British Music

[albion]

Vassily Sinaisky's Proms performance of Parry's 5th Symphony (depicted in the recent BBC documentary) is now in Folder 2.

Many thanks to Mark for supplying the files! 

[albion]

In anticipation of the forthcoming Proms extravaganza, last December's landmark performance of Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony in Brisbane (very recently broadcast on Australian 4MBS radio) can now be found in Folder 4.

Many thanks to Johan for making access to this transmission possible. 

[oldman]

An incredible improvement over the Naxos performance!  Thanks to johan for sharing this with us all!

[Amphissa]

I'm going to admit that I'm just not very familiar with most of these British composers. I am particularly ignorant about choral music, since I've never really listened to it much and didn't grow up with it in school or church. I know some works by Russian composers and the more famous operas, but really have no clue about what to expect here.

So, please help me get going.

1. What are the best 2 or 3 choral pieces in this entire British broadcasts collection? The pieces I really must hear.

2. I've got several versions of Brian's Gothic, but have listened only to Boult's. The audio is not so good. It's such a long piece -- I am curious which other version you like best. Would your second choice be the one in this collection, or some other recording?

2. I'm also going to ask you to go out on a limb and tell me which orchestral and concertante works you think are especially good. I've listened to Cliffe's VC and Parry's 5th symphony. I'm also quite familiar with Bantock's music. What should be at the top of my queue for further listening.

Basically, I'm concerned that I could be wallowing about in this large collection aimlessly for quite a long time. I'd like some "highlights" to help me remain focused.

[britishcomposer]

The HRH-inspired flurry of interest in Parry has reminded me that a few years ago there seemed to be several broadcasts of Parry's The Chivalry of The Sea. For one reason or another I managed  not to record any of them. I know there's now a commercial recording, but if anyone has one of those pioneering broadcasts, commentators write highly of the piece and I'd be very interested to hear it...?

I could offer a 2001 BBC concert broadcast (BBC Concert Orchestra, Guildford Choral Society, Hilary Davan Wetton). I recorded it from Dutch Radio 4 (Euroclassic Notturno) some years ago. Sound quality is not very good due to my then mediocre sound card. I am not sure where to post it. Albion has collected all British works in his folders and I would gladly place it there if possible.

[britishcomposer]

I'm always on the lookout! I would love to know if anyone has -

Hamilton Harty: The Mystic Trumpeter (1913)
Brian Rayner Cook, baritone/ BBC Singers/ BBC Concert Orchestra/ John Poole (broadcast 5/8/1991) or
Belfast Philharmonic Society Choir/ Ulster Orchestra/ John Lubbock (broadcast 12/10/1994)

Alexander Mackenzie: Scottish Rhapsody No. 1, Op.21 (1879)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/ Bryden Thomson (broadcast date unknown)

Hubert Parry: The Soul's Ransom (1906)
Bach Choir/ Philharmonia Orchestra/ David Willcocks (broadcast 5/6/1986)

Ethel Smyth: Mass in D (1893)
BBC Symphony Chorus/ BBC Concert Orchestra/ Meredith Davies (broadcast 6/4/1986)

Arthur Sullivan: The Golden Legend (1886)
Leeds Philharmonic Chorus/ BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/ Charles Mackerras (broadcast 15/3/1986)

Joseph Holbrooke: Byron (1904)
BBC Singers/ BBC Concert Orchestra/ John Poole (broadcast 6/12/1978)

Charles Villiers Stanford: Requiem (1897)
BBC Singers/ BBC Concert Orchestra/ John Poole (broadcast 6/10/1978)

Charles Villiers Stanford: Phaudrig Crohoore (1896)
BBC Singers/ BBC Concert Orchestra/ Ashley Lawrence (broadcast 11/6/1974)

and (post-1918)

Ina Boyle: Overture (1933-34)
Ulster Orchestra/ Colman Pearce (broadcast 17/3/1992)

In the meantime, there are some more wonderful recordings of later twentieth-century repertoire in progress!

Albion, I can offer a recording of the Harty:

Hamilton Harty – The Mystic Trumpeter (1913)
James Rutherford, Hallé Orchestra and Choir, Sir Mark Elder

It's a recording of a BBC live-broadcast. The quality - as with all my BBC recordings - is rather shabby due to my bad internet connection at that time.
I will upload it and the Parry Ode to mediafire and send you the links. If you like you can download and publish it in your folders.

