Recording British Music: A personal history of fifty years researching and recording neglected repertoire
By Lewis Foreman
Published 2024
xxxi, 426 pages. Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-9996796-2-0
Vocalion Books
The cause of British Music has been immeasurably aided by the industry, commitment and hands-on diligence of Lewis Foreman – author, researcher, reconstructor and a one-man protagonist for the music he has come to love. He was a full-time librarian, too, at the Department of Trade and Industry which meant that his many activities had to be fitted around his day job. This is his personal history of his five decades of research and the consequent recordings that derived from that research, and during this long and absorbing text the reader is introduced to the many collaborators, executant musicians and record labels that have propagated the music he has suggested or brought to them. It is a dizzying story of achievement, frequently against the odds of indifference, destruction – wanton or inadvertent – and commercial realities. Where lesser men might have faltered, the protean Foreman has been indefatigable.
Record collecting for him began in the late 1950s, first on 78s, later on LPs. His initial interest was in new music generally and it was only later that he focused on British music. He owes debts, as do we all, to the Proms, the BBC’s Third Programme and other engines of the musical good. A performance of an obscure concerto, say, would send the nascent musical detective scurrying for a recording. If no commercial recording existed, he would slowly come to realise that there was a worldwide, underground community for whom off-air broadcasts tapes offered an ex-officio catalogue to be pursued and heard. As a young librarian, before his move to the Department of Trade and Industry, he naturally wanted to develop his collection of scores. It’s remarkable – possibly distressing – to realise the ease with which he could buy rare, important and still in-print scores or could consult back issues of periodicals such as, say, The Musical Times, a state of affairs that existed until the destruction of printed scores that had been in-print for decades but were thrown out wholescale. In my own small backwater, and much more recently, I had to oversee the destruction of half my library service’s scores, developed over decades, only managing to save half by shunting them off-site.
Foreman may call himself a ‘freelance hobbyist’, but he is an active channel between a work and the performers and their recording. He has also written orchestral parts – for Bax’s Enchanted Summer for example – that enable the work to be heard. Bax, of course, is the composer one most associates with Foreman and his astonishingly comprehensive biography of the composer has reached its third edition. His dealings with Harriet Cohen and Mary Gleaves, whose stories are important, even vital, show how necessary it has been to search out, interview and record their testimonies, however quixotic, in Cohen’s case. Trunks of material, such as letters, like full orchestral scores, are fragile and ephemeral. We’ve all heard horror stories of scores and recordings ending up in skips, thence to be ferried to the afterlife of landfill.
No matter how healthy the state of the recording of British music might be (or was, as the industry transitions and fractures in the face of downloads and streaming) the importance of semi-professional forces can never be overlooked. They promoted the music, sometimes arcane music, but often using demo tapes to convince independent producers of the value of that music and the financial advantages that might accrue if it was presented professionally. Leslie Head is a particular figure in this story, a gifted conductor who never quite made it but whose Bax demo tapes, for example, were listened to by Vernon Handley in his own preparation for recordings. The Kensington Symphony Orchestra might not ring many bells now but its significance in the propagation of British music was crucial. In addition to the various formal appendices, to which I’ll refer later, Foreman studs his text with tables. If you want to test the commitment of the Kensington Symphony and Chorus turn to pages 16 and 17 for a thirty-year dedication that includes such well-known names as Baines, Bantock, Bax, Bliss, Boughton, Bridge and Bush – that’s just composers beginning with ‘B’ – in then-unfamiliar works. Foreman is equally generous and scrupulous in tabulating the achievements of Robert Tucker and the Broadheath Singers and Windsor Sinfonia (between 1971 and 2003), as well as the Lambeth Orchestra and Christopher Fifield. Even the less well-remembered, but no less dedicated Joe Vandernoot and the Fulham Orchestra, are included handsomely.
There is a chapter of ‘Session Reports’ where one gets a sense of the interaction between the conductor and his orchestra, between the producer and performer, and where Foreman’s presence, and private detective-like ability to take down verbatim comments adds colour and meaning. I especially liked the reproduced exchanges between producer Mike Ponder and Ronald Corp; detailed, specific musicians’ talk, nothing airy-fairy. I was especially keen to read of the sessions he attended that finally managed to record Harry Waldo Warner’s Suite in D minor, along with the orchestration of Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata, Richard Walthew’s A Mosaic in Ten Pieces and Benjamin Dale’s Romance for viola. The heroine of this session, and many others, was Sarah-Jane Bradley. David Owen Norris is another old friend whose name appears throughout the book, indefatigably and amiably trying out music. Margaret Fingerhut is another whose contribution is rightly saluted.
