Percy Grainger
Grainger Edition vol. 9, Works for Chorus and Orchestra 3

* Mock Morris
* The Power of Love^
* Died for Love^
* Love Verses from The Song of Solomon
* Shepherd's Hey!
* Early One Morning^
* The Three Ravens
* Scherzo*
* Youthful Rapture
* Random Round (Set version)*
* The Merry King^
* O Gin I Were Where Gadie Rins*
* Skye Boat Song
* Danny Deever^
* Irish Tune from County Derry (1952)^
* Dollar and a Half a Day
* Molly on the Shore

* premiere recording
^ premiere recording in this version

Susan Gritton (soprano), Pamela Helen Stephen (mezzo), Mark Tucker (tenor),
Stephen Varcoe (baritone), Tim Hugh (cello)
Joyful Company of Singers
City of London Sinfonia/Richard Hickox
Chandos CHAN9653 Total time: 62:34

Summary for the Busy Executive: Prepare to be amazed.

The CD's title slightly misleads. Not all of these pieces are for
chorus and orchestra. Some are for orchestra alone. Nevertheless, the
CD gives us Grainger at his most characteristic. Grainger always considered
himself primarily a choral composer who occasionally dabbled in short
works for orchestra and chamber ensemble. For far too long, almost
everybody dismissed Grainger as a lightweight, but, happily, that seems
about to change. For one thing, more works have come to light and, more
importantly, to performance and recording. Chandos's Grainger Edition
counts, in my opinion, as one of the most significant projects in British
music. The thorough scholarship, the unfailingly terrific performances,
and the comprehensiveness of the project have all begun to fill in our
portrait of Grainger. Pioneers like Stokowski, Fennell, and Britten kept
our lines open to the music and provided tantalizing glimpses of something
at least attractive. Hickox and Co. build on these others to reveal
someone very like a major composer.

Grainger himself, however, never made things easy for critics. He wrote
no symphony or opera or string quartet. His works are mainly short,
averaging from three to four minutes, and, as we all know, great worth
means great length. He doesn't construct music like the German masters,
still our benchmark of musical importance. Very often, he simply repeats
a tune over and over, not even bothering to change key, although varying
the accompaniment. Even "accompaniment" can be the wrong word, since it
frequently takes primary place. It's more a matter of Grainger's piling
up of tune and fulsome supply of counter-tune. Then there's the question
of his fascination with the same tunes (and the same titles) over and
over again.  Grainger almost obsessively re-orchestrated and re-composed
previous work - sometimes for practical reasons of performance, sometimes
because he thought of a new approach. The veteran Grainger fan will
recognize several titles in the current program, but these works probably
differ substantially from the versions he knows.

Once again, Chandos has built a program that shows off Grainger's range.
We can put the items in the following bins: early, even student work;
music influenced by folk tunes; Grainger lite; and Grainger the Modernist.
Often, a single piece spans different categories.

The early work includes the Scherzo, Love Verses from the Song of Solomon,
Youthful Rapture, and the two Scottish songs, "O Gin I Where the Gadie
Rins" and "Skye Boat Song." I almost said "student work," but, outside
of a few lessons (which he hated) from Ivan Knorr, Grainger taught
himself. "O Gin I" and "Skye Boat" we can deal with quickly. There's
nothing wrong with them.  Indeed, the "Skye Boat Song" is very beautiful
(Varcoe sings the solo baritone version on volume 2, CHAN9503, Della
Jones the mezzo version on volume 12, CHAN9730), but it's not remarkable.
It doesn't meet our expectations for a composer who can astonish you
almost without trying. It sounds as if just about anybody competent could
have written it. The Scherzo, on the other hand, Grainger wrote around
the age of 15 (c. 1897).  It doesn't sound like Grainger either. Again,
we find Grainger, even at a young age, confounding expectations. The
Scherzo is not in triple time and indeed sounds more like the gavotte
in Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, years before the fact. I doubt either
composer had heard the other, but the coincidence does show the same
questing and quirky sort of mind. The Love Verses and Youthful Rapture
are early examples of a major Grainger genre: the fantasia or, in
Grainger's beautifully apt phrase, the "free ramble." Grainger disdained
the classical forms as artificial, academic, and dead, although he
certainly recognized great examples. The "free ramble" represents
Grainger's attempt to come up with something "organic" - a form that
arises from the material at hand, rather than fitting the material to
the constraints of a form. Actually, I believe Grainger missed the point
of classical form. No two sonatas - other than school exercises - are
alike, as Haydn and Beethoven proved again and again. In the classical
masters, material almost always shapes the form, and the "form" becomes
something less static than the term suggests. Instead "form" morphs into
something more dynamic, like "procedures." At any rate, Grainger preferred
to free-associate sections, rather like Delius (although he didn't meet
Delius until 1907). This, plus the adaptation in these works of a
chromaticism one normally associates with Delius, has led some critics
to mistakenly talk about Delius's influence on Grainger. In truth, the
two arrived at similar ideas independently, and when they finally met,
they became great friends.  Youthful Rapture Grainger originally (1901)
wrote for cello and piano, called it "A Lot of Rot for Cello and Piano,"
and dedicated it to his best early friend, a Danish cellist named Herman
Sandby. He later worked up the piece for cello and small ensemble. It's
a charming morceau, with real poetry in it, although it's hard to get a
good performance, and for the same reasons as with Delius. The musicians
have to tune themselves to the composer to an unusual degree. However,
the most ambitious of these early works is surely the Love Verses
(1899-1901). I recall reading somewhere that Grainger was told to set
something from the Bible as an exercise. Grainger, like many free-thinkers
of the time, detested the Bible in general. However, hearing his
fellow-student and composer Roger Quilter read from the Song of Songs
aloud set his musical imagination working. The irregular speech rhythms
as well as, I suspect, the sensuality of the text appealed to him.  And,
the Church Fathers notwithstanding, the Song of Songs is pretty much
doctrine-free - yet another advantage to someone like Grainger. The
composer comes up with something lush and sensual that sounds like a
cross between Delius's Mass of Life and Vaughan Williams's Flos campi,
again years before the fact of either. Grainger intended to set the whole
book but got only as far as this. Hickox performs the 1931 revision.
According to the liner notes, the 1901 version will appear in a later
Chandos volume.

