This was a memorable concert for several reasons. Firstly, we welcomed back to Leicester Helene Clement, Viola and Alasdair Beatson, Piano, fine artists both. However, that wasn’t the half of it. The programme they had put together looked and proved to be fascinating, centring as it was upon music by three people who in one way or another revolutionised the British music scene in the middle of the last century, Frank Bridge, Imogen Holst, and Benjamin Britten.
The first was, besides being a composer to be reckoned with, the person most responsible for nurturing the young Britten but more of that in a minute. The fact that Britten’s vision of a kind of Bayreuth on the East Coast of England in his native Aldeburgh came to such a successful fruition is very much down to Imogen Holst and is perhaps not always fully recognised, not least for the effect it had on her own compositional life. Some people have felt that she did not always receive the gratitude which should have been hers. It is sadly often the way with genius that the more earthbound things are taken for granted.
Whatever, genius Britten most certainly was. Now it is commonplace to see him, with Shostakovich, spoken of as the most significant composer of the mid 20c century and certainly its greatest opera composer but it was not always thus. In the 1950’s into the 60’s I was in London and I heard Peter Grimes for the first time 15 or so years after its premiere in 1945 and barely could believe what I was hearing. I have since thought of it as my Hector Berlioz moment (!), said moment being when in the late 1820’s he saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the stage for the first time and, never a man to do things by half, had on the same night also became besotted with the Ophelia of Harriet Smithson, walked the streets of Paris for the whole night, no doubt plotting the Romantic revolution and later, and much more disastrously, finished up married to the said actress. I did not walk the streets of London and had yet to meet my wife, but otherwise was quite as disorientated. An opera of all things in English and as powerfully dramatic as anything in the repertoire? I must be imagining things, I thought, but then along came Billy Budd, Turn of the Screw, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the War Requiem etc.etc. In 1963 I was at the composer’s 50th Birthday concert in the Festival Hall in which he conducted a performance of his Spring Symphony. In the same era London fell in love with Mahler, who had been a major influence on the young Britten and one critic, I think Hans Keller, the Austrian /English musicologist, remarked in an article that living in Mozart’s Vienna must have felt not dissimilar to what it was to be in London in the 60’s. Of course, many of the learned, particularly those who belonged to Schools dedicated to the new music, laughed derisively and William Glock in charge of BBC music for the period introduced British listeners to the really ‘important’ things going on in Europe, much of which seems now, to judge by the rarity with which it is publicly performed, actually of very little importance.
As it happens, the music chosen to shed light on this triumvirate was fascinating and it was difficult to think that any of it could have been played better. Frank Bridge’s Cello Sonata in an arrangement by Helene Clement for viola seemed to have preserved the heart of the music admirably. Even though a friend, a cellist, felt something had been lost, in all honesty to this listener who did not know original it at least conveyed very much of the vigour and at times beauty of the composer’s voice. The loveliness of the viola’s tone was such that one was beguiled time and again by the musical content so much so that one wondered why the composer’s output did not feature more in concert programmes. The programme perhaps gave the clue when it mentioned the turmoil the composer had been reduced to by the first World War. Perhaps that explains why in terms of structure, and despite the continuing interest of what one was hearing, this listener at least was uncertain at times where the music was going. It felt more a tone poem than a sonata.
Imogen Holst’s Suite for Solo Viola on the other hand was clarity itself and in its own terms also delightful to listen to. The last two movements Sarabande and Gigue seemed to seek to recall the pre Romantic world like a number of composers in the inter war years, Stravinsky and Ravel to name but two.
That left the three pieces by Britten, two from his student days only discovered shortly after his death and a first hearing for me. I remember the excitement the discovery caused but had never come across either in a concert programme. In one, his teacher’s There is a Willow grows aslant a Brook was wonderfully atmospheric in the student’s arrangement for viola and piano. The performance was beyond words beautiful. The other work Elegy for solo viola written on the day after he had left public school at the age of 16 was so much more than an adolescent’s pay back gesture. It created with extraordinary power and in a very short space a dark and mournful world. No wonder Frank Bridge was so eager to give all he could to the young prodigy.
That left one work of Britten’s maturity, Lachrymae, Reflections on a song of Dowland written for the famous violist William PrimroseThis is famous for having been possibly the first theme and variations in which the theme comes after the variations, only to be revealed in its entirety at the end. I have heard it several times and have usually struggled to see quite where the music is going at times. However, for some reason this time I actually felt there was light on the way due no doubt to the wonderful playing of the two artists and as a result I don’t think that I have ever been so moved by the way at the end out of the thicket the unadorned and simple rendition of the song emerges and creates a wonderful few moments of beauty and contemplation.
Lastly, throughout this concert in the background there was the knowledge that one was listening to Britten’s viola, an instrument given to him by his teacher as he left for America in 1939, perhaps as a thank you to the young man who had given him some sort of immortality by composing for the Salzburg Festival of 1937 Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra , which it is agreed was the work which put the young composer on the international map. That knowledge and the wonderous sound of that particular instrument, an 1843 Giussani, made this concert something very special.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 