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Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)
L’île Enchantée (1864)
Procession March (1863)
Day Dreams (1863, orch. 1934, Herman Finck)
The Sapphire Necklace – Overture (1863-64)
BBC Concert Orchestra/John Andrews
rec. 2021, The Watford Colosseum, London, UK
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7404 [82]

Dutton continue their survey of Sullivan without Gilbert with this recording of his early Ballet/Divetissement L’île Enchantée. This is the work’s second complete recording – the previous one from Andrew Penny conducting the RTÉ Concert Orchestra released originally on Marco Polo and re-released within the last year on Naxos. I was surprised to realise that that performance was now effectively thirty years old. Penny understands the Sullivan idiom and the Irish orchestra play well but this new performance edges it out on a couple of grounds and is to be preferred. In the intervening years Sullivan’s original score has been found allowing a couple of brief extra movements to be reinstated and generally a more critical edition of the score to be created. But to be honest these musical gains are fairly minor except for the Sullivan completist. The main ‘improvement’ is in the technical recording of the music. The Dutton recording is in their undemonstratively sophisticated SACD sound made in the generous acoustic of the Watford Colosseum. The Marco Polo engineering is quite thin in comparison with a distinct sense of a small string group especially with the microphone focussed on the front desks. The playing from both orchestras is neat and nimble but the BBC players are given more of an opportunity to shine. Another benefit of this new disc is the exceptionally generous playing time – 81:53.

As to the music itself this shows both Sullivan’s strengths and limitations as a composer. L’île Enchantée was his first experience of writing a ballet. At the age of just twenty Sullivan had an enormous success with his incidental music for The Tempest and he was quickly marked down as Britain’s “great hope” as a national composer. Two years after that success he was approached to provide this dance divertissement to be bolted onto performances of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Royal Italian Opera in Covent Garden. Part of the concept of 19^th Century Grand Opera was the inclusion of a ballet and if the work did not contain one already it was added. Given that the opera alone is a good two and a half hours tacking fifty minutes of a new ballet on afterwards would test the concentration of any audience. The general acclaim the score received – it was performed thirteen times within the season – would indicate that the audiences heard and saw enough to keep them entertained.

At a distance of a century and a half it is easy to understand the music’s appeal and to admire Sullivan’s undoubted talent. The orchestrations are always effective, the melodic flow attractive and indeed often memorable (Sullivan reused portions of the score in later works). What it lacks – and what it did not really need in its original context – is emotional and dramatic weight. This is just what it says on the tin – a divertissement. The excellent Dutton liner provides a synopsis for the ballet which is about as flimsy as it is possible to hang a narrative on. As such it is not worth relating and the music has little if any dramatic context – there is a storm sequence and a Scène de jalousie but otherwise this is simply a vehicle to display the dancing talents of the performers – the emotional temperature runs very low. Conductor John Andrews sensibly keeps the music light and the textures clean. Unsurprisingly – especially at this early point in Sullivan’s career and in the prevailing musical climate of Britain at the time – Mendelssohn is the predominant influence. Sullivan was after all the first recipient of the Royal College of Music’s highest award for composer – the Mendelssohn Scholarship. Intriguingly there are little glimpses in the galops especially of the kind of nimble patter songs that would be such a key part of the Gilbert & Sullivan legacy. The music is always fluent, certainly enjoyable, skilfully and aptly written in a way that few if any of Sullivan’s British contemporaries could match. But it is also clear that the oil of Sullivan required the vinegar of Gilbert to raise his undoubted musical ability to the level of unique brilliance that lay latent within him. Away from the operettas that have ensured his enduring fame Sullivan was rather too content to write in styles and genres that supported rather than challenged convention.

Proof of that is amply supplied by the remainder of the music on this disc. Again, all of it is perfectly good and attractive, certainly it is very well played and recorded here but it lacks individuality. The Procession March is a case in point. A huge coup for a twenty-one year old composer to be asked to provide a ceremonial march for the wedding of the Prince of Wales – quite how Sullivan got the commission is unclear but apart from any talent he literally had friends in high places. The march given here had to be reconstructed from a combination of orchestral parts found at Drury Lane and tuba and horns parts from the surviving Military Band arrangement. The reason it did not survive away from the original purpose is it is no more than functional – it could be one of any number of “Grand Marches” written by any number of 19^th century composers. The recording here is marked as a world premiere – in fact all of the music on this disc is given in some manner a first recording – but this is something of interest for Sullivan completists only.

More attractive are the orchestrations of three of the six Day Dreams originally for piano. These also date from the 1860’s which – as the liner points out – was an extraordinarily productive decade for Sullivan. But he did not orchestrate these works. That was left to Herman Finck who in 1934 selected three of the pieces to create a little orchestral suite. Finck belonged to that talented group of conductor/composer/arrangers who flourished in the interwar years when the demand for live music was at its greatest. Fans of light music will know his name from his own Lady Dragonfly Suite and miniatures such as The Dream Girl. His In the Shadows has endured as it was one of the last pieces played on the Titanic as it sank. But as an orchestrator as here he is equally effective and within the limitation of the form this suite is genuinely charming. Robin Gordon-Powell took Finck’s standard theatre/light orchestra instrumentation and has seamlessly added a second oboe, bassoon, tuba and harp. The liner again points – rightly – to Mendelssohn as the clear influence but because the scale and intention of the original music is slight the effect here is charming rather than the lack of inherent drama that impacts the ballet. Likewise the BBC Concert Orchestra and its principal players perform the work with exactly the right finesse and sophistication that it requires.

The disc is completed by the ten minute overture Sullivan wrote for an abortive opera The Sapphire Necklace. This work has disappeared so completely that no libretto, synopsis or score of any kind except for this overture still exist. Contemporary reports – presumably based on information supplied by Sullivan – hint at “dramatic unsuitability” with what music that had been written being repurposed elsewhere. The overture was again recorded by Andrew Penny in Ireland for Marco Polo/Naxos although it did not appear on the same release as L’île Enchantée. Both that version orchestrated by Roderick Spencer and the new recording orchestrated by Robin Gordon-Powell appear to have been based on the same surviving military band arrangement made by Charles Godfrey Jr. Technically the Marco Polo recording of the overture receives a warmer more appealing recording than the ballet did. Because of the presence of two different orchestrators the work is essentially the same-but-different across the two recordings. Penny is a few seconds longer than Andrews but again both conductors are well in tune with the style and idiom and both performances are effective and well played. The overture itself deserves more of a life than the Procession March and again there are tantalising hints in some of the melodic shapes and the overture’s final grand peroration of the musical path Sullivan would be taking in the years ahead.

As part of Dutton’s ongoing Sullivan retrospective this is a very well performed and well presented disc in excellent sound. The inherent limitations of the emotional range of the music do little but reinforce the idea that for all his technical talent Sullivan needed Gilbert to release his genius. Collectors of the other releases from Dutton will enjoy and indeed relish these performances and need not hesitate. For those curious about Sullivan before Gilbert I would direct them to the one-disc survey on Chandos from Richard Hickox and the BBC Philharmonic which featured The Tempest suite of incidental music, The Irish Symphony and In Memoriam as providing the best over-view.

Nick Barnard