Among the lollipops, we find Mock Morris, a work so often played (as far
as Grainger goes) that I, at any rate, had forgotten to really listen
to it.  Hickox performs the string-orchestra version (begun 1910; published
1914).  Grainger called it originally "Always Merry and Bright," but as
the composer himself remarked, unlike most composers of "jolly" music,
his dances were usually expressions of fury. The music stings as well
as charms, and Hickox gets the strings to bite. Grainger becomes a kind
of musical prophet, anticipating not only the writing of the hard-core
"folk" school, especially something like Holst's St. Paul's Suite, but
also that of the neo-classicists of the Twenties and Thirties. Shepherd's
Hey!, essentially the same sort of piece as Mock Morris with its collision
of tune with counter-tune, nevertheless shows greater subtlety, even
though written earlier, in 1908. Hickox does the original version for
"room-music 12-some" (8 strings, flute, clarinet, horn, and - gasp! -
concertina). The counterpoint ticks like a Swiss watch and the "fits"
between lines are so eccentric, they remind me of one of those Escher
"fractal" designs. Molly on the Shore, a meditation on fiddle tunes,
comes originally from 1907 and shows the same angry energy, almost like
a terrier harrying a rat. Again, Grainger anticipates the kind of stuff
to come years later from people like Holst and Vaughan Williams. All
three works essentially repeat the same harmonic rhythm over and over.
For this reason, critics call them "passacaglias" or "chaconnes." Grainger
might not have disavowed the labels, but something else really goes on.
Grainger basically gives up chorus after chorus, in a way similar to a
jazz musician or a folk player. It takes a very focused mind indeed to
do this without listener boredom setting in. At any rate, Grainger came
to regard these works with a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, people
loved them. On the other, listeners had no desire to go beyond these
works. One could argue that Grainger didn't help matters by continually
"dishing up" new versions of these pieces (Molly on the Shore exists in
at least five; Hickox does the original, for strings). I suspect very
strongly that he took pride in these pieces of his, aiming and hitting
both popularity and elegance.

