Let’s start with a
prediction. On 21 October 2006, Sir
Malcolm Arnold C.B.E. will be 85 years
old. No, that’s not the prediction,
this is: on his birthday he will
look back, with not unreasonable pride,
at the overwhelming reception given
to a stonking great celebration of his
music, in all its glorious breadth and
depth ... at the 2006 "BBC
Proms". Moreover, Sir Malcolm will
continue to enjoy these performances
at leisure, as they will all have been
recorded by the the unfailingly diligent
and devoted Anthony Day, who will file
them all carefully alongside newspaper
clippings of rave reviews - and
a number of reported sightings of the
porcine equivalents of Dumbo, circling
the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. Please
pardon my cynicism; nothing would please
me more than for the BBC to prove it
utterly unjustified.
Still, it’s gratifying
that I can leave my cynicism tucked
away in its crusty old box when I turn
towards the world of commercial recordings.
Several special Arnold anniversaries
have indeed been celebrated, but more
noteworthy is that a goodly number of
record companies continue to promote
Arnold’s music regardless of any "excuse",
proceeding purely on the grounds that
the music itself is special – and,
let’s not forget, commercially viable!
Today, the lover of Arnold’s music,
provided only that he possesses the
requisite audio kit, has a greater store
of Arnold treasures at his fingertips
than ever before. Yet although
in many cases we’re spoilt for choice,
there are some significant works still
awaiting their first recordings.
As the label on this
CD implies, The Return of Odysseus
is one of them. In fact, apart from
its first performance Odysseus
has rarely "returned"! I do
find myself wondering, how could it
have slipped the net for so long? Although
Arnold wrote several pieces for choir,
this substantial work is his only
foray into the exalted realm of choir
and symphony orchestra. That makes it
something of a "sore thumb",
don’t you think? Maybe people have been
put off by the work’s provenance. It
was commissioned by the Schools’ Music
Association, so presumably it is intended
for performance by (senior school) children.
Given that, I can see that some folk - consciously
or otherwise - might prejudicially
dismiss it as "kids’ stuff".
I would hold my horses,
not least because I happen to have a
tape recording of The Song of Freedom,
a setting for children’s choir and brass
band of some decidedly pungent children’s
poetry. Now, this is "kids’
stuff" - but there is
nothing even remotely childish about
it. Avoiding Britten’s generally somewhat
"precious" approach to writing
for kids, Arnold gave them some real,
red meat to chew. On the recording,
the choirs of Mancunian children rip
into it with all the delicacy and attention
to etiquette that you’d expect of your
average pride of starving lions.
Returning to Odysseus,
you might anticipate that a work written
smack in the middle of Arnold’s singularly
troubled time in Ireland would be bound
to contain some relevant resonances.
After all, the text of The Return
of Odysseus concerns the unwavering
faithfulness of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope,
and it was while Arnold was working
on it that his wife left him. Well,
strange though it may seem at first,
The Return of Odysseus is a "resonance-free"
zone!
As Harris and Meredith’s
biography so graphically conveys, Arnold
was severely "troubled", not
just whilst in Ireland, but all
the time. Yet, he contrived to partition
his output. In fact, throughout his
career he was able generally to confine
confessions of his angst to the
works he, in effect, chose to
label "personal". This, perhaps
the only aspect of his congenital illness
that he could - and did - control,
is something remarkable upon which to
ponder – because otherwise
it’s possible that he would have ended
up writing very little music at all.
Arnold conjures up
the impression of "ancient Greece"
by having the choir, with the sole exception
of the confused gabbling that conveys
Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors,
sing monophonically, in unison or harmony.
Moreover, much of the descriptive verse
is presented in solemn, chant-like melodies,
of the sort which our ears instinctively
associate with antiquity. This might
appear to border on cliché - though
that didn’t bother Stravinsky, either - and
in a sense it does, because it soon
becomes obvious that Arnold was drawing
on the very skills he had honed through
many a film score. In fact, it’s probably
fair to say that the music has a lot
in common with film music, being palpably
simple of utterance and direct in its
expression. In Arnold’s hey-day there
were plenty of folk who looked down
their noses at film music and its composers.
