CONTEMPORARY ARTS
MUSIC
Gloriana. (Royal Opera House.)—A Garland for the Queen. (Royal Festival Hall.) AT Covent Garden, Britten's Gloriana has still, at the time of going to press, been held incommunicado to the weeklies. Monday's broadcast, however, and the vocal score provide grounds at least for a preliminary judgement. This, I take it, is not meant to be a closely-woven drama in which the musical delineation and develop- ment of character are the chief interests. It is a festival piece, such as eighteenth-century composers wrote for royal weddings—part Pageant, part ballet, part cantata—an occasional work which should not be judged by the standards applicable to opera in general, where the music and the drama are their own masters. My impression is that Britten has understood this and fulfilled his commission with brilliant success. The subject was not in itself promising, for neither Elizabeth nor Essex makes a very attractive figure and the relationship between the ageing Virgin Queen and her youthful, ambitious captain and courtier—half-maternal and half-erotic—is in itself hardly a subject for glorification. It is in the scenes of court festivities, the masque offered to Elizabeth on her visit to Norwich and the crowd scenes that Britten's music' seems most successful—simple and forthright yet extraordinarily poetic, full of a ,sense of the occasion yet never derogating from a high musical standard. Excelling as he does in the expression of tortured or thwarted emotions and in scenes of ,nervous tension or outbreak, he has presented isolated moments in the lives of both Elizabeth and Essex with great power, though he has not attempted to present their characters as a whole or " in the round." In a warmer, more evenly flowing emotional scene— that between the lovers Mountjoy and Lady Rich—there seemed to be an element lacking, that sense of ordinary human life continuing all the time against the background of intrigue and personal enmities. If William Plomer, the librettist, designed this scene as a moment of contrast, Britten's music hardly follows that intention. The second- scene of the last act, on the other hand, gives the atmosphere of the crowd in the streets with extraordinary vividness and the Blind Ballad-Singer's music, like Essex's lute-songs, belongs to the most effective in the piece. It will be easier to speak of the performance after seeing it in the (Vera house. Jomin Cross's Elizabeth seemed dignified and dramatic- ally moving. She spoke the lines in the last scene, where Elizabeth is haunted by spectres, with great dignity and feeling ; but a fuller- bodied and larger voice would have been more effective. 'Peter Pears, frankly miscast as Essex, did his best to give a robust, heroic ring to a voice whose natural character is anything but that. So Much for first impressions. I shall hope to say something more next week, when more nearly acquainted with Gloriana in the flesh. * THE Garland for the Queen commissioned by the Arts Council and Performed at the Festival Hall on June 1st was a happy idea—the free collaboration of ten of our leading composers in a set of un- accompanied choral pieces, with the general theme of the Coronation as the only connecting link. The results were extraordinarily differ- ent in mood, treatment and scale but the standard was almost uniformly high ; and it was cheering to see that the greatly increased interest in instrumental music among our composers has not meant any neglect of a musical form in which this country has traditionally excelled. In these ten pieces there was,something to suit very nearly every taste. Many of the composers set poems specially written for the occasion and the collaboration between composer and poet was generally happy—Bliss with Henry Reed, Tippett with Christopher Fry, Howells with Walter de la Mare, and Rubbra with Christopher Hassall were particularly successful partnerships. It was interesting, too, that the better texts seemed to have inspired the better music in every case ; and the one major disappointment of the set—Bax's " What is it like to be young and fair ? "—was a setting of some abysmally commonplace verses. Each composer very properly gave of his most personal, individual Music, so that the pieces were often like miniature self-portraits. Those whose natural predilection is for vocal music were naturally at an advantage and, on any showing, the contributions of Tippett, Howells and Rubbra were quite outstanding for the richness of their texture and invention and the ease they showed in the handling of a Medium in which both the commonplace and the over-elaborate are equally to be shunned. Tippett, like Bliss and Berkeley, wrote a decorative piece with plenty of rhythmic interest and florid ornament. Howells and Rubbra were more serious in' their approach ; and Rubbra, with his poet, even had the happy idea of alluding to the disquiets and anxieties of the day and finding in the Coronation a source of inspiration and hope—an element df contrast which other composers for the most part denied themselves.
Vaughan Williams's contribution, " Silence and Music," though distinguished in itself, was most unsuitable in mood. John Ireland's " The Hills " was a simple and charming old-fashioned part-song, with , no. particular relevance to the occasion. Finzi's setting of a topical piece by Edmund Blunden was a charming essay in a rather tame style. Rawsthorne set a poem by Louis MacNeice, with a recurring refrain from the Pervigilium Veneris, which seemed an odd choice but proved a pretty piece, though not typical of the composer. All in all, it was a most enjoyable and distinguished offering to the Queen on the eve of her Coronation, and the singing of the Golden Age Singers was well worthy of the occasion. MARTIN COOPER:
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