A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed

Spectator

16-07-2025

Grade: A–
There's a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the Establishment. Right now, you can watch it happening in real time to Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage – inevitably, unwittingly, falling unto the pattern established by Sir Arthur Bliss, who shocked critics in the 1920s but died in 1975 as a KCVO, CH and Master of the Queen's Music. I knew musicians who played under him at the end of his life. One described him as 'a cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria'.
Bliss was a very capable conductor and this collection of live broadcasts of his own music gives us back the firebrand behind the national treasure. The tapes have been cleaned up by the enterprising indie label Somm, and include fierce accounts of his Colour Symphony and the volcanic Piano Concerto of 1939, with John Ogdon as soloist. In the 1960s, when these pieces were recorded, British orchestras didn't really do lushness, but this is music that demands urgency, and these wiry, sometimes jagged performances convey an authentic inter-war restlessness and bite.
And then there's Morning Heroes, the haunted choral symphony in which Bliss threw everything he had – orchestral laments, explosive choruses and great chunks of the Iliad (declaimed here by the actor Donald Douglas) – into a doomed attempt to find meaning in the first world war. Imagine Britten's War Requiem without the slickness (Bliss was gassed at Cambrai and his brother Kennard died on the Somme). In this live Proms performance from 1968, it makes questions of musical fashion feel very small indeed.