[britishcomposer]

In 2007 the BBC broadcast the complete Elgar Starlight Express music as a sort of radio play. The story had been shortened and the whole thing ran for about 95 minutes. Have any of you recorded this performance? I did so but the quality of my recording is so bad that I cannot enjoy it. Why hasn't it been released? Chandos would have been the obvious candidate; they did The Crown of India. The performers (BBC Concert Orchestra, Barry Wordsworth) would probably have suggested a Dutton release.

[MikeInOz]

Re the 4MBS recording of the Havergal Brian Gothic Symphony from Johan.

I hate to say this but unless my ears are playing me tricks, the left and right channels are reversed. I have only downloaded Part 1 from Folder 4, but this MP3 does appear to be reversed. At the concert, the 3 harps were hard left with the horns and the brass/tubas were hard right.

Anyone downloading may wish to convert to WAV and reverse the channels for best playback.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Thanks for that startling information, Mike. I hadn't noticed at all... The recording was made over the internet by a friend, who kindly sent it to me after my connection was lost during the Te Deum, leaving my recording incomplete... I uploaded it later again to Mediafire for those interested, fellow member Albion among them.

When I have the time, I'll feed the files into Audacity and see if I can 'redress the balance'...

--Johan

P.S. I just checked. In the Vivace (third movement) I can hear the tuba coming from the left. The great xylophone solo comes from the right...

[marinomau]

Wonderful collection, thank you! It has been my welcome at Unsung Composers, a wonderful source of musical delights.
God save british music!

[albion]

Here's a copy of Holst's Songs of the West, as performed by Gavin Sutherland and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and broadcast on June 27, 2011

Thanks very much for this, Dave - I wasn't able to catch the broadcast at the time so this is very welcome indeed! I've put a copy into Folder 3 of BMB. 

[albion]

Our friend Dylan has very kindly supplied a copy of the 1965 BBC radio production of The Starlight Express, a play by Algernon Blackwood with incidental music by Edward Elgar (Op.78, 1915). The original performing material was lost in a bombing raid at the Kingsway Theatre (September 1940), but luckily the autograph manuscript was held by the publisher Elkin.

For years this invaluable full score (with also contained many emendations in Elgar's hand relating to the original production) lay forgotten in their archives until Lionel Salter's research led to its rediscovery in 1965 and subsequently to this (to all intents) complete production, which was re-broadcast in 2004. I have added the two files to Folder 2, together with a cast-list and other relevant details.



The following is taken from notes by Kevin Jones -

Elgar needed little persuasion when approached in 1915 to compose music for The Starlight Express, an adaptation for the stage of Algernon Blackwood's fantasy novel, A Prisoner in Fairyland. The storyline and its author's sympathies – an identification with childhood, reverence for patterns and processes in the natural environment, and a sense of otherworldly mysticism – immediately struck a chord with the 58-year-old composer. Happily diverted from the depressing bleakness of wartime London, Elgar threw himself heart-and-soul into the project, the closest he came to writing an opera.

In the mountains and forests of neutral Switzerland the children of a close-knit family form themselves into a secret 'Star Society', where each child identifies with a familiar constellation: Jane Anne with the Pleiades, Jimbo the Pole Star, Monkey the Great and Little Bear, and Cousin Henry Orion. They realise that adults have become 'wumbled' – a Lewis Carroll-like conflation of the words 'worried' and 'jumbled' suggesting disorientation and confusion – owing to a lack of 'sympathy', or 'understanding the feelings and needs of others'.

At night the children play among the stars, collecting stardust – in effect grains of sympathy – to sprinkle on the adults to release them from their sorry state. The children are helped by a group of 'sprites' who travel on the eponymous Starlight Express, a 'train' of thought, which serves as a portal into the star world. The Lamplighter lights up hope, the Tramp personifies instinctive simplicity, the Laugher laughs troubles into fun, the Gardener makes things grow, the Sweep sweeps the blues away, the Dustman brings the stardust of sympathy and the Woman-of-the-Haystack, mother of them all, is borne on the winds. An additional character, the Organ-Grinder, introduces and comments on the action. Following a successful 'un-wumbling' of the adults, the stage version adds a seasonal twist, not in Blackwood's original story, where the Christmas star extends a promise of universal harmony, neatly echoed by Elgar's working of the carol 'The First Nowell' into the musical texture of the Finale.

