This series treats Bridge with the authoritative
style and sensitive musicianship Chandos
have also extended to Schmidt, Glazunov,
Bax and Harty. Bridge’s music is getting
to the stage where it will no longer
need special pleading.
It has undergone a rocky and sometimes
desultory renaissance. In the 1950s
and 1960s there was precious little
available unless you were prepared to
track down rare 78s or trade home-spun
tape recordings of BBC broadcasts. In
the 1970s things began to change. EMI
Classics recorded an LP’s worth of orchestral
music including Enter Spring and
The Sea with Groves and the RLPO.
Groves had already conducted a dazzling
performance of Enter Spring at
the 1978 Proms with the BBC Symphony
Orchestra - now that would be
well worth issuing if someone had a
presentable tape. As we know from a
BBC Legends CD, Britten had paid practical
tribute to Bridge mounting performances
of both works at the Maltings Snape
during the 1960s. Decca issued the Allegri
recordings of the grittiest of his string
quartets: numbers 3 and 4, as well as
the spare and dissonant Piano Trio No.
2 (on Argo). Pearl had a double LP of
his piano music and songs in 1971 including
the grim Piano Sonata. Lyrita issued
most of the orchestral music between
1978 and 1982 but these valued and often
inspirational recordings by Boult (SRCS
73) and Braithwaite (SRCS 91, 104, 114)
slipped into an oblivion from which
they have still not emerged when the
LP was felled by the CD in 1983. At
least EMI Classics kept their Bridge/Groves
miscellany in the catalogue. Pearl produced
the opera The Christmas Rose
and a far from modest crop of LPs and
CDs of the chamber music, piano solos,
songs (Tagore), choral works
(A Prayer) as well as diminutive
(Norse Legend) and not so diminutive
(Isabella) orchestral pieces.
They also had a quite extraordinary
CD (SHECD9601) of Enter Spring and
Oration. This featured performances
by John Carewe conducting the Cologne
Radio Symphony Orchestra with Alexander
Baillie (cello) in Oration. If
ever Pearl felt moved to issue their
recorded Bridge legacy (analogue and
digital, please) in a single boxed set
it would be likely to be greeted very
warmly - if only they would! Continuum
had all the piano music on four CDs
and all four quartets on two CDs. Meridian
have done well by Bridge (e.g. the four
string quartets) as also have Hyperion
with the latter producing a complete
edition of the songs as well as a smattering
of the chamber music.
The present Chandos
selection gives us three works of his
uncompromising older age from 1930 to
1941 as well as two more lyrically accessible
works from the teens of the century
both written during the axle-turn of
his life: The Great War. That very war
swept away the softer innocence and
pastoral delight and opened the eyes
and mind to brisk and bracing currents
from the Continent. Bridge began to
find a new voice but few critics of
the time reacted well to it. His Summer
and The Sea delighted the
Edwardians and later romantics but what
were this generation to make of the
nightmares of the Piano Sonata, the
last two quartets and the Piano Trio
No. 2; never mind the enigmatic Oration
and Phantasm. Even when he
returned to the countryside in Enter
Spring and the Two Jefferies
Poems the language, while even more
intoxicating, had an unnerving allure
that was strange to those brought up
on his Tchaikovskian tendencies.
Oration:
According to the work's first soloist,
the cellist Florence Hooton, Bridge
gave the concerto the principal title
Oration because he wanted it
to be not only a passive elegy (its
subtitle is Concert Elegiaco)
but also a protest against war.
He had been gripped by that theme in
the Piano Sonata of 1924 dedicated to
his young pupil Ernest Bristow Farrar,
killed in the trenches. Oration
was completed in 1929-30 and was rejected
by three other cellists before finding
Hooton. Felix Salmond was to have premiered
it in Chicago but didn't, Guilhermina
Suggia turned down a BBC broadcast as
did Lauri Kennedy. It was broadcast
finally on 17 January 1936 after three
grand rehearsals and was warmly greeted
by Ernest Newman, not a great admirer
of Bridge's later style. A set of discs
were made of the premiere and these
are still held by the Frank Bridge Trust
(a chance here for Symposium surely
even if the original engineer did omit
a couple of bars). There was one other
broadcast, 6 December 1936, and the
piece then sank without trace until
revived in the 1970s by the young cellist
Thomas Igloi with the English Chamber
Orchestra conducted by Frederick Prausnitz
in 1975.
Julian Lloyd Webber
made the first commercial recording
of Oration. His is an unsentimental
approach in which steadiness of tone
production and a refined natural sound
quality go to produce a very fine result
in the best analogue traditions of Lyrita.
Braithwaite lets the hysteria build
organically to an angry peak (15:23).
The luminous recording quality can be
heard at 12:31 in the quiet skein of
sound through which the harp momentarily
peeps out. Lloyd Webber takes 27:30
as against the 31:20 taken by Alexander
Baillie on the rare and sadly deleted
Pearl CD SHE CD 9601 from 1987.
The Baillie version works well although
his tone is not quite as cleanly produced
as Lloyd Webber's and the soloist's
final note does not float free with
quite the pristine soprano purity you
get on the Lyrita LP. Steven Isserlis
on EMI Classics CDC 7 49716 2 (much
reissued) in 1988 takes 30:24. He is
with the City of London Sinfonia conducted
by the very same Hickox who now conducts
the BBC Welsh with Alban Gebhardt.
