IVOR GURNEY WAR ELEGY REVIVED AT CHELTENHAM
On the face of it one might expect that an orchestral
War Elegy by so well-known a poet of 1914-18 as Ivor Gurney
should be a familiar piece from the First World War, and yet the
music which the Gloucestershire Symphony Orchestra revived at
their concert on Sunday 2 March is completely unknown. A glance
at the manuscript full score of the War Elegy, preserved
in the library of the Royal College of Music, immediately suggests
why. Although it opens confidently, it becomes increasingly uncertain
as it goes along; the central climax seems clotted and awkward;
in one or two places its seems unfinished. I was therefore delighted
that the GSO and their conductor Mark Finch had programmed it
at their concert at Cheltenham Town Hall, the home of so many
notable first performances, providing an opportunity to judge
the music in performance.
This was the first performance since Stanford
conducted it at the Royal College of Music in June 1921, although
Richard Carder gave the music a run through at the Canford Summer
School of Music in 1988. But this was the first formal performance,
and in the programme notes conductor Mark Finch summarised the
problems of trying to elucidate what Gurney actually meant from
the score and parts that survive. "Of the six notes which
make up the last bar of music, three were written differently
in the parts. Indeed, trying to unpick Gurney’s intentions throughout
from the hand-written evidence has proved an interesting challenge
– on the one hand, the score contains many ambiguities and some
clear mistakes, on the other, the hastily written parts . . .
also contain errors of their own. . . there are many other examples
of unusual dissonance of varying degrees of plausibility."
Nevertheless it worked in performance, and while
it is no masterpiece, and it certainly needs sensitive editing,
Finch and his forces did a good job in bringing Gurney’s personal
world to life. Hearing Gurney’s trudging funeral march given added
voice by the clumsy second climax followed by its all-too-expressive
fade out, one could not help but feel that we were hearing an
authentic account of the hardships and sorrows of an eloquent
poet whose terrible experience it encapsulates. As the programme
put it "the futility of Gurney’s war experience . . . summed
up in the bare fifths for flutes and clarinets with which the
piece ends". I made it run 9’26". When a First World
War programme is next being considered this surely deserves to
be heard again.
LEWIS FOREMAN
RECORDING
HYPERION’S BANTOCK VOLUME 6
Lewis Foreman reports enthusiastically from
Watford, where Hyperion’s recording session for their next Bantock
CD was safely completed.
On 1 and 2 April at the Watford Colosseum (or
Town Hall, if you prefer) the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under
Vernon Handley successfully recorded the sixth volume of Hyperion’s
Bantock cycle for issue later in the year. The vocal soloists
in excerpts from The Song of Songs were the soprano Elizabeth
Connell (fresh from singing Richard Strauss in Australia) and
tenor Kim Begley. As on previous volumes the producer was Martin
Compton and the engineer Tony Faulkner. It went remarkably well,
and all involved are reported delighted with the outcome.
The programme consisted of three orchestral tracks
and three vocal ones. Two comparatively well-known works by Bantock,
the Overture to a Greek Tragedy and Pierrot of the Minute,
were contrasted with less-known repertoire. The once-popular aria
‘The Wilderness and the Solitary Place’ from Bantock’s short oratorio
Christ in the Wilderness proved a worthwhile find, explaining
its one-time regular appearances at the Proms, and the three extracts
from The Song of Songs made one eager to hear more of the
complete work which is quite impossible properly to experience
from the vocal score.
The sessions started on the afternoon of the
first day with "Day 2" (or Act 2) from The Song of
Songs. The Song of Songs is a literal setting of the
whole of the Biblical "Song of Songs", treated as a
passionate drama in five acts (which Bantock calls "days"),
each separated by massive choruses which were not recorded. The
previous volume of Hyperion’s Bantock had included the Prelude
from this huge undertaking, and that had created considerable
enthusiasm for now exploring some 40 minutes of the complete work.
Bantock enthusiasts will know "Day 2" from the Dutton
historical CD of Laelia Finneberg singing it as a solo scena in
a 1936 broadcast conducted by the composer. Now it was sung as
Bantock intended, as a duet, and Vernon Handley was remarkable
in doing it in exactly the same time that Bantock took, though
perhaps without all of Bantock’s excessive rubato. Elizabeth Connell
was notably enthusiastic, and she told me she had been out and
bought the Dutton historical CD and said that given the opportunity
she would love to sing that version in concert. Now heard as a
duet, with the orchestra in digital sound, it really is a strong
recommendation for doing the work complete, whatever "complete"
may be.
