Sir Arthur BLISS (1891-1975)
The Lady of Shalott, ballet in one act (1958) [43:19]
Rout for soprano voice and orchestra (1920) [7:36]
Polonaise (1925, orch. of the second movement of Suite for Piano) [3:17]
One-Step (1923, orch. 1936 by Leighton Lucas and Victor Fleming of piano piece) [2:28]
Answering You [Your Questions Answered] (1944) [1:29]
Heritage of Britain [versions A & B] (1950) [1:55]
Two Contrasts for string orchestra (1950, arr. 1972 from the middle two movements of String Quartet No. 2) [12:57]
March of Homage in Honour of a Great Man (1965) [4:00]
Ilona Domnich (soprano), BBC Concert Orchestra/Martyn Yates
rec. January 2020, Watford Colosseum, UK
DUTTON EPOCH CDLX7387 [77:38]
Arthur Bliss remains one of those English composers we praise more than we play—a fate perhaps worse than neglect. This Dutton Epoch disc, stuffed with rarities and oddments from across five decades, makes a case for rehabilitation that’s both stronger and weaker than one might hope.
The Lady of Shalott occupies the disc’s center of gravity, and rightly so. Bliss composed this one-act ballet for Frederick Ashton in 1958, when he was Master of the Queen’s Music—a position that seemed to encourage his already ceremonial tendencies. The Tennysonian subject matter plays to Bliss’s strengths: there’s genuine atmosphere in the opening pages, where harps and high strings create that shimmer of unreality the story demands. The curse, when it comes, has real dramatic bite. But over forty-three minutes, the invention flags. One hears too much of the Elgar who wrote The Crown of India, not enough of the astringent voice that produced the Colour Symphony.
Martyn Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra give it their all. The strings dig into those big romantic gestures with conviction, though the Watford Colosseum acoustic doesn’t help—there’s a dryness that robs the climaxes of bloom. Still, you hear the craftsmanship. Bliss knew his orchestra inside out.
Rout comes from 1920, when Bliss was still finding his feet after the Great War’s devastations. Here’s the composer at his most experimental—Ilona Domnich navigates the wordless vocal line (syllables, not text, famously) with admirable security, though one wishes for more timbral variety in her upper register. The orchestration crackles with nervous energy; you can hear Stravinsky’s influence, but filtered through an English sensibility that can’t quite commit to full-throated modernism. It’s fascinating rather than wholly successful.
The miniatures scattered across the disc’s second half present problems of their own. The “Polonaise” and “One-Step” are salon trifles dressed in orchestral finery—the orchestrations (the latter by Leighton Lucas and Victor Fleming, not Bliss himself) can’t disguise the slightness of the material. They’re performed with more care than they perhaps deserve.
“Answering You” and the two versions of “Heritage of Britain” are film music fragments, around a minute each. They document Bliss’s work for the screen but offer little beyond historical curiosity. The March in honor of Churchill—the “Great Man” of the title—has appropriate pomp but little genuine feeling. You sense duty rather than inspiration.
The Two Contrasts, arranged late in life from the String Quartet No. 2, fare better. Here the musical argument has substance, even if the string orchestra version dilutes some of the original’s intensity. The slow movement has genuine eloquence—Bliss writing from the heart rather than the committee room.
What emerges from this survey is a composer of real gifts who too often settled for the merely competent. The BBC Concert Orchestra plays everything with professional polish, though one senses they’re not quite inside this music the way they might be with, say, Walton. Domnich handles the vocal challenges in Rout without making them disappear, which is about right.
Dutton’s engineering captures everything clearly, perhaps too clearly—a bit more warmth might have helped the ballet’s more expansive moments. The documentation is thorough, as we’ve come to expect from this label.
For Bliss completists, this disc is essential. For the curious, The Lady of Shalott and Rout offer enough interest to justify investigation. But the persistent question remains: if this is Bliss at his most characteristic, why isn’t he performed more often? This disc provides some answers, not all of them comfortable.
