The recording of late Victorian/Edwardian music by Scottish composers continues.
Chandos and Hyperion have given us valuable insights into the work of McEwen,
Mackenzie and MacCunn now Hyperion give us four symphonic poems by the
little-known composer Dr William Wallace.
William Wallace was a remarkable man - a classical scholar (and a Hebrew
scholar), a doctor and an eye surgeon. He was also a poet, dramatist, and
painter as well as a writer on music and musicians, in addition to being
a composer. In his later years, he became a Professor of Harmony at the Royal
Academy of Music when his fellow Scot and composer, John McEwen, was Principal.
Wallace wrote six symphonic poems; the two not included here are the second,
Amboss Oder Hammer based on Goethe, and the fourth, Greeting to
the New Century. Closely associated with these is the Prelude to The
Eumenides. It seems unlikely that the second Hammer symphonic
poem, not heard since World War II, will be recorded because the score is
lost. Perhaps it is tucked away in the house of some conductor? John Purser,
who has written the very full notes for this new Hyperion recording, lists
other Wallace works of note: The two symphonies including the fine
Creation Symphony and the choral symphony, Koheleth based on
Ecclesiastes, the lovely Pelléas et Mélisande Suite,
the bitingly satirical choral ballad, The Massacre of the Macphersons
and The Divine Surrender, another large-scale choral work based on
the mystery play by Elliot Stock plus the four orchestral suites including
the Scotts Fantasy, The Lady from the Sea and the Suite in
A.
Neville Cardus, in 1964, described Wallace as a composer who was one of the
first in the progressive movement of seventy years ago. Indeed Wallace and
Bantock (incidentally, the son of a Scottish-based surgeon) were amongst
a small group of rebels who challenged the conservatism of the music schools
of the time. Shaw described Wallace as "a young Scotch composer with a very
tender and sympathetic talent" but suggested that his The Passing of
Beatrice should be cut down by nine-tenths. This was a typical Shavian
over-statement but it has to be said that some of the music might have benefited
from a little judicious editing and some more memorable themes. But there
are many strengths: exciting and stirring passages, fine atmospheric and
dramatic writing and colourful orchestration. Influences of Liszt and Wagner
are evident.
As usual, in this series, Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Orchestra play the
music of their fellow countryman with great zest and commitment.
All four symphonic poems are based on highly dramatic subjects. The Passing
of Beatrice is based on Dante and takes us from Purgatory to Paradise
where Beatrice is taken up into a white rose made up of the souls of the
blessed. The music, reminiscent of Parsifal and Lohengrin,
is intensely romantic and reverential. Sister Helen, Wallace's third
symphonic poem, reveals the opposite side of love. This is high melodrama
based on a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Helen, insane with jealousy and
frustrated love, murders her lover by sorcery (she slowly burns a wax effigy
of him causing him to writhe in agony and eventually expire). The music gives
a rounded view of Helen including a warmer, side reminding us of her former
feelings before she was slighted, as well as the more hair-raising aspects
of the tragedy. Sir William Wallace (the fifth symphonic poem) is
clearly about the composer's namesake, the Scottish hero and freedom fighter
who was betrayed by his fellow-countrymen and beheaded and dismembered by
the English. There is all the excitement of the battles as well as more nostalgic
yearning for the highlander's homes. The influence of Elgar in
nobilmente mood is apparent. Villon, Symphonic Poem No 6 is
the most successful of the set. It is based on the exploits of François
Villon the French rebel poet, murderer, drunkard and whore-monger - a loveable
rogue. One is drawn to comparing the piece with Elgar's Falstaff -
the subject and treatment are not too dissimilar. Of course, the Elgar opus
is superior but Wallace's work is no mean achievement. All the riotous behaviour,
mischievous irony and pathos of Villon is cleverly and subtly conveyed. An
invaluable collection for lovers of late romantic music.
Reviewer
Ian Lace
And another view from Vincent Budd
Like MacCunn, Wallace (1860-1940) was a son of Greenock and as with almost
all of the composers of the time was from a privileged background. But, despite
being born with the silver knife and fork on his plate (which can sometimes
mask unwarranted artistic indulgence), he was clearly a genuinely gifted
individual; a bit of an all round clever Richard in fact: trained as a doctor
specialising in ophthahmology, he also dabbled in Classical Scholarship,
wrote poetry and drama, and painted, and to boot served in the Royal Army
Medical Corp during the First World War.