I dare say that they or their descendants
would view this cantata with the same
lofty disdain. Equally, others might
dismiss these qualities as concessions
to the "limited technical facility"
of youngsters.
As I see it, both factions
would be barking up the wrong tree.
Let’s look at the libretto, which was
written by Patric Dickinson, one of
Arnold’s Savile Club pals. It succinctly
summarises the two dozen books of Homer’s
original epic poem. In fact, in spite
of a couple of instances of slightly
dog-eared scansion, it’s a summary that’s
a sight more succinct than it seems,
because - in line with common practice
down through the ages - the text and
its choral setting involve much repetition.
But most importantly there is nothing
in the least reverential about Dickinson’s
poem: he merrily mixes and mingles formal
phraseology and vulgar vernacular. Two
particularly tasty examples are:
"And stow
your gab," they snarled at him,
"Or we’ll chuck you overboard!"
Odysseus spent his
daytime weeping
Out by the empty sea.
He wept for his wife, ‘til the
sun was setting
And Calypso called,
"It’s time to be getting
In bed with immortal me."
Then again, even in
1976 it must have seemed fairly shocking
to find words like "lousy"
and "fornicating" in a work
intended for performance by children.
I don’t suppose for a moment that the
kids would have batted an eyelid – quite
the contrary, they’d have lapped it
up! - but I’ll bet it caused quite a
flap in the hallowed halls of the Schools
Music Association.
So, Arnold had a libretto
telling a juicy tale that was brimming
with graphic incident and, not least
from his previous experience with The
Song of Freedom, he was well aware
that school-children were fully capable
of charming the birds out of the trees
one minute, and raising the roof the
next. It was all just sitting up and
begging for the explicit, full-frontal,
film music treatment. He never was one
to pass up such an opportunity, so the
result was simple, direct, and bristling
with opportunities for – shall we say?
– enthusiastic performers.
Naturally, Arnold packed
in far more than chanted evocations
of "ancient Greece". For dramatic
contrast, he roped in styles with other
associations altogether - the
sailors, for example, lustily recount
Odysseus’s adventures with what is generally
thought of as a "sea shanty",
though to me the style sounds like nothing
more than that of a rugby song. He develops
this idea into some of that rollicking,
"Arnold on the Razzle" stuff
that we all love so well, and which
occasionally veers dangerously close
to Swing. Still further contrast is
provided by moments of tenderness -
and towering, tumultuous outbursts.
It will come as no surprise, I am sure,
to learn that there are several memorable
tunes – one in particular,
rooted in the words "He’ll never
come back", is singularly "sticky".
There is a particularly
curious coincidence, concerning a passage
(starting at 9:54) where the returning
sailors recount how the lost and wandering
Odysseus had become so desperate for
directions that he went down into Hades
to ask the way. As it begins, it is
momentarily reminiscent of the third
Cornish Dance. However, thereafter
it sounds strikingly similar to part
of The Song of Freedom, both
in its mesmerising melodic line and
in the accompaniment rhythms of the
three verses. Here, although I am convinced
that Arnold is recycling material
– and why not? J. S. Bach did! – it
is a far cry from straightforward self-quotation:
the "old" materials are inventively
re-worked.
Arnold never ceases
to amaze me because, yet again,
all this apparent simplicity and directness
conceals - certainly from
the casual ear - a finely-crafted,
tautly-knit musical structure. Taking
his cue from the symmetries of the tale,
Arnold creates a "game of two halves"
separated, at "half-time",
by a summarial orchestral "development".
There are lots of cross-connections,
the principal one being that the first
half comes to be dominated by that "sticky"
theme, and the second by another, march-like
theme, which grows out of the
"sticky" theme. To me, this
is a stroke of structural genius, brilliantly
mirroring the shift of initiative in
the storyline.
By way of complement,
what we might call the prelude and postlude
display a touch of dramatic genius.
