Grainger Choral and Orchestral Works – Sir Andrew Davis

Some men collect stamps. Percy Grainger collected versions of himself.

He rewrote everything for band, for chamber forces, for two pianos, for something he called “elastic scoring” that would let a performance happen with whatever ensemble wandered into the hall. The habit looked like restlessness. It was closer to a compulsion, and if you know anything about the man’s private life, the whips, the diaries in code, the mother he adored to a degree that curdled, you start hearing the arrangements differently. Grainger never trusted a final version of anything, himself included.

This new Chandos collection, gathering his large-scale works for chorus and orchestra, catches him in his most public, least confessional mode. No sadomasochistic marginalia here. Just a composer chasing enormous, blazing sonorities with a homemade harmonic language that owes debts to Delius, to folk-song modality, to Grieg, his friend and champion, and to nobody else in particular.

King Solomon’s Espousals opens the disc and it’s a strange, gorgeous piece. Grainger setting the Song of Solomon in the Douay translation, of all things, scored for a chorus and a wind band bloated to thirty-two players. There’s an unaccustomed sacred glow to it, almost incense-thick, which will surprise listeners who know Grainger only through “Country Gardens” and the folk-song romps. The reading here has weight and unhurried breath. Whether it has ideal transparency is another question. The orchestral massing occasionally swallows inner vocal lines, though that may be Grainger’s fault as much as the engineers’.

“Danny Deever” is the shocker on the program, four minutes of Kipling’s execution ballad set with a bluntness that still lands like a slap. José Carbó sings the baritone solo with real menace and control, dark, unforced, the vowels placed with care, and then the piece simply stops, an orchestral chord slamming a door on the whole grim narrative. No lingering. No sentiment. Grainger knew exactly when to get out of a room. One small complaint that has nothing to do with musicianship: the chorus’s diction is excellent, almost too excellent, and their Australian vowels come through clearly enough to occasionally tug the ear away from Kipling’s Cockney soldier and toward Melbourne. A minor matter. It’s not a flaw so much as a passport stamp.

The Marching Song of Democracy took Grainger sixteen years to finish, sparked, apparently, by a statue of George Washington glimpsed in Paris in 1900, and it shows the long gestation in its structural confidence. Wordless chorus, singing pure vowel-color against the orchestra, functioning almost as an extra instrumental choir in the Delius manner. It builds with real cumulative tension and the performance here doesn’t shortchange the peroration; the final pages have genuine heat.

Then there’s the Longfellow fragment. Grainger meant to set the whole of “The Saga of King Olaf,” the same text Elgar tackled complete decades earlier, and got only as far as “The Wraith of Odin” before abandoning the project. Hearing it, you wonder what stopped him. The choral writing has a hushed, almost Nordic tenderness, cool as fjord water, and it’s tantalizing precisely because it’s a torso. Elgar’s version is the more architecturally satisfying achievement, inevitably; he finished the job. But Grainger’s fragment has an intimacy Elgar never attempted.

Andrew Morton and Alexander Knight round out the solo work capably, if without quite Carbó’s individuality of timbre. Tempi throughout feel unhurried without dragging. This is a director unafraid to let Grainger’s massed sonorities breathe rather than rushing toward climaxes for their own sake.

Chandos has been excavating this repertoire for nearly three decades now, since the Grainger Edition began in 1996. Five outright premieres appear here, plus two more of specific versions never before documented. That’s not nothing. Grainger left behind a chaos of manuscripts, revisions, alternate scorings; sorting through it requires the kind of patient devotion that doesn’t win Grammys but deserves them.

Is this an essential disc? For Grainger completists, unquestionably. Some of this material has simply never been available before in any form. For newcomers wanting to understand why this odd, brilliant, troubled man matters beyond the popular miniatures, it’s a strong point of entry too. The playing is committed, the singing mostly first-rate, the sound full-bodied without becoming congested. Grainger deserved better than his caricature as a composer of pretty trifles. This disc, warts and all, makes the case for the larger, stranger artist underneath.