Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
Organ Music
Epithalamion, Op 67 No 3 (1968)
Trois pièces brèves
Plenum IV for Organ duet, Op 100 (1975)
Nativity for soprano and organ (1951)
Sinfonia, Op 32 (1955)
Suite, Op 17 (1948)
A Sleep of Prisoners (1966)
Chorale Prelude
Temenos, Op 72 (1969)
Tom Winpenny (organ)
Philippa Boyle (soprano), Dewi Rees (organ, Plenum IV)
rec. 2021, Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban, St. Albans, UK
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0639 [70]
Elisabeth Lutyens’s music is beginning to emerge after many years in the doldrums. Recently we have had a disc of her piano music – with more to come, I believe – and now, perhaps surprisingly, a disc of organ music which includes two works for soprano and organ. But how seriously did she take her organ works? Interestingly, her autobiography A Goldfish Bowl (Cassell and Company 1972) mentions none.
I think it is best if I proceed not in the order on disc but in chronological order.
The unpublished and undated Chorale Prelude could be a very early work. It is fugal and rather academic, and might have been set as an exercise in baroque style by Lutyens’s teacher Harold Darke. She was organist at Woolpit
Church in Suffolk (famous for its amazing hammerbeam roof), as she tells us in her autobiography. The piece could come from that time. It is, in any case, quite impressive reaching a fine climax.
In 1948 Lutyens wrote her first recognised organ work, simply entitled Suite. She was married by then to Edward Clark and she wanted him to conduct her movie scores. He did that, so she dedicated this four-movement work to him. It is strictly serial and Webernesque. Clark had known Webern and was still acquainted with Schoenberg. The movements are Prelude, Palindrome (we will meet more of these later), Pastorale and Chorale. What the man who first played it, Wolverhampton’s Borough Organist Arnold Richards, made of it, history does not tell, but a review of its first performance damned it with faint praise.
I have in front of me a copy of the Novello publication Sing Nowell, a set of 51 carols most of which I have never performed or even heard. Number 25, Nativity with words by W. R. (Bertie) Rodgers, was first scored for strings and soprano solo, but here is effectively set for organ. The opening three falling fourths followed by a rising semitone are heard throughout and sometimes in inversion. It also forms the pedal part for the 12/8 central section which marks the climax of what is a searching and perhaps quite disturbing piece. Lutyens only other religious work is a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (recorded by Exaudi on NMC D124 – review), which she probably never heard.
The Sinfonia of 1955 is a pure example of dodecaphonic composition. The tone row is used palindromically. The two halves of the chosen row, that is 6+6, are used to help create the formal structure, and a central section uses the full row. Putting aside the composer’s workshop, this is a beautifully austere piece in contrasting tempi. In A Pilgrim Soul by Meirion and Susie Harris (Michael Joseph 1989), we read that Ralph Downes, the original performer, told Lutyens that she made the organ “sound like a woodwind quartet”. The implication is that she had not exploited the organ idiomatically.
Lutyens is also associated with incidental music for Hammer Horrors. They were a good money-spinner, and she often needed the cash for family and, sadly, for her alcoholic addiction. Incidental music for organ is rather odd but is simply explained. A Sleep of Prisoners was written for a touring production of Christopher Fry’s play, and performed in St. George’s Cathedral in Perth, Western Australia. The twenty-one cue points are given in the booklet, as set by the director Harold Lang. It makes an unsatisfactory listening experience: these rather unrelated sections are, musically speaking, short and rather difficult to follow.
Epithalamion, written for a wedding, is a setting of Edmund Spencer for soprano and organ. It is broadly lyrical with a wonderful ending but it is difficult to imagine what the guests made of it, let alone the happy couple Hilda and Anthony Gaddum in the church of St. Mary Disley in Cheshire. It is a somewhat disturbing piece, but Philippa Boyle performs it superbly and passionately.
Listening to Temenos (sacred enclosure), I recall how beautiful Lutyens’s music can be. The piece was written for an inaugural concert to be played on a baroque organ at Dartington Hall. The piece, however, was not suitable for the instrument and despite publication seems never to have been performed. Interestingly and possibly surprisingly, it was dedicated to Harald Darke, who had given the composer some organ lessons and who had been an immensely helpful and sympathetic teacher at the Royal College. The work is again a palindrome, Prelude 1 – Interlude - Canticle I - Interlude II - Canticle II – Coda. Each section drifts into the next. To my ears, the textures and harmonies are very similar to those heard in Lutyens’s 1960 orchestral masterpiece
Quincunx.
In Trois pièces brèves, written just a few months later, Lutyens reused music from her recent drama Isis and Osiris, and offered the piece to Nicholas Danby to be played instead of Temenos. It falls in three attractive and interesting sections: Conte, Berceuse and Rondes. They use what was by now her own style of serial technique.
By the time of Plenum IV, the last organ work from 1975, Lutyens is clearly hearing the organ in her head as an orchestral instrument, but she also writes ideally for it. Nicholas and Stephen Cleobury who first played it helped with the very particular registration. We also find the composer writing in her most mature style. We have darkly mysterious passages which quickly rise to powerful climaxes, and other passages of stark, austere beauty. Of course, beauty is in the eye, or hearing, of the beholder. I must not forget that, when I was at a lecture she was giving at Dartington in the early 1970s, a student asked “Miss Lutyens, why is your music so ugly!”
Congratulations for Toccata Classics and Tim Winpenny for bringing this music out into the open. Documentation is excellent as always, with the complete Harrison and Harrison specification listed. Perhaps I might be bold enough to ask if Toccata could consider Lutyens’s String Quartets next; there are at least twelve to discover.
Gary Higginson
Previous review: David McDade