At the start, the insistent, bell-like
chiming of a glockenspiel, aided and
abetted by high woodwind and harp, seems
to evoke the ticking of eternity’s clock,
measuring the waiting occasioned by
Odysseus’s somewhat lengthy absence
- nowadays, even after a mere seven
years he’d have been "presumed
dead", wouldn’t he? Against this
is set apparently reposeful music – all
is quiet but, as the clouded collisions
of the music’s meandering harmonies
imply and the words of the choir explain,
all is far from well. Arnold craftily
re-deploys these same materials, minus
the harmonic pungency, to evoke
the real repose of the conclusion’s
lullaby. It’s all so simple, but all
so marvellous!
Odysseus is - as
ever - instantly recognisable
as Arnold. Oh, I am sure that you could
bang on until you’re blue in the face,
that this passage is a bit like X and
this other is a bit like Y – indeed,
I did so myself a couple of paragraphs
ago, as did Rob Barnett - ever
the finest ferreter of appropriate analogues - in
his review.
Yet, to the best of my experience, it’s
also true that Odysseus is not
quite like anything else that Arnold
ever wrote.
The big question is:
how well does it transpose from a children’s
to an adult choir? That’s a difficult
one to answer if you’ve never heard
the work done by children’s voices!
The best I can offer is that, for most
of the time, as I listened I felt no
sense of "loss". Just occasionally
I found myself thinking, "Yes,
this bit would sound so right
sung by kids! Wouldn’t there be a nadge
of extra purity in the concluding lullaby,
and doesn’t that outburst cry out for
rampant ‘screaming kids’?" But,
without the actual experience, these
can amount to no more than conjectures. So,
I’d have to be a real sour-puss to use
them to diminish, even if only comparatively,
the achievement of the Glasgow Chorus.
First, though, let’s
get the bad news out of the way. I noticed
a tendency for the choir to "curl
its ‘r’s". Now, I know that this
is customary choral practice in pursuit
of improved intelligibility, but - I
stress, to me - it sounds contrived,
and I’d rather they didn’t. In any case,
it doesn’t help the intelligibility
of the remaining 25 letters of the alphabet
and Arnold, with an almost unheard-of
consideration for intelligibility, adopts
his usual practice of "one syllable
– one note". Looking on the bright
side, at least they don’t "rrrrroll
their ‘rrrrr’s"!
I did wonder whether
the choir, or conductor Graham Taylor,
was too mindful of the responsibility
that went with this première
recording? For, it seemed to me, occasionally
they played it too safe. The dynamic
never drops below piano - nowhere
is there any real pianissimo.
Yet, there are parts that would seem
to demand it. For example, the ladies’
appeal to the sailors, "We want
to know if he is alive" (at around
5:00) surely should be sotto voce?
When your question concerns nothing
less than your entire future and well-being,
your voice might just be little more
than a tremulous whisper. However, please
weigh this in the light of my comments
on the recording (see below). Also,
the printed text said that the sailors’
first entry (just after 4:30) is "(in
distance)", yet the voices all
too obviously came straight from their
normal locations. Admittedly, if that
one and only "stage direction"
had been omitted, this would have bothered
me a lot less than it did!
One the other hand,
sometimes I found myself hankering for
just a bit more, as a bit more
"punch" in the punch-line
to the "Cyclops" episode (6:20-ish),
or sailors crying "Land at last!"
and sounding a bit more over the moon
about it, or that extra ounce of anxiety
in the ladies’ "He must, he will"
(c. 7:15), or a greater sense of crescendo
through the build-up to "He has
drawn the bow!" (22:13 – 23:25)
which is, let’s face it, nothing less
than the zenith of the entire drama.
