Sir Granville Bantock(1868-1946)

I recently read ‘The Edwardians’ by Roy Hattersley. He sees the age as an optimistic and creative time in Great Britain, despite the indulgent and often indolent son of Queen Victoria who when he became King gave his name to the brief period of his monarchy. Whilst Hattersley sees the English composer Edward Elgar as typical of those years, Bantock (and the two men were great friends ) could equally be the same, though he lived into more recent times. He was a teacher of eminence, holding important posts in Birmingham for many years. One critic says of him that he was a ‘man of exceptionally wide culture, boundless curiosity and unlimited energy’. The Grove Dictionary entry accuses him of writing too much music, most of which is now entirely neglected.

So why remember him? First I think because he was an original amongst the English music renaissance of the nineteenth and twentieth century. He was fascinated by Oriental, Celtic and Greek myths and found inspiration in them for much of his music. He was widely read and was a master of French, German, Arabic and Persian and it was not unusual for him to correspond to his friends in Latin. (Whether the friendships survived is another matter). He was influenced by Wagner, Liszt and Richard Strauss as were so many other European composers of his time, but otherwise was a traditionalist and a brilliant orchestrator : his music has a sumptuous, long-breathed splendour that is often very beautiful if perhaps lacking in variety. Certainly he wasn’t lacking in ambition and his grandiose and idiosyncratic interests may be one reason why his music fell out of favour as well as the impossible demands he made on performers. His Celtic Symphony for String Orchestra for example requires six harps, and some of his many choral works call upon huge resources both of numbers and of skill.

I have an inveterate fascination for composers who may have slipped out of favour – what some might call ‘minor’ composers. What they often lack in immediate appeal they compensate for by their originality and determination to be themselves. Looking at my modest CD collection, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner and the rest are well represented, but there are others amongst them, composers such as Alan Rawsthorne, Lutoslawski, Malcolm Arnold, Frank Martin, Herbert Howells, Michael Tippett. And three CD collections of orchestral music by Bantock, issued on the Hyperion label in the early 1990's.

B.R.

An Unwanted Experience

There has been a terrible silence in our house for the last three weeks, since the amplifier broke down, and with high drama. I was listening to music that suddenly got louder – as music tends to do – and I moved quickly to turn the volume down but as I did so the sound continued to increase and then, with my ears hurting so that I thought I would never be able to hear again, deadened and stunned, the sound went off completely. The awed silence in its different way was as hard to bear as the terrifying sound had been. The whole unit had killed itself – and nearly me as well, to say nothing of people in the street.

It went back to the manufacturer through our excellent local dealer, and then I waited for the result which was the one I feared. They had no replacement for the broken equipment. Well, it was twelve years old and most electronics have limited lives these days I was told when I explained what had happened. ‘I expect it’s had a lot of use’, a friend said later when I told my sad story. It had.

So today I bought a new amplifier. Other members of the household may be quite relieved, for it is manually controlled and I shall no longer be able to change the volume from a seated position of power. Loud music will now involve a corporate decision instead of depending on a private whim. After I had achieved the immediate challenge of installing the equipment – no simple task for me – and tested that all my speakers hadn’t blown as well (what a relief!), the next big decision was what CD should I play to break my days of silence?

It had to be a rich orchestral piece, so I chose Granville Bantock’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’, after Shelley’s poem of that name. Shelley’s witch is a very lively proposition

‘For she was beautiful: her beauty made
The Bright world dim, and everything beside
Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade…’

Delightful tuneful music from Bantock, with lots of splendid solo playing from the woodwind and strings of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley. To my great relief, my dim world has become bright again.

B.R.

(More about Granville Bantock next time)

Bath Festival - again

Piano accordions aren’t really my cup of tea and I hadn’t thought of them as a jazz instrument until we heard the Karen Street Quartet the other day. Street has worked with the Mike Westbrook Orchestra and released two CD albums. She is highly inventive, getting sounds from the accordion which were more like a clarinet than a keyboard instrument. She was brilliant, especially in a Duke Ellington number and then, finally, in a hymn tune – ‘When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old, He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold’ - which I remember from childhood. The Quartet featured Stan Sulzmann on tenor and bass saxophone, and was competed by electronic and acoustic guitars. It was all foot-tapping stuff and very enjoyable.

Joanna McGregor, Artistic Director of the Festival, introduced the fourth concert we attended. We had all been informed that the scheduled Borodin Quartet were unable to play – one of their members having injured his bowing arm in a ski accident – but the Jerusalem Quartet at very short notice would be performing a similar Shostakovich programme instead. It’s the centenary year of the composer’s birth and concerts everywhere are highlighting the fact.

I had heard the young Jerusalem players before. They are enormously talented and are now performing around the world though still based in Tel Aviv. Daniel Barenboim loans Jacqueline Du Pre’s cello to the group, a fact which they acknowledge in their CV. Haydn’s sprightly’ Sunrise’ Quartet was played between the two Russian performances, as if to stress that the quartet has its origins in his elegant style and structural form.

The Shostakovich Quartets 11 and 6, abundantly full of the tunes that seem to flow seamlessly from his pen, even when expressing the despair and hopelessness which was part of his being and part of his creative genius. The later quartet is a continuous series of seven movements, the earlier one characterised by a short, sad cadence that ends each of the four movements. The contrast with the Haydn was interesting, the Shostakovich felt like four soloists playing in groups or alone, whereas Haydn was more of a single entity. Following an enthusiastic ovation from the normally well behaved Bathians and their visitors, the Quartet encored with Samuel Barber’s Adagio. It was a notable evening.

B.R.