Foreman devotes nearly 180 pages to a sequence of chapters on named composers, beginning with Richard Arnell, ending with Vaughan Williams but including a miscellaneous collection at the end from Corp and Cecilia McDowall to Alun Hoddinott and Michael Hurd. Some offer a compressed biography and overview of existing recordings, as the chapter on Arnell does, whilst the shorter chapter on Malcolm Arnold offers a more focused look at a composer who is now represented by a number of biographical studies. You skim these pages at your peril. If, for example, you wanted to familiarise yourself with the Paxton 78s of Granville Bantock, they are all there in the chapter on the composer. Gratifyingly, a few have been reissued by Dutton but there is much yet to see the light of reissue. The process of recording Bantock, whether by Dutton Epoch or Chandos, is well described by a real insider and artists are touched upon here too, as are the many complimentary reviews these discs received. Foreman is not uncritical; he is unconvinced by some of Bantock’s songs, for instance.
One would expect the Bax chapter to dwarf the other composers but in point of fact it doesn’t, Foreman knowing better than to skew his text. After all, he has written the definitive biography and doesn’t need to. Nevertheless, it was interesting to read that Ken Russell financed Myer Fredman’s recordings with the London Philharmonic of Bax’s Symphonies 1 and 2 for a projected release on his own label, which Foreman suspects was a tax dodge – and that he designed the LP packaging, which was in fact never used when the recordings were later issued by Lyrita (his projected artwork for No. 2 featured a typically Russelian naked woman on a white horse). If you want to find out who tried to ensure his Bax symphony sessions coincided with a late round of golf, courtesy of a short aeroplane trip back to Dublin, you can find the answer in this chapter. It was Bryden Thomson. Also valuable for Baxians is the background to the Handley symphonic cycle and how it came to be made, which involves the BBC Music Magazine cover CD, Chandos, and the commitment of the BBC Philharmonic. It helped that Handley was by then at the peak of his prowess as a Baxian.
The chapter on Havergal Brian features a table of BBC performances of Brian’s music produced by Robert Simpson, starting with Boult in 1954 (No.8) and ending with Mackerras in No.2 in 1979, as well as those pseudonymous Aries LPs that one used to see all over the place with their ever more whimsical attributions; the Dresden Symphony Orchestra under Ernest Weir and the Lisbon Conservatory Orchestra under Peter Michaels were just two of the funnier ones (Mackerras and Stanley Pope, in fact, respectively). However, the ‘Wales Symphony Orchestra’ and ‘Colin Wilson’ in Symphonies 18, 19 and 22 – covering a portmanteau of conductors, Bryan Fairfax, John Canarina and Myer Fredman – tickled the real Colin Wilson, the author and serious music lover, who had his own copy of the disc prominently on display. Interesting, too, to eavesdrop on Leopold Stokowski’s view of Symphony No. 28, which he performed in 1973: ‘What terrible music.’
There was less to do with Delius but some important projects remained. In Delius, Foreman had an ally in Robert Threlfall, a student of Solomon, in excavating in particular early Delius works that Eric Fenby had wanted to keep unperformed. There was also the Violin Concerto, played from Albert Sammons’ own marked copy in his own edition. In an interview Foreman had with George Lloyd, a Sammons student – Lloyd has his own chapter here – Lloyd remembered how Sammons drew himself up for the opening to really ‘go at it’, something that Walter Legge had stopped at the recording session by pushing Sammons further into the orchestra and away from the microphone. If only George Lloyd could have heard the live recording that exists, when Sammons does precisely what Lloyd recalled. In fact, as we learn from the chapter on him, the indefatigably energetic George Lloyd wanted Foreman to write his biography
Talking of that live recording brings us to the man who made the recording, Kenneth Leech, who made his own off-air discs from 1936 to 1954. Leech’s Elgar recordings, many of which have been released by the Elgar Society, are listed and one page of Leech’s own handwritten ledger is reproduced. Foreman’s encyclopaedic knowledge of recordings allows him a digression on Joe Batten’s 1924 extended extracts from The Dream of Gerontius which were reissued by Dutton, with booklet notes by Foreman himself. On the subject of transferring older recordings Foreman clearly has a strong preference for Dutton’s sound reduction, noting of the late Roger Beardsley’s work on the Elgar-Leech discs that ‘I can imagine other engineers might have reduced even further the level of surface on the noisier items’ which is fair enough and expressed in a very gentlemanly fashion. (For what it’s worth, I don’t much like Dutton’s noise reduction, much preferring the work of Mark Obert-Thorn, Andrew Hallifax and Ward Marston.)
