Roberto GERHARD (1896-1970)
The Plague (1964) [44.01]
Sir William WALTON (1902-1983)
Façade (1951 edition) [38.51]
Igor STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
The Soldier’s Tale (1918) [60.14]
Alec McCowen (narrator), National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Washington DC/Antal Doráti (Gerhard)
Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield (reciters), London Sinfonietta/Sir William Walton (Walton)
Glenda Jackson (narrator), Rudolf Nureyev (Soldier), Michéal Mac Liammóir (The Devil), ensemble/Gennady Zaikowitsch (Stravinsky)
rec. Constitution Hall, Washington, 11 May 1973 (Gerhard); Abbey Road Studios, London, 5-7 May 1969 [music], Air Studios, London, 9-10, 16-18 and 21 February 1972 [recitation] (Walton); Decca Studios, London, 5 September 1975 [music], Argo Studios, London, September 1975 [narration] (Stravinsky)
ELOQUENCE 484 2200 [66.19 + 77.07]
This makes for an interesting compendium of three works that on first sight have almost nothing in common except for the fact that they employ the combination of spoken voice and instrumental accompaniment. All three were issued in the 1970s on labels from the Decca group, and all three cast major actors in the roles requiring spoken voice; but the three are very different in their aims. The Gerhard piece is a solidly symphonic score requiring full chorus and orchestra, the Walton is a series of brief poems set in the context of a chamber ensemble with jazz overtones and elements of 1920s pastiche, while the Stravinsky has a more conventional narrative structure where the instrumental accompaniment is reduced to a mere skeleton of seven players.
Tully Potter is his booklet note makes a valiant effort to find a common thread between the three scores in the newly contemporary theme of pandemic – Gerhard’s setting of Camus’s The plague echoing the Spanish influenza epidemic which overshadowed the creating of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale – but even he has to admit defeat in an effort to find a similar factor in Walton’s almost wholly light-hearted Façade, given here is the supposedly definitive version the composer published in 1951 and then promptly set about expanding and revising. In fact, although the Walton recording is split between the two discs, it is this work that is given pride of place on the booklet cover with a photograph of Dame Edith Sitwell, the author of the Façade poems. In fact Dame Edith herself had appeared on an earlier mono Decca recording of the ‘entertainment’ featuring her and Peter Pears; but when Decca came to issue the work in stereo in 1972 Sitwell was dead, and the parts for the reciters were assigned to Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield. The spoken parts were recorded nearly three years after Walton had conducted the London Sinfonietta in the musical segments of the score, presumably to accommodate the schedules of the two actors; and it must have seemed an excellent idea to feature two such theatrical luminaries in parts that that had on disc previously been taken by cabaret stars or jazz singers. Unfortunately the idea in practice just failed to come off. The difficulties of getting the rhythms precise – and those difficulties are extreme – simply were beyond the abilities of the actors or their engineers, and with the best will in the world the imprecisions are clearly audible throughout. The reciters, having to synchronise their voices precisely to a pre-existing soundtrack, are simply unable to marry their voices to the jazzy rhythms with which the composer is presenting them. They do their very best, and often their very best is considerable; but all the felicities of interpretation and the comic effect of their accents cannot redeem the passages where the two elements in the music just fail to coalesce. The whole effect is not helped by the very close observation of the voices by the microphones. A few years ago I lamented the fact that a 2015 recording featuring Carol Boyd and Zeb Soames gave us the voices set so far back into the instrumental texture that it was often impossible to make out what they were saying; here the engineers go to the opposite extreme. In terms of balance I still regard the old ASMF version under Marriner, with the incomparable Fenella Fielding and Michael Flanders, as about the ideal in enabling the listener to hear everything. But it really does help to have Sitwell’s words – the fantastic images need to be read to be appreciated – and none of these issues provide these…