The second vocal extract was the closing scene
– for those with the vocal score from the bottom of page 279 to
the end. At the beginning William Prideaux, still a student at
the Royal Academy of Music, sang the 4-bar walk-on baritone role
of the Watchman, and then the soloists launched on their tremendous
– very Straussian - final love duet which in the event ran 14’
48". It is quite impossible to have any idea of the sheer
sumptuous colour of this from the vocal score, and it was a great
success. Later, at the end of the second day of recording, the
orchestra recorded an extended orchestral interlude from the "Third
Day" (vocal score 156-163) which ran just over 7’ to link
the vocal sequences on the CD. Various starting points were tried
and the final edit will depend on the total running time, the
extract having been chosen to be flexible to ensure the whole
programme did not over-run.
Apart from the problems of chosing a programme
which worked as an entity on CD, this project also had considerable
problems in finding the music and sourcing performing materials
for the sessions, an exercise which altogether took me over two
years. Fortunately Swan & Co’s original parts of The Song
of Songs from the 1920s survive and were available to allow
the recording to take place, thanks to Sean Gray and the hire
library at Weinberger’s, the present owner of the work.
In selecting the orchestral works for the programme
it seemed a good idea to have one or two better-known works alongside
the rarities, and for this reason Juga Naut which had been
carried over from Volume 5 when its companion Processional
had been recorded was carried over again. Vernon Handley brought
a characteristic sympathy to the two previously recorded works,
and in the sympathetic acoustic at Watford, both ran slower than
on the competition, though in fact Nicholas Braithwaite’s LP Lyrita
recording of Greek Tragedy has never been reissued, and
has not been available for many years. A wonderful two days: Hyperion
tell me they are going for release in the Autumn.
ELGAR WASN’T OSCAR PETERSON
At a CD launch at the Savile Club sponsored by
Elgar Editions on 4 April, the pianist David Owen Norris introduced
his pioneering programme of Elgar’s piano music, tantalisingly
headed Vol 1. Here is a production where the booklet, by the pianist,
is almost as important as the performances in discussing Elgar’s
relationship both to the keyboard and to his inspiration. Early
and late: here we have four early pieces and a succession of late
one including David Owen Norris’s transcription of Elgar’s piano
improvisations, made in the small Queen’s Hall on 6 November 1929,
but not issued commercially until EMI’s historic LP set "Elgar
on Record".
In his notes the pianist reminds us that a keyboard
improvisation by an orchestral composer of Elgar’s imagination
launches ‘on an unknown sea of spontaneous creation, unconstrained
by notation’, and admits that his ‘own second thoughts on Elgar’s
behalf are also the work of ear and hand alone’. Thus where Elgar
was clearly constrained by the ending of a 4½ minute side Norris
has to decide where to stop. His solution is eminently artistic,
not to say Elgarian: ‘The last Improvisation follows an intricate
pattern of thought, with quasi-recapitulations and fleeting thematic
references. I'm convinced that Elgar would have wanted to recall
his beautiful melody, and so I bring back its second phrase in
combination with the opening rising thirds, and I play the falling
sequences from its beginning in a circular imitation similar to
a passage in the Finale of the First Symphony. Then I return to
Elgar's final cadence, with its unmistakable and moving reference
to the word "wiedersehen" in the soprano aria in Brahms's Requiem.’
In discussing the limitations of Elgar’s piano technique,
Norris suddenly produced my musical aphorism of the month: ’Elgar
wasn’t Oscar Peterson’. Well no, but the flavour of Elgar’s improvisations
come from his idiosyncratic pianism, though without the ultimate
in virtuosity, and a fertility of invention which he shares with
Peterson.
Framing the whole programme is the Sonatina,
dating from 1889 but revised for publication in 1930 and fascinatingly
analysed by Norris. Here also is In Smyrna, the source
of "Hail Immemorial Ind!" in Crown of India,
and piano transcriptions of the Imperial March and Three
Bavarian Dances. The other discovery of the programme is Elgar’s
Concert Allegro, possibly thought by many Elgarians to be one
of his few duds, and certainly viewed in that light by critics
at the first performance by the celebrated Fanny Davies a pupil
of Clara Schumann. Frankly, even in John Ogden’s celebrated recording
this is a piece that has never loomed large on my Elgarian horizons.
