On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Channel Crossings By John Simon THERE SEEMS to be a tacit conspiracy against modern British music in various countries, ours included. I have written here about Benjamin Britten...
...The two met at the 1936Barcelona International Music Festival, where each had works performed...
...RETURNING to the aforementionedLyrita disc, we come to the Serenade for Strings (Op...
...They form a kind of four-movement symphony, redolent of genuine piety and, I suspect, happiness in anew marriage...
...Not until his friendship with Britten, 10 years his junior, was he encouraged to emancipate himself from Boulanger and French neoclassicism...
...And all this during the somber opening months of World Warll...
...There follow Three Mazurkas (Op...
...Peter Dickinson suggests that they became lovers in his The Music of Lennox Berkeley (to which I am greatly indebted), and Humphrey Carpenter confirms this in his Benjamin Britten...
...Berkeley's last concerto, it exemplifies the late manner: airily easeful in the Andantino-Allegretto, spacious and contemplative in the Lento, and understatedly exultant in the Allegro con brio...
...It begins with Five Short Pieces (Op...
...Meno mosso, expertly combines rhythmic energy and melodic winsomeness...
...The opening movement, Prelude, sawily blends one melting and one rambunctious melody...
...65,1964), the guitarist Jukka Savijoki is joined by the tenor Ian Partridge in settings of five poems by Walter de la Mare...
...A handy introduction to Berkeley's evolution is Selected Compositions for Piano Solo (Kingdom 2012), played by Christopher Headington, one of Berkeley's first students at the Royal Academy of Music, where he taught composition from 1946 to '68...
...It ranges from childlike simplicity to jazzy syncopation, featuring the blue notes Berkeley was fond of and a truly bravura ending...
...More chambermusic, on Dutton 7100, displays the eminent Endymion Ensemble...
...The composer seems to want to shake off his reputation as traditionalist and complaisant melodist, as one hears passages all set to soar, yet quickly pulling back...
...the Scherzo shows a wry but contained humor, and the Finale lets loose with Poulencian droll ery...
...As Sheila MacCrindle has written, "Essentially a private person, Berkeley led an unusually serene home life in his charming house in the Little Venice section of London, due in no small part to the delightful personality of his wife__Their three sons...
...He never had quite the talent for conducting—or playing the piano—that he had for composing...
...But I relish another joint Britten-Berkeley CD, now reissued as Auden Songs (Naxos 557204...
...Next, the Divertimento in ? Flat (Op...
...More compelling is Symphony No...
...Opening with the cheeky Sonatina (Op...
...Hence Royal Navy Captain George Berkeley did not inherit the title that, in turn, would have gone to Lennox...
...This brings me to Berkeley's vocal music...
...The following Lento may, despite Berkeley's denial, reflect in its sparseness the austerity of wartime...
...The Magnificat (Op...
...I realized quickly," he was to reminisce later, "that here was someone of greater musical ability than I, and from whom I could learn...
...More important are the Five Poems by W.H...
...70,1967) is a typically uncategorizable piece of musical free association, now sumptuous, now frolicsome, and ending in a melancholydyingfall.The disc concludes with the enchanting Palm Court Waltz (Op...
...49,1955) for violin, cello, flute, and piano, the last two replacing the original recorder and harpsichord...
...51, 1957), written for Julian Bream, is a spunky, idiosyncratic piece with real body to it...
...66, 1964/5) is a muchmore earnest, cerebral work...
...39,1954), it continues with Diversions (Op...
...althoughBachian in spirit (Bach, Mozart and Chopin were Berkeley's favorites) it does not sacrifice feeling to intellect...
...At the same time Berkeley, appearing on the popular radio show Desert Island Disc, listed the eight works he would most want to be shipwrecked with...
...Even so, engaging elegance persists...
...44, 1952), where Berkeley fully dispensed with his Frenchness and adverted to a very British, somewhat buttoned-up late mode...
...Cleverly, the outer movements are for all four instruments, the inner two, called Arias, each for a different pair...
...The Suite (Op...
...Music was in his blood, his naval officer father being a great music lover...
...Don't think all the time whether Nadia Boulanger would approve," Britten advised...
...His true vocation emerged when he squired the visiting Maurice Ravel around Oxford and showed him some of his compositions...
...The next, Allegretto, dubbed "wistful waltz" by Anthony Burton in the accompanying booklet, allows three memorable themes to flow into one another...
...The already discussed Six Preludes are played here by their dedicatee, Colin Horsley...
...Because his grandfather, the Seventh Earl of Berkeley, lived with Countess Cecile, of a noble FrancoScottish family, before she could shedher elderly husband, their first two children were born out of wedlock...
...The Partita for Chamber Orchestra (Op...
...Berkeley generously wrote to his younger friend that he preferred his contributions...
...A substantial, highly listenable, three-movement work, it arrived along with his declaration that the kind of strict repetition sonata form prescribes is no longer acceptable...
...18,1943), a wealth of the most diverse melodies that nevertheless merge into a shapely whole...
...There are also four miniatures from various periods, and the Petite Suite of 1927, a student effort, but very charming...