When it comes to Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale the recorded balance between voices and instruments is much more realistic and the revised English translation by Nigel Lewis is readily audible and comprehensible even without texts provided in the booklet. Indeed for much of the time the narrative is carried forward without any instrumental accompaniment to get in the way of the actor’s voices or require them to be straightjacketed into precise rhythms. I should perhaps at this point declare a personal interest in one element of this performance. At about the time of this recording, I was involved in a collaboration with Michéal Mac Liammóir in an operatic setting of his play Diarmuid and Gráinne, and I had the frequent pleasure of listening enthralled to the playright/actor/manager’s lusciously rotund voice in conversation. By the time he came to this period in his career, he no longer had the richness of tone that can be heard in his earlier recordings or films, but nonetheless the voice is marvellously appropriate – both sinister and majestic. Glenda Jackson was at this stage at the very outset of her career, and she also is marvellous in the role of the narrator – taking on also much of the characters’ dialogue. Those who loved her assumption of the part of Queen Elizabeth I (recently revived to much acclaim on British television) may have found cause to regret that in her subsequent political career her addresses to Parliament never quite matched the imperiousness of her Gloriana; but her return to the stage in the past decade has been the occasion for much rejoicing. The only peculiarity in this performance is the ritzy casting of Rudolf Nureyev in the part of the soldier himself; there is no real reason why the character should have a Russian accent (the author of the original text was the French novelist C F Ramuz), and his assumption of the title role is decidedly at cross-purposes with the more theatrically trained voices around him. But since he only appears in six of 27 short numbers, this is hardly more than a minor irritation to those who might regard his presence as an intrusion (he was given star billing on the original LP sleeve). The playing of the solo instrumentalists, featuring major names such as Erich Gruenberg, Gervase de Peyer and Tristan Fry, is excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed this performance. The balance between voices and instruments is superbly well judged.
The third work in this compendium is a much larger-scale piece, a setting by Roberto Gerhard based on Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague and commissioned by the BBC for a performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall where the narrator was Stephen Murray (nowadays remembered principally as a comic actor in the long-running BBC series The Navy Lark, but with a respectable career in straight theatre and broadcasting). For this 1973 revival in Washington the part of the narrator was taken by Alec McCowen, who at much the same time took a similar role in Decca’s studio recording of Oedipus Rex. Here, in the context of a live performance, he proves every bit as adept at accommodating himself to the difficult business of ‘fitting in’ with the forces of chorus and orchestra; and since he has a prominent part throughout, this is just as well. This recording indeed reinforces my general opinion that works combining spoken voice and music often come off best when the two are performed simultaneously, rather (as is usually the case with recordings) with the spoken voice dubbed on afterwards. The fact that the narrator and orchestra can interact with each other is every bit as important in melodramatic works of this type as is the relationship between soloist and orchestra in a concerto. But – and I am afraid it is a very big but – the impact of the music here is dampened considerably by the failure of Decca Eloquence to provide us with the words of the text. They are of course in English (translated by Stuart Gilbert), and in the performances of Façade and The Soldier’s Tale the actors do ensure that English-speaking listeners can hear most of the words; but in the case of The Plague there is also a substantial amount of significant text assigned to the chorus, and here we can hardly understand a single syllable that is being sung. The original LP came complete with a single sheet insert which contained the text, and I was able to use this to follow the performance; but this is an entirely fortuitous luxury which will only be available to those who actually bought the original issue nearly fifty years ago.
Nonetheless this is a welcome reissue of three contrasting recordings, presenting very different approaches to the vexed question of how to deliver works which seek to combine the spoken word with musical accompaniment. It is odd that this combination should prove so troublesome to composers – after all, it is no more than the transfer to the live theatre or concert hall of a technique which is commonplace in the cinema – but it still seems to occasion difficulties even with modern microphone techniques. Nonetheless the three pieces here demand that the difficulties be addressed – although both Stravinsky and Walton acknowledged the possibilities of defeat by arranging suites from their music – and it is good to have these disparate recordings back in the catalogue. The enterprise of Decca Eloquence is to be commended. Now, what about those Argo LPs of Malcolm Williamson’s children’s operas?
Paul Corfield Godfrey
