Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)
Miracle in the Gorbals, F.6 (1944)
Metamorphic Variations, F.122 (1972)
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra/Michael Seal
rec. 27 February 2025 (Variations) and 1 March (Miracle), MediaCity UK, Salford, Manchester
Chandos CHSA5370 [79] 

In his lucid notes for Miracle in the Gorbals, Ben Earle refers to its having been composed in Arthur Bliss’ ‘art deco’ style. That is both a blessing and a curse because the ballet was premièred in 1944 by which time art deco was passé, its heyday two decades in the past. People call its scenario lurid, because it concerns a suicide and the murder of a Christ-like figure, but is it any more lurid than Martinů’s opera The Greek Passion, composed the following decade which also concerns the murder of a Christ figure. Maybe the ballet format, compacting the action into tight scenes, adds to the problem as it has seldom been staged in the last sixty years, though there was a revival in 2014.

There is also the editorial problem concerning Bliss’ revisions. In the piano reduction there are fifteen movements and in the manuscript full score, the same music is divided into seventeen movements. Bliss prepared a concert suite which he recorded in 1954 for Decca employing eight movements and Paavo Berglund followed in Bournemouth but with ten movements, which equates to three extra minutes of music. So far as I’m aware, Christopher Lyndon-Gee’s Queensland Symphony Orchestra recording on Naxos is the only competing version of the full version and I suspect its sub-division into seventeen movement plus the coda follows the full score distribution.

There’s a lot to be said about these matters and you can read about them in the notes. However, the music is the thing and art deco or not, Bliss’s setting of Michael Benthall’s scenario is consistently inventive and attractive. The overture is strong and punchy with percussion very much audible and each cue brings out sharpness of characterisation, from the scurrying Glaswegians in The Street, the refined cortège of The Girl Suicide, or the Lovers’ slow waltz. The Official receives his own squally brass to insinuate his hypocrisy and the Suicide’s Body is borne to the sounds of a slow sarabande, accompanied by eloquent wind writing. Bliss is always ready to introduce novelty but is just as adept at honouring tradition – listen to the passacaglia, powerful in cumulative effect and only lasting three minutes, that announces the arrival of The Stranger. In the succeeding panel, Dance of Deliverance, after the Suicide’s revival, Bliss evokes some blues and syncopated writing, including the use of tom toms, in his attempt at full-scale symphonic jazz. This then slows to reflective panels of intimacy with renewed jazzy cadences and inflexions. The music becomes terser and darkens during The Slander Campaign – those high winds are really piercing – before the unleashing of The Killing of the Stranger, a bludgeoning (in every sense) with brass and percussion going full tilt. The only disturbing thing is the ship’s horn which is – spatially speaking – surely far too loud. The music softens and slows to end.

Michael Seal and the BBC Philharmonic turn in a fine, incisive and dramatically convincing performance in their MediaCity – oh that trendy compaction – recording studio. They have a tougher job on their hands when it comes to Metamorphic Variations, a late work composed in 1972, three years before Bliss’ death. This is really the only game in town if you want the complete recording as previous ones by Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Welsh on Nimbus, David Lloyd Jones in Bournemouth on Naxos, and Vernon Handley and the BBC Symphony on Carlton Classics all excised two movements called Contrasts and Children’s March, which were cut during rehearsals for the premiere given by Handley and the LSO when the work was still known as ‘Variations for Orchestra’. For the first time on disc both are included in Seal’s recording.  

It’s a work with which I’ve never really got to grips. The fluctuation of moods, the variety of instrumentation for individual sections, and the overarching scheme of the piece are personal but also complex and I find it hard to navigate through these contrasting elements. A ballet movement is followed by a prickly, brittle section, a spare movement called ‘Speculation’ – played at reduced dynamics – is followed by the melismas of ‘Interjections’ projected by clarinet, bassoon and flute and chorale-inclining brass. Later, a Polonaise is succeeded by a threnodic section and a ‘Scherzo 2’ features a lot of colour, not least from woodblocks, with a duet for violin and cello over the diaphanous orchestra taking the work in the direction of chamber music. The finale is a Bliss Ceremonial. The inclusion of the two excised movements is welcome but, for me, serves only to deepen the rather bizarre nature of the work as ‘Contrasts’ and the ‘Children’s March’ – the former spectral and the latter an almost parodically Old School classical movement – coming as they do early in the piece, establish an out-of-kilter expressive feeling that fails to dissipate.

Once again, the orchestra and Seal give their all in the Metamorphic Variations but it’s clear Chandos feels Miracle in the Gorbals is the primary focus as a photograph from the original 1944 Sadler’s Wells Ballet production is reproduced on the booklet cover and the font size for the ballet is larger than that for Metamorphic Variations, the longer work. That seems just, as the latter will always remain on the periphery of Bliss’ orchestral works and is much less explicable and engaging than the Meditations on a theme by John Blow, which also involves variation form but on a broader, richer, less bitty, and more symphonic basis. However, here is the complete Metamorphic Variations and an incisive, characterful Miracle in the Gorbals.  

Jonathan Woolf

Other review: John Quinn (October 2025)

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