The folk-song arrangements show a very wide range of musical expression.
Britten, no slouch himself as an arranger of folk tunes, considered
Grainger the finest setter of British folk-tunes. As much as I like
Holst and Vaughan Williams and Britten himself, I can see his point.
The Power of Love is actually a Danish folk-song. Grainger's interest
in Scandinavia ran deep - probably even deeper than Delius's - and he
spoke fluent Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. The Power of Love Grainger
collected only in fragment. The singer knew only the last verse, although
she remembered the outline of the story. Grainger stretched it, however,
to more than four minutes. He began it in 1922 and it took him to 1941
to work it into the form here. It's a doom-laden score, surely influenced
by a rather bloody plot, with Grainger's chromatics twisting into the
earth like Wotan's spear. He later included a purely instrumental version
of it in his Danish Folk Song Suite. Died for Love also exists in several
forms, including one for solo voice and piano (heard on CHAN9730, with
Della Jones). Hickox plays a version for strings.  The accompaniment is
an ostinato that sticks to the memory like a burr and becomes hypnotic.
It's as if one overheard the music under the hill. Early One Morning
occupied Grainger on and off for almost forty years. Hickox performs a
version for strings. The well-known tune receives a head-snapping new
set of harmonies, which emphasizes the sorrow of the abandoned maiden.
Begun in 1902, The Three Ravens is one of Grainger's masterpieces (1949
version), for solo baritone, chorus, and a chamber group of five clarinets.
Grainger emphasizes the grotesque, with wails from the sopranos, as the
soloist tells the story of the carrion feast. The Irish Tune from County
Derry has appeared on several recordings, usually in the string version.
The basic blueprint of the composition is unusual. Grainger determined
to write a full harmonic setting made up entirely of lines that would
make sense sung independently. Hickox presents the premiere modern
recording of Grainger's setting with strings, harmonium, and Solovox (a
primitive electronic keyboard instrument), originally made for a Columbia
recording by Stokowski in 1952. It's an odd, sour sound that lends even
more poignance to the tune.

Dollar and a Half a Day (also known as Lowlands) from 1909 (published
1922), for men's chorus and solo baritone and tenor, is yet another
Grainger masterpiece. The tune alone tears your heart out. It's a
fascinating remnant of a little-known corner of history - a shanty
sung by black ocean-going sailors, lamenting their unequal pay:

  Five dollars a day is a white man's pay
  (Lowlands, lowlands away my John),
  But a dollar and a half is a nigger's pay
  (My dollar and a half a day).

The setting is mostly one of great longing, and Grainger exploits the
richness of the male choir. At one point, the solo tenor tears through
that soft, cushiony sound, with an upward, jagged line. It illustrates
superbly Grainger's contention that a discord made its greatest effect
in a setting of "sweetness" and that one understood his music rightly
only as a "pilgrimage of sorrow."

That leaves us with the visionary Modernist. The Chandos team has
given us here two outstanding examples: Danny Deever and the Random
Round in its recording premiere. Grainger began Danny Deever in 1903 and
substantially finished it in the Twenties. This version, for men's chorus,
solo baritone, piano (maybe even a couple of pianos), and harmonium comes
from 1926.  Compared to the music of its time, the harmonies are livid,
garish, stark, and wildly unpredictable. It's like encountering the music
of Gesualdo.  Grainger captures the incomprehensible brutality of Deever's
crime. I've always suspected that Kipling wrote about a real incident.
He doesn't try to give motive. The poem, for all its reflexive
sentimentalizing of the British Tommy, has at its core the terror of
one of those notorious Midwestern killing sprees. Hickox and Co. play up
the harshness of the story, even going so far as to overdo the Cockney
soldiers' accents, which lends an even more metallic sound to the score.

Grainger wrote the Random Round in 1912. He got the idea from hearing the
group improvisations of South Sea Islanders. John Bird describes the work:

Random Round is divided into several sections, each of which is begun
when a Javanese gong is sounded. Within each section the thematic material
is treated in ten to twenty variant forms and, to a harmonic ostinato
strummed on a guitar, the vocalists and/or instrumentalists are at liberty
to take any variant at any time, at any speed, and jump to another at
will (but at the correct pitch). The variants are written so that some
sort of harmonic whole might emerge from a performance.  Grainger seriously
overestimated most classically-trained musicians' ability to improvise,
although I believe he'd have a decent shot now. After all, we've had
decades of experience with Hovhaness and Harrison and Cage and Lutoslawski
and Ligeti. At any rate, in 1943 he threw in the towel and made a set
version, which Hickox records here. It's a piece that leaps and sparks
about. For all of Bird's perfectly-correct but exceedingly solemn
description, Random Round throws off, like much of Grainger's best work,
more high spirits than you are prepared for. It reminds me of those
stories of Grainger's incredible physical energy, as when he would toss
a ball over the roof of a house, run through the house, and catch the
ball on the other side.

I regard this CD as one of the standouts of an already-wonderful series.
Hickox gets rhythmically sharp and clear playing from his instrumentalists.
The Joyful Company of Singers take their place as one of the finest
choral groups in the world. Stephen Varcoe is simply one of the best
singers before the public. He invests his Three Ravens and Danny Deever
with the dramatic subtlety of a Faure song. He seems able to sculpt a
musical line into any shape he wants. Barry Ould's notes are quite good,
although I would have liked to have had more details on instrumentation
and dates somewhere in the booklet. To those collectors considering
Grainger, I would suggest putting these on one's wish list, even before
collections from bigger names.

Steve Schwartz