Arthur Bliss spent much of his long career being admired and underperformed — a peculiarly English fate, and one he shared with Bax, with Rawsthorne, with a dozen others whose music filled the concert halls of the forties and then, somehow, didn’t. The neglect stings more in his case because Bliss had genuine ambition, the kind that doesn’t settle for the merely pleasant.
These two late works — Metamorphic Variations from 1972, Meditations on a Theme by John Blow from 1955 — bracket almost two decades of a composer still willing to take chances. That matters.
The Meditations is the more immediately rewarding piece, and David Lloyd-Jones knows it. His conducting here has the quality I prize above almost everything else in this repertoire: patience. The Blow theme — a ground bass from the Amphion Anglicus, grave and modal — doesn’t appear until late in the work, yet Bliss constructs each of the variations so that when the theme finally arrives, you feel you’ve known it all along. It’s a conjuror’s trick, really. Lloyd-Jones understands that the architecture requires long breath, and he gives it that — the orchestra’s tone consistently warm but never slack, brass entries clean without being aggressive, the strings in the more searching variations carrying real weight.
Hugo Rignold’s old recording has its partisans, and I understand why. There’s a directness to it, a no-nonsense English quality. But Lloyd-Jones brings more interior life to the slower variations, and the recorded sound — less boxy, better separated — lets you hear what Bliss was actually doing in the inner voices.
The Metamorphic Variations is harder to love. I’ll say it plainly.
Bliss wrote the work in response to paintings by George Dannatt, his friend of many years — an abstract painter of considerable reputation, and the connection explains something about the music’s character, its tendency toward texture and color over melodic argument. The work opens with an extended oboe solo, sinuous, chromatic, more than a little indebted to the Tristan prelude. It’s a striking gesture. The trouble is that this opening melody, angular as it is expressive, refuses to lodge in memory the way a great theme must if it’s going to sustain fourteen variations. I found myself — even on repeated hearings — losing the thread, and only when the trumpet enters in the fifth section, “Interjections,” did I suddenly hear the relationship clearly. That’s a long wait.
The Barry Wordsworth release on Nimbus, made in 1991 for the centenary, has been the reference version by default rather than by distinction. Lloyd-Jones is sharper, more purposeful — he doesn’t let the slower sections drift into mere atmosphere — and the result is the most persuasive case I’ve heard made for this score. Whether it’s a persuasive enough case is another question. The Metamorphic Variations may simply be a work where Bliss’s ingenuity outran his instincts. The variations proliferate, transform, accumulate — and yet something is missing at the center.
Still. Both pieces deserve far better than the silence that surrounds them in concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic, and Lloyd-Jones is exactly the advocate they need: serious, unsentimental, and clearly convinced. The Meditations alone would justify acquiring this disc without hesitation. It’s one of the finer things in English music from the postwar years, and it has never sounded better than it does here.
