Comeback by a Poor Relation

By Michael Walsh

Modern British music is getting a well-deserved hearing

British music has long been treated like a poor relation in the world's concert halls--the sick man of Europe. German, Italian, French and Russian compositions make up the bulk of the standard repertory. But British music--with a rich tradition stretching from Tudor church composers like William Byrd to innovative moderns like Peter Maxwell Davies--is patronized as a national school, a sort of cultural Toby-jug collection, of interest chiefly to natives and diehard Anglophiles elsewhere.

This is a misapprehension on the order of considering Picasso merely a Spanish painter, or Joyce a parochial Irish Catholic writer. The best British composers speak an international language--inflected, to be sure, by characteristic clipped accents and at times marked by a stiff-upper-lip emotional restraint--as surely as do the German Beethoven, the Italian Verdi, the Frenchman Debussy or the Russian Tchaikovsky: men who transcended the boundaries of their birth and made fellow countrymen out of the world's citizens.

The two eloquent symphonies of Sir Edward Elgar, for example, are works whose depth of expression rivals Brahms' more famous essays in the form. Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the finest string-orchestra piece of the century, reaches back for inspiration to the English Renaissance, achieving a spiritual serenity rare in this age of anxiety. Gustav Hoist's The Planets is a superbly effective orchestral showpiece. And two of Benjamin Britten's major operas, Peter Grimes and Death in Venice, belong on any list of the most important modern music dramas.

In the U.S., despite the popularity of a few pieces, British music has never been a vital part of the orchestral scene. One reason: music directors of U.S. orchestras tend to be European born and steeped in the Continental tradition that calls for plenty of the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies as a musical diet for all seasons. Another is that American orchestras, when they venture beyond the classics, feel an obligation to home-grown composers. Further, they may be predisposed against British music on account of its sometimes folkish nature, a trait that does not hinder appreciation of Bartok or Stravinsky, both of whom made extensive use of folk music.

Fortunately there are signs that attitudes are changing. In September the San Francisco Symphony organized a weeklong festival devoted to the music of Sir Michael Tippett, 76, which included the U.S. premieres of the composer's closely argued, Beethoven-quoting Fourth String Quartet and his Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello, an idiosyncratic but convincing mixture of cacophony and pastoral lyricism. These are two significant works that affirm Tippett's standing, since the 1976 death of Britten, as England's leading composer. Later this month, the New York Philharmonic will offer an all-Britten program that includes the U.S. premiere of his The Young Apollo. Most extensive of all is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's British Festival, which began two weeks ago and continues in performances this week in Pittsburgh, New York City and Washington, B.C. Under Music Director Andre Previn, 52, who spent eleven years as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, British music from Elgar to Oliver Knussen (born 1952) is getting a long-overdue hearing--and proving that, at its best, it is the equal of any.

Among the works featured on the Pittsburgh's programs: Britten's Les Illuminations, which can take its place next to such song-cycle masterworks as Berlioz's Les Nuits d'et and Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Vaughan Williams' radiant Symphony No. 5; Knussen's accomplished Third Symphony, which reveals his mastery of complex modern techniques; and Elgar's brooding, sorrowful Cello Concerto, his last great work, a welcome alternative to the inescapable Cello Concerto of Dvorak.

"English music since about the turn of the century has interested me since I was a student," says Previn, who feels that English musicians are partly to blame for the neglect of their composers abroad. "It's a question of export," he says. "The English still feel slightly possessive about their music. The artists who play it the most don't seem to travel that much." Previn acknowledges that British music can seem pale and unemotional when compared with the fervid passion of Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Puccini, or the ruminative profundity of Bach, Brahms and Bruckner. Yet he maintains, "The expression is there. You have to stand back from it a little and ask for half-reticent playing from the orchestra. In something like the 'Nimrod' variation in Elgar's 'Enigma,' you have to just let it build by itself. You can't force it."

The vitality of British composing in the 20th century is one of music's great comeback stories. After the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, Britain waited two centuries, until the emergence of Elgar, for its next native-born master. In between came imitation Handel and ersatz Mendelssohn, as music fell into the hands of well-meaning but pedestrian composers (among them Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford) who were bent on aping their European betters. Now, with the average orchestra's repertory hopelessly hidebound, British music of the past 100 years provides a largely untapped source of appealing, accessible and accomplished works to complement by now tiring warhorses.

Writing in 1919 of the future of British music, George Bernard Shaw observed that for too long Britain had been content to borrow its music from other countries, without repaying the debt. "If we have to borrow tea from China and pay for it in hardware," wrote Shaw, "we can at least plead that our soil will not produce tea. Now music it can produce. It has done it before and can do it again. The stuff is there waiting for a market to make it worth mining." Today the market exists; conductors and concert managers need only get out their picks and shovels. --By Michael Walsh

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