This is music in which Elgar bowed to the suggestions of his pianist,
and David Owen Norris believes that Fanny Davies played the piece
at anything down to half speed. As he writes in the notes: ‘The
clues lie in Fanny Davies's pencilled suggestions on the MS. As
a pupil of Clara Schumann's, she had been 'properly trained' -
something of which Elgar's particular genius had never known the
need. To take one example, the classic style of piano playing
frowns at putting the thumb on a black note. As I know from my
recreations of his improvising, Elgar had no such inhibitions.
And the Concert Allegro is full of passage-work where the
obvious thing to do is to preserve the finger pattern you first
thought of, which means that the thumb often ends up on a black
note. In many of these places, Fanny suggests alterations that
would enable her to twist her fingers round in a different way,
often at the expense of Elgar's harmonic integrity. . . . The
gulf between her musical world and Elgar's couldn't be clearer.
Fanny's finicky fingering would immediately slow down the glorious
rush of Elgar's semi-quavers. And for anyone out-of-tune enough
with Elgar to attempt to curb his rhetoric, there's a pitfall
right at the opening of the piece, where the crotchet chords are
marked risoluto and look (to a pianist) as if they
should be played in a heavy, deliberate manner. It takes more
than a moment to see beyond one's assumptions, and realize that
Elgar has specified two beats in a bar, not four, and put a swift
metronome mark of Minim=88.’
This a wonderful example of practical musicology
by a pianist totally in sympathy with his subject – intelligent,
idiomatic playing, a sympathetic eminently realistic recorded
sound and the promise of other volumes to follow; it could not
be better. Recommended.
LEWIS FOREMAN
DAVID OWEN NORRIS plays ELGAR – vol 1
(Five Improvisations; Skizze; Presto; Waltz "Enina";
Chantant; Griffinesque; Sonatina; Imperial March; In Smyrna; Three
Bavarian Dances; Serenade; Concert Allegro; Adieu.) Elgar Editions
EECD 002
MALCOLM WILLIAMSON: obituary
Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music,
died on 2 March after a long illness. In the 1960s he had been
one of the biggest names among the younger generation of composers
active in the UK, with a constant stream of new works, and yet
by the 1980s he seemed to be in decline and in the 1990s had become
almost faded from view. Why this should be, for he remained an
active composer, is likely to be the subject of endless research
and discussion, for his music forms one of the most approachable
and accessible bodies of work of his time.
Williamson was born in Sydney on 21 November
1931, the son of a Protestant clergyman. He began composing as
a child, and like many another musical son of a church family
achieved his first successes as organist at his father’s church
when very young. He soon went to the Sydney Conservatoire ("the
Con"), where he is remembered as being full of himself as
a student piano wizard – he loved to play the brilliant opening
of the then new Khachaturian Piano Concerto, and needed little
excuse to show off with it. This did not endear him to some of
his contemporaries. When the opera Judith by his composition
teacher Eugene Goossens was staged at "the Con" most
people remember it for the first public recognition of the student
Joan Sutherland in the title role – but if one looks carefully
at the list of orchestral players in the programme, Williamson
will be seen listed at the end as the celesta player.
Williamson came to London in 1950 and discovered
a new world of music – the then newly empowered serial avant
garde and the music of Messaien – of which he had previously
been ignorant. Settling permanently in London in 1953, from then
to 1957 he studied with Elisabeth Lutyens and with the Schoenberg
disciple Erwin Stein. Yet while he explored serialism, it was
not long before he embraced a personal eclecticism encompassing
popular elements, both rhythmic and melodic. He was soon within
the orbit of the Britten circle and was represented at the Aldeburgh
Festival in 1955 by the song Ay flattering fortune sung
by Peter Pears, and in 1956 appeared himself to play his sparkling
new first Piano Sonata. He scraped a living by working in Harrod’s
and playing in a night club. Converting to Catholicism at the
age of 20, he was also a church organist, successively at the
Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street and at St Peter’s,
Limehouse.