...2,1935...
...14, 1937) of poems Auden wrote for Britten, with whom he was unrequitedly in love...
...Oddly, the no less charming Paysage (1944) was deemed too slight for an opus number, and remained unpublished and unknown till 1987...
...88, 1974), performed on RCA Victor 61605 by its dedicatee, Julian Bream, with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Orchestra, sounds fresh as a daisy...
...Now on to the chamber music...
...Finally comes the Piano Sonata (Op...
...Largely introspective, it sometimes dwindles to a few woodwinds in a quasi-concertante mode...
...There are several nice lesser works here, notably the aforementioned Polka in the two-piano version...
...A brooding quality leads up to a climax of despair, only to lapse into more intense brooding...
...Two other works are slight, butthe very popular Six Preludes (Op...
...Finally, two masterworks...
...Night Covers Up the Rigid Land" and especially "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" are, again, fascinating mixtures of the lyrical and the elucubrated, which Berkeley's music remarkably manages to reconcile...
...More fetching are The Three Pieces, (Op...
...The disc also contains the Serenade...
...As a nonpartisan of the liturgical, I leave Sacred Choral Music (Naxos 557277) to others to judge...
...4 (Op...
...Back in England, the pair lived together for a while and, in 1937, jointly composed the Mont Juic Suite, based on those Catalan dances...
...Even so, he barely scraped by at Oxford...
...The admittedly talented and more "modern" Michael, who is of lesser interest to me, may be partly a sop to the younger generation, but I find having to acquire twice as many CDsabit daunting...
...16,1940/41), which Dickinson notes "justifies its title in terms of lyrical rather than dramatic development...
...1 (Op...
...The Oboe Quartet (Op...
...His opus numbers surpass 100, and would have gone beyond but for his being stricken with Alzheimer's disease...
...These poems meld simple human feelings with wildly surreal imagery...
...now for the third B, Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989), who, except by connoisseurs, is unknown in America...
...Ravel advised him to study with the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris...
...Especially fine are the third, Aria, an adagio of great but unsaccharine sweetness, and the fourth, Canzonetta, a perky yet somehow restrained Andantino...
...the third, as Dickinson says, is "a bustling but restrained scherzo" with a bit of youthful swagger...
...Entering his 70s, Berkeley takes stock of his undiminished feelings in five movements ranging from the ruminative to the heartwarming...
...3 (Op...
...The fast final movement goes from resoluteness to an earned equanimity and ends in a slightly playful triumph...
...The major guitar works, interspersed with those of Britten, are on Ondine 779, starting with Theme and Variations (Op...
...Volume 1 offers the Symphony No...
...the second, Andantino, has a nicely serenade-like, guitarish quality...
...The performance (Intaglio 7281) is from 1969, and makes the good work of Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic sound a trifle fuzzy...
...Happily, Chandos Records has begun bringing out what they call the Berkeley Edition, very fine discs that presumably aim to comprise the entire symphonic oeuvre...
...I have written here about Benjamin Britten and Sir Granville Bantock...
...32/1, 1949), subtitled Hommage à Chopin, a sophisticated blend of Chopinian and Berkelian elements, composed as part of a multicomposer centenary tribute...
...DURING a three-year wartime stint as a very effective BBC program director, while also serving as an air raid warden, Berkeley met a BBC secretary, Elizabeth Freda Bernstein, daughter of a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant, who in 1946 became Mrs...
...Volume 3 features the Symphony No...
...the Nocturn is genuinely nocturnal, exhibiting a sense of solitude suffused with consolatory melodies...
...23,1945) are as beautiful as piano writing gets...
...From 1927 to 1932 he did, and in the process he converted to Catholicism, possibly under Boulanger's influence...
...In the Songs of the Half-Light (Op...
...Its second movement features variations, one of the composer's favorite forms...
...Perhaps a little less demanding because it was written for a youthful orchestra, it is not at all patronizing...
...The first movement, Vivace, has a slightly mischievous jauntiness...
...It is very French in feeling, not particularly pastoral, but ends in a lovely, understated melody that is characteristic Berkeley...
...27,1947), translated by Arthur Symons...
...The Polka for piano duo (Op...
...A work typically Berkelian, in that its impact grows with each renewed hearing...
...On EMI 85138, Thomas Hemsley sang them in a straightforward, virile baritone...
...Next on the EMI CD is what many consider Berkeley's masterpiece, Four Poems of St...
...About 90 seconds each, these pieces are songful, unpretentious and markedly different from one another, yet all are imbued with the same playful lyricism, climaxing in a last Andante of ethereal delicacy...
...inherited the musical leanings of their parents...
...Naxos adds a pair of earlier settings (Op...
...Somewhat disturbingly, each includes the music of two Berkeleys: father Lennox and son Michael...
...the fourth, Lento, exudes a winning sense of quiet satisfaction...
...Sung here by Pamela Bowden, a true contralto, accompanied by the Collegium Musicum Londinii under John Minchinton, these are poems of religious ecstasy alternating with Christian shepherd songs...