In the end, however, it was music that came to take precedence in his life
both as a composer and a writer. He studied under Mackenzie at RAM, becoming
friends with his fellow, younger student and, to my mind, the most outstanding
composer of that generation, Granville Bantock. He was obviously a man whose
bonnet could buzz with some restive bees as Bantock's letters reveal how
he was apt to throw china round the kitchen in the heat of an argument; though
the younger man admired and did much to promote his music.
Wallace eschewed his own country, preferring to live in London for the sake
of his career: yet, as with his re-domiciled Professor, Wallace's compositions
are almost totally forgotten today, and this is a genuinely enterprising
restoration-act by Hyperion. Indeed the sleeve claims the first ever commercial
recording of any of Wallace's works. Listening to this CD the stature of
Wallace's music becomes immediately evident and it is a wonder how such obviously
exhilarating and rapturous music could have so easily fallen into neglect:
finely constructed, filled with charmed orchestral writing, it reveals a
sincere and affecting musical personality.
George Bernard Shaw once rightly observed that Wallace had 'a very tender
and sympathetic talent', but typically also advised that Beatrice be cut
by nine-tenths. Shaw could be as inanely flippant as he was clever, and was
often more intent on being amusingly droll than showing a necessary critical
empathy with the subjects of his acute wit. Wallace's music is undoubtedly
of its time (an often lazy critical artifice - so of course was Bach's, Mozart's,
and Beethoven's), and oozing the still less than fashionable effusive romantic
musical rhetoric of late-Victorian and Edwardian British music.
More hard-bitten commentators will clearly discern a certain diffuse quality
in Wallace's work again this was part of the very charm of the music of the
period. (It is perhaps worthwhile noting that both Bantock and Wallace were
considered 'difficult' in their own time - too radical for one age, soon
too conservative for another - and that furthermore many of the decidedly
'unromantic', say Schoenberg-influenced, composers who came for a period
to dominate British music are now also all but forgotten.) Shaw's remark
is just plain tommyrot.
The Passing of Beatrice is an inspired work, moving and evocative throughout,
with an exquisite orchestral touch and deserves to be a standard part of
the repertoire of British rnusic.
Sir William Wallace was written to rnark the 600th anniversaIy of the death
of the 'Scottish hero and freedom-fighter; beheaded and dismembered by the
English'. It has a tender lento opening before becoming more dramatically
involved in its subject with the sustained tension of that evocative orchestral
exposition so associated with the 'romantic' idiom, including some exquisitely
pleasing moments. Scots wha' hae provides thematic material, but,
in an unusual structural tum-about, is not fully stated until the finale.
It is a fine and affecting piece which repays a concentrated ear.
Villon, the last of these four symphonic poems, published in 1910, is a
marvellous evocation of the French 'rebel-poet' and perhaps the most immediately
satisfying of the four symphonic poems with some memorably fertile scoring.
After a marvellous opening and clever employment of the bassoon, the music
unfolds into a gripping and ever-changing piece, with light touches and elegiac
tempers, contrasting with passages of sensuous exhilaration, at times rising
to climaxes of telling intoxication. It is one of the highlights of the whole
series.
The final piece, Sister Helen, inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
poem, equally reveals the abiding stature of the composer and another forcibly
fervid musical characterisation.
Whilst the neglect of the music of MacCunn, Mackenzie, and Wallace is not
unduly beyond the unfathomable, and hardly as unjustifiable as in the case
of say Granville Bantock, it is a joy at last to hear this forgotten but
more than worthy music played with such enthused commitment. It is abidingly
picturesque, passionate, warmhearted, and unpretentious. Yet, though these
were evidently characteristically Scottish spirits at work, they were unable
to achieve an overwhelmingly distinctive national focus in their music. For
all the intrinsic and satisfying musicality, the conventions of their musical
language still very much looked outward to Europe and remained very much
bound within the strictures of the academy as opposed to springing from the
roots of Scottish folk music, disenabling them to establish - as one now,
a century on, would have liked - a more radical and truly culturally diagnostic
classical music.
The works of Wallace are truly resplendent and, performed by an orchestra
thoroughly immersed in the heart of the composer, provide perhaps the most
demonstrably soul-subduing musical experience.
Reviewer
Vincent Budd
More detail on this recording is
available
BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins.