In Paris he was in the circle of Messaien and
Boulez, and as a champion of the former’s organ music it was to
Messaien he turned for a language to articulate his newfound conversion
to the Roman Catholic Church, in such large-scale organ pieces
as Fons Amoris, the six movement Symphony for organ, and
the Vision of Christ-Phoenix in which the emotional impact
of the charred shell of the old Cathedral seen from the new Coventry
Cathedral impelled the composer to produce a wide-ranging set
of variations founded on the ‘Coventry Carol’, which was often
played by Allan Wicks soon after it first appeared. Soon afterwards
the short Epitaph for Edith Sitwell, and then Elegy
for J F K had a topicality which ensured many performances
at the time.
Williamson was very prolific, and his music encompassed
almost all conventional forms. These included 9 operas, 6 ballets,
10 cassations (his term for music, particularly for children,
involving audience participation), 7 symphonies, 4 piano concertos,
concertos for organ, violin, 2-pianos and saxophone; a huge number
of vocal works, a large body of church music, chamber & organ
music, and several substantial cycles for solo voice and orchestra.
Williamson was not so prolific when writing for voice and piano,
though the Brittenesque Stevenson cycle of 12 songs From a
Child’s Garden has Williamson’s endlessly inventive piano
figurations supporting the easy lyricism familiar from his children’s
music.
Between 1957 and 1962 Williamson produced a succession
of concertos, the first Piano Concerto appearing at Cheltenham
in 1958 and reappearing at the Proms in 1959. This was criticised
at the time by critics who could not reconcile his exploration
of the new with a popular lyricism. His short Sinfonia Concertante
for piano, three trumpets and strings took two years to bring
to fruition, and at this time, hearing rather late in the day
of a competition in Western Australia for a concerto for piano
and strings, Williamson wrote what became the second piano concerto
in 8 days and won the competition. In the Third Piano Concerto,
Williamson is on a grander scale, with four movements, and he
remarked about the finale: "the tears have gone, the curtained
privacy of the slow movement is shattered with the Caribbean sunlight
. . . in a combative dance’. It was a formula he often used.
In the 1960s one was constantly encountering
new works by Williamson, possibly one of the first for me was
the Organ Concerto at the Proms on Friday 8 September 1961, when
it was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in what now seems a strange
programme consisting of Beethoven Symphony No 8, Beethoven’s Fourth
Piano Concerto (with Myra Hess), Brandenburg No 3 the Williamson
and ending with Ravel Daphnis and Chloe suite No 2. "The
organ Concerto was a labour of love" recalled the composer,
explaining "it was written in honour of Sir Adrian Boult."
In fact the motif ACB is heard throughout. When it was recorded
by Lyrita in the mid 1970s it was coupled with Williamson playing
his Third Piano Concerto (which had been premiered by John Ogdon).
Although offered to Sir Adrian, he declined to conduct the Piano
Concerto and Leonard Dommet stepped in to complete the record.
In 1964 Williamson’s Violin Concerto was written for Yehudi Menuhin
and as a memorial to Edith Sitwell, and although not well received
by the critics in 1964, it became one of Williamson’s most performed
works, and the composer was delighted to be warmly congratulated
by Sir William Walton after the London premiere.
Williamson’s setting of Graham Green’s entertainment
Our Man in Havana, was first produced in 1963 and revived
the following year, before being seen in Germany, Belgium, Hungary
and the USA. It is surely the most purely enjoyable British opera
of the last forty years, and the most demanding of revival of
all the many new operas, most of them disasters, which were commissioned
from British composers during the quarter century after 1960.
The ‘operatic entertainment’ English Eccentrics after Edith
Sitwell, was a great success at the 17th Aldeburgh
Festival in 1964 and it seemed both entertaining and new-minted
at the time. Listening to a recording, I thought it had worn less
well than some of his other stage works, though a student revival
by the Trinity College of Music at King’s College in the Strand
in 1990 underlined the sparkle of Williamson’s invention and his
catchy parodies of the popular music of its day. Williamson’s
opera The Violins of St Jacques at the London Coliseum
in 1966 seemed to be a triumphant synthesis of the operatic tendencies
of the time, and it was given for four consecutive seasons and
then filmed in Australia. It seemed to underline at the time that
here indeed was Britten’s operatic successor.
In 1965 the magazine Music & Musicians
ran an extended feature on Williamson in which Stephen Walsh referred
to his "graduation to the status of a household name".
