ARTS
Byrd-song and English elegance
Anthony Burgess
William Byrd Psalmes, Sonets and Songs (Decca Florilegium DSLO 596) Hoist The Planets (CBS 40 37249)
The great William Byrd was, as it were, laterally didactic. Publishing his Psalmes, Sonets and Songs of Sadness and Pietie in the year of the Armada, he recom- mended singing to the English as 'a singuler good remedie for a stutting and stammering in the speech' and said 'It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, & doth open the pipes.' Impressed, perhaps, by the thera- peutic properties of the art rather than the art itself (very much the British approach), Byrd's public sent the volume into three editions in the one year (editions, not im- pressions: the restrictive practices of printers demanded a complete resetting of the type after the sell-out of the first and subsequent runs). Byrd, of course, thought he meant what he said but didn't really. He thought, too, that his purpose was moral rather than aesthetic in setting verses whose small poetic merit he perhaps didn't recognise. His deeper, musical, self did the talking but had to be rationalised in terms of healthful and ethical messages.
We have, in the Florilegium Series of L'Oiseau-Lyre, sung by the Consort of Musicke under Anthony Rooley, and ac- companied by a quartet of viols, a very ade- quate selection from the Byrd book. Byrd is 'English' in his restraint, though he could copy the more ebullient Italian manner when he wished to, 'English' too in that remarkable mastery of five-part counter- point which seems to point the mystery of free will functioning as part of a design — I mean, the easy liberty of line subsisting within a considered harmonic pattern. Most moving and original of the items is the cradle song (' Lulla, lullaby, /My sweet little baby, what meanest thou to cry?') sung to the new-born Christ with its background of Herod's massacre. The two elegies for Sir Philip Sydney (dead in 1586), with inade- quate words attributed to Sir Edward Dyer, use, in the Byrd manner, the text as a pretext, filtering the meaning into music and caring little for the verbal surface. For those who know of Byrd but rarely hear him, this disc is a fine introduction, but it must be taken as that and no more. We still
await the whole volume, with no verses, as here, cut to the measure of a single disc.
In the same series Catherine Mackintosh, Monica Huggett, Christophe Coin and Christopher Hogwood perform Purcell's Ten Sonatas in Four Parts (string trio with organ or spinet continuo). Purcell was a better prose-writer than Byrd and could wittily explain, in his preface to this decalogue, what was going on in the English music of 1690. "Tis now learning Italian, which is its best master, and a little of the French air to give it somewhat more of gayety and fashion. Thus, being further from the sun we are of later growth than our neighbouring countries, and must be content to shake off our barbarity by degrees.' In fact, Purcell was synthesising the native consort element with court Latinity. He was not, in the Victorian man- ner, really being humble; he knew the value of the 'barbarity'. How right Gerard Manley Hopkins was in praising Purcell's 'sakes' — that uncontrived-seeming panache which shows off less the personali- ty of the composer than 'the build and make of man' — extravagant, but it is hard not to be extravagant when praising Purcell. Of these sonatas, only perhaps the 'Golden' (the one in F — modelled on Ber- tali's Taussent Gulden or Vitali's La Guidoni, both also in F?) has impressed the unscholarly public. The other nine are of unfailing interest and variety — bringing the bucolic, courtly, meditative and extro- vert together with immense elegance.
The third and last of the new recordings of English music is perhaps something of a redundancy, since we have renderings of Hoist's Planets by every orchestra from Valparaiso to Peking, but, in view of the sturdily consistent refusal of the French to see anything in British music, it is hearten- ing to have a version from the Orchestre National under Lorin Maazel. On French television, about a month ago, we had a highly structured presentation of the work by the same performers, with montages of the planets concerned (wrongly, since Hoist was being astrological, not astronomic) and the orchestra clad in what looked like spacesuits. Maazel clearly likes the work and takes no liberties with Hoist's own markings — except that 'Mars' is perhaps a little too ponderous — and, perhaps wickedly, points out the composer's in- debtedness to Dukas in 'Uranus'. The delicacy of the renderings of 'Mercury' and 'Neptune' is ideal, Debussyan, to be con- trasted with the clodhopping of, say, the late Malcolm Sargent.
The 'Paris' symphonies of Josef Haydn are efficiently rendered by the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Mar- river. These six works — Nos. 82 to 87 were commissioned by the Concert de la Loge Olympique, and some of them were quick to pick up French nicknames — L'Ours' (No. 82) because of the come- muse drone suggesting the accompaniment to a dancing bear; `La Poule' after the fan- cied hen-clucking of the first movement (No. 83); 'The Queen of France' (No. 85) because it was a favourite of Marie An- toinette. This particular symphony is, in fact, a kind of homage to the commission- ing nation, with its evocation of the French Overture's dotted rhythms, the courtly minuet with a (though properly disinfected) bucolic trio, and a set of variations of the song 'La gentille et jetine Lisette'. Anyone daunted by the sheer number of Haydn's symphonies but desirous, in this celebratory year, of collecting them, could do worse than use this album as a nucleus. It shows Haydn ready to break rules of sonata form, indulge in mercuriality without corny japes (as in the `Surprise'), and achieve immense variety with great economy. The orchestra here is about the right size; the clarity of the recording is exemplary.
Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 rendered by the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and male voice choir, with John Shirley- Quirk and under Kirill Kondrashin — is a product of the Khrushchev period, when the composer, and the poetling he sets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, thought they might get away with a few cracks at the deficien- cies of the Soviet regime — hence the tributes to the long-suffering who queue for goods that aren't there, the snarls at bureaucracy, the final tribute to the free- speaking Galileo. But it was the first move- ment which, unexpectedly, caused trouble. This, a setting of the poem `Babi Yar', touched the USSR's own suppressed guilt at its Nazi-style pogroms. This is an in- teresting work, because it is by Shostako- vich, but it reaches no great depths of feel- ing or invention. It is superbly sung.
A word for two Beethoven symphonies — Nos. 2 and 7 — played by the LSO under the late Pierre Monteux. Monteux, so French, so modern, had his own approach to Beethoven, bringing out orchestral delicacies less important in the German in- terpretative tradition than the sense of overall structure, though Monteux's ap- proach to structure was highly intellectual and, as here, very illuminating. These recor- dings, first made 20 years ago, did not satisfy Monteux, who was not satisfied with any of his recordings. We can afford to be less fastidious.
(g) A. Burgess 1982
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