A Mixed Bag

The Oriel Music Trust provided a very useful service in providing recordings of opera, choral and vocal music taken from BBC Radio 3 (or The BBC Third Programme in its earlier manifestation) which were not available elsewhere. I bought a good number of these about ten years ago (proceeds were given to the Musicians Benevolent Fund) and very much enjoyed listening to some fascinating repertoire - Bliss's opera 'The Olympians' for example - and made sure I retained these 'pirate' recordings even when disposing of most of my CD collection. While browsing the few discs remaining looking for something for my son Hugo to play in his car I came across a mixed recital taken from various broadcasts of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The programme is as follows:

'The Window' - Sir Arthur Sullivan (Duncan Robertson/Wilfred Parry)

'Five Songs' - Joseph Holbrooke (Ian Caddy/Jennifer Coultas)

'Six Landscapes' - Joseph Holbrooke (Ian Caddy/Jennifer Coultas)

'In the Temple of a Bird's Wing' - Elizabeth Lutyens (Ian Caddy/Jennifer Coultas)

'Three Songs' - Joseph Holbrooke (Ian Caddy/Jennifer Coultas)

A very mixed bag; strange bedfellows - call this what you will, but listening to this varied recital gave considerable pleasure and provoked some interesting research.

Sullivan suggested to Tennyson that they collaborated with the artist John Everett Millais to produce a work that simultaneously celebrated the arts of music, poetry and painting, to provide an English song cycle to emulate those of Schubert. Tennyson produced eleven poems that Sullivan was delighted with but the Poet Laureate became increasingly concerned that his verses were too light-weight to be published, particularly with the Franco-Prussian war in progress, and he went as far as offering Sullivan £500.00 to abandon the project. Sullivan would not be dissuaded however and the cycle was eventually published in 1871. By then Millais, probably fed up with waiting for artistic scruples to be allayed, had sold most of the drawings he had produced for the project, so that only one was eventually printed.

The cycle has attractive moments although the music is never truly distinguished. Duncan Robertson, a well respected Scottish tenor from the 1960s and 1970s (he recorded 'Messiah' on the Saga label) whom I remember singing Dowland in the Holywell Music Room Oxford in around 1971, has a pleasantly lyrical voice (rather stretched at the top) but his diction is rather muddy and Ben Johnson's commercial recording on Chandos (accompanied by David Owen-Norris) is to be preferred.

Before my latest research, Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1958) was a name I'd heard of, but other than that was an unknown quantity. I am indebted to Rob Barnett for the following:

Joseph Holbrooke belongs to the generation of composers at the core of the twentieth century British musical renaissance. He died in 1958, the same year as Vaughan Williams, and in almost total obscurity. His neglect began after the Great War and the gradient of descent increased dramatically from 1925 onwards. However he had a heyday and one with considerable celebrity.

Joseph (more often known to his circle as 'Joe') Charles Holbrooke was born in Croydon, North London, on 5 July 1878. It seems that the place of birth was an accident of the touring music-hall life of his father and family.

His earliest grounding in music was given by his father (also called Joseph), a practical though brutal musician. The identical name, in later years, led to confusion when both began teaching in the same London suburb. Holbrooke adopted the German spelling of the name 'Josef' and this is reflected intermittently in his later works, letters and articles.

His father introduced the teenage Joe to playing and making arrangements for leading music hall artistes. He came into contact with many of the leading music hall figures of the day and wrote countless arrangements for them.

A formal musical education was sought and, after a spell as a chorister at St Anne's Church, Soho, he went to the Royal Academy of Music. There he was a pupil of Frederick Corder for composition and of Frederick Westlake for piano. While at the Academy he won various prizes. He left the Academy in 1896.

I

n June 1896 he made his solo piano debut at St James' Hall and later the same year joined various music troupes touring the United Kingdom. He was an adaptable 'jack of all trades': pianist and music director of fit-up 'orchestras' with as few as three players. One of these tours took him to Scotland in Arthur Lloyd's entertainment: 'Two Hours of Fun.' This ended disastrously when the tour manager made off with the takings leaving Holbrooke stranded. Making his way South he settled in Haringey as music teacher and composer.