That sounds like an
awful lot of grumbling, so let’s set
it in some sort of context, which as
far as I am concerned is the context
of the odd bit of cracked marble in
an otherwise perfectly-formed Greek
statue. Soon after its first entry,
the chanting chorus expands imposingly
towards its first cry of "Odysseus"
then, a minute later, the sopranos’
blanched voices tell us that "Lady
Penelope waits and weeps, in her cold
bed". Another minute on, and the
contraltos gloomily report that "Our
land is leaderless", then grow
panicky at the thought that "You
are too young to act". At the end
of the "Circe" verse (before
8:52) there is a cracking exchange on
the "He’ll never come back"
refrain, between (male) sailors and
(female) people. The latter make a particularly
telling diminuendo ("We
will wait and hope"), opening up
the hiatus into which step those thoroughly
nasty suitors.
I could add quite a
lot more, but I’ll limit myself to two
"non-musical" events. The
final words of the "Hell"
episode are greeted with a howl of anguish
that is truly hair-raising, and the
frantic flapping of the suitors, which
is understandable as they are being
slaughtered, is fit to curl that raised
hair. Of course, this all adds up to
something, and that something is that
the Glasgow choir put on a generally
damned good show of vocal acting, and
that perhaps I’m being just a wee bit
picky.
The solo soprano’s
rôle is very small: she sings
but one word ("Odysseus"),
although Arnold does allow her a full
repeat! However, it’s a very important
rôle, which she carries off with
appropriately modest triumph. Arnold
could have stuck rigidly to his choral
brief, and plunged straight into the
massive celebration, but he’s a better
dramatist than that. Instead this lone,
still, small voice creeps into the resounding
silence following the moment of mayhem - a
tentative recognition of the true identity
of the "scrawny old beggar"
who has delivered the people from evil.
It is an apt and logical prompt provoking
the massed realisation of the fact.
Occasionally, the Orchestra
of Scottish Opera sounds a bit rough
around the edges. Of course, to some
extent that’s only what you’d expect,
in comparison with any of those jet-setting,
super-glossy bands that supposedly define
"excellence" in our enlightened
world. In many ways, I’m glad about
that. I like a bit of old-fashioned
human frailty. It keeps me aware that,
to paraphrase JFK, "they do these
things, not because they are easy, but
because they are hard". Technical
excellence is usually bought at the
expense of a distinctive character,
and in my book that’s too high a price.
So, I’m happy to ignore those rough
edges, which anyway are not all that
rough, and instead to lap up the OSO’s
characterful performance.
And, with delights
such as are on offer, why not? Mind
you, because the choir (quite properly)
predominates, the orchestra spends a
fair bit of its time doubling the choral
line or "filling in" – a
job that’s bread and butter to an opera
orchestra, and one they do admirably
well. But, just as in any opera, when
they do get their chances to show their
mettle, they are positively champing
at the bit. You can almost phrase it
like one of those old film trailers:
"Hear the shining purity
of the woodwind at the start, extending
the sounds of the chiming glockenspiel,
weep at the forlorn weariness
of the well-rounded strings and the
horns’ injected pang of pain! Revel
in the refreshing sea-spray splashed
by the ensemble as the sailors arrive,
or the bouncing brasses in the ‘shanty’.
Gape in awe at the baleful booming
of heavy brasses, underpinned by a black
bass drum and surmounted by a towering
tam-tam! Cower before the fearful
majesty of the entire orchestra in the
central climax!" Finally, I suppose
we should add, "Be amazed
by the skills and prowess of the conductor,
whose guiding hand has set these wonders – and
more - before you!"
Yes, Graham Taylor
does deserve a mention – and
with that exclamation mark! – not
least because he has, to some considerable
extent, drawn on relevant experience
and played Odysseus as if it
were a concert performance of a "choral
opera". Above all, he has made
the performance alive to the ebb and
flow of the considerable drama being
played out before our ears. Somebody,
some day, will do it even better, but
this first one is more than good enough
to be going along with, that’s for sure.
I wish that I could
say the same for the recording. This
is generally acceptable, being warm,
clean, free of congestion and accommodating
the hefty climaxes with ease. However,
there is something amiss in the perspectives - although
let me stress right now that this is
only slight, and likely to be perceptible
only by headphone listeners. I for one
can live with it, though I’d rather
not! There is plenty of width, but there
is much less "front to back"
depth – the choir feels almost
to be seated in and amongst the strings.
