house. He is currently Musical Director of the Glyndeborne Touring Opera and permanent guest conductor of the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra and has toured widely. Clearly recorded and finely balanced, the whole production is of the highest standard and I hope it will meet with the success it deserves.
“Particularly valuable was Julian Lloyd Webber’s marvellous performance at the opening concert of Bridge’s ‘Oration’, a work that should surely gain a permanent place in the repertory.”
I missed the work of the third Icelandic composer, Atli Heimir Sveinsson’s Together with you, being tempted to slip into the Elizabeth Hall next door for the first London performance of Bliss’s Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich, first heard at Aldeburgh two years ago. The performers this time were the gifted young English cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and the Chanticleer Orchestra under Ruth Gipps. Originally the work was modestly described as a concertino, but it deserves the grander title, consisting as it does of three full-scale movements, whose contents fall easily on the ear and whose mood recalls that of the Walton Cello Concerto. So far as one could judge from a shy and tentative orchestral performance, Bliss has scored richly but with fastidious care not to drown the soloist—Mr Lloyd Webber produced a lovely, singing tone, and a fine breadth of phrase. Why it has not been heard before in London is a mystery—but even fewer cello concertos than cellists are box office draws. RONALD CRICHTON
Bliss Cello Concerto – ‘Cellist’s fine style in Bliss Concerto’
Sir Arthur Bliss’s recent cello concerto received its London premiere last night in a programme given by the Chanticleer Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and it was excellently performed by the young cellist Julian Lloyd Webber.
With his customary orchestral expertise, Bliss solves brilliantly the problems of balance, posed by the medium, supporting the cello most colourfully yet always allowing it to penetrate.
Both the opening Allegro and the slow movement seem to have ceremonial overtones, yet this is not a pompous work, rather it is capricious and light in spirit with moments of magical lyricism, and the two veins of feeling are often thrown into mercurial contrast.
Mr Lloyd Webber’s confident and stylish interpretation was for the most part well accompanied by the orchestra under Ruth Gipps.
Anthony Payne
Bantock Sappho. Sapphic Poem. Susan Bickley (mez); Julian Lloyd Webber (vc); Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vernon Handley. Hyperion CDA66899 (75 minutes:DDD). Text included. Recorded 1997. Gramophone Editor’s Choice.
Sappho was the fourth in a series of exotic song-cycles with piano accompaniment Bantock composed from 1898 to 1905. The orchestral version (subtitled “Prelude and Nine Fragments”) lasts around an hour and Bantock would appear to have scored individual songs as and when they were first heard in the concert-hall. Sappho derives its text from the tiny, but enormously influential output of the eponymous Greek poetess – or rather, from a free refashioning of the fragments by the composer’s wife, Helen, into a dramatically effective sequence of nine poems. Prefaced by a magnificently imposing orchestral introduction, it is a hugely ambitious, yet curiously compelling outpouring, by turns yearningly passionate, ecstatic, sensuous and darkly jealous to mirror the capricious emotions of the lovesick Sappho herself. Elsewhere, it’s difficult not to he hugely impressed by the positively Wagnerian intensity and profound emotional scope of Bantock’s writing in the fifth song, “The moon has set”. Note, too, the psychological insight in the last stanza of the second song, “1 loved thee once, Atthis, long ago”, where Bantock’s colouring of the phrase “Thou art nought to me” acutely conveys the resignatory self-deception of the poetess’s true feelings. Certainly, Sappho can be viewed as an intoxicating celebration of love in all its guises. Some may find Bantock’s inspiration too relentlessly wan and lacking in truly memorable thematic invention; others will revel in its endearing decadence. No praise can be too high for Susan Bickley’s remarkable assumption of what sounds like an exceedingly tricky vocal part (with its demandingly wide tessitura); Handley and the RPO, too, cover themselves in glory. The 15-minute Sapphic Poem for cello and orchestra acts as a wholly charming pendant to the main work. Delicately scored (with some lovely touches for the woodwind in particular) and beautifully conceived for the medium, it is a richly melodious, sweetly expressive outpouring, raptly performed here by Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn receives exemplary support from Handley and the RPO.
Sappho’s songs and Sapphic Poem
Bantock Sappho. Sapphic Poem. Susan Bickley (mez); Julian Lloyd Webber (vc); Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vernon Handley. Hyperion CDA66899 (75 minutes:DDD). Text included.
This really is most welcome. In a fascinating booklet-essay, Lewis Foreman relates how, between the years 1900 and 1914, Bantock produced no fewer than seven works for chorus and orchestra (including the three parts which make up his two-and-a-half-hour setting of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiydt of O’mar Khayyam in its entirety), a dozen purely orchestral creations, countless songs as well as two orchestral song-cycles. All this concurrent with his considerable educational duties (no wonder Elgar spoke admiringly of Bantock as “having the most fertile musical brain of our time”).
Sappho was the fourth in a series of exotic song-cycles with piano accompaniment Bantock composed from 1898 to 1905. The orchestral version (subtitled “Prelude and Nine Fragments”) lasts around an hour and Bantock would appear to have scored individual songs as and when they were first heard in the concert-hall. (The first complete account may well have been as late as March 1921 at an Usher Hall concert under the baton of Donald Tovey, though no claims were made as such.) Sappho derives its text from the tiny, but enormously influential output of the eponymous Greek poetess – or rather, from a free refashioning of the fragments by the composer’s wife, Helen, into a dramatically effective sequence of nine poems.
Prefaced by a magnificently imposing orchestral introduction (almost a tone-poem in itself, based on thematic material from the remainder), it is a hugely ambitious, yet curiously compelling out-pouring, by turns yearningly passionate (the opening “Hymn to Aphrodite”), ecstatic (“Evening Song” and “Bridal Song”), sensuous (“Stand face to face, friend” and concluding “Muse of the golden throne”) and darkly jealous (“Peer of gods he seems”) to mirror the capricious emotions of the lovesick Sappho herself. Elsewhere, it’s difficult not to be hugely impressed by the positively Wagnerian intensity and profound emotional scope of Bantock’s writing in the fifth song, “The moon has set”. Note, too, the psychological insight in the last stanza of the second song, “I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago”, where Bantock’s colouring of the phrase “Thou art nought to me” acutely conveys the resignatory self-deception of the poetess’ true feelings (and, as Lewis Foreman perceptively states in his notes, “we know all too well she has, admitted to herself that it is an empty lie”).
Certainly, Sappho (here receiving what may bt only its third-ever complete performance) can be viewed as an intoxicating celebration of love in all its guises. Some, I fancy, will find Bantock’s inspiration too relentlessly wan and lacking in truly memorable thematic invention; others will revel in its endearing decadence. For myself, I must admit that Sappho held me pretty spellbound even on first acquaint tance – testimony, no doubt, to the valiant heroics of the present performers. Indeed, no praise can be too high for Susan Bickley’s remarkable assumption of what sounds like an exceedingly tricky vocal part (with its demandingly wide tessitura); Handley and the RPO, too, cover themselves in glory.
The 15-minute Sapphic Poem for cello and orchestra acts as a wholly charming pendant to the main work. It was first heard with piano accompaniment in December 1906; Bantock’s version with orchestra was published three years later. Delicately scored (with some lovely touches for the woodwind in particular) and beautifully conceived for the medium, it is a richly melodious, sweetly expressive outpouring, raptly performed here by Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turns receives exemplary support from Handley and the RPO. Tony Faulkner’s stunningly natural engineering (marvellous bass-drum sounds throughout) complements what is another triumphant addition to Hyperion’s ongoing Bantock series.