There are many interesting things in the Vaughan Williams chapter, but the most rewarding is surely the detail about Martin Yates’ transcription of the complete surviving manuscript of Scott of the Antarctic and the fact that the recording of the orchestrated version of the Songs of Travel, sung by Roderick Williams, was ‘one of the most wonderful musical experiences it has been my pleasure to witness’. Some commendation given the huge number of sessions he has attended.
Thereafter Foreman devotes chapters to some of the labels with which he has worked; Lyrita, Chandos, Hyperion, Continuum (not to be overlooked), ClassicO and Dutton Epoch. In fewer than a dozen pages he presents a mini company history of Lyrita, still the most exciting of the labels of its time in the propagation of British music, and a label that – notwithstanding some earlier 78s and compilation LPs – put composers on the map; think of Finzi for instance, or Moeran, Bridge, and Ireland. It’s good to see Boult and Richard Itter pictured together and to learn something of the reserved Itter’s life. In the chapter on Chandos we learn of their house conductors, the Big Projects – majorly Cyril Scott, George Dyson and Bantock, a composer who I’m afraid, by and large, has defeated me. Still, I’m glad he has been recorded so widely and well. Hyperion too continued on the Bantock trail, though Foreman especially prizes Arthur Bliss’s songs which they recorded. He is always quick to praise the many artists who have been involved with these projects, a deft and thoughtful touch.
I was surprised and pleased to read that it was Foreman who suggested to Murray Khouri, who owned Continuum, that his label should reissue Louis Krasner’s live recording, with Webern conducting, of Berg’s Violin Concerto. It’s one of the few references to non-British repertoire and a reminder that Foreman’s is a wide-ranging musical mind with an appreciation beyond the normal horizons. There’s valuable information on ClassicO as well, with a table of its 16-CD ‘British Symphonic Collection’ – and we learn that it took five hours, for example, to record Frederic Austin’s (28-minute) Symphony. Not just a quick run-through recording, then.
Foreman writes judiciously and is the opposite of a pompous stylist. His prose is to the point, but though he has much to be proud of, he never crows about his achievements. He’s not averse to the occasional joke, one of the best concerning a consideration of the violist-composer-conductor Anthony Collins (he of the Sibelius cycle) whose piece for viola and orchestra, Romney Marsh, Foreman calls ‘a sort of boggy Lark Ascending’. By the way, it seems as if we’ll never know, as Romney Marsh appears lost. Certain conductors’ names recur throughout the text, Vernon Handley most obviously. Handley was considered unreliable by orchestral managements as he seems to have cancelled very late on a number of occasions in his career. The Dutton chapter includes a mini-biography of the label’s founder, Mike Dutton, the details of whose life are diverting and instructive, to say the least, including encounters with John Betjeman, Bruce Forsyth and working on Lloyd Webber shows.
Chapter 23 is called ‘Some Notable Performances Recorded Live’ to which a subtitle has been added; ‘(usually off-air) and issued much later’. This is a grab-bag of things; VW conducting Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Bantock’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, Bliss’ The Olympians, The Beatitudes and Tobias and the Angel and others. These allow Foreman to conduct portraits of the music though the performances at which he was present, such as the Bantock and Brian’s Gothic Symphony, are that much more immediate and revealing. I appreciate the chapter but think it would best have been incorporated into the main body of the text, and much excised.
The practical research and groundwork for previously unrecorded works has drawn on Foreman’s skills as it has on others and Foreman pays handsome tribute to editors and musicologists in the field – men such as Rodney Newton, Graham Parlett, Christopher Palmer, Anthony Payne, Martin Yates and Jeremy Dibble – and their tenacious work on behalf of unfinished and incomplete scores. There is a table of orchestral scores and transcriptions produced by Parlett of the music of Bax and Ireland (both substantial), Bowen, Dorothy Carwithen and Hubert Clifford. Similarly, there are tables of some of each man’s editions and reconstructions. Each contains major contributions to British music.