Lena Ashwell, the producer who commissioned Elgar to write the music, was a great believer in the power of music, 'the straightest road to the unseen world of spiritual beauty'. She told Elgar of 'a great mystic quality in the play which I am sure will help people to bear the sorrows of the war'. Elgar later said that he had 'been waiting a generation for just such a story to set'. He and Algernon Blackwood would enjoy a profound partnership, sharing juvenile japes and erudite philosophising in a bond that lasted many years. The inaccurate image handed down to us of Elgar the stuffy country squire belies the fun-loving rascal revealed in the accounts of those close to him. His was no mawkish nostalgia for a lost childhood, but a vibrant preservation of a childlike sense of wonder: at the height of his fame he would pop into the local Woolworths store to purchase children's novelty toys for his own amusement.

Fired up with enthusiasm, Elgar recalled that as a youngster he wrote a musical play in which children ostensibly redeem befuddled adults after crossing into a magic world. Although a fortuitous resemblance to The Starlight Express scenario may have been overstated, many key motifs in this late work are recycled from Elgar's winsome childhood sketches, which he had arranged eight years earlier into two orchestral suites known as The Wand of Youth. Elgar's instinctive identification with the narrative inspired a sustained outpouring of much imaginatively original material. The music's subtle charm and evocative tone-painting become immediately apparent in the Organ-Grinder's opening song, 'O children, open your arms to me'.

The other aspect of the tale that appealed to Elgar was Blackwood's overt nature mysticism. Elgar, too, was a child of nature. At one with his local landscape he literally immersed himself in its rhythms when composing – in a tent outside, surrounded by rustling breezes in the trees. He marvelled at the patterns revealed in his chemistry lab, and under his microscopes, and also at those in the heavens, declaring that music was 'written on the sky'. He went stargazing with his daughter Carice, in one letter exclaiming, 'I seem to miss a star out of the constellation of Orion: do you know anything of it?' Elgar spoke with awesome reverence of the beauty in these natural symmetries – which, when echoed in his music, seem to beguile the listener into a transcendental engagement with the soul of the universe.

A serious interest in kite-flying and the Aeolian harp, or wind harp, exemplified Elgar's particular fascination with the musical effects of the wind. The breath of the wind as it blew across these taut strings produced haunting utterances that many Victorians believed were the voices of ethereal spirits, an effect emulated in the Starlight Express music, for example, in the solo violin cadenzas. Blackwood described the rails supporting the Starlight Express as a network of 'filmy lines' joining the mountain tops and trees, 'threading the starlight ... they would twang with delicate music if the wind swept its hand more rapidly across them'.

Audiences gave enthusiastic support to the play, and the music was well received, but the story was dismissed by critics as 'preachy and pretentious', a 'delicate fancy' turned into a 'heavy sermon'. After just 40 performances the play mysteriously closed ahead of schedule. The Starlight Express was more than wartime escapism and its thinly disguised pacifist message would have been deeply unsettling for the Establishment. By contrast, its main rival in wartime escapist children's theatre, Peter Pan, enjoyed a long and successful run. Its comforting dualistic theme, where the swashbuckling heroes' excusable violence firmly trounces the 'baddies', struck a more appropriate triumphalist tone.

Though loyally patriotic, Elgar was distressed by the war and doubted its purpose. By including cowbells, a wind machine and organ in his instrumentation for The Starlight Express, as used by Strauss in An Alpine Symphony, was Elgar subtly empathising with his German friend and admirer? Elgar's pioneering recording of The Starlight Express in 1916 provided balm for the forces. An officer wrote to Elgar that among even the roughest of the soldiers, 'all care for your music ... the whole thing is unreal, and music is all that we have to help us carry on'. It was a sad irony that the talented young baritone who played the Organ-Grinder, Charles Mott, died of battle wounds in 1918 after returning to the front.

Woefully neglected for many years, the sentiments of The Starlight Express were prophetic in urging selfless understanding between peoples and a harmonious reverence for the natural environment. The work is ripe for a new generation raised on stories of children who plunge through magic portals and ride magical trains in a quest to save the world (the parallels with Harry Potter are unmistakable). Elgar's richly apposite music deserves to find a place among his greatest works, as well as in the realms of incidental music and of music for children. Its universal message is a potent parable for our time.

[gpdlt2010]

What a wonderful collection!
Can't thank you enough for posting it!

[albion]

What a wonderful collection!

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of (otherwise-unavailable) British music. I'm really glad that you are (hopefully) finding new things to explore!

[TerraEpon]

I've started going through this collection as well -- well at least the stereo recordings (about 53 hours or so).