MUSIC
Another country
GILLIAN WIDDICOMBE
One of London's saddest concerts in a long while was the 'Composer's Choice' pro- gramme of music by Peter Racine Fricker at the Purcell Room last week. Like the Gerhard Memorial concert a couple of months ago, it drew a pilgrim audience: a band of friends, a publisher and three critics; only forty in all.
Had Fricker himself been more the staunch, knockabout personality such as Malcolm Williamson. I'm sure his music would be much better known; it gets played only in a comparatively barren context now- adays—his Pastorale for organ, for instance. The British Council sponsored three records including his chamber music during the early 1960s. but although these are still available they don't seem to have helped his reputation. Those more prepared to push their wares—say Goehr and Hoddinott- have overtaken with less musical individu- ality to show for it. Yet in 1949, when his first symphony won the Kussevitsky Award. and in the 1950s when works of all sizes were often performed. Fricker seemed all set to be much bigger and better than even an older colleague like Tippett.
The diminuendo must have been caused by a change in taste, as well as by his- appointment as Director of Music at Morley College. Suddenly everyone stopped sayinp 'This is promising and I'd like to hear ii again', and began to say 'This is well writter but it leaves me cold'. An agonising time for any composer, no matter how cavalier his attitude to criticism; but for Fricker it must have been worse because Morley College left him little time to compose.
His escape came in 1965, in the form of a lectureship at Santa Barbara: more time to compose and a smaller, less archly corn- petitive environment. As a combination of two familiar fables—the New World and the Musical Menopause—it sounds too good to be true. Yet on the evidence of this con- cert, it seems to have worked. The music written in America has colour and nerve; one can see behind it genuine inspiration from the climate of contemporary music in most American universities today—more noisy, bold and free, particularly by com- parison with the polite internal contortions that characterised 'difficult' music in London's 1950s. Perhaps the same thing would have happened if Fricker had stayed in London, for now we have even caught up with New York along the avant-garde. But the complete change, and the living of musical middle-age in another country, have obviously much to recommend them.
Restricted, for this concert, to chamber music, the works that Fricker chose and introduced were the Serenade No. I and the Octet, both written at the end of the 1950s for a mixture of wind and strings: then two Episodes for piano and a song cycle. Day of the Spirits', from his American years. The interesting thing was that the two English works are mild, lyrical pieces, suggesting that Fricker himself prefers this image to the earlier more aggressive stuff of the 1953 String Quartet No. 2 which was probably responsible for his label as composer of dry abstract pieces. The Serenade and the Octet both please at the time, but leave only slender thoughts behind: of the two, the Octet is the stronger, with a soft atmo- spheric Nocturne as well as a witty Scherzo. Of course, Fricker wrote plenty of soft or sustained passages in the second and third movements of that second Quar- tet: but the Octet matches them better with less angular lines. Yet the vitality of both the piano Episodes swept such details out of sight, for their points are made much more openly, and the song cycle suggested that Fricker has found a style of writing for voice that works in performance, though still awkward to sing.
Unfortunately the Virtuoso Ensemble did not fully support their name, nor would have if called the Expressive Ensemble: they were more the Adequate Assembly. Like Gerhard's, this is the kind of neat music that needs a well-tailored performance, so it was odd to undertake a concert like this out of affectionate conviction and not play with more of it. (The two exceptions were the brilliant young pianist Landon Young, and Noelle Barker who sang the songs.) What made me sad was not this obvious re- juvenation in a composer's work, but the fact that so few people were there to witness it. Perhaps this was partly related to the fact that the Redcliffe Concerts could not be bothered to send out press tickets.
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