Bantock's Banter and Bravura
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Bantock's Banter and Bravura By John Simon If his distinguished surgeon father had prevailed, Sir Granville Bantock(1869-1946)wouldhave become a chemical engineer or Indian...
...It comprises an orchestral prelude and nine songs...
...Curiously, the manuscript had disappeared in the early '70s, but was rediscovered recently on a market stall in Ross-on-Wye thanks to a sympathetic and knowledgeable musician...
...To help out, friends arranged for frequent commissions for smaller pieces—hence a return to chamber music, which the young Bantock had quickly abandoned...
...Something similar occurs while listening to this work: The mind wanders off dreamily, only half attentive...
...He set about writing 24 symphonic poems based on it, but produced only two...
...the Prelude and Camel Caravan from Omar Khayyam indeed sound mildly exotic, and receive on this disc the desiderated authentic camel bells...
...The Violin Sonata No...
...The Violin Sonata No...
...The orchestration calls for string orchestra and, with typical Bantockian magniloquence, six harps, producing in unison extraordinary effects...
...His two longest works, the nearly threehour Omar Khayyam (the complete FitzGerald Rubaiyat), and the two-and-ahalf-hour Song of Songs, have here their only, very fragmentary representation...
...The idea may have been suggested by Edward Elgar's famous Enigma Variations...
...2 in D major starts out just as engagingly...
...in the right hands, it can cast a powerful spell...
...Two important works appear on Hyperion 66630...
...DESPITE his knighting in 1930, Bantock in later life fell on hard times...
...I would single out the Debussyesque introduction (Bantock was an early admirer of the Afternoon of a Faun), based on a flute-driven ascending and descending chord...
...1 in G is a treasure trove of tunes...
...Seldom has orchestral music been put to such translucently chamber music-like use...
...makes use of a Hebridean folk song, "Sea-Longing...
...In 1899, the young husband composed the Helena Variations, using as a theme his wife's initials in German musical notation: HFB...
...Though numerous, those slightly belated juvenilia may be safely ignored...
...The disc includes delightful works by Frank Bridge and George Butterworth...
...Based on a crabbed poem by his beloved Robert Browning, this is the story of a man whom a butterfly lures away from his sedate married life to the excitement of a country fair, where he has a headlong dalliance with a flighty carnival performer, Fifine...
...An hourlong piece, it contains outbursts of intense passion and passages of passing despair interrupting stretches of bittersweet melancholy or overwhelming sweetness, sometimes on the verge of cloying, but always remaining tasteful...
...The Cyprian Goddess is, of course, Aphrodite, but the music is not at all Hellenizing or even especially sensual...
...No one who hears them should doubt the mastery of a composer whose works cry out for rediscovery...
...nonetheless, Michael Hurd is right to observe, "In any other country such a work would have become a staple item in the romantic orchestral repertoire...
...I find the Sonata in G minor for solo cello rather arid and unrewarding...
...then, suddenly, the ear awakens to a phrase, a snatch of melody, with the pleasure of retrieving something lost...
...Such a gift for languages was rare among the British, composers included...
...At only 20 minutes, the Celtic Symphony is wonderfully contained...
...Bantock reprinted his 44 lines in the score with letters identifying the corresponding passages in the music...
...and works he called, very cavalierly, symphonies, a couple of them for a cappella chorus...
...Like some of his lesser works, they mirror his return to his family's Scottish roots and "his passion for all things Celtic," to quote Michael Hurd...
...The music artfully and dramatically intertwines the Elvire and Fifine themes...
...Indeed, it was Elgar himself who referred to Bantock as 'having the most fertile musical brain of our time.'" In preparation for the symphony, the composer went on a Hebridean walking tour wearing kilts...
...However, the three short fillers on this CD are all worthwhile...
...Even so, these sonatas can stand comparison not only with those of Arnold Bax and John Ireland, as the booklet notes would have it, but also, in my opinion, with the great violin sonatas of César Franck and Gabriel Faur...