Unlike many of the great names of the era, Holbrooke had no inherited wealth. He was often hungry and lived in poor conditions particularly during these early days. Later some success brought commissions, modest affluence and finally a millionaire patron who continued to support Holbrooke until the mid 1940s.

During the period 1897-1899 solo piano and violin and piano genre pieces flowed from his pen. The dedications are instructive. They were written for the leading soloists of the day and also for his pupils: the sons and daughters of the aristocracy and for the rising middle and upper classes.

He wrote music prolifically and sent various scores to a range of conductors of the day. One of these, his orchestral tone poem The Raven, went to August Manns. Manns' orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace were the scene of a wide variety of adventurous new and exotic repertoire. He accepted the young Joe's tone poem and put the destitute 'rough diamond' composer up at his house while preparing for the premiere.

Before the Crystal Palace 'breakthrough', an even more important event took place. Holbrooke was aware that at the healthy seaside to the South and West of London the conductor Dan Godfrey was building up a reputation as a pioneer of new music. In Bournemouth the resort's Municipal Orchestra had evolved from a brass band to a fully fledged ensemble well able to tackle the big orchestral scores of the day.

On 7 December during the last year of the old century, Holbrooke conducted the Bournemouth Orchestra in his Suite for Strings Op. 40 (a precursor of his Hommage Suite for full orchestra in pastiche recollection of various composers including Tchaikovsky). This event was more important than the Crystal Palace premiere which was an isolated peak and seems to have marked the last time Manns touched a Holbrooke score. In the case of Bournemouth Holbrooke's works continued to feature in concerts there well into the 1930s and beyond. The music featured included several performances of his Grasshopper Violin Concerto and a rare 1920s performance of the Saxophone Concerto. The Saxophone Concerto is a work in which, in its original version, used a different register of saxophone in each movement. Dan championed various of Holbrooke's orchestral works in one of his last broadcasts with the BBC house orchestra during the 1930s.

In 1900 Holbrooke was appointed conductor of the Woodhall Spa Orchestra. On 3 March Manns conducted The Raven to considerable acclaim. His lifelong friend who was just finishing his reign as music director of the New Brighton Orchestra gave the premiere of Holbrooke's Skeleton in Armour in the Wirral on 19 August. Bantock secured for Joe what proved to be a short-lived appointment as a tutor at the Midland Institute. The year ended with Holbrooke's most popular work the, Variations on Three Blind Mice, being given at the Proms under Sir Henry Wood. Later it was recorded by Wood in a much cut version on 78 disc. This recording of a much disfigured score does scant justice to the variations.

Holbrooke, in common with many Corder pupils at the Academy, was an enthusiast of the music of Tchaikovsky. Holbrooke, the virtuoso pianist, appeared in August 1899 as soloist in the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto with Bantock conducting the Liverpool Orchestra repeating the work in Bournemouth in 1900. The Skeleton in Armour (on a poem by Longfellow), now revised, was included in a concert conducted by Bantock in Antwerp in 1900 - his first overseas performance though as the years passed others were to follow in Paris, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Budapest, Monte Carlo, Munich, Berlin, Vienna and Salzburg.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings were an enduring obsession for Holbrooke. He wrote more than 35 works based on the various Poe poems and tales.

Holbrooke was always an energetic publicist for his own works and he wrote voluminously in the form of articles and letters for the specialist musical press and the newspapers.

He was also active in promoting the work of other British composers. His chamber music concert series which ran from 1899 to 1936 presented works by many British composers of the day including the earliest ever performance in the UK of some works by Delius. As late as 1946 one of his De Walden-supported LSO concerts featured a work by George Lloyd.

Holbrooke remained something of an outsider. He was a working class man from a common background and the class system was still strong in Britain at that time. He also had a tough approach to criticism and he upset many people (both performers and critics) with his demands for repeat performances and informed comment.

