BLISS: Morning Heroes; Investiture Antiphonal Fanfare; Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi
Brian Blessed, orator; East London Chorus, Harlow Chorus, Hertfordshire Chorus; London Philharmonic Players / Michael Kibblewhite
CALA CACD 1010 [64:40]
Originally recorded November 17–17, 1991 & January 26, 1992, All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, London
Arthur Bliss never quite escaped the shadow of Elgar and Vaughan Williams in the public imagination, yet Morning Heroes stands as one of the most searing—and unjustly neglected—responses to the Great War in British music. A symphony for orator, chorus, and orchestra lasting nearly an hour, it’s a work of raw memorial power, dedicated to the composer’s brother Kennard and “all my comrades-in-arms who fell.” That Bliss waited until 1930 to complete it tells you something about the depth of the wound.
This Cala recording, emerging from the 1991 centenary celebrations but not actually released until the following year, captures something essential about the work’s architecture. The LPO plays with uncommon bite—listen to the brass fanfares that punctuate “The Heroes,” Owen’s text delivered with ferocious choral attack. Kibblewhite, who founded and directed all three choruses himself (a punishing schedule, one imagines), draws singing of genuine intensity from his forces.
You can almost hear the rosin dust settling on the strings.
The ensemble is complex, yes, but always tightly disciplined. The recorded perspective lets you hear into the score’s layered textures without losing the work’s monumental sweep. But then there’s Brian Blessed.
Now, Blessed brings undeniable theatrical flair to the narration—he certainly captures a spirit of the work. Yet his delivery lacks the measured gravity, the haunted introspection that John Westbrook brought to the Groves recording on EMI. Blessed sometimes pushes too hard where understatement would cut deeper.
When Homer’s lines from The Iliad arrive—”Hector is dead”—you want the words to fall like stones into still water. Instead they’re declaimed, almost hectored. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it misses something crucial about Bliss’s memorial intent.
The choral writing in the Whitman settings (“O what venerable and reverent creatures”) comes off beautifully here. Kibblewhite understands how Bliss builds these massive paragraphs of sound, how the textures accumulate and then suddenly thin to expose a solo line. The acoustic of All Hallows Church provides enough resonance without muddying the complex polyphony—no small achievement given the forces involved.
Those two shorter works preceding the symphony offer interesting contrasts. The Investiture Antiphonal Fanfare gets a properly resounding execution from the LPO—brief but imposing, as such ceremonial pieces should be. More intriguing is the Prayer of St.
Francis, receiving its first recording here. Unaccompanied female voices only, the material itself perhaps not particularly memorable, but Bliss layers the sonorities with real imagination. It creates an atmosphere of hushed devotion that makes an effective palate cleanser before the main event.
The documentation deserves mention: Giles Easterbrook’s essay provides substantial context, and the full texts are included—essential; for a work drawing on such varied sources from Whitman to Owen to Robert Nichols to Homer. Does this displace the Groves disc as a primary recommendation? Not quite—that Westbrook narration still haunts me decades later.
But the orchestral playing here is finer, more alert to the score’s modernist edges, and the choral work brings a special fervor. For those who want to know Bliss’s masterpiece in all its ambitious, flawed, deeply moving glory, this remains an important document. The composer called it “a symphony of moods and emotions,” and Kibblewhite honors that conception even when Blessed’s theatricality occasionally works against it.
A distinguished effort that does credit to all involved—mostly.