This was reinforced by the fact that Williamson also found a sympathetic
vein writing for children, with The Happy Prince,
after the Oscar Wilde short story and Julius Caesar Jones,
which was recorded. A full length score, Lucky Peter’s Journey,
took a fairy-tale play by Strindberg to make Sadler’s Wells Opera’s
1969 Christmas show at the London Coliseum. "What goes on"
said Williamson "is as serious as in Die Zauberflöte
or Die Frau Ohne Schatten, but it should float past the
listener as lightly as a feather. After all, I was asked to compose
an operatic pantomime, and I chose a serious subject so that it
would be entertaining." Given 14 performances in its initial
run, it has not been heard now for many years.
I was first introduced to Williamson by Malcolm
Smith when I called one day at the hire library at Boosey &
Hawkes, perhaps twenty or more years ago. First meeting Malcolm
Williamson at that time was a memorable experience: a charming
manner, and a wonderful flow of conversation and sympathetic comment.
His reminiscences were fascinating, of Edith Sitwell, Britten
and all the names of the time. Later I spoke to him on the phone
on various occasions and found this same spiel became wearisome
on the fourth or fifth repetition. Once, he found himself speaking
to my wife on the phone, never having met her, but held her captivated
for some 50 minutes. "What a fascinating man" she remarked.
Soon after he was appointed as Master of the
Queen’s Music (a political appointment if ever there was one),
Williamson appeared on a BBC Radio Three programme introducing
music by his predecessors in the post, Bax and Walford Davies.
I still have a tape of that programme, and no man has ever seemed
more ill-at-ease than did the new Master of the Music making those
introductions on that occasion. He seemed unable to decide what
tone to take, and adopted a stiff and unnatural formality. He
seemed like a fish out of water.
Williamson became Master of the Queen’s Music
on the death of Sir Arthur Bliss in 1975, yet after 27 years one
has difficulty in remembering any pieces written by Williamson
in his official capacity. This is unlike his predecessor, who
revelled in the role and did much to reinvent it. However, the
Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 did result in Williamson producing several
works for the occasion, even if it also saw him fail to meet a
particularly high-profile deadline, which gave him an unfortunate
reputation of not completing commissions on time.
Williamson’s big commission for the Jubilee celebrations
in 1977 was the Fourth Symphony which failed to be ready, and
after one performance has not been played since. This was compounded
by the same problem over the 70-minute Mass of Christ the King.
Commissioned for the 250th anniversary of the Three
Choirs and dedicated to the Queen on her Silver Jubilee, this
was eventually sung incomplete, at Gloucester, the completed score
not being heard until November the following year. However, when
it was first heard in full at Westminster Cathedral and later
at the Perth (Scotland) Festival in 1981, and was also seen on
BBC television, it was widely praised. "A Mass worth waiting
for" announced David Cairns’ review in the Sunday Times.
In fact Williamson had a very active and otherwise
successful Jubilee year, it was the PR that went wrong. Underlining
a more Brittenesque role, during 1977 two smaller works were heard:
the Jubilee Hymn, to words by the poet laureate John Betjeman,
and Ode to Music. Both were sung by a Suffolk Schools Choir
at Ipswich on 11 July 1977 an occasion later broadcast. There
was also an orchestral suite The House of Windsor and an
opera for children, The Valley and the Hill, performed
before the Queen and Prince Philip in Liverpool. The same year
came an organ piece, The Lion of Suffolk, for Benjamin
Britten’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps Williamson’s
most active performance during the Jubilee was the presentation
by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes of his 1964 collaboration
with Ursula Vaughan Williams in his pageant cantata The Brilliant
and the Dark, which was recorded by NFWI choirs (auditioned
from across England) specially to commemorate the Jubilee. It
would be hard to imagine a more high-profile way of Williamson
being seen as the successor to Vaughan Williams and Britten as
the unofficial as well as the official musical laureate.
Later Williamson wrote the five-movement Ode
for the Queen for the Queen Mother’s 80th birthday.
Played by the Scottish Baroque Ensemble director Leonard Freedman,
this was first performed at the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh
in 1980 at a private concert to mark the 80th birthday
of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Its first public performance
came in a BBC broadcast in November the same year. Tuneful and
rhythmic, it is rather like a latter day St Paul’s Suite.
Here the opening movement is dubbed ‘Act of Homage’ and the fourth
‘Majesty and Beauty’ suggesting that Williamson was, perhaps,
working hard to discharge his royal role. That Williamson could
tap a deep vein of emotion, even in occasional works, was especially
notable in his spontaneously written Lament in Memory of Lord
Mountbatten of Burma for violin and strings.
