John GARDNER (1917-2011)
The Ballad of the White Horse, Op. 40 (1959) [48:25]
An English Ballad, Op. 99 (1969) [16:05]
Ashley Riches (baritone), City of London Choir, Paulina Voices, BBC Concert Orchestra/Hilary Davan Wetton
rec. 2017, Air Studios, London
EM RECORDS EMR CD057 [64:30]
The stock of G. K. Chesterton, highly esteemed during the earlier years of the twentieth century, seems to have been quite heavily discounted after his death in 1936. Even in the past decade, when interest in his Father Brown stories has been awakened by a new series of television adaptations starring Mark Williams, the scripts for the broadcasts have been largely recast. Entirely new plots have been substituted for Chesterton’s admittedly sometimes thin whodunits, and greater emphasis has been placed on character and period atmosphere; it was done in a manner that sometimes tends to convert the eponymous priest into a sort of male counterpart of Miss Marple. Chesterton’s poetry, too, has fallen into neglect, with the possible exception of his bucolic idyll about the rolling English road, which still maintains a grip on the imagination. His extensive historical romance The Ballad of the White Horse exudes some of the same pastoral atmosphere, tinged with regret and sinister undertones, of Housman’s Shropshire Lad. Unlike the latter, Chesterton has generally failed to attract the attention of composers, who have done quite a bit to raise Housman’s profile over the years when his style might have been expected to fall out of fashion. John Gardner has here taken passages from Chesterton’s massive epic, rather than the whole, and has crafted a text which is excellently suited to music.
The very opening lines, “Before the gods that made the gods had seen their sunrise pass”, strike a heroic note. It is underpinned by thudding timpani rhythms which will recur to even more devastating effect in the final bars. Gardner’s abridgement of Chesterton focuses on the defeat of the Viking invaders of Wessex by Alfred the Great. The White Horse of Uffington symbolically represents defiance against the pagans, be they “great, beautiful, half-witted men from the sunrise and the sea” or – as in the final pages – new barbarians where “books be all their learning and ink be on their hands”. The work indeed falls into the old-fashioned – some might even say obsolete – category of the secular cantata so beloved of our Victorian ancestors and choral societies, and it goes a long way to demonstrate that the form is not entirely moribund.
The choral writing ranges from the deliberately modal opening chant to a choral description of the Battle of Ethandune [track 6] which bids fair to challenge Elgar’s King Olaf. Then there are other passages of religious significance in The Vision of the King [track 3] where Alfred sees a vision of the Virgin Mary (Chesterton was of course a Catholic), and a full-scale dramatic scena where Alfred disguised as a minstrel sings the praises of Christianity before the Danish ‘emperor’ Guthrum [track 5]. The resemblances to Elgar do not stop with King Olaf: the climax of the scene in the Danish camp brings a nobilmente choral passage worthy of Caractacus. Even the near-quotation from Orff’s Carmina Burana at the beginning of The Northmen [track 2] is quickly absorbed into a more English style. Nor is Gardner above the employment of sheer onomatopoeia: when the chorus sing of the horses in the battle neighing loud and long, they really do so. The finale [track 8], beginning with the thudding timpani from the opening, rises to a heroic threnody before subsiding into a pastoral conclusion as the chorus describes how the weeds progressively “unwrought the work of man”. This is a very moving ending to a very powerful work whose first recording has been long overdue.
A performance of The Ballad of the White Horse conducted by the late Sir Charles Groves with Bournemouth forces (the world première, indeed) has been available for some years on the Internet, but this new studio recording totally supersedes it. The sound on the Internet transfer is generally atrocious, with varying levels testifying to some panic-stricken twisting of dials. The live recording also appears to have been made from a position in the middle of an audience afflicted with coughs and splutters both near and far to make listening a positive trial. This performance, with a smaller choir than at the première, has a clarity of focus and sound which eases appreciation; the words are sometimes smothered by the heavier sections of orchestration, but the full texts are provided in the booklet. Ashley Riches, sometimes singing the words of Arthur, provides a great variety of sympathetic tone, and the orchestral playing is faultless even though the writing is sometimes clearly demanding. The role of the Virgin Mary, taken by a small girls’ choir, fits perfectly into its context.
The disc is rounded off with another first recording, this time of Gardner’s English Ballad written for amateur performers ten years later. In the choral work, as I have observed, Gardner is far from reluctant to engage with illustrative writing in both voices and orchestra. It therefore seems even odder than in a piece he describes unequivocally as “programme music” he persistently refused to give the slightest clue to the images underlying his score, except to indicate that these involved the age-old legend of a squire’s lady eloping with a gypsy lover. There are clearly sections of the music – in particular just before the boisterous concluding section, and at the very end – where the orchestral effects are intended to depict specific events in the story that was in Gardner’s mind, but we are left totally in the dark as to what these events might have been. To add confusion to the matter, he writes an extensive solo part for what the booklet notes describe as an “electric guitar” but which is effectively an amplified instrument (without any of the special effects associated with the modern pop version). The booklet note suggests that this may have been the result of a visit to Hammersmith Odeon during the year of composition, but this sort of biographical speculation is even more off-putting than the programme which the composer himself so eloquently excoriated in his original programme note (cited in full). Indeed the detailed booklet notes here by Chris Gardner (the composer’s son, and also a musician) are almost exclusively biographical. There is almost no discussion of the music beyond a vague reference to the use of leitmotifs in the choral work. For some bizarre reason, the solo guitarist in the English Ballad is uncredited.
All the same, The Ballad of the White Horse is a very real discovery, a revelation of a score that has clearly been neglected for far too long. One might hope that it would now be taken up by other choral societies; it certainly sounds well within the capabilities of gifted amateurs. This disc makes out the best possible case for the work, excellently recorded and produced albeit with notes and texts in English only. The quality of Chesterton’s verse is a pleasant surprise, too.
Our thanks are due to both EM Records and Hilary Davan Wetton for yet another revelation of a worthwhile rarity.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Previous review: John Quinn