...84, 1972/3...
...81,1973) forpiano duet, bordering on salon music, but enough to turn any hotel lobby into a concert hall...
...20,1945), a substantial work of23 minutes, composed during the War years and dedicated to the great pianist Clifford Curzon...
...This despite four symphonies, four operas, several concertos for various instruments, an impressive amount of fine instrumental and chamber music, much liturgical music, as well as works for film, ballet, drama, and radio, plus numerous exquisite art songs on French and English texts...
...On Helios 55138, we get A Centenary Tribute, by the distinguished Nash Ensemble...
...12, 1938/9...
...As elsewhere in these pieces, he never raises his voice—I doubt if there is so much as one forte marking— yet the emotional range is considerable...
...Claude Debussy, Ravel and Albert Roussel were to be major influences too...
...20 years after the wedding, the composer wrote in his diary, "I feel that I have been so immensely lucky, and I know that to have lived with someone so good, so sweet and so generous has made me into a different person...
...Thus he became, in his early stages, the most French-accented English composer...
...9) is an attractive work that hews fairly close to the source material but sparkles in orchestration, especially in the second and fourth movements...
...But as Lennox' composer son, Michael, later observed, his father would have made a poor castellan and rider to hounds...
...71, 1968) is, to be sure, on a religious text, but as Berkeley wrote, "essentially a concert piece," not meant for church use...
...The lyrics are rather pallid, but the music endows them with vivid personality, notably in "The Moth," where the fatal encounter of insect and flame is evoked with refined irony...
...So far three have come out, all featuring the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Richard Hickox...
...84) Berkeley completedfor his 75th birthday in 1978...
...5a, 1934), Berkeley's first hit, is here played solo...
...74,1969) in one 15-minute movement full of changes of tempo...
...Auden, about which more anon...
...Berkeley started out studying French and philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, though he had been composing little things at the piano since childhood...
...She certainly gave him rigorous neoclassical training, guiding him toward the works of Gabriel Fauré and Igor Stravinsky...
...63,1964) for four woodwinds and piano quartet, a work of great variety and surpassing loveliness...
...Teresa of Avila (Op...
...This begins with the 26-minute Horn Trio (Op...
...Conversely, the Guitar Concerto (Op...
...It is curious to hear them set by Berkeley, Britten's lover until dropped forthe singer Peter Pears...
...The first movement, Allegro moderato...
...For a long time there was secrecy about who wrote what, we now know that Berkeley composed the first two movements, Britten the last two...
...and, after Lennox' knighting in 1974, Lady Berkeley...
...47,1955) for clarinet, horn and string quartet has similar largeness of feeling andrichness of invention...
...He had also learned French very young, spending time in France with his Francophile parents even before they settled permanently at Cap Ferrât, near Nice, in 1920...
...Written for oboe and an otherwise oboeless chamber orchestra, it could pass for an oboe concerto...
...Taking the opposite tack, Philip Langridge on Naxos, accompanied by Steuart Bedford, emphasizes the quirkiness with fancy tempo and volume changes, gaining drama but losing immediacy...
...It was an exceptionally happy marriage...
...Besides the aforementioned Sextet and Oboe Quartet, we find here the Concertino (Op...
...The Sextet (Op...
...Under its "adorableness," Anthony Payne, the annotator, discerns "hidden strength," which neatly characterizes so much of Berkeley's music...
...the middle one, a Chopinesque berceuse, is especially ingratiatmg...
...4,1936), pleasant fluff dedicated to José Raffalli, a young Corsican flatmate of Berkeley's in Paris, later killed fighting with the French Resistance...
...Volume 2 opens with the Third Symphony, already discussed, and goes on to the Sinfonia Concertante (Op...
...As often in his later music, Berkeley experiments with a modified form of tone rows, but, as Dickinson observes, "the personality means more than the technique...
...77,1970), which shows Berkeley at his most epigrammatic, a bit too concise for my taste...
...Ditto Francis Poulenc, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, and, less obviously, an acquaintance, Jean Françaix...
...it is one happy smile, utterly contagious in less than two minutes...
...Lennox Randall Francis Berkeley was born near Oxford on May 12,1903, into an aristocratic family...
...They were the Andante of a Mozart piano concerto, an aria from a Bach cantata, part of a late Beethoven quartet, an aria from Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, Debussy's Faun, some of Frank Martin's Petite Symphonie Concertante (a choice I heartily applaud), a duet from Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and part of the piano version of Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales...
...Though not much longer, the Sonatina for Guitar (Op...
...Together they went to Mont Juic Park, to enjoy a performance of Catalan dances, with Britten jotting down the music for some of them on scraps ofpaper...
...The Mont Juic Suite is available with Steuart Bedford conducting the English Chamber Orchestra (Collins 11232), and with Berkeley himself conducting the London Philharmonic a touch less incisively (Lyrita 226...
...Like most of Berkeley, it does not overwhelm with easy effects, but offers ample reward upon each rehearing...
...A useful disc is A Lennox Berkeley Centenary Album (EMI 85138...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