If Williamson’s profile began to wane from the
late 1970s, one broadcast concert from February 1979 underlines
that his fertility and vitality were undimmed. This was from that
year’s Milton Keynes Festival when Williamson’s orchestral movement
Fiesta and his orchestral song-cycle Les Olympiques
were both heard in the UK for the first time, under the direction
of Lionel Friend. The boisterous brashness and constantly driving
rhythm of Fiesta has some of the exotic colour of an orchestral
work by Villa Lobos. It reminds us that the one work of Williamson
which at one time seemed poised for the permanent repertoire was
the tuneful overture Santiago de Espade, certainly Australia’s
answer to Bernstein’s ever-popular Candide. That neither
Fiesta or his earlier success are still heard is most unexpected.
The song cycle Les Olympiques, also written
in the Jubilee year of 1977, is one of several remarkable works
for voice and orchestra that Williamson has produced, including
the Hammarskjöld Portrait of 1974, and the Tribute
to a Hero of 1981. In Les Olympiques, in a work the
composer described as "nocturnal", Williamson sets words
by Henri de Mantherlant, a poet who hymned athleticism but was
wounded during the First World War; Williamson’s verse-sequence
is like a journey through life and it was first performed at the
Festival of the Ruhr in 1977.
In 1986 I worked for the Department of Trade
and Industry and found myself involved in the planning for the
celebrations of the bi-centenary of the foundation of the Board
of Trade. In this capacity I was responsible for commissioning
an anthem for the centenary service in St Margaret’s Westminster.
My immediate thought was the Master of the Queen’s Music – what
could be more appropriate. Never having commissioned music before
from a leading composer, I consulted a variety of musical sources
on how I should go about it, the fee, and most important of all,
who should be commissioned. Throughout the musical world I was
strongly warned off Williamson on the grounds that he probably
could not meet my deadline and that as a civil servant I could
not take the risk. In the end I rang Bill Matthias and asked him
if he could do it and he delivered in three weeks. It was an eye-opening
experience as to how a composer, even the most celebrated, can
lose his support.
In the days of LP Williamson’s music was constantly
recorded, yet when I reviewed a new collection of Williamson’s
popular church music (News 80) in December 1998, the accompanying
booklet claimed it to be the first new recording of his music
for 19 years. It included the short cantata Harvest Thanksgiving
which I must have bought over 35 years before when it was recorded
by Brian Alldis and it seemed very new, and was certainly the
best of then fashionable "church jazz" started by Geoffrey
Beaumont in the 1950s. It reminds us that Williamson made a speciality
of such things and his Five Cantatas were for some time
thought the best church music of their kind.
In recent years Williamson reconnected with his
Australian roots, being commissioned to write the massive Sixth
Symphony in 1982 written for the (then) seven orchestras of the
Australian Broadcasting Commission, linked electronically. The
Seventh Symphony, this time for strings, was commissioned to mark
the 150th anniversary of the State of Victoria in 1984,
and in 1988 the Australian Bicentennial produced two more substantial
works not yet heard in the UK, The True Endeavour for speaker,
chorus and orchestra with words by the historian Manning Clark
and The Dawn is at Hand, a choral symphony on words by
the Aboriginal poet Kath Walker. Williamson had comparatively
few performances during his last twenty years, certainly compared
to the activity of the previous two decades. Yet he was never
completely out of view. The wonderfully entertaining orchestral
suite from the opera Our Man in Havana was heard from the
BBC Concert Orchestra at the Proms in 1988. In that year the BBC
broadcast a series in which all six Williamson ballet scores were
heard in sequence. In the 1995 Proms, the premiere of the song-cycle
The Year of Birds for soprano and orchestra setting words
by Iris Murdoch, proved to be unexpectedly moving. The same year
also saw the first performance of With Proud Thanksgiving his
tribute to the 50th anniversary of the United Nations
which he dedicated to the memory of his former friend Harold Wilson.
There are signs of a revival, not least the
championship of Christopher Austin at Bristol who has been programming
his orchestral music for the last seven or eight years, and has
recorded the Seventh Symphony. We need to hear Williamson’s many
works that have not yet been played in the UK. This is surely
an opportunity for the BBC, with Composer of the Week or one of
their invaluable one composer surveys.