Although not (with one minor exception) a Three Choirs man he did have a few choral festival successes at Birmingham (The Bells for chorus and mammoth orchestra) and Leeds (Queen Mab for chorus and a more modest orchestra).

These successes brought him more public attention and he caught the eye of the Irish poet Herbert Trench who wanted a composer to set his philosophical poem Apollo and the Seaman. This produced a large-scale symphonic work with a brief last choral (male voices) movement. This is remembered in derisory terms because at the poet's insistence it was used as an early multi-media experiment with the orchestra playing in darkness and slides projected on a great screen at London's Queen's Hall displaying the text and suitable pictures. The music and slides drifted out of synch and much laughter followed. There was a second performance, at the same venue, where things went more happily. The second performance was also the last complete one. The tragic march from Apollo however was played a number of times as a homage to Captain Robert Falconer Scott to mark his death during the ill-fated Polar Expedition in 1912. Holbrooke and Scott had been close friends and the composer had been a guest aboard Scott's command, a Royal Navy battle cruiser.

The Apollo Symphony had important repercussions in Holbrooke's life. He was approached by Lord Howard de Walden (T.E. Scott-Ellis) with a commission to set his poetic drama 'Dylan, Son of the Wave'. Initially this was to be a choral symphony but it soon evolved into a music-drama. Together Holbrooke and de Walden were the authors of what was to become an operatic trilogy based on Welsh folklore. This had the collective title The Cauldron of Annwn. It consisted of the music-dramas The Children of Don, Dylan and Bronwen. The setting was legendary Wales. In Fairest Isle Year (1995) BBC Radio 3 finally broadcast substantial extracts from Bronwen. These revealed a work of dark imagining and dramatic intensity. The cycle of three music-dramas was the source of many overtures, concert songs, tone poems and other free-standing concert pieces often for full orchestra but occasionally for solo piano, organ and concert song.

The Piano Concerto Song of Gwyn-ap-Nudd (his first numbered piano concerto) was first performed in 1907 by Harold Bauer at the Queen's Hall. This is another De Walden work with a Cymric plot. The concerto has been recorded several times but is not a strong piece.

De Walden's generosity resulted in a degree of financial security, a car and holidays in the South of France. In the first flush of their early days they went together on holidays. Famously Holbrooke was a guest during De Walden's honeymoon cruise of the Mediterranean in the late 1900s. Later the two went to South America and Africa together. When de Walden died in 1946 Holbrooke found himself largely forgotten, resentful and now without a financial benefactor.

Holbrooke's music has many links with Wales. The Cauldron music-dramas are central to this but we should not forget the concert waltz Talsarnau and the four Cambrian Ballades all for solo piano. These works are souvenirs of Holbrooke's family holidays in the Harlech area. Harlech in those days was a major centre of the arts and was visited by Cyril Scott, Granville Bantock and Eugene Goossens among many others. The Holbrookes took holidays in this area from 1914-20 and musical mementoes of these happy vacations are to be found in many works of these and later years. While Welsh culture and Welsh performances were important to Holbrooke he did not take things as far as de Walden who learnt the Welsh language and who opened his estates and castle to provide a setting for various Welsh cultural events of all types.

Holbrooke had a number of pupils. These included the pianist, Lydia Stace who later recorded the First Piano Concerto for Paxton. The conductor, Anthony Bernard was also a Holbrooke student. Outside the limited sphere of his pupils Holbrooke's friends were many and various. From musical spheres there were characters such as Havergal Brian, Percy Grainger (with whom he corresponded extensively until Holbrooke's death in 1958), Bantock and Godfrey.

He was also at home in the spheres of art and sculpture. He was a friend of Jacob Epstein and from the 1920s there is a famous bronze bust of the composer by Epstein. Various painters were financially supported by De Walden and Holbrooke came into contact with them both at Harlech and at the de Walden family Castle (Chirk Castle) close to the Welsh/English borderland. Holbrooke also enjoyed the company of literary figures such as the novelist George Moore.

