Rule, Britannia!

So, I'm on a British music kick lately. I just finished reviewing the excellent 2-CD re-issue of British Cello Concertos, with Raphael Wallfisch, and I've lined up a couple of other discs from the excellent Chandos label. So I'm sitting here with a glass of stout (Seaport Vanilla Stout from the excellent local Lighthouse Brewing Company) and imagining myself at our local pub, which happens to be in Hammersmith, 6,500 kilometres away.

The Dove from the river jetty. Public Domain. Photo: Fin Fahey

The Dove is a historic pub on the Thames, close to Hammersmith Bridge. You can sit on the deck and look out on the river just as James Thompson did when he wrote the words to the 1740 song Rule, Britannia!, or so says Wikipedia. All he needed next was Thomas Arne to write the tune, and one of the great British songs was born. That song shows up in more than one of the Overtures on this disc, the second volume in a series of some of the best British light music you could hope to hear (volume 2 will be released later this month). Alexander Campbell Mackenzie's Britannia Overture is based on the tune, but even better is the delightful Plymouth Hoe, by John Ansell. There are other nautically themed works here: Walton's Portsmouth Point and the great Ethel Smyth piece The Boatswain's Mate. I've always loved Eric Coates, ever since a portion of his Three Elizabeths Suite was used as the theme song for the BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, and his overture The Merrymakers is reliable light entertainment. And I'm also a big fan of Roger Quilter, who wrote some great songs, as well as the superb Christmas entertainment Where the Rainbow Ends. His Children's Overture seems so familiar to me. This kind of music was often used as a television or radio theme song, so I expect it's from some long-forgotten puppet show from the days when the only TV station we got was CBC.

I've read more than one review of the first volume in this Overtures from the British Isles series that ended with a wish for a second volume. So here we are; this is everything we could hope for, with more great playing from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, under the baton of someone who knows British light music backwards, and provides it with the best possible advocacy. Bravo to Rumon Gamba for his mastery of this perfectly British music, and bravo to Chandos for providing us with more.

To end on a sad note, James Thompson, who should be celebrated by music lovers not only for his Rule, Britannia lyrics, but also his poem The Seasons which was set by Haydn, met his end not far from The Dove. As Samuel Johnson tells the tale, in his Lives of the English Poets, "...by taking cold on the water between London and Kew, he caught a disorder, which, with some careless exasperation, ended in a fever that put end to his life." The next time I'm at The Dove, I'll make a toast to Thompson: 

The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crown'd,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.
"Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."

Rule Britannia

It's British Music week here at Music for Several Instruments. I'm listening to three new Chandos discs: a 2-CD re-issue of British Cello Concertos with Raphael Wallfisch, volume 2 in the Overtures from the British Isles series from Rumon Gamba and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and another volume 2, in Tasmin Little & Piers Lane's British Violin Sonatas series. Before we get started, then, just a reminder of what went before, or as they say on TV,

Previously, on British Music from Chandos....

The first disc in the Tasmin Little/Piers Lane series, released in June of 2013, is marvellous, and this model bodes well for the new disc, due to be released in June 2016. The full-blown pastoral yumminess of Howard Ferguson's Violin Sonata is presented to its best advantage, without sentimental flourishes or ironic winks. Benjamin Britten flexes his muscles in his early Suite for Violin and Piano; grown-up music from a 21-year-old. This is definitely a Continental side-trip for Little and Lane - it was chosen for a Barcelona Contemporary Music festival by Anton Webern and Ernest Ansermet - and they provide the requisite sophistication here. The William Walton pieces are a bit in both camps, looking back with nostalgia and ahead with spikes out, but again the shift in tone is handled very well, with sensitivity to this more introverted, cerebral music.

The first of the Rumon Gamba Overtures discs, from January 2014, was also a real success, and with some quite obscure music:

This disc got rave reviews from Britain - I'm not sure it was heard much anywhere else.  These are well-crafted late Victorian overtures, and together they conjure a time when classical music, of the lighter variety, to be sure, was truly popular. We're all off to the concert!

A Canadian genius

Everyone raves about the Toronto-born violinist who gained fame as the 'King of Concertmasters', but whose solo career never reached the highest level his talent deserved. Steven Staryk is retired now, still teaching but mainly managing the release of a lifetime of music on disc, first with the 30-CD Staryk Anthology, and now with Steven Staryk: A Retrospective. The reviews for both have been phenomenal, and this seventh release in the latter series is a fine one with which to begin an examination of the Staryk Revival.

The Schumann Violin Concerto had an odd early history involving the composer's mental illness, the love triangle between Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, clairvoyance, Nazis, and all sorts of other shenanigans. Check out the Wikipedia article, or better yet read about Jessica Duchen's novel Ghost Variations, to be published this summer. Steven Staryk's live 1983 performance with an excellent Toronto Festival Orchestra under Pierre Hetu is outstanding in every way except its sound, which is somewhat muffled, but serviceable. Staryk's performance is intense, electric. Perhaps if more people had heard it the current rehabilitation of the Schumann Violin Concerto might have happened sooner. I remember Pierre Hetu well, by the way, as the Music Director of the Edmonton Symphony beginning in 1973. I have a recollection of Staryk playing with the ESO at the Jubilee Auditorium during that period - I want to say the Mendelssohn, but can't be sure.

Next is another superb live performance, this time with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under Mario Bernardi in a concert from 1981. The Walton Concerto is romantic and melodic, but the solo part (the composer wrote it for Heifetz) is fiendishly difficult. This concerto has somewhat better sound than the Schumann; all to the good.

The final work on this disc is very, very cool; a 1973 live recording of the Mendelssohn Concerto from my new home town, Victoria BC.  The mono sound from the outdoor (!) concert with the University of Victoria Symphony under George Corwin is again serviceable. Kudos to the student players from UVic, by the way. They must have been thrilled to play with such an accomplished soloist, and they acquitted themselves very well. Staryk zips through the work at a furious pace with hardly a note out of place. It's really quite remarkable.

A final note about Staryk. While reading more about him on the web I learned about the Symphony Six, a little known Canadian story from the black-list period. Read about it on Wikipedia. While these shameful events put a temporary crimp on Staryk's career, he was soon working again as concert-master with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony. Finally he was back as concert-master at the TSO, where all was apparently forgiven. Did Staryk's brush with McCarthy play a role in the unfortunate cap on his solo career? Was it his success running orchestral strings as concert-master? Or did Fame just randomly slip on by when no one was looking? In any case we have this disc (and many others in these two series) to show us the true value of a Canadian artistic genius at the highest level.