Search - John Shirley-Quirk, David Bedford, Elisabeth Lutyens :: Elisabeth Lutyens: Quincunx; And Suddenly It's Evening; David Bedford: Music for Albion Moonlight

The Best Of The Sixties and Seventies in Britain.

James S. Eisenberg | 03/10/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Elisabeth Lutyens, perhaps the first composer in Great Britain to use twelve-tone and serial techniques, initially suffered considerable neglect because of her musical radicalism. She had little in common with figures like the more accessible Britten and Tippett. Initially rarely commissioned, she kept afloat financially by composing for films, stage and television. Film audiences accepted her wild dissonances more readily than concert audiences.

By the mid 1960s, time and taste had caught up with her, and suddenly she was an admired figure.

QUINCUNX (1960) is a large orchestral piece with very brief vocal solos for soprano and baritone. (The superb Josephine Nendick and John Shirley-Quirk.) The vocal bits are so short that the work could not be described as a cantata. The vocal sections are melismatic and neo-bel canto and contrast boldly with the dense and sometimes violent orchestral writing. It is really quite an arresting piece. AND SUDDENLY ITS EVENING (1966) for tenor and three separate groups of instruments is much more lyrical. On texts of Salvatore Quasimodo, it is gently expressive and paints a haunting picture of a world at war. Tenor Herbert Handt performs the remarkable feat of singing the difficult vocal lines with aplomb AND conducting all three of the work's chamber ensembles !

David Bedford's MUSIC FOR ALBION MOONLIGHT, a quasi-melodramatic song cycle on poems by Kenneth Patchen, was written under the influence of the Polish "white noise" school. The sometimes sung, sometimes declaimed vocal lines contrast boldly with the space/time notation and the frequent glissando effects. At twenty-nine minutes, the work is a bit too long. It does have the odd boring moment, but also has much that is fascinating. Jane Manning is the wonderful vocal soloist and David Atherton the admirable conductor.

The sound recordings, from Argo LPs are nicely cleaned up, and the Lyrita label is to be praised for giving us these long unavailable works.

I would like to add a plea for an enterprising opera company to stage the world premiere of Lutyens' huge opera THE NUMBERED. It is probably "the" great unperformed masterpiece of music of the 1960s !"