...She promptly went to work on what was to be a nearly two-year project...
...The Prelude from the latter is attractive, salonish music...
...At the very end, though, as our man settles back into home life, there is an "unexpectedly plangent chord," Lewis Foreman writes, that "suggests a lingering regret for what has been lost...
...I close with an irresistible CD, Dutton 7121, a selection of 22 songs out of Bantock's 400...
...This is genteel British music, free-flowing but not carelessly crafted, and always careful not to allow its tunefulness to turn into kitsch...
...Also the grotesque dance of the satyrs going from nervous friskiness to oompah blatancy, followed by an airy, genuinely antique-sounding dance of the nymphs...
...At 15 minutes, with Julian Lloyd Webber, Andrew's younger brother, as soloist, it is a respectable minor work...
...The fourmovement Sonata in ? minor (1940) is a substantial 27-minute work, incorporating as its third movement the 1925 Fantastic Poem...
...A cappella choruses are one of my musical antipathies: The works seem to me solidly crafted with much variety, but still not to my taste...
...Its very prelude, Norman Lebrecht tells us, "predicts two of Mahler's most original ideas—the Abschied of Das Lied von der Erde and the motionless end of the 9th symphony...
...Sappho (Hyperion 66899) for mezzosoprano and orchestra—originally piano —developed slowly and intermittently from 1900 to 1905...
...Here mostly light dance music was played, but Bantock changed all that, introducing serious works by new, chiefly British, composers...
...In the case ofDante and Beatrice, the Beatrice music is chastely alluring...
...the others are patched together from fragments often rewritten and copiously added to by Helen Bantock...
...Obviously, Mahler did not crib from someone he probably never heard of, but the sequence of events does suggest that Bantock was, in Cardus' words, "definitely contemporary...
...They are performed by the Royal Philharmonic under Vernon Handley, as are the next four CDs I will discuss...
...Similar, by no means superior works by Frederick Delius, six years Bantock's senior, and Vaughan Williams, four years his junior, did...
...The Elegiac Poem is Bantock at his melodious best...
...Bantock was a great recycler from one instrument to another or to voice, or from smaller to larger forces...
...also opera, mostly chamber...
...Bantock's early predilections were for the then fashionable tone poems, sometimes with chorus...
...Also on the CD is the Sapphic Poem, originally for cello and piano (1906...
...On Music Bantock's Banter and Bravura By John Simon If his distinguished surgeon father had prevailed, Sir Granville Bantock(1869-1946)wouldhave become a chemical engineer or Indian civil servant...
...The first has for text the only surviving complete poem by Sappho...
...He was massive in build also, and golden-bearded at a time when all the fashionable men-about-town were mustachioed with monotonous regularity...
...Et ego in Arcadia vixi (I too have lived in Arcadia), Bartollomeo Schidoni's variation on the epitaph seen in Quercino and Poussin paintings...
...Both a painter and a poet, she was equally smitten with him...
...It is all eminently listenable, if not exactly momentous...
...The Helena theme and its 12 variations are a good example of what Bantock's music is about...
...From a few simple yet lovely themes the composer wrests his most ingenious harmonies and multifarious variations...
...The gossamer quality of this little gem is perfectly captured by Norman del Mar and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta...
...Bantock's two so-called choral symphonies for mixed chorus are available on Troy 180 (Albany Records) by the BBC Singers under Simon Joly...
...The Elgars were friends of the Bantocks, and during a visit of theirs to New Brighton, Bantock conducted what may have been only the second performance ofthat popular work...
...The Hebridean Symphony, at over half an hour, combines landscape painting à la Sibelius with echoes of Scottish balladry, trend-setting music for England...
...One March afternoon in 1896, on a teatime visit to an old lady in London, Bantock met Helena (later Helen) von Schweitzer, like himself 28, and was bowled over...