Gebhardt is an intriguing
choice and not one I had predicted.
After all, during the year 2000 Hickox
conducted Oration with the BBC Welsh
and Chandos regular Raphael Wallfisch,
for BBC Radio 3. The engineering
quality on the Chandos is very clean,
achieving good transparency if without
the silk and canvas strength of the
fabulous Lyrita. By comparison the no-nonsense
radio studio balance for the Pearl,
done by German Radio WDR, Otto Nielsen
and Klaus-Dieter Harbusch, is meaty
and not at all sketchy. On the other
hand the playing of the orchestra especially
in the epilogue is outstanding and Isserlis
almost matches the enigmatic singing
quality luminously achieved by Lloyd
Webber.
Of course the Lyrita was only ever issued
on LP. It has never been reissued on
CD.
The Chandos recording
perspective is spectacular, probably
the best it has ever had, and very much
in the most exalted Decca manner though
not at all what you would hear in the
concert hall. The cellist is given a
microphone eminence which is extremely
commanding, exciting, flamboyant and
gratingly moving. That epilogue is deeply
affecting, tender through the soloist's
voice yet bleakly haunted like the second
movement of Havergal Brian's Gothic
and related also to the extended finale
to RVW's Sixth Symphony.
Rebus has
been recorded before but never on CD.
It first emerged in a BBC broadcast
by the English Chamber Orchestra conducted
by Frederick Prausnitz in 1975. Then
in the late 1970s the LPO and Nicholas
Braithwaite (used extensively by Lyrita
in those days) recorded it on Lyrita
SRCS 114.
The 1940-41 Allegro
moderato for string orchestra
is all that remains of a projected symphony
for strings. In fact the last few bars
were left unfinished on Bridge's death
and were ‘completed’ by Anthony Pople.
This too was issued on LP by Lyrita
on SRCS 104 and of course was never
reissued on CD. This is a classically
clean work and very romantic for that
time when you compare it with the bustle
and elfin dissonance of Rebus.
The 1915 Lament
has been recorded several times
before. Strange how returning to it
after a longish time I hear more predications
of the sourer Bridge from There is
a willow grows aslant a brook than
I did previously. It is warm but there
are harmonic eddies and depths that
look forward a decade.
A Prayer to
words by Thomas à Kempis takes
us down a road Bridge did not go down
again except, to some extent, in the
opera A Christmas Rose (on Pearl).
It is Bridge's only work for chorus
and orchestra and is an invocation to
peace. The orchestration was completed
in October 1918 and it was premiered
in the great spaces of the Royal Albert
Hall in January 1919 and then again
in 1935. Its style now sounds rather
Finzian (5.04 onwards) and warmly cocooned.
It receives here a very fine performance
There is some lovely antiphonal work
superbly captured by the Chandos team.
That high exposed ppp singing
recalls Holst's Ode to Death
written for Cecil Cole another young
composer victim of the Great War. It
is not perhaps the equal of the Holst,
which has a mystical spirituality not
quite attained by Bridge, but it remains
a work of candid sincerity.
Its two previous recordings are a moving
but rather fleet-footed version (all
over in 15:07) on a Pearl LP (Chelsea
Opera Group/Howard Williams) and most
recently a recording by Liverpool forces
conducted by Douglas Bostock (Classico).
Hickox's measured pace works very well
and is extremely moving, reminding me
also of parts of Hickox's Chandos set
of Dyson's Quo Vadis at O
whither shall my troubled muse incline
where, at 3.48, we seem to hear the
marching tread of starry soldiery.
Rebus was
originally entitled A Rumour
(like the Cowell piece once recorded
by Neville Marriner). It was written
in 1940 and would have been in that
year’s Prom season had it not been cancelled
due to the Blitz. In fact it had to
wait until 23 February 1941, just a
month after Bridge's death, before it
gained a hearing. Apart from some threatening
and inimical shadows and an occasionally
ruthless tread this is a bustling determined
and fairly romantic little concert overture
with Elgarian and even Waltonian moments.
The recording by Lyrita and Braithwaite
has that additional smashing tension
but there is not much in it. It's all
a bit academic anyway; the Lyrita is
of course only available on LP and then
only of you can find someone who will
sell you the now almost thirty year
old LP or who might be tempted to make
a stop-gap CDR until you can buy a Lyrita
CD - if that day ever arrives!
This all adds up to
a very fine addition to the Chandos
series. It stands up extremely well
in the Bridge discography generally
being perceptive, varied, sensitive,
excellently performed and recorded and
generously assembled. Not a hint of
series burnout here. It is superbly
documented by Bridge expert Paul Hindmarsh.
An instant and uncontroversial recommendation.
This is the fourth volume. I wonder
if there will be more.
Rob Barnett
THE BRIDGE SERIES ON CHANDOS
Volume 1 Reviews by Hubert
Culot Terry
Barfoot
Volume 2 Review by Rob
Barnett
Volume 3 Reviews by Rob
Barnett Tony
Haywood Paul
Shoemaker (SACD)
See MusicWeb's
Frank
Bridge pages
written by Rob Barnett
Alban
Gerhardt (cello)* 