Bliss on Chandos: Ballet and Variations

Arthur Bliss is one of those English composers from the twentieth century whose name became more familiar to most listeners of “serious music” than did the music itself. He was Master of the Queen’s Music after the end of World War II. While his modernism had been appreciated during the Twenties and Thirties, by the time of his royal appointment in 1950, he had become viewed as “old hat” by a new generation of “composers on the rise,” such as William Walton and Benjamin Britten.

This coming Friday Chandos will release an album of two works by Bliss composed in 1944 and 1972, respectively. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders of this new release. The first of the selections is the music composed for the one-act ballet choreographed by Robert Helpmann, “Miracle in the Gorbals.” The second is the first complete recording of “Metamorphic Variations.” Both of these selections are performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Michael Seal.

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

The Gorbals is an area of Glasgow, which was a slum when Helpmann created his ballet. During the second half of the last century, the area was “redeemed” through the construction of sixteen high-rise public housing apartment blocks. The cover of the new album shows a photograph taken during a performance of “Miracle in the Gorbals” with a set whose background shows the slum dwellings. The track listing includes more than enough description for the attentive listener to follow the ballet’s narrative.

The first thing one will observe about “Metamorphic Variations” in the booklet is how short each of the variations is. It would be fair to say that there is as much description for the tracks of this performance as there was for the narrative of “Miracle in the Gorbals.” As will be seen on his Wikipedia page, Bliss was never shy when it came to compositing music based on “storytelling,” rather than “pure abstraction.” As a result, those listening to this new album will probably appreciate the benefit of following the texts in the booklet accounting for the narrative flow of both the ballet score and the subsequent unfolding of a series of variations.