[Bruckner c 1892, credit Wikipedia]
Endnotes, March-April 2025
In this edition: Archive performances of Bruckner from SOMM Records * Rare Holst from EM Records * Coronation Procession, by Ruth Gipps, reviewed by Stuart Millson
A belated, final salute from The Quarterly Review to Anton Bruckner’s 200th anniversary year (last year) in this, our assessment of SOMM’s Volume 5, ‘Bruckner from the Archives’. This two-disc edition contains memorable performances from the late-1950s/early-1960s of the Seventh Symphony – often described as the more radiant of the composer’s great cycle of nine (or is it really eleven symphonies, if you include the early ‘study symphony’ and Number 0?) – plus the more austere, No. 6, and the glorious, forthright Te Deum.
The performance of Bruckner’s Seventh comes from Stuttgart, 1955 – and sound Engineer – or sound magician – Lani Spahr has brought the performers, the South German Philharmonic Orchestra from 70 years ago, into the modern digitised soundscape with stunning effect. Under the baton of, perhaps, a lesser-known conductor, Hans Müller-Kray, who held many important provincial posts throughout Germany in the 1940s and ‘50s, Bruckner’s work from 1884/5 is taken at a brisk pace – a contrast to the seemingly-longer, expansive versions which one often hears today. And yet there is no loss of nobility or magic here: the South German players produce some gorgeous string tremolo effects at the opening, and a fine, deep cello sound as the great theme-tune of the symphony gathers and clarifies, like a great mountain-slope coming into view through the lens of a telescope. The slow movement – which is a commemoration in music of the moment when Bruckner heard the news of the death of Wagner – has delicacy and depth; soaring up, though, to the usual heights of ecstasy, at the burning summit of this adagio.
A tense, scherzo movement follows, taking your breath away in its rushing, relentless power, before Müller-Kray scales the heights of the finale – and just listen at the end to the brass of the South German Orchestra in their fabulous, stately recapitulation of the almost playful final-movement opening bars. We have become accustomed to the perfect studio sound of Bruckner, from Dresden, Amsterdam, Berlin or Vienna, in so many great recordings – Sinopoli, Karajan, Haitink – but SOMM has allowed us to discover the world of the Bruckner broadcast and performing techniques of Germany’s regional orchestras, from a generation ago.
Also in the volume, are the Sixth Symphony – a work that is the polar opposite to No. 7 – a taut orchestral landscape, often displaying severity and melancholia; a perfect pairing with Bruckner’s Ninth – his enigmatic, unfinished symphony. Christoph von Dohnanyi conducts the NDR Symphony Orchestra in No. 6, the conductor and orchestra treating the first movement like a titanic struggle. The ‘filler piece’ in the collection is the 20-minute, choral-orchestral Te Deum performed by Viennese forces under Herbert von Karajan in 1962 at the city’s Musikverein. And the famous tenor, Nicolai Gedda, is among the solo group that does what Bruckner intended them to do: praise God in the highest.
The English composer (of Swedish parentage) Gustav Holst was also much preoccupied with metaphysical, mystical and Christian ideas – as the intensity of his famous, large-scale choral-orchestral Hymn of Jesus clearly shows. But in a new CD from the recording arm of the English Music Festival, EM Records, we find the composer turning to the classical world, in his Seven Choruses from the Alcestis of Euripides, a hitherto unrecorded piece, which dates from 1920. A discovery by the English Music Festival’s founder, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck, the Euripides piece also shares the new collection with a Playground Song (1911), a two-minute Gavotte (1933 – the same year as the charming, homely BrookGreen Suite, also on this album); and the 25-minute-in-duration The Vision of Dame Christian, from 1909. What unites these pieces is the influence of Holst’s (and Em Marshall-Luck’s) beloved school, St. Paul’s School in the West London area of Hammersmith: the composer taught there, the record producer, a couple of generations later, was a pupil there – and judging by Em’s compelling role as reciter, in the Euripides piece, her time at St. Paul’s engendered a great love of drama and dramatic speaking roles. Listeners to Radio 3 may be familiar with the Words and Music, poetry and music series, in which well-known actors give of their best. Holst’s ‘Euripides’ and Em’s narration would certainly gel effectively in this programme. And, as a flavour of what you can expect:
And the cold grey hand at the helm and oar
Which guideth shadows from shore to Shore,
Shall bear this day o’er the
Tears that Well,
A Queen of Women, a spouse of spouses,
Minstrels many shall praise thy name
With lyre full strung and with voices.