...it evokes a British salon goddess, poised but intermittently whimsical, and only in the end dramatic...
...And the intoxicatingly tuneful visit of the Cyprian, plus a Finale summing up all that went before...
...I guess composers' fates depend on the whims of conductors and, of late, record companies...
...Earlier Bantock had developed a passion for Robert Southey's now justly forgotten Indian epic, The Curse ofKehama...
...Two amiable miniatures complete this cherishable disc...
...The Sonata in F-sharp minor, in three movements, is again very civilized: It allows feelings to come through music that seldom raises its voice and never its temperature...
...The music ranges from mostly melancholy inwardness to some festive effusions, and includes even a highland reel...
...Of an academic bent, Bantock knew Greek and Latin, French and German, and seriously studied Persian andArabic...
...Banfield is on safer ground when he continues, "Romantically eclectic and enthusiastic by temperament, Bantock was forever drawn toward the exotic, particularly the Oriental and the Celtic...
...As Keith Anderson summarized, "The music grows in intensity from the mists of the opening to an impressive storm, war, a love-lament, and a stirring song of victory, before the mists close in once more...
...So it is high time to lift the cloud of oblivion that has come to enshroud him...
...Some passages are so fine-spun that they feel a trifle overextended, and the invention flags near the end...
...Susan Bickley sings aptly...
...whether sequentially developing or starting out on a new tack, they keep surpassing one another in gracefulness...
...This piece and the tone poem The Cyprian Goddess (1938/9)— its score bedecked with quotations from Horace, Theocritus, Moschus, andBion— plus Dante and Beatrice (1901, revised 1910) are to be found on Hyperion 66810...
...Not cut out to be either a virtuoso soloist or orchestral instrumentalist, he turned to conducting, and was employed by the well-known light opera producer George Edwardes in one of his touring companies...
...later, with Charles Stanford's Shamus ? 'Brien, he toured all over Britain and got to love folk songs...
...The composer appends a motto...
...Indeed, unlike Browning, Bantock subtitles the work "A Defense of Inconstancy...
...Particularly winning is the third variation, allegretto scherzando, evocative of prancing toe shoes and twirling tutus...
...Dutton 7119 offers works for violin and piano, idiomatically performed by Lorraine McAslan and Michael Dussek, all composed after Bantock turned 60...
...They are sung condignly by Jean Rigby and Peter Savidge, with David Owen Norris at the piano...
...Vanity of Vanities (1913) is a selection from Ecclesiastes, though Bantock was not religious...
...But recollection of domestic happiness with his faithful and forgiving wife, Elvire, makes him return to the hearth...
...Rightly does the booklet note refer to the composer as a "master of the sustained singing line" who rarely needs to indulge in elaborate double or multiple stops...
...very foreign to that period of many taboos...
...He wrote songs, too, whose number reached 400...
...As Lewis Foreman writes, "the fashionably dressed Helena with her romantic intellectuality and interest in all Bantock's pet enthusiasms almost immediately found herself inveigled to collaborate with her enthusiastic admirer...
...Happily, Sir Granville rediscovered it, and Dutton 7107 offers most of the composer's cello chamber works played by Andrew Fuller, with Michael Dussek on the piano...
...The former updates pieces by Elizabethan composers, but early music is another of my blind spots...
...His coming from a wealthy family notwithstanding, Bantock, after his four years at RAM, had to earn a living...
...But by age 21 he was at the Royal Academy of Music, busily composing away...
...His enthusiasms during this period were for Tchaikovsky and Sibelius (who dedicated his Third Symphony to him), to which he added a lasting devotion to Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, and Richard Strauss...
...But regardless of provenance, these are savory morsels...
...The music is restlessly various: sometimes sweet, verging on swoony...
...at other times martial, verging on bombastic, but never particularly Eastern...
...Program notes make further classical references...
...Stephen Banfield, in the Grove Dictionary of Opera, condescendingly notes that "until World War I his reputation was second only to [Sir Edward] Elgar's, though it is doubtful whether he was ever considered great...