There are comprehensive details of the 236 plates. The earliest grouping is black and white, many featuring Boult conducting or discussing scores with colleagues. There’s an especially fine action shot of the young Vernon Handley conducting – he sports a kind of quiff and period neckwear – at Guildford in the late 1960s swivelling to look at Foreman’s lens. Some of the composer portraits are familiar – the decorous sequence of Edwardian women composers in particular – but many others are unique to Foreman’s inquisitive eye and camera expertise. Among them are the second section, which include striking colour photographs of Richard Itter’s recording room, orchestral and choral studio sessions, composers, singers, instrumentalists, conductors, informal shots of recording engineers and they achieve an informality and a sense of relaxation, or post-recording elation/exhaustion rarely seen. The third selection of colour plates is from sessions from 2008 onwards and one can see contemporary exponents in action, in relaxed mode – not stiffly formal. Incidentally, Sarah-Jane Bradley seems to favour a ‘lucky’ red top and seems to be wearing it in sessions from 2008 to 2011.
There are also some reasonably well reproduced black and white photographs of record labels. The London Transcriptions Service as well as the BBC’s own labels provide important material and the labels here are those of the last movement of Hubert Clifford Symphony, conducted by Boult in 1944 (I think it says 1944) and Julius Harrison’s lovely Bredon Hill rhapsody, played by Laurence Turner with the BBC Northern Orchestra conducted by Harrison himself in (definitely) December 1944. There’s also the handwritten label of a Holbrooke song recorded by Star Sound Studios. Collectors will be familiar with these labels and the treasures they contain.
There are substantial appendices. The first is a survey called ‘Recording History: The Early Years (Acoustic 78s)’. This is a handy checklist of some highlights with catalogue numbers – or CD details if they happen to have been transferred to silver disc – though it makes no pretence to be complete. That would have involved a monograph of its own. The second appendix is devoted to discs from 78s to stereo and CD which takes a necessarily compressed look at the subject. It does include a list of the recordings of the English Music Society’s two volumes of 78s recorded between 1935 and 1938 – Purcell in volume 1, Bax in volume 2, though a small correction is required in the ‘Golden’ Sonata of Purcell, on which William Primrose played the violin and not the viola, as indicated here. The British Council-sponsored recordings are also tabulated, handily, as are the Welsh Recorded Music Society, often overlooked, and issued on Decca 78s. Appendix 3 concerns programme notes, about which there can surely be no one better than Foreman, as well as issues relating to cover art (remember Ken Russell’s naked woman?) and photography. A final appendix is devoted to the various Trusts and Societies that exist for British composers
There are two references to Musicweb International in the finely constructed index compiled by Stephen Gilbert, though there should, in fact, be three. All relate to Rob Barnett’s reviews and the missing one is on page 47.
I noticed a very small number of typos and rogue apostrophes (Jacobs’s for Jacob’s, Harriot for Harriet, Fould’s for Foulds’, a missing diacritic in Martinů’s name) but otherwise this is a handsome production in every way.
There are a few times when some elements of the book resemble an omnium gatherum, as Foreman revisits his own booklet notes in some detail. Sometimes recordings are mentioned in two places in the text; I’m thinking, for example, of references to Susan Gritton singing a song composed by her grandfather, Eric Gritton, best known as a Decca pianist – this crops up on page 169 and again on page 296. Redundancies such as this, though, are rare.
What this book illustrates is that dedication, self-improvement through studying music and learning to write it, and advocacy for the music one loves can lead to a remarkable expansion of the commercial discography, augmented by seriously well-researched booklet notes. Foreman has done much more besides, as a look at his many books, theses and articles, reproduced at the back of this book, amply demonstrates. Modest as he remains, he combines pragmatism, curiosity and scholarship. Anyone who enjoys British music and notably its neglected repertoire will owe him an immense debt, whether they know it or not, and the landscape of British music on disc would have been far bleaker and unexplored without him. That’s not a bad legacy for a librarian-hobbyist.
Jonathan Woolf
Availability: Dutton Vocalion
