Arthur Bliss

* String Quartet No. 1 in B-flat
* Conversations for flute, oboe, violin, viola, and cello
* String Quartet in A (1914)

Maggini Quartet; Nicholas Daniel, oboe; Michael Cox, flute.
Naxos 8.557108 Total time: 64:01

Summary for the Busy Executive: Wonderful.

For most of the twentieth century, one could best describe the British
music scene as feudal.  Great figures loomed over the landscape: Elgar,
Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten, and Tippett.  One's eye naturally
fastened on the high, lonely towers and tended to ignore the rest of the
terrain.  Of course, in Britain such things seemed to matter.  The United
States, both officially and unofficially, takes very little interest in
its composers.  I doubt most Americans even know the names of Walter
Piston or Roger Sessions, let alone recognize something either wrote.
We democratically ignore just about everybody, though we may take a
sporting interest in how Our Guys measure up against the furriners.
Beginning with Parry, at any rate, Britain has produced at least as many
very good, perhaps even great, composers as anyone else.  Elgar tended
to block out Parry.  Vaughan Williams blotted out just about everybody
else over most of his long life: Boughton, Bax, Holbrooke, Grainger,
Brian, and (excepting one piece) Holst.  Walton crowded out Lambert,
Rubbra, Foulds, Gurney, Warlock, Finzi, Bliss, Howells, and Moeran.
Britten became in his lifetime, of course, The Greatest English Composer
Since Purcell and accept no substitutes.  It never seems to occur to
people that King of the Mountain is not a particularly interesting game.
Even if you've seen Everest, Mount McKinley should still impress you.

Bliss will probably never garner a large number of admirers.  He's not
hard in the way that Carter is, for example, and he lacks the vulgarity
of most great composers.  Some of the fans he has, however, command
respect.  He early on attracted the support of Elgar, who commissioned
the Colour Symphony from him.  In later life, he won a strong advocate
in Britten.  Although he succeeded Bax as Master of the Queen's Music,
his most promising years ran from the Twenties to just after World War
II.  He also suffered from a number of creative silences.  In the Twenties,
people considered him a young Turk, but his radicalism lay largely on
the surface.  His soul was deep down a Romantic one and his language,
with rare exceptions (more like outbursts), harkened back to the nineteenth
century. One sees this most clearly in the concerti: the almost-famous
one for piano recalls Liszt and Tchaikovsky, while the violin and cello
concerti evoke the time of Elgar.

Bliss at his most consistent (ignoring masterpieces like Morning Heroes
and the Music for Strings) I find in the chamber music, too little known,
so all praise to Naxos for making this stuff available.  Of the items
here, I've heard before only the String Quartet No. 1.  Bliss wrote it
in the early Forties during a short two-year stay in the U. S.  The
quartet, the first movement especially, shows him at his Romantic best.
It typifies his "mature" idiom.  If you like the piano concerto, odds
are you'll like the quartet.  The introduction - unusual (though definitely
tonal) chords moving along in unusual ways - and the transition to the
main matter of the allegro is not only gorgeous string writing, but a
subtle bit of composing.  The movement in general quickly builds to a
rage, rages to a kind of triumph, and then winds down to a mood of
acceptance, using the material of the opening.  However, the emotions
are more fluid and thus more ambiguous than such a description implies.
The second-movement scherzo plays neat games with a main rhythmic idea
derived probably from American jazz.  The trio lopes along in 7 beats
to the measure.  The form's a bit unusual, in that the trio reappears
at the very end, pesante.  An alert listener will probably ask what it
means.  The emotions never hit you straightforwardly, since they seem
to continually morph into something else.  The entire movement has the
refinement (though not the idiom or awesome inspiration) of Ravel.  I'm
shallow enough to consider it my favorite of the four.  The slow movement
has its gorgeous singing moments, but compared to the others it doesn't
hold together.  It mostly just goes by.  The finale, however, makes up
for any flag in energy.  It runs on the same high-octane fuel as the
scherzo of the Ravel quartet.

Conversations for flute, oboe, and string trio comes from the Twenties,
perhaps his most consistently experimental period.  Unusually for Bliss,
it shows the influence of Stravinsky, especially L'Histoire, as well as
(more usual for Bliss) Ravel.  However, you have only to compare it to
Walton's Facade to see its deep conservatism.  Basically, Ravel wins
out.  The first movement, "The Committee Meeting," is the quirkiest of
the set, with the instruments all going so much their own way, you begin
to wonder how the composer maintains a steady pulse.  "The Committee
Meeting" leads you to expect a jeu d'esprit, but the deeply-felt second
movement, "In the Wood," dashes that.  The work becomes an exquisite set
of miniatures, in the way of Debussy and Ravel (you may even hear a bit
of "Golliwog's Cakewalk" in the "Scherzando: In the Ballroom").  "Soliloquy"
belongs to Bliss's beloved cor anglais, featured in so much of his chamber
music, all by itself, singing not only poetically but coherently .  The
finale, "In the Tube at Oxford Circus," alternates Stravinsky's L'Histoire
with lyrical Ravel as well as with bouncy Debussian proto-jazz.  The
whole suite is a valentine to France.

Bliss composed the String Quartet in A in 1915, while he served in World
War I (demobbed in 1919, he fought through almost all of it, and his
brother Kennard died in action).  He withdrew most of his early work,
this piece among them.  I've collected Bliss since the Sixties, and I
didn't know even *of* this piece.  The maturity of its craft strikes the
listener right away.  Emotionally, it sings nostalgically, as Gurney and
Rupert Brooke did, "of Severn meadows."  There's a bit of Vaughan Williams,
a lot of Elgar, and an "Irish" pastoralism, anticipating the final quartet
of E. J. Moeran, written almost four decades later.  The finale evokes
the first movement of the Ravel quartet.  But the whole brims over with
something heartfelt and beautiful.  Why Bliss withdrew it, I have no
idea.  Composers aren't always the best judges of their own stuff.

It's obvious that the Maggini Quartet and its partners love these works.
They play not only with no condescension at all, but with great relish.
The disc makes for great Sunday listening: relaxed, civilized, and often
moving.

Steve Schwartz