As was the case with a number of other composers, particularly his great and life-long friend Granville Bantock, Holbrooke suffered neglect and unfashionability from 1918 onwards. This happened despite his involvement in writing music for dance band and for the jazz age. The resort and provinces orchestras played his music but London looked the other way unless he or de Walden paid for the performances. Dan Godfrey and Bournemouth remained staunch friends despite personal squabbles. Ernest Goss at Torquay supported Holbrooke with concerts featuring his Fourth Symphony (an entry in the 1927 Schubert Competition, judged by a committee chaired by Glazounov, which was, according to the World Encyclopaedia of Recorded Music, privately recorded on 78 during the 1940s - does anyone have these 78s?) and the First Piano Concerto.

Like Beethoven, Holbrooke was afflicted with deafness. This set in relatively early from 1920 onwards. Visitors to the family home often had to contend with Holbrooke struggling with a massive old-fashioned hearing aid. Composition and re-composition continued. He revised earlier works and quarried discarded works for thematic material. There are also a few cases of the same work emerging under a different title. He occupied himself during the late 1930s and through into the 1940s with an autobiography.

So now, despite being a leading figure in English music up until WW2, Holbrooke is now pretty much forgotten. Does he deserve this neglect? Professor Stephen Banfield (Sensibility and English Song) is not a huge fan: 'With Joseph Holbrooke [and Rutland Boughton] we reach the lunatic fringe. Such wayward and self-deceiving personalities warrant little place in this study, and neither made a positive contribution to English song.'

The 'Five Songs', broadcast in 1978 by Ian Caddy and Jennifer Coultas, find Holbrooke in what the BBC announcer coyly describes as 'Bacchanalian mode'. There was a vogue for what might be described as 'tweedy drinking songs' before and after WW1, which William Gaunt (quoted by Banfield), attributes to a reaction against the aestheticism exemplified by

Oscar Wilde: 'Poets, no longer velvet-collared, absinthe sipping, were now a hearty and virile race, tweed-clad, pipe-smoking, beer-drinking, Sussex-down tramping.' Composers followed suit and satisfied a growing demand for straight-forward rumbustuousness at masonic 'smoking concerts' and the like. Holbrooke's contributions to the genre are workmanlike but not on the level of, say, Peter Warlock. Having said this, Holbrooke's jaunty setting of A.P. Herbert's 'Tinker Tailor' is (unfortunately) an ear-worm difficult to eradicate. Less memorable (fortunately) are his settings of two poems by G.K. Chesterton 'The Saracen's Head' and 'The Folks That Live in LIverpool'. The more I learn about Chesterton's unsavoury political views the more I find this sort of premeditated bluffness hard to take. Holbrooke does nothing to persuade me to presevere. He is even less successful when attempting something more serious. His, doubtlessly heartfelt, settings are invariably meandering and unmemorable. Despite the best efforts of Caddy and his pianist (and the enterprising English tenor James Geer in a recital of Holbrooke and Holst) I have not been persuaded that any of Holbrooke's songs I have heard merit reappraisal.

With Elizabeth Lutyens (1906 - 1983) we enter very different territory. One of the many chips on Holbrooke's shoulder was his humble family background, Lutyens' family on the other hand was very much blue of blood. I am, once again, indebted to Wikipedia:

Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 1906 – 14 April 1983)

Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a member of the aristocratic Bulwer-Lytton family, and the prominent English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Elisabeth was the elder sister of the writer Mary Lutyens and aunt of the 4th Viscount Ridley and the politician Nicholas Ridley.

Lutyens was involved in the Theosophical Movement. From 1911 the young Jiddu Krishnamurti was living in the Lutyens' London house as a friend of Elisabeth and her sisters. At the age of nine she began to aspire to be a composer. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education in Paris at the École Normale de Musique, which had been established a few years previously, living with the young theosophical composer Marcelle de Manziarly, who had been trained by Nadia Boulanger. During her months in Paris Lutyens showed the  first signs of depression that later led to several mental breakdowns.