...They are alternatingly dreamy and zestful, sentimental and boisterous...
...The Hebridean Symphony is also recorded on Naxos 555473, by the then Czechoslovak State Philharmonic under Adrian Leaper, and is mated with an Old English Suite (1909) and Russian Scenes (1899...
...Both symphonies were cast in one continuous movement, as was Bantock's wont...
...His first stationary employment was as musical director of the Tower Orchestra, New Brighton (1897-1900...
...It was lightly orchestrated a couple of years later and it bears a motto from Sappho: "And this I feel in myself...
...Further in the score, a quotation in Greek from Sappho, "Immortal Aphrodite on your elaborate throne," marks the goddess' appearance...
...Rounding out the CD are several pleasant shorter pieces, some of them reworkings...
...Presently he accosted Helena with a grandiose request for six poems each on Arabian, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, and Japanese subjects...
...It, too...
...the Dante music is more intense, with odd outbursts of virile passion that are not quite Dantesque, but much needed relief in a 25-minute piece...
...An example is The Witch of Atlas, also on Hyperion 66450, based on Shelley's poem ofthat name, with Bantock choosing 44 of the poem's 672 lines...
...So it was that with Sidney Jones' The Gaiety Girl he toured all over the world and developed a taste for the foreign...
...The influential English critic Neville Cardus wrote, "those of us who were then 'young' and 'modern' regarded Bantock as of much more importance than Elgar...
...Hard as it is now to grasp, this composer was an innovator...
...The earliest of the available tone poems is Thalaba the Destroyer (Hyperion 67250), circa 1900...
...The talk was as unconventional as the surroundings were prosaic...
...It is based on another long Southey narrative poem full of demons, death and vengeance, as well as a love story that has a tragic end in this world and a happy one in the next...
...This raises the thorny question of whether greatness, whatever it exactly may be, is necessary to be a valuable and cherished composer...
...meanwhile, in 1898, she and Granville were happily married...
...Two lesser but worthwhile Hebridean pieces round out the disc...
...The latter is a five-movement suite that is altogether charming, and its Mazurka is outstanding, even if it is a Polish dance, just as the Polka is Czech and the Valse is French...
...Charming, too, is the exquisite short comedy overture The Pierrot of the Minute (1908), based on Ernest Dowson's verse playlet (Chandos 8373) about the ephemeral dream love affair of Pierrot with a Moon Maiden...
...The Pagan Symphony finished in 1927/8, but probably first sketched in 1923, may be Bantock's most beautiful score, and would make a terrific ballet...
...For Atalanta in Calydon (1911), Bantock chose choric odes from Swinburne's verse drama of that title...
...His head," she wrote, "was leonine with its massive formation and tawny coloring, and his eyes were remarkable, scintillating with vivid life, windows to an intense inner existence...
...Most of the Celtic works derive from Hebridean folk songs...
...Hamabdil, based on a pensive Jewish melody, and Pibroch, apparently derived from a 1526 bagpipe dirge—both felicitously scored for cello and harp—will please the heedful listener...
...We must overcome some current prejudices against program music...
...it is impressive in its ability to change moods—playful, hearty, subtly ear-cajoling—without fragmenting into a mere collage...
...Why, then, didn't it...
...The texts cover a wide range from Chinese and Persian poems to 20thcentury lyrics of Scottish mistiness, and are set with admirable aptness, variety and musicality...
...Bantock's Hebridean Symphony(l9l3) and Celtic Symphony (1940) can be found on Hyperion 66450...
...Fifine at the Fair (1901, revised 1911) finds Bantock in a very different mode...
...Thus, from Horace's Odes, "Bacchus I behold on distant rocks—believe me, posterity!—teaching songs to the nymphs and goat foot, pointy-eared satyrs...
...He did choose the more charming aspects of The Witch and bypass the troubling ones...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