Malcolm Williamson was appointed CBE in 1976,
and Honorary AO in 1987. He married Dolores Daniel in 1960 and
had one son and two daughters. They were divorced in 1978.
LEWIS FOREMAN
Ted Perry Obituary
The following is the unedited script of Lewis
Foreman’s obituary first published in The Independent,
which has been slightly expanded in respect of Ted Perry’s contribution
to the exploration and revival of British music on the Hyperion
label, for its reappearance here.
Ted Perry, the founder-owner of Hyperion Records
died from lung cancer on 9 February. He was 71.
George Edward Perry was born in Derby in 1931
and was at first apprenticed to be a printer, a background that
influenced his entire career in the record industry, giving him
a lifelong sympathy for typography. A childhood illness left him
with a characteristic limp only relieved by a hip-replacement
operation long after the foundation of Hyperion. He inevitably
countered any enquiries about his health by saying ‘I always feel
like Bernard Shaw, never ask how someone was, they might just
tell you’.
Without formal qualifications he had a succession
of jobs in the record industry. He came to London in 1949 and
worked in the EMG record shop, and gradually acquired a collector’s
knowledge of recordings and music. ‘He was a terrific record buff’
recalls Quita Chavez, a colleague at the time, and to the end
he could quote numbers of significant LPs from the history of
recording from memory. Eventually he moved on to the newly founded
Heliodor label in 1956, but feeling his career was not developing,
the following year he went to Australia where he worked for Festival
Records, which not only recorded new repertoire but also distributed
British records in Australia. Returning to London in 1961 he worked
for one of the first independent labels, Saga, in an industry
then dominated by the big names, and for them made very early
recordings of Janet Baker and John Shirley Quirk in then unrecorded
music, including British music, notably by John Ireland and Vaughan
Williams. His repertoire also included one of the first widely-disseminated
recordings of the Bartok String Quartets, by the Fine Arts Quartet.
In doing so he developed the two principal strands of his later
success: being able to spot talented artists early, and having
a vision of repertoire needing development which he recorded on
gut-instinct without any clear evidence of whether it would be
financially successful.
In 1963, unhappy with the record industry, he
gave it up and had a succession of casual jobs, including driving
an ice cream van. Returning to records nine years later, he worked
for Saga again and then jointly founded the Meridian label with
the recording engineer John Shuttleworth, making the first recording
by an independent to win a Gramophone Award. However, nearing
fifty, it pointed him towards achieving his lifetime’s ambition,
by starting his own label, and in 1980 Ted founded Hyperion Records,
literally at the kitchen table.
His first record was Dame Thea King’s performance
of the Finzi and Stanford Clarinet Concertos, which he licensed
from the player, soon followed by her award-winning recording
of the Mozart Concerto and Quintet, where in the concerto she
played the basset clarinet, then a significant innovation. He
had the problem of all newly founded independent record companies:
lack of capital, the high cost of orchestral recordings, establishing
himself in the market and the slow returns while building a catalogue.
Yet Ted Perry had acquired that instinctive lifetime’s experience
of his customers which gave him an unchallenged feel for his market,
the ability to choose talented artists and explore worthwhile
unknown repertoire. Ted was not the man for flashy offices or
expensive publicity launches, though, as all who attended the
Hyperion 20th anniversary party in 2000 will remember,
when it came to it Ted knew all too well how to push the boat
out. But in the early days he financed his label by driving a
minicab at night, and he recalled that for this the weekends were
the most financially rewarding part of the week.
Gothic Voices’ pioneering recording of the twelfth-century
abbess Hildegard of Bingen, to which Hyperion gave the title A
Feather on the Breath of God, was an unexpected success, a
success which has continued over the years, selling approaching
350,000 copies. Effectively this capitalised Hyperion for years,
Ted remarking about new projects ‘Oh don’t worry, St Hildegard
of Hyperion will pay for it’. Effectively it allowed him to make
a few mistakes. Ted’s method of working was remembered by Gothic
Voices director, Christopher Page, who sent Ted a cassette of
a Radio3 broadcast of Hildegard. Ted had, in fact already heard
the broadcast in his minicab and he accepted the idea, and Hildegard
was done in one long day at St Jude’s-on-the-Hill in Hampstead,
featuring a then unknown Emma Kirkby. The session was made all
the more personal by Ted’s wife, Doreen, bringing an enormous
picnic for the performers. At the time Hildegard was known only
to a few scholars, and the recording’s successful championing
of it was a significant straw in the wind of what would follow.
