Devoted to music written
both by and for Wilfrid Mellers, this
handsome and imaginatively put together
double CD provides a conspectus of a
composer, now in his 93rd year. Mellers’
work has often seemed to be overshadowed
by a long and distinguished academic
and musicological career. This began
at Dartington in the 1930s and culminated
in an innovative professorship at the
University of York from 1964 to 1981,
takng in important appointments, inter
alia, at Downing College, Cambridge,
and the University of Pittsburgh along
the way.
The first disc, consisting
of music by Mellers himself, is specifically
designed around the theme of Innocence
and Experience derived from his beloved
William Blake. This has allowed the
composer to demonstrate a concept which
has been central to his philosophy and
his approach to education, namely the
integration of music as part of human
experience as opposed to being an esoteric
art practised in isolation. It comes
as no surprise that the American experience
resulted in elements of folk, jazz and
pop music being absorbed into his creative
palette.
Blake’s significance
is immediately apparent in The
Echoing Green, three of his
poems set with subtle simplicity for
soprano and recorder, which lie at the
heart of Sunflower, a major Leeds
Festival commission and the composer’s
magnum opus. The Three Songs of
Growing to words by David Holbrook,
whilst mirroring the Blake lyrics, aim
to treat the innocence/experience concept
in terms of the process of growing up,
consciously embracing folk and pop idioms
without compromising their modal roots.
Folk aspects in the
form of the blues dominate the centrepiece
of the disc, A Blue Epiphany for
J.B. Smith for solo guitar,
and here it is experience, not innocence,
to the fore. Smith was a black lifer
in a Texan prison whose blues singing
drew a parallel between his personal
situation and the human condition in
general. The piece is made up of what
the composer calls "permutations
of Smith’s permutations", an anguished
and intense twelve-minute journey relevant
to everyone’s personal "prison",
which offers the hope of attaining some
measure of resolution as a tune put
together from those permutations is
at last defined.
Innocent in total contrast,
albeit a little ambiguously with unspoken
classical connotations, The Happy
Meadow comprises four dances
arranged for recorder and guitar from
a 1964 theatre-piece for children to
sing, dance and play. Each explores
an aspect of goatishness as part of
the growing-up process, including a
quasi-Warlockian Caper, before the epilogic
Envoi turns meditative when,
as the composer puts it, "goatish
innocence and embryonic human consciousness
meet"; look out for that knowing
goatish flourish at the end. From here
it is a short step to the instantly
likeable A Fount of Fair Dances
for recorder and string orchestra, taking
its name from a 17th Century collection
of dances, which in marrying the physical
and the metaphysical brings us back
full circle to the opening Blake lyrics.
The second disc presents
a wide-ranging selection of music by
friends and colleagues of Professor
Mellers, much of it written to mark
his ninetieth birthday in 2004. It neatly
complements the thread of Innocence
and Experience as well as touching upon
other associations he holds dear, both
profound and light-hearted. Pride of
place here has to be accorded to the
Piano Variations of 1930
by his friend Aaron Copland, magisterially
played by Peter Lawson. This seminal
work of the 20th Century – by a substantial
margin the oldest on these two discs
yet wholly relevant to today – holds
special significance for Wilfrid Mellers,
who ventures so far as to suggest that
"there has never been a work more
decisive in its originality". One
can glimpse J.B. Smith’s fragmentary
blues mirrored in these bare adamantine
textures built from a strict five-note
row.
Mellers’ far-reaching
American associations, which include
an influential historical survey, Music
in a New Found Land, are acknowledged
by a ninetieth birthday tribute from
Ned Rorem setting words by Blake in
Sound the Flute. Peter
Sculthorpe carries the international
dimension even further with his Koori
Dreaming, a haunting piece for
recorder and guitar based on a native
chant from southern Queensland. "Koori"
is a colloquialism for "aborigine"
– that salutes the part played by Mellers
in encouraging his characteristic Australianism.
Another antipodean
reference is to be found in the sound
of the koel, the Australian cuckoo,
which sings, would you believe, an upside-down
version of its European cousin’s call.
This gives David Matthews in The
Two Cuckoos the opportunity
for some genial and ingenious interplay
for solo recorder neatly incorporating
a passing nod to another Mellers hero
by way of a quotation from Beethoven’s
use of the (European) call in the Pastoral
Symphony. Purring flutter-tongued geniality
also informs Stephen Dodgson’s tribute
to a feline-lover in The Monk
and his Cat set to an anonymous
and timeless Irish text of the 8th or
9th century. There is the added bonus
of his Daphne to Apollo,
which also appeared on an earlier Cameo
release.
That journey from Innocence
to Experience appears again, through
the eyes of Shakespeare, in a setting
of Feste’s Song from Tweflth
Night by Howard Skempton who like
Mellers was Leamington-born. John Paynter
elects to focus on Experience in Of
Time and Place with three meditations
on old age by Longfellow and Keats for
a seemingly ageless Wilfrid Mellers.
Philip Grange turns to the metaphysical
Blake in A Spectre Scene
ambitiously taking Blake’s belief that
he would commune with his dead brother,
who would dictate words to him to be
realized fully later, as the cue to
adapt five verses of an unfinished poem
as if related in this way by the poet’s
wife. It is by no means easy listening,
but powerful and moving in Lesley-Jane
Rogers’ superb performance.
Robin Walker, who with
John Turner devised this enterprising
collection, is represented by two works.
Already previously recorded, The Dances
from "The Bells of Blue Island"
are well on course to become
something of a 21st Century classic.
Reflections for soprano,
recorder and guitar, composed in 2004,
has the capacity to do likewise. This
setting of a visionary text encompasses
in a short span the composer’s basic
belief – and I think that of Wilfrid
Mellers too – that music is something
which "helps us to live".
That sense of inner repose derived from
Indian and Buddhist antecedents which
so characterizes the Walker style runs
even through the turbulence of the third
verse ultimately to bring peace in the
final lines sung unaccompanied with
all the purity of mediaeval plainchant.
If, as I certainly do, you can discern
"Divine Grace ... dancing"
in the Blue Island Dances, then
here too you will call to mind Vexilla
regis and that solitary trombone
which opens Holst’s masterwork.
Performance and recording
are, as always with this team, exemplary,
though on first hearing I would recommend
reprogramming the second disc so that
Reflections plays as the last
track instead of the first. You will
find the effect after the towering grandeur
of the Copland Variations quite
revelatory.
Roger Carpenter
for
details
Lesley-Jane Rogers (soprano) 
