Born in Belfast, Brian Knowles was educated in Liverpool, and
went on to study composition with John Gardner, while a student
at the Royal Academy from 1964 to 1967. He taught music at the
Herbert Shiner School in Petworth, before abandoning school teaching
for work as a performer with the group Saffron and then as Musical
Director for Roger Whitaker, who recorded many of Knowles’ songs.
He continued to write in other idioms too and recent years have
seen the commissioning and performing of works such as his anthem
‘Jubilee Tribute’, performed at the Albert Hall during the annual
Service of Remembrance (2002), and his cantata ‘Pentecost’ performed
in Chichester Cathedral.
Knowles’ music is,
on the evidence of this present CD, pleasantly melodic and resolutely
tonal. Knowles’ mentions Vaughan Williams and Ireland as major
influences on his work and certainly his music seems to belong
in a direct line of descent from such figures. His writing bears
few or no traces of any developments in western ‘serious’ music
since the early decades of the twentieth century – individual
readers and listeners will, no doubt, all have their own views
as to whether this is a good or a bad thing. It has, either
way, to be admitted that there isn’t a lot that is especially
distinctive or innovative about Brian Knowles’ music here, thoroughly
competent and listenable as it is.
The present project
involves the setting of eighteen poems. Some of them are by
major poets, such as Wordsworth (‘Written in March’, ‘The Daffodils’),
Byron (‘She Walks in Beauty’), Tennyson (a passage from ‘In
Memoriam’, ‘Crossing the Bar’), Hardy (‘Weathers’), and Yeats
(‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’); the Victorians are well represented
– not only by Tennyson, but also by Thomas Hood (‘I Remember,
I Remember’), Christina Rossetti (‘Love Came Down at Christmas’)
and Mary Coleridge (the lovely ‘Lord of the Winds); there are
two medieval texts – one of Helen Waddell’s translations from
the medieval Latin (‘Come, Sweetheart, Come’) and the anonymous
15th century poem ‘I Sing of a Maiden’; the twentieth
century is represented by Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Everyone Sang’,
an extract from Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ (comparisons with Britten
are perhaps best avoided here), Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘A Child’s
Sleep’ (Aaron Jay Kernis’s settings of poems by Duffy in his
Valentines are altogether more distinctive) and the anonymous
‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep’ (most often attributed to
Mary Elizabeth Frye, though the authorship is uncertain). Brian
Knowles’ taste, it seems, is for poetry of relatively direct
emotional expressiveness and for natural imagery and, on the
whole, he respects the texts he sets without failing to also
do something with them, musically speaking, that enhances them
and articulates important things about their emotional substance.
Yet there isn’t,
I’m afraid, much sense of magic or excitement here. This may
have quite a lot to do, I suspect, with the circumstances under
which the recording was produced. Unless I am much mistaken,
the orchestral accompaniments were recorded first and the singers
added their contributions later, without all the performers
ever being in the same room at the same time. It certainly sounds
that way to me. This isn’t, of course, an altogether unfamiliar
procedure in some areas of recorded music. Here, however, the
lack of flexibility available to the singers, the lack of creative
and interpretive interplay amongst orchestra, conductor and
soloist generates a kind of stiffness and squareness, a lack
of musical fluidity, as it were. So, for example, one could
imagine a performance of ‘Written in March’ far fuller of exuberance
than this one is, a performance that might be full of serious
‘Joy’ (to use a word of major importance to the English romantic
poets); as it is it all sounds too constrained, too short on
the sense of freedom and release which are the very essence
of the poem. This lack is not, I think, anything to do with
the skills of the performers but with the uneasy ‘separation’
which, I feel sure, was involved in the production of the recording.
Something of the same goes for the setting – as performed here
– of Hardy’s ‘Weathers’.
For some of the
settings the problem is less acute – the extraordinarily beautiful
words of ‘I Sing of a Maiden’ (one of the greatest of all surviving
Middle English lyrics) have about them, with their slow overlapping,
incremental repetitions a hieratic, static quality, like an
icon of the virgin or of the annunciation, as in the second,
third and fourth stanzas (‘He’ is Christ):
He came also stille
Where his mother was,
As dew in Aprille
That falls on the grass.
He came also stille
To his mother’s bower
As dew in Aprille
That falls on the flower.
He came also stille
Where his mother lay,
As dew in Aprille
That falls on the spray.
Knowles creates
a lovely, slow melodic line for this poem, to which Elin Manahan
Thomas does full and beautiful justice – indeed my own feeling
is that the choral accompaniment adds little. What I have described
as ‘stiffness’ on some of the other tracks, the absence of the
kind of flexibility of phrase and rhythm that only truly ‘live’
performance can possess, here becomes part of the very way the
piece works, part of its musical and poetic ‘stillness’.
All of the soloists
have their moments (Jon Christos sings very attractively in
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Nick Garrett is moving in ‘Crossing
the Bar’), though the contributions of soprano Thomas and mezzo
Juliette Pochin generally outshine those of the two men. Both
the choirs heard let no one down.
All those who admire
the more traditional end of twentieth-century English song should
find things to enjoy here.
Glyn Pursglove
1
Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano); 2 Juliette Pochin (mezzo);
3 John Christos (tenor); 4 Nick Garrett (baritone);
5 RSVP Voices; 6 Brighton Festival Youth Choir;
City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra/James Morgan 