Such was the integrity of Ted and the regard in which he was held,
Page remembers that although eventually he made 23 records for
Hyperion he never had a contract, remarking ‘you could always
phone Ted and get a straight answer’.
Ted had a special feel for singers and also evolved
a marketing strategy of developing series, sometimes of the most
unlikely material, ranging from Vivaldi and Purcell to Schumann’s
songs and the music of Robert Simpson. Probably the most remarkable
of these was Graham Johnson’s epic survey of Schubert’s songs
which was finally completed in 37 volumes. Here Ted’s belief in
the highest production values, with booklets which were allowed
to find their own length (one was a monograph of 37,000 words!),
was a significant contributor to the series’ enormous success,
winning two Gramophone and numerous other industry awards. Ted’s
feeling for voices and for casting really came into its own, and,
having been involved in the beginning of Janet Baker’s recording
career he was proud to have been able to launch the series with
one of her last recordings. Later he managed to record future
big names such as Christine Schäfer, Ian Bostridge and Matthias
Goerne, and win international awards with them before they became
more widely known. The choice of singers across the series is
a remarkable portrait of the art of singing at the end of the
twentieth century.
The current Hyperion catalogue runs to over
250 pages and, as the outcome of one man’s vision, it represents
an enormous achievement. It is impossible to mention here many
of the distinguished names that contributed to it. As Graham Johnson
has pointed out, Hyperion came on the scene at the moment when
BBC patronage of the middle ground of British musicians receded,
and Hyperion was instrumental in giving international voice to
a generation of artists. In repertoire, too, Hyperion’s championship
of unknown music has varied from Romantic Piano Concertos, masterminded
by Mike Spring and still ongoing after 31 volumes, Leslie Howard’s
95-disc traversal of the complete Liszt Piano Music. Peter Holman’s
‘The English Orpheus’, a remarkable series of 47 discs with the
Parley of Instruments gave voice to English music from the late
seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which was
completely forgotten. This was totally unexplored repertoire which
prospered owing to the high quality of both music and performances.
The Hyperion list of award-winning pianists includes Tatyana Nikolaieva,
Angela Hewitt, Marc-André Hamelin and Stephen Hough.
Totally different was the series of Sir Granville
Bantock’s orchestral music, which prompted a critical revaluation
of Bantock as a composer, thanks to sympathetic performances from
Vernon Handley and the RPO and Hyperion’s remarkably high production
values. Before the fourth of these which was devoted to Bantock’s
Sappho Songs, Ted asked me to advise what he should record.
I suggested Sappho but Ted was not keen, until he was persuaded
to attend Stephen Banfield’s revival of the cycle at Birmingham
University, which was nothing short of Ted’s road to Damascus.
He came out converted. ‘I’m going to do it’ he announced enthusiastically
and within a few months sessions were underway, Ted playing his
masterstroke by casting the mezzo-soprano, Susan Bickley as the
soloist. Sales of over 9,000 copies for such little-known music
was remarkable. I last spoke to him in the Office two days before
he died about the next volume of this very series which we had
been working on for nearly three years: I had no idea it would
be the end.
He was an impulsive person, totally reliant on
his instinct, and would always back his hunch. Robert King, later
to make many superb recordings with the King’s Consort for Hyperion
remembers first sending Ted four tentative ideas for recordings.
Early the next morning Ted telephoned to say ‘Hi Robert, Ted here
– we’ll take them all. When are you going to record them?’
Ted Perry, the tousled ‘sweet natured utterly
honest man’ as Dame Thea King remembers him, was a records man
through and through, and was always excited by the new, even to
the extent of personally unpacking newly delivered CDs. Like all
self-made men he could be difficult, but he inspired huge loyalties
in his associates. He believed in the record industry as something
much more than a business to make money, and he demanded quality.
If a project made artistic sense he would back it, an approach
which paid off, for as well as a host of other awards, in 22 years
Hyperion won 24 Gramophone Awards including 3 Records of the Year.
‘Ted was unique in the record business, he made Hyperion feel
like a big family – one to which you were so happy to belong’
remarks the pianist Angela Hewitt, and he is warmly remembered
by all his artists and all his associates. Ted Perry was appointed
MBE in 1999 for services to music.
LEWIS FOREMAN