Sir John Frederick Neville CARDUS (1888-1975)
MacLaren Cantata (1932-1934) [26:13]*
Scenes from Three Men in a Boat (1959-1974) (orch. Cecil Rothgay) [38:57]*
Barrie (1952?) [3:23]
Nicholas Wright (tenor)*; Mark Greenhouse, Richard Wandsworth (baritones)*
Men of the Opera North Chorus*
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins
rec. Studio 7, BBC Manchester, July 2009. DDD
CHANDOS CHAN19466 [68:33]
Sir Neville Cardus led a double life. During the summer, he was the Manchester
Guardian's "Cricketer", painting cover drives and square cuts in
vivid verbal brushstrokes. In the winter and by night he was an inspired music
critic.
What his autobiography almost omits to mention is that he composed. There is
nothing novel about critics composing. Think of Berlioz and Schumann, or Peterson-Berger
and Virgil Thomson. Unlike these others, though, Cardus lacked formal musical
training. He was entirely self-taught and, by his own acknowledgement, was
a man of letters rather than a man of notes. He composed for his own enjoyment
and without serious hopes of performance. While an apocryphal tale related
in the liner notes has him showing Beecham a couple of his scores (Beecham
supposedly observed that if composition was cricket Cardus would be carrying
the drinks), he was nervous about revealing his work, so it languished unplayed
in his desk drawer. Until now.
After his death in 1975, several of his compositions came to light in various
stages of completeness. The Salford University musicologist Cecil Rothgay,
from whose garrulous liner-notes I have borrowed heavily for this review, has
devoted much of his free time over the last decade to sifting through the manuscripts,
assembling scraps and preparing the more complete works for performance. He
tells us that Cardus wrote no symphonies or string quartets - his modesty presumably
prevented him from tackling these august genres. He did, however, leave a selection
of impressionist piano pieces, a few songs in vaudevillian and salon style
and the works presented on this disc.
Cardus seems to have toyed with elegies to A.C. MacLaren, who captained Yorkshire
and England for a good part of Cardus's youth, for a period of years. At first
there was nothing but a few rag-tag scraps of song with piano accompaniment.
In 1932, however, the events unfolded on the cricket field that proved a catalyst
for Cardus's first - and to date only discovered - completed orchestral work.
Scored for chamber orchestra with single winds, trumpet, muted trombone and
12 male voices, Cardus' MacLaren Cantata enshrines the unofficial test
match between the invincible Australians and an all-England side captained
by a retired A.C. MacLaren. The match seemed a one-sided affair and almost
not worth covering, until MacLaren, who could not buy a run in either innings,
unleashed a firestorm of match-winning captaincy that destroyed the Australian
second innings. Cardus wrote his own lyrics and they drip with references to
art, literature, music and the classics. I would not be surprised if some of
the songs are a straight setting of Cardus's own match report. The music is
Elgarian - more King Olaf than Gerontius - earnest and celebratory.
There are some nice dramatic touches, such as the sudden silence that greets
the fall of MacLaren's wicket in the first innings, and the swelling swagger
that colours MacLaren's instructions to his men as the match turns their way.
Nicholas Wright, singing MacLaren, is memorable in the Dressing Room song,
a rousing Elgarian setting for tenor soloist of a tea-time exhortation to cricketing
glory.
Cardus's incomplete opera on Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat is
a product of his later years, a time when he felt trapped by his lifestyle
of cricket and concerts and began to feel that he ought to have created something
more lasting than the ephemera of newspaper articles, notwithstanding the illusion
of permanence granted some of them by their collation and publication in book
form. Cardus does not manage to take us very far down the Thames, but then
again JKJ’s book was all about the journey rather than the destination.
Rothgay has arranged and orchestrated Cardus’s extant fragments and linked
them for the sake of continuity with dialogue from that Cardus had intended
to set to music. The excerpts start with a smashing Waltonesque prelude of
knock-‘em-down, thigh smacking hilarity, and there are some excellent
ensemble numbers, which veer in style from stolid Sullivan to German with dashes
of Johann Strauss II and Offenbach dropped in. Really the music is more than
a little derivative and the idiom a hodge-podge, but the sheer good fun of
it and panache of the performers make it difficult to resist. Wright’s
delivery of the Cheese Aria is superb - a tall tale in an ironic bel
canto rendering that reeks of Bellini.
Barrie is a portrait in sound of JM Barrie, the mercurial creator of
Peter Pan with whom the composer once stayed when covering the Lord's test.
It is a fleet twinkling scherzo, Mendelssohnian in feel. Rothgay was fortunate
to have a full short score of this piece with margin notes indicating intended
instrumentation. His orchestration is light and flecked with the colours of
Holst's Mercury. A brief and charming orchestral miniature, it flies
by and is over too soon, a compliment in anyone's book.
It would be idle to pretend that there are undiscovered masterpieces here,
but the music is better than you might expect. Collectors of English 20th century
music will find their curiosity rewarded.
Tim Perry
Collectors of English 20th century music will find their curiosity
rewarded … see Full Review