Latest news with #ColourSymphony
Spectator
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed
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.
Telegraph
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Critics fawned over Britten, but I'd rather have Bliss
Arthur Bliss died 50 years ago this week. He had a profound influence on British musical life but his reputation slipped into decline even before his death, and has only recovered slowly since. The appreciation of his output wavered during his lifetime partly because of his marked changes in style, which left critics surprised or, possibly, confused. Bliss was born in 1891 and in his 20s came under the influence of the radical European composers of the time, Stravinsky and Ravel. After reading classics and music at Cambridge he studied at the Royal College of Music, but left after just one year to fight in the Great War. He was wounded twice and his experience of war, as well as the interruption of his musical training, affected his approach to composition. The radicalism mostly went out of his style, replaced by a deep romanticism that perhaps owed something to the men who affected his idea of music at the Royal College: Vaughan Williams and Holst, from the generation above him, and his contemporary Herbert Howells. After his Colour Symphony of 1922 – which shocked Elgar, whom Bliss idolised, with its modernity – his subsequent major works as well as his ballet and film scores were all rooted in romanticism. But first Bliss had to exorcise some demons of the Great War. Although from a generation that did not parade its feelings, Bliss had been greatly affected by the death of his brother on the Somme. To come to terms with this loss he wrote a choral symphony, Morning Heroes, that had its premiere in 1930. It sets poetry connected to war – including Wilfred Owen's Spring Offensive – that is sung by a chorus and spoken by an orator. Later in the 1930s Bliss wrote his best-known ballet score, Checkmate and, on the eve of the Second World War, his Piano Concerto. The war years were a lean period for him as a composer, for two reasons. American by parentage, and with an American wife, he was in the United States when war broke out and, too old to fight again, taught for a time at the University of California. However, he came home in 1942 and, anxious to do something for the war effort, took over from Adrian Boult as director of music at the BBC. In that capacity, he began the planning for what would become the Third Programme, which launched in 1946. After the death in 1953 of Arnold Bax, Bliss was named Master of the Queen's Music. To many critics this appointment seemed to confirm what an establishment figure he was. Bliss's misfortune in this respect was typified by the virtual disappearance of his choral work The Beatitudes, written for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Also written for that occasion was Britten's War Requiem, which, as much because of the critical sycophancy its composer attracted as for the inherent qualities of the respective pieces, completely overshadowed the older man's work. Bliss is a much better composer than that suggests. In this anniversary year, he merits not merely a revival, but a permanent elevation into the highest rank of our composers.
