Arthur Benjamin
      Orchestral Music

* Symphony No. 1 (1944-48)
* Ballade for String Orchestra (1947)

Queensland Symphony Orchestra/Christopher Lyndon-Gee
Marco Polo 8.223764 Total time: 58:25

Summary for the Busy Executive: No tip.

For some reason, we tend to want to hear not only the same composers,
but the same pieces over and over.  Arthur Benjamin, Australian-born but
long resident in England, seems to have fallen victim to his one "hit"
- Jamaican Rumba, delightful but hardly representative of his output
as a whole.  Benjamin has no real settled style.  His musical intellect
wandered down many paths.  Depending on where you looked at his career,
you would have thought him influenced by Gershwin, Walton, Sibelius,
Bax, Hindemith, and others.  He settled in at the Royal College of Music
as a professor of piano, where his students included Benjamin Britten
and, improbably enough, Anna Russell, who considered herself Benjamin's
professional despair (he was, however, one of her many fans, though not
of her piano-playing).

During his life, Benjamin enjoyed the interest of world-class musicians,
including Heifetz, who recorded his Romantic Fantasy twice.  It's easy
to see why.  From Stanford, he had learned both facility and craft.
This, plus his distinguished "light" music, sunk his posthumous reputation.
After all, as good Romantic children, we suspect facility and craft,
associating them with superficiality and "mere" craft, antithetical to
real inspiration.  For many years, Malcolm Arnold's music suffered from
basically the same rap.  Benjamin doesn't make it easy, however.  We
tend to judge the worth of composers by something that makes their music
unique or quickly identifiable: Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartok, Vaughan
Williams, Shostakovich, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and so on.  Benjamin's music
hasn't got a distinctive profile. He does what many composers do, but
very, very well.  This makes his more ambitious work difficult to bring
off.

Certainly, the symphony and the Ballade qualify as ambitious.  Indeed,
they may surprise a listener acquainted only with Jamaican Rumba or
Cotillon.  I feel at a loss commenting on either one, because the
performances - the only ones I've heard - are so feckless.  Jack Rollins,
super-agent and patron saint of great American comics, once took a young
Dick Cavett, at that point a superior comedy writer and an aspirant as
a performing comedian, to a club to see a hot young act.  After the comic
had finished his set, Rollins asked Cavett what he thought.  Cavett
pronounced the jokes well-written and the performance polished.  Rollins
replied, "Yeah, but he didn't leave a tip" - meaning that the audience
had no idea who the comic was or was supposed to be.  Comics like Jack
Benny, the Marx Brothers, W.  C.  Fields, Burns and Allen, Laurel and
Hardy, and Woody Allen (another Rollins client) gave you a world through
the gags.  Sometimes they don't even have to do a joke.  Off-hand, I
can't think of even one joke either Laurel or Hardy told.  A lot of it
comes from a delivery that tells you something precise about character,
about relationship, about "neighborhood."

Compared to symphonies roughly contemporary - Vaughan Williams's Sixth,
Bax's Seventh, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, Stravinsky's Symphony in
C, Copland's Third, Hindemith's Symphony in E-flat, for example -
Benjamin's music hardly startles or surprises.  But it is felt.  The
idiom approaches Bax more than it does anyone else.  The opening movement
should lower like a sky full of storm clouds and thunder.  With Lyndon-Gee
and the Queensland it's no more than Generally Sad.  Lyndon-Gee also
seems to have little grasp of the architecture of the piece.  One reviewer
described this motifically-tight work as "rhapsodic." It wasn't a
compliment.  It's the same with the Ballade, another thematically complex
work which the band seems simply to read through.  Furthermore, the
strings are alternately raw and weak, disastrous in a piece for strings.
One can easily imagine both works played much better.  The recording
does Benjamin little good, unfortunately.  We will have to wait for
another.

Steve Schwartz