Lord BERNERS (1883-1950)
A Wedding Bouquet (1936) [33:17]
March arr. Philip Lane (c. 1945) [1:58]
Luna Park (1930) [16:35]
RTE Chamber Choir, RTE Sinfonietta/Kenneth Alwyn
rec. February 1994, Taney Parish Centre, Dublin, Ireland
NAXOS 8.555223 [52:07]
Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt, the fourteenth baron Berners, was that rare thing, a successful amateur composer. He was an amateur both in the sense that he had an inherited income and did not need to work and also that he practised other arts as well: he was also a novelist and a painter. After he inherited his title and assets from his uncle in 1918 he abandoned his diplomatic career to live the life of an eccentric aristocrat, about whom many anecdotes remain. I shall not repeat them, but just mention that he was portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. As a composer he wrote songs, piano pieces, a few orchestral pieces and film scores and, above all, a series of five ballets. He was commissioned by Diaghilev and praised by Stravinsky. Walton and Constant Lambert were among his many friends.
A Wedding Bouquet is a choral ballet, based on the opening pages of a play by Gertrude Stein, They Must be Wedded to Their Wife. The setting is the garden of a farmhouse in France. People are preparing for a wedding feast. Children and adults arrive. We hear the stories of some of them. Two of them, Josephine and Julia, raise problems and make scenes. The Bridegroom (unnamed) dances a tango with a chorus of his former mistresses. Everyone else departs and Julia is left alone. As a choral ballet on the theme of a wedding this subject has obvious affinities with Stravinsky’s Les Noces, his choral ballet of 1924. It is not surprising that it does not have Stravinsky’s extraordinary ability to evoke both gaiety and melancholy, sometimes at the same time, or his immense power – whenever I see or hear Les Noces I come away thinking it is Stravinsky’s greatest work – but it is a charming and delightful piece, full of varied music, and, for all its composer’s eccentricities, perfectly competent in the ordinary craft of composition. It bears somewhat the same relation to Stravinsky as does, say, Poulenc’s Les biches.
Between this and the other ballet here we have a March, which survives as a piano score but which was probably intended for an ensemble. Philip Lane has scored it here for a brass ensemble. It is brief but effective.
Luna Park is a shorter and earlier ballet which features a circus with a showman who shows four freaks to the public then bows and departs. The freaks turn out to be normal people who come forward and decide to leave the circus and go their own way. The showman returns and finds nothing left of them but the props which enabled him to show them as freaks. Again the subject recalls Stravinsky, Petrushka this time, but this music is closer to the Walton of Façade – not so much the original version for reciter and ensemble but the orchestral suites Walton subsequently made – apart from one number which sounds like pastiche Tchaikovsky. Again, this is a charming work.
These performances are very nicely done and the players play with enthusiasm. The choir sings well but their words were mostly not clear enough for me to follow and, sadly, the booklet, otherwise very informative, does not include them. The recording is good. These performances were first issued on the Marco Polo label in 1996 and this reissue on the much cheaper Naxos label is most welcome.
Stephen Barber