Holst’s style is often difficult to pin down – sometimes we find him in playful mood (as in the Brook Green or St. Paul’s Suites); in The Planets there is jostling joviality, which gives way, in the Neptune movement, to a weird, but not altogether untroubling sense of remoteness – exactly the trance-like loneliness that he conjures up on Dorset’s Egdon Heath. Playfulness and a good tune sit side-by-side with seriousness, austerity and a deep well of drama in Holst. Look no further than this CD for an ample helping of all four characteristics. The players – the St. Paul’s School’s Paulina Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Leigh O’Hara – do great justice to their composer, and to the motto which guides the hearts and minds of all who pass through those hallowed Hammersmith gates – Fide et Literis, the very title of the album.
Finally, to the music of Ruth Gipps, another of England’s somewhat overlooked 20th-century composers. Chandos – with its typically resonant, lush, detailed and impeccable sound recording – elevates Ruth Gipps’s music into the English mainstream, as for so many decades, the composer had to settle for competent, heartfelt, but ultimately amateur, freelance, or student-ensemble performances. With Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic, we feel that we are in the company of a composer, equal to Bliss, Alwyn, and at the beginning of the Coronation Procession, Vaughan Williams himself.
They called the Coronation time of 1953 the New Elizabethan Age, – and high hopes had already been stirred by the 1951 Festival of Britain – a combination of scientific marvels, English eccentricity and that lost word – fun. Despite post-war austerity, people still found it in themselves to be jolly and optimistic, and from those early, grainy colour films and newsreels of the period, united, and – amid all the crowds and bunting – automatically proud to be British. How different this all seems from today’s (apparent) era of ‘plenty’ (in the materialist sense) yet all tinged with angst and what is so often officialdom’s rejection of the patriotism which guided those 1950s’ New Elizabethans.
A definite feel of Englishness – the use of delicate woodwind, a sense of history suffusing the musical landscape – opens the Coronation work, and we begin to feel that we are, perhaps, wandering along London streets of the past, or leafing through a history book as the work unfolds. Lovers of this era of composition will also relish the Concerto for Horn and Orchestra, Op. 58, of 1968 – a lyrical, big-hearted work, that seems to be in a parallel universe from all the other social trends spilling onto the streets at the time. Twenty years on from the Horn Concerto and Ruth Gipps’s love of tradition and melody still remained undiminished: her Ambervalia of 1988, evoking ancient Roman fertility ceremonies – played beautifully by the BBC forces under Rumon Gamba. Personally, I would pay double the licence-fee for the BBC orchestras, alone. With the exception of Radio 3 and one or two untainted-by-woke programmes, a switch of the dial away on Radio 4, you can more or less keep the rest.
CD details:
Bruckner from the Archives, Volume 5, SOMM ARIADNE, 5033-2.
Holst, Fide et Literis, EMR CD090.
Ruth Gipps, Orchestral Works, Volume 3, CHAN 20284.
Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review
An excellent account (as usual) of excellent music.
My schooldays in the 1950s were in a country with complete “acceptance” of its own identity and its place in the postwar world, including my experience of a short journey to Australia just after the Festival of Britain. On balance the period 1951 to 1956 was a time of English pride, patriotism and confidence. “The past was another country” all right.
The “national essence” in music, deliberate or implicit, is an interesting issue, specifically exacerbated in the case of Bruckner, whose symphonic composition was allegedly edited in the Nazi interest and used on German radio at the death of the Hitler. Poor ugly old Anton has survived this controversy but not his supposedly undue interest in teenage girl piano pupils.