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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
January 11, 2012
By any measure, Percy Aldridge Grainger was one of musical history's most remarkable figures. And, whereas one might say that all of us are masses of contradictions, Our Percy did nothing by halves.
Composer, inventor, virtuoso pianist, pioneering folksong collector and arranger - Grainger was all these. He was also a physical fitness fanatic long before that was popular (he would often run to concert venues, sometimes concluding by running up the aisle and jumping onto the stage before performing).
He was also, alas, firmly convinced of the superiority of the Nordic "Aryan" Races - hence his disdain for Italian musical terms and his insistence on (his own, idiosyncratic) English terminology: "middle fiddle" for the viola, "louden lots" for "molto crescendo" and the like. Yet this was the same man who, during his brief tenure at New York University in the early 1930s, was the first to present black musicians (Duke Ellington and his band) on stage in an American university, as part of a lecture, and who, when on one occasion he arrived at a venue in South Africa running alongside members of a Zulu tribal band he had befriended, could not understand why his new friends were not allowed inside the hall.
And, as for his posthumously notorious sexual preferences - well, if you don't already know, I'm not going to be the one.
Musically, Grainger is well-known for a mere handful of the vast array and variety of pieces he composed and arranged, sometimes many times over.
Three of those better-known works were, for me, the highlight of Wednesday's superb concert by the Galiano Ensemble and Yariv Aloni.
Mock Morris, (Room Music Tit-Bits No.1), is the only one of Grainger's most popular pieces which is entirely original ("no folk-music tune-stuffs at all are used herein") and he rather resented that fact that many listeners assumed it to be another of his folk settings.
Although the tempo Aloni adopted at first seemed somewhat on the steady side, as the music progressed it became clear that he knew precisely what he was doing: the tempo allowed for a perfect combination of precision and exuberance.
If anything, Molly on the Shore (British Folk-Music Settings No. 19), based on two Cork (Ireland) reel tunes: "Temple Hill" and "Molly on the Shore", was even better, with the players really digging in and producing a marvellously earthy sound.
The melody used in Grainger's "Irish Tune from County Derry" was collected by a Miss Jane Ross, of New Town, Limavady, Co. Derry (Ireland) and printed in The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (Dublin, 1855). Unfortunately, as editor George Petrie observed, "the name of the tune...was not ascertained by Miss Ross, who sent it to me with the simple remark that it was 'very old', in the correctness of which statement I have no hesitation in expressing my perfect concurrence."
Many people have written words to go with the melody, the most famous being "Danny Boy", written by one Frederick Weatherly - an Englishman, oh the irony! - in 1910. (He had actually written them for another melody and modified them to fit). This is perhaps unfortunate, as the association of the Londonderry Air with an almost glutinous sentimentality is a hard one to overcome.
But overcome it Aloni and his players did, despite taking the music at a tempo so slow that, in the hands of lesser players or a conductor with a less good sense of the long line, would fail to cohere.
In this instance, the luscious tones and firm hand on the tiller, not to mention Grainger's wonderful writing, combined to elevate the sentimental to the level of high art. (Before we get too carried away, Percy was quite content to let it sink back down again, as witness his arrangement for orchestra and "Solovox", an electronic instrument designed to imitate the sound of the human voice. In fact, as became clear when the only remaining example of the instrument was exhumed for a 2000 Prom performance: it sounded about as human as Sparky's Magic Piano.)
If I have expatiated at what seems like inordinate length about what amounted to little more than ten minutes of music, blame my enthusiasm for a composer whose real worth and stature have only begun to be acknowledged in the past couple of decades. It is rare enough to hear any Grainger live except for "Country Gardens", but to hear it played with such skill and perfect stylistic acumen is an almost-unimagined treat.
The evening opened with Edward Elgar's Great Malvern Suite. It is surely a measure of the work's rarity that a web search should have produced, among the first page of hits, five references to this very concert.
The work is an arrangement for strings by one Steve Jones (not, I am sure, the erstwhile guitarist with the Sex Pistols) of Elgar's Vesper Voluntaries, his first work for organ, composed in 1890, shortly after his marriage to Alice Roberts.
There are, as Jones points out in his preface to the score, many reasons to suppose that Elgar did not originally intend the work for organ (to be precise, "harmonium or American organ") at all. Certainly it makes a fine addition to the Elgar string orchestra repertoire.
Cast in nine short movements, the work may not be that of the mature composer, but there are certainly indications of what was to come: not just in the shape of the melodic lines, but in the tempo indications, using terms which, if not uniquely, are certainly characteristically Elgar: "piacevole", "pensivo".
From the opening bars, the ensemble's tone was rich, with a resonant and commendably firm bass line. The music itself, as one would have anticipated, was given a thoroughly idiomatic and sympathetic reading, propelled by Aloni's flowing stick technique.
Like that of Grainger, the popular image of Gustav Holst is a limited one: he is often seen as a one-work composer, whereas The Planets, while undoubtedly a masterpiece, is, in fact, scarcely characteristic of its author at all.
Written towards the end of his life - it was actually composed in hospital - the Brook Green Suite was intended for his students in the Junior Orchestra of the St. Paul's School for Girls in Hammersmith (Brook Green itself is a park-like area close to the school - it was also the location of Holst's wedding in 1901). And, in the event, its first performance in 1934 was the last concert Holst ever attended.
Holst wanted to give his students a work which was easy enough for them to play, yet not trivial musically. In which aim he succeeded brilliantly.
The quality of the musical material and thinking is what makes the music worthy of performance by professionals - as long as they don't overplay it. There was, naturally, no danger of that with these performers and the simplicity and innocence of the music was charming.
John Ireland was a respected teacher at the Royal College of Music, including Richard Arnell, Ernest Moeran, Alan Bush, Geoffrey Bush (no relation) and Benjamin Britten among his students, although it must be admitted that Britten did not particularly take to his teaching. He was one of a number of English composers of the first half of the twentieth century (he lived from 1879 to 1962) whose talents and skills somehow did not find a sufficiently individual style for more than a handful of works to have attained a firm foothold in the repertoire.
Which is a pity, as the closing work on the programme - an arrangement (by Geoffrey Bush) for strings of Ireland's A Downland Suite - amply demonstrated.
The music was originally scored for brass brand, but if Aloni had not mentioned it in his (commendably brief) spoken introduction I, for one, should never have guessed.
While none of the four movements possess themes which stick in the memory (at least not after a single hearing), the music is superbly crafted and never less than interesting, whether it was the vigorous triple-time opening movement, the occasionally Elgar-tinged slow movement, with its striking opening viola and cello unison, the minuet (more waltz to my ears) which put me in mind of the Viennese composer Joseph Marx, or the marvellously busy finale, whose unstoppable momentum was only briefly held back by a lovely slow episode before the close.
It was, in short, the kind of performance to make one want to hear more of the composer.
Another outstanding evening from the Galiano Ensemble, which I left with one question still unanswered: why should I have spent the interval with the scherzo of Schubert's "Great" C major symphony running around my head?
Answers on a postcard, please.
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