She accompanied her mother to India in 1923. On her return to Europe she studied with John Foulds and subsequently continued her musical education from 1926 to 1930 at the Royal College of Music in London as a pupil of Harold Darke.

In 1933, Lutyens married baritone Ian Glennie; they had twin daughters, Rose and Tess, and a son, Sebastian. The marriage was not happy, however, and in 1938 she left Glennie. They divorced in 1940.

She then became the partner of Edward Clark, a conductor and former BBC producer who had studied with Schoenberg. Clark and Lutyens had a son, Conrad, in 1941 and married on 9 May 1942. She composed in complete isolation, a process greatly impeded by the drinking and partying at the Clark flat, and the responsibilities of motherhood.

In 1946, pressured by Edward Clark and her mother, she decided to abort her fifth child. Two years later, she had a mental and physical breakdown that forced her to spend several months in a mental health institution. It was not until 1951 that she managed to regain control of her alcohol addiction, having endured days of extreme withdrawal.

Lutyens' mainstream compositions are uncompromisingly contemporary; her musical language is far less accessible than Britten's, for example, but she was also a successful film composer, mainly for 'Hammer Horror' films, work she needed to undertake to keep the family finances afloat, as Edward Clark was effectively unemployed from 1936 until his death in 1962.

Lutyens' cycle 'In the Temple of a Bird's Wing', settings of poems by Teresa Tanner, by far the most demanding work, for listener and performers, in this varied recital under discussion, gives a very individual view of nature in a variety of moods. The poetry is generally obscure and undistinguished, impressionistic in tone. The first lines of the opening song are:

'In the temple of a bird's wing/Would I build a loving throat/Applauding the eyes of spring/And envying wood secrets'

The vocal line and piano accompaniment both rely on short breathed,filagrees of sound to suggest the quiet beauty of the 'wood secrets'. This tranquil mood is maintained in the second song 'Drowning Heaven Rests Her Lullaby in Earth' where Nature is personified as a benign presence:

'She steps forward and surveys her loves/And shines blue on them'

The mood darkens in the third song 'It Seems the Minutes Creep'. The vocal line becomes more assertive and falling melodic figures mirror the autumnal imagery: 'each lung of tree grows/A spiralled tree-top bare'.

The final macabre lines draw some fine word painting from Lutyens:

'Dead leaves that dung the forest air

And moulding shadows spread

When roses are but pin-cushions,

All dead.'

'All dead' is twice repeated on a ghostly ascending minor 9th; this is very finely executed by Caddy and Coultas.

The fourth song 'The Moon, Seen in the Night' continues the gothic lexis, with the occasional echo of Dylan Thomas:

'The moon, seen in the night

Seen in a bed of water

Scythes high at its pyramid top

(Moon)

A chilly house where cormorants

And pooling mackerel on debt-mowed tides,

Gaze deep under the sea'

Lutyens conjures a beautiful nocturne here, with a tonal palette of icy pale blues and greens, taking the baritone very gently and softly into the upper vocal reaches. As elsewhere in this cycle, Caddy and Coultas are very sympathetic advocates.

The fifth song, 'These Birds Were Skeletons' is the most extrovert of the set. The vocal line is fervid in describing the seabirds frenetic energy:

'The untidy sands, where

They wet their feet in open

Beds behind the sea,

Where they wrap their

Wings in tar,

And silt the scales

Of their feet in rapturous panic.'

The final song, 'How Can I Ask Differently the Current of the Night?' is unaccompanied, and the focus is now on the creative artist in nature rather than just the natural world as something self-contained and complete. How is it possible to create 'differently'? To say something individual? Why should we strive when the universe is unchanging? There are questions but no answers.

'Why all the stars for ever and ever roll over

With eyes like red-pressed fishes,

Why the arid arch of air

That charges the parade of months,

Ferries the memory and never narrows or varies?'

The questioning voice is restless and querulous but fades away to nothing without any resolution.

Lutyens' work does not give up its secrets readily but the exploration is well worth-while.