La Belle Dame
Roderick Williams (baritone)
Rupert Marshall-Luck (violin)
BBC Concert Orchestra/John Andrews
rec. 2023, Battersea Arts Centre, London
Texts included
EM Records EMCD085 [61]
You won’t have come across a number of these works before because they’re making their premiere appearance on disc. Perhaps assiduous radio listeners or score-hunters may have run into Roger Quilter’s The Faithless Shepherdess, Holst’s Ornulf’s Drapa, Norman O’Neill’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, and Cyril Scott’s The Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel but I haven’t. That’s not to say, however, despite EM’s typically sumptuous booklet presentation and the fine recording, that they’re all equally deserving of reclamation in this way.
The Quilter is a short song, orchestrated by an unknown hand, and here sung with stylish elegance and aptness by Roderick Williams. That said, it offered me the curious experience of forgetting something as I was listening to it. Delius’ Petite Suite d’Orchestre No.1 needs to be distinguished from the suite of the same name written in 1890 but which only has three movements – the one recorded in what is its first performance here has five movements. Delius’ orchestra is small – theatre-sized, really – and for most of the time the music could be by anyone – certainly not the mature Delius. There are perhaps a few light fingerprints in the wind writing in the concluding Theme and Variations but you’d need to be astute to notice them. The recording is exceptionally clear and clean so you can really hear the cymbals, for example.
Holst wrote his scena during his last year at the Royal College of Music, in 1898, rescoring it two years later. The text is based on Nordic saga and written by Ibsen, still alive at the time of Holst’s composition. There are Wagnerian hints during its ten-minute length but then there are also hints of Coleridge-Taylor, a fellow student at the RCM, so that doesn’t get us very far. Holst the trombonist informs the lower brass writing and the good thing about this gloomy piece of work is that Holst at least got on with it.
Cyril Scott wrote The Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel at around the same time to a text by Walter Scott in his transcription of a Border Ballad. Like the Holst-Ibsen setting, it’s a typically jolly tale about death. As so often with Scott, his revisions complicate matters but let’s cut that Gordian knot and just crack on with what we have, an orchestrated version – it was originally cast for voice and piano in 1897 – lasting eight minutes. Deftly scored, Scott is good with winds and percussion in particular. Rupert Marshall-Luck has orchestrated Havergal Brian’s Legend, playing the violin, in a performance that he admits stands alongside Brian’s original and doesn’t seek to supplant it. The short motifs, tights trills, and reflective paragraphs offset the more jagged elements of the writing. Alexander Mackenzie’s overture to Colomba is an odd man out as he was from an older generation, not like the three Frankfurt Gang members here. It’s a Prelude to Act I of his opera of the same name – finely orchestrated and well-paced, full of Italianate lyricism with ripe lyric elegance, warmly burnished and swelling with romantic refulgence – a fine overture. Too much to hope we’ll get the opera recorded, but it’s a tempting index of the potential worth of the work.
I’ve left to last Norman O’Neill’s La Belle Dame sans Merci. Admittedly the disc’s programme consists largely of miscellaneous sheafs, many dating from youth, and not especially distinctive – or, in Delius’ case, not especially good – but O’Neill’s eleven-minute setting strikes me as distinctive and convincing. He was not, in any case, especially young when he wrote it, being about 33, and already involved in writing chamber music and scores for theatrical productions. Its brooding quality is clear – the singer George Baker said it had a ‘half-elusive and delicate aromatic quality’. It is, moreover, fulsome and has a rich romantic vibrancy. Williams sings it with a sure sense of its curdling romantic ambivalence.
The very uneven nature of the selected works is a factor in this programme though Williams is a fine ambassador for them and Mashall-Luck’s orchestration of the Brian is a useful, though hardly essential, piece of work. John Andrews directs the BBC Concert Orchestra in unflappable style. This disc is directed at British music enthusiasts/obsessives and I’d advise even them to sift with discrimination from amidst the dross (Delius, Quilter), the largely inessential (Holst, Brian) and to focus instead on the distinctive and valuable (O’Neill, Scott, Mackenzie).
Jonathan Woolf
Availability: EM Records
Contents
Roger Quilter (1877-1953)
The Faithless Shepherdess (pub.1908)
Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Petite Suite d’Orchestre No.1 (1889-1890)
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Ornulf’s Drapa (1898 rescored 1900)
Norman O’Neill (1875-1934)
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1908)
Cyril Scott (1879-1970)
The Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel (1900)
Havergal Brian (1876-1972)
Legend orch. Rupert Marshall-Luck
Alexander Mackenzie (1847-1935)
Colomba (1883)
