Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983)
Piano Music Volume 3
Overture (1944)
Berceuse (1944)
Barcarolle (1944)
Helix, op.68 (1967)
Holiday Diary (1949)
Bagatelles, op.141, Books 1, 2 and 3 (1979)
Dance Souvenance (1944)
Martin Jones (piano and narrator)
rec. 2023, Wyastone Concert Hall, Monmouth, UK
Resonus RES10331 [78]
Many years ago, I heard Elisabeth Lutyens’s O saisons, O chateau! at a concert in the Glasgow City Hall. I still recall thinking that this was one of the most appalling pieces of music I had come across up to that time. Some fifty years later, I have listened to several works by this oft-regarded “fearsome” lady. My opinion has radically changed: she is one of the most original and diverse British composers from the past century. I have found out that not everything she wrote was in a hard-edged, serialist style. What made me look again at her achievement was her film score for the British Transport Film The Heart of England with its “cow and gate” musings (that she so despised in others).
This final volume of Martin Jones’s landmark survey of Elisabeth Lutyens’s piano music includes works written over a thirty-five-year period. Volume 1 is reviewed here, here and here, Volume 2, here and here. I am beholden to Leah Broad’s excellent liner notes in the preparation and content of this assessment.
The recital opens, appropriately enough, with an Overture, a neo-classical piece full of joie de vivre. There are lots of ideas and pianistic gestures in this short but dramatic number. The Berceuse may be partially twelve-tone with its enigmatic wanderings. I am not sure that it would serve well as a lullaby, but it is certainly sophisticated and dreamy. The Barcarolle gives a decent impression of the gondoliers’ song and the rippling waters of the Lagoon. Again, nothing here to challenge even the most conservative of listeners.
Helix is much more typical of preconceived notions of Lutyens’s music as “complex, difficult [and] abstract”. Based on a concept of a coiled corkscrew, this piece explores diverse sonorities ranging over high and low registers. It is written in her individual serialist style. At one point the score instructs the soloist to hum! It was originally conceived for piano duet but is played here as a solo. In a programme note, Lutyens wrote: “Faced with the endless (too many!) possibilities and multiplicity of notes playable with four hands at a piano, I decided to choose one note; to emphasise this and let the sounds radiate, ‘coil’ out from this one note: as one might throw a stone in the water and ripples radiate from the impact.” Yet, Merion and Susie Harries explain in their 1989 biography of the composer: “The sounds she created are not flowing enough to suggest the ‘coiling’ which is implied in the title, and the line [is] too choppy to evoke the idea of ripples; the effect is more like sparks thrown off from a cogwheel slowly grinding.” All that said, Martin Jones gives an absorbing account of this abstract work.
Holiday Diary is one of the most charming pieces of music that I have heard in a long time. The background is simple: it is the story of a family holiday in Cornwall. The piece is presented as being devised by one of Lutyens’s four children, Sebastian. There is a narration in this performance. The Holiday Diary is “a small-scale example of Lutyens in theatrical mode, able to conjure images deftly and succinctly”. Topics covered include a crab walking sideways, the recitation of a fairy story, a game of cowboys and Indians, a misty sea, a bumpety donkey ride and a taxi journey home. The voice-over is by Martin Jones himself. (I would guess that, as music and text overlap, it was overdubbed.) It would be easy to condemn this half-hour long work as childish. It is not: it is childlike, a different thing altogether. I still fondly recall Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five…
The major item on this disc are the collected Bagatelles, seventeen mostly short pieces in three books. They cover a wide range of moods, from anger to stillness, from romance to acerbity, and some even downright sinister. Yet there is much beauty in these pages. They were all composed using Lutyens’s own version of serialism. I would recommend listening to them a book at a time, with a wee rest between bouts.
The final work here is the Dance Souvenance (dance of remembrance), unbelievably un-Lutyens in every aspect. It is a miniature pot-boiler that no one could fail to love in and be moved by. The liner notes say that this “wistful little piece [shows her] talent for quickly capturing a mood or emotion that would make her a successful film composer in later life”.
Pianist Martin Jones’s sympathy with this repertoire is self-evident in the masterly and engaging performance. I have mentioned the outstanding liner notes. The recording is clear and vital.
This enlightening disc explores a broad range of Elisabeth Lutyens’s piano music. I have not had the privilege of hearing Volume 2 in this series, but judging by the material here it would be a fascinating further exploration.
John France
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