Sometimes, the choral blend tends to
fragment, exposing numerous individual
voices. Sometimes, notably in the patter-song
of "shanty", I can feel in
the men’s voices something that I can
only describe as a slight "corkscrewing"
in the sound image.
The session photograph
reproduced inside the booklet’s back
cover shows the choir, seated in about
three rows against the back wall, with
a line of microphones running right
along the front row. Extrapolating the
picture, I think that there could have
been as many as seven of them - which
may be the reason for the lack of true
pianissimi. And, without going
into a pile of technical detail, I shall
say, simply, that therein lies the cause
of the other three problems.
It’s a shame that the
disc couldn’t have been filled with
more Arnold. For instance, a nice, modern
recording of The Song of Freedom,
even if slightly arranged for adult
voices and orchestral "brass band",
would have been the icing on the cake.
I would dearly have loved to hear what
these Scottish forces made of it! That
said, I very much enjoyed what we do
get.
It came as a bit of
a shock to realise that the Vaughan
Williams piece is an "unknown region"
to me. Contrariwise, I was not in the
least surprised that it was love at
first hearing! Its sophisticated, late-romantic
sonorities and complex choral polyphony
provide a nigh-on perfect foil to Odysseus,
so much so that I would recommend programming
the VW immediately before the
Arnold. Graham Taylor fondly moulds
the finely-spun, extended crescendo
of VW’s mystical journey, coaxing some
gorgeously blended singing from the
choir – their lines layered
and lapping, with nary an "individual
voice" obtruding. Not that it sounds
like they needed much coaxing, such
is the warmth of their expression. Ditto,
or its equivalent, the orchestra, which
caps it all with a blazing, brazen affirmation.
You know what? If I get to go to Heaven,
I want this as my introductory music!
Milhaud’s piece was
originally scored for wind band, and
the composer made this orchestral arrangement,
I suspect, purely to extend the work’s
commercial potential. Whether you prefer
the marginally extended palette on offer
is purely a matter of taste. Still,
it is a lovely, jolly work, and a fitting
stablemate for certain suites of dances
by Arnold! In the finale, unless I’m
very mistaken, Milhaud follows Bizet’s
L’Arlesienne in incorporating
the lusty banging of a Provençal
drum. The OSO under Graham Taylor steer
well clear of any undue sophistication
and render it as rude, robust, ruddy-cheeked
entertainment, with just the occasional
nod in the direction of tendresse.
The booklet, in English
only, is graced by decent documentation,
including all the usual details and
the full texts of both choral works.
In Odysseus, I did notice one
or two minor discrepancies between what
is written and what was sung. Rather
less trivially I did wonder why - when
we have the libretto - it
was felt necessary to devote virtually
half the note for Odysseus to
a summary of the action, and again why
the choral forces were omitted from
the first performance credits?
Inevitably, there will
be hardened Arnold fans who will have
grabbed copies of this CD almost before
they hit the shelves. Happily, there
will be open-minded souls who will buy
it out of intrigue. Sadly, there will
also be many who will refuse to listen
to it even if the only cost is thirty
minutes of their time. Predictably,
the reaction of the fans will be ecstatic.
I watch with interest for the reaction
of the intrigued, of whom many will
be very agreeably surprised, and of
whom some will even be ecstatic. I await
delivery of a carpet under which I can
sweep the last lot, for they will never
know what a wonder it is that they’ve
missed.
I applaud Divine Arts
for this valuable contribution to the
Arnold discography: Odysseus
is indeed returned - to his
proper place, before the music-loving
public. Make no mistake, overall this
is a sterling performance by Graham
Taylor and his Glasgow cohorts. They
sound as though they enjoyed themselves
hugely whilst making the CD. I hope
that they’ll be pleased to hear that,
in spite of my pile of little niggles,
I’m having just as much fun listening
to it - and so, for that matter,
should you.
Paul Serotsky
see also
review by Rob Barnett
Malcolm Arnold website
Anne Taylor (sop) (Arnold) 
for
details
