Ketèlbey started young. At thirteen he won the
Queen Victoria Scholarship for composition at Trinity College. By sixteen
he was organist at St John, Wimbledon and six years later Music Director
at the Vaudeville Theatre. Along the way he turned out an admirably
diverse – if somewhat predictable – series of compositions; a Costa
Prize-winning Quintet for Piano and Wind, songs, instrumental works,
comedy numbers and the inevitable Anthems. Under the name Anton Vodorinski
he made a number of piano arrangements and, as if this wasn’t enough,
he turned out to be a veritable multi-instrumentalist, claiming some
practical experience of clarinet, oboe, horn and cello. He couldn’t
claim much proficiency on the violin – which didn’t much matter as his
brother, Harold, was something of a virtuoso in his own right. All this
in addition to Queen’s Hall performances as a solo pianist and increasing
fame for his light music.
This is the second of Naxos’s British Light Music