The recording under the microscope this week is this 2019 one of Dora Bright and Ruth Gipps piano and orchestra works, played respectively by Samantha Ward and Murray McLaughlin, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Charles Peebles. It’s an interesting programme and an interesting juxtaposition, an outcome of both SOMM Records’ series of mostly-forgotten British music of the last two hundred years, and of RLPO’s interest in a more diverse programming (although they could think a bit more about album covers - a trawl through their shop leaves the image of Vassily Petrenko burned indelibly into my retinas).
Ruth Gipps was a student of the Royal College of Music, so I concentrate here on Dora Bright, who of course is over on our Composer of the Month, having studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1883-8. She is one of a slew of late nineteenth-century Academy women students (now on the whole older at entry than the young teenagers of the first intake) who started doing well professionally both nationally and globally. It’s a shame that most of these names are forgotten or at best neglected; the range of musical language and idiom offers a wealth of listening experience.
The concerto was written while Bright was still a student at the Academy, the composer having just won the Charles Lucas composition prize for an air and variations for string quartet. Bright herself played at the premiere which took place with the RAM orchestra, going on to play it several times that year in Britain, and over the next few years around the Continent. George Bernard Shaw attended the second outing of the work, writing with his usual mix of compliment and cynicism:
“Miss Dora Bright […] is a pianist who writes her own concertos better than she plays them. She is dexterous and accurate, and a thorough musician to boot; but her talent has not the pianist’s peculiar specialization. I do not know that she plays any better than I do, except in respect of her fingering scales properly, and hitting the right notes instead of the wrong ones. Her concerto is remarkable – apart from its undeniable prettiness – for its terse, business-like construction and its sustained animation. ”
Other reviews were just as complimentary about the concerto, and rather more impressed by the pianist at the piano:
“[M]atters are most promising for the future of the Royal Academy of Music. […] Striking evidence of this was afforded in the production by Miss Dora Bright of a new Concerto for the Pianoforte, which the young lady played with remarkable skill. Miss Dora Bright a few days since won the Charles Lucas Medal, and the work performed on this occasion was ample justification of the award, for it contains many fresh and charming ideas and some very effective passages, calculated to display the talents of the executants. […] The first movement is, perhaps, the least decided in style, but the second intermezzo has some beautiful passages, in which the combination of the pianoforte with the strings indicates an excellent feeling for composition and tone painting. This was loudly applauded, and in the finale there were some clever and effective ideas. Miss Bright, who has studied comnposition under Mr Prout and the pianoforte under Mr Walter Macfarren, has gained much from these professors, and they gain honour in return from a pupil so talented. ”
There appears to be no evidence that the concerto was played by any other pianists – Ward may well be the second to perform it publicly – but Bright and her work were a successful and popular mix, having a constant presence in journal and newspaper reviews. Of course, as was and still is the wont of reviewers of works by women, many parallels are drawn between Bright’s music and that of her male peers. It is notable that one hears Mendelssohn, another Sterndale Bennett and yet another Schumann, all writing assuredly of the clear influences. Indeed, Mendelssohn is still often held up as a model for Bright’s aesthetic, at times, I feel, with a faint but unmistakable undercurrent of distaste for the resulting “Victoriania”. One can feel a palpable relief on the part of reviewers when they come to the Gipps - here is a sound world with which they are more comfortable.
But why do we view this aesthetic with such suspicion? Are we with Oscar Wilde, or Szymanowski (both men, it must be observed, and therefore treated as being on the “rational” side of thought), in viewing sentimentality with contempt? Once, when I was a student, I played with a singer who was programming Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord. We turned up to perform it to her teacher, and launched into it with more than faint embarrassment, and with an air of apology for the over-the-top mawkishness on offer. The teacher pulled us up immediately. We should not play this, she said, unless we could do so with complete conviction, with the realisation that this was how both poet and composer sustained life in the face of Victorian hardship. It’s a lesson that I have never forgotten. And as I have journeyed further and further along the road of seeing how difficult is the relationship between emotion and reason for most, I begin to wonder if our approach to Victoriana is a contemporary issue rather than a nineteenth-century one.
This highlights notions of how chronology functions in a programme, that we are leading the listener in ever-rising circles until we reach the pinnacle of complexity that is the twentieth-century. Henry Coates, writing in 1915 of his views on programming, demonstrates an complicated mix of old-fashioned (even for then) and forward-thinking ideas. He talks about a programme of music as a feast, beginning with the hors d’oeuvres and ending with dessert, then goes on to mix his metaphors rather splendidly with the following passage:
“Apparently, this ‘chronological order’ fetish is based upon two ideas, both equally fallacious; firstly, that the listener’s ear should, during the concert, be gradually educated up to the newest music, secondly that the older works would seem tame and commonplace if performed after the strenuous strains of our living composers.
As to the first idea, I believe a good many people will agree with me that the full enjoyment of a 17th or 18th century classic demands a connoisseur’s taste far more than does a Tchaikovsky or Elgar symphony, just in the same way that old china, furniture or pictures require cultured appreciation. The second idea has about as much sense as the suggestion that, after the sight of a fine modern building, one would not care to look at a mediæval cathedral round the corner.”
I certainly found myself humming the opening theme for several days, not just because of its earworm qualities, but because like much of Bright’s music, it demonstrates her capacity to draw the sublime from the slightest of material. The theme may feel somewhat pedestrian on first hearing, but it is a structural edifice that underpins the whole movement. The following slow movement is wonderfully evocative; I hear the ballet composer emerging here. The quality of the recording itself offers a veiled sound that suits the musical content (the outer movements felt much brighter in tone). The finale was for me perhaps the least successful in performance, mainly because of the sedate tempo adopted, although this may have been to balance the lengthy first movement, which considerably outlasts the next two movements combined. This finale felt to me as if it needed to be more headlong, to throw caution to the winds (in this I am reminded of Hensel’s allegro songs, such as Italien, and Bergeslust). Nevertheless, the clarity and palette of Ward’s playing is, on the whole, a perfect match for Bright’s idiom.
The Theme and Variations are a much later work, from 1910, when Bright was in the midst of her collaboration with dancer Adeline Genée, and was well-known for her stage works. Indeed, in 1910 the papers are full of praise for her latest ballet The Dryad, first performed 1907 and at this point in the middle of a long run at London’s Theatre Royal. (Bright would later make a pastoral fantasy out of the musical material). The theme itself is sparse, and as has been noted many times already, Bright displays extraordinary imagination and craft in drawing out so much variety and hue from its bare outline into seven substantial variations. The fughetta finale in particular is extraordinary, with harmony that presages a later language.
Costume worn by Adeline Genée for The Dryad. collections.vam.ac.uk
Although I have concentrated mainly on Bright’s works, I cannot finish without a nod at the two Gipps works. These, too, are beautiful works, displaying a composer well worth getting to know. More of Gipps works have been recorded, particularly a album of clarinet chamber music, and Opalescence, an album of piano and string chamber works, both released in 2021. I hope more of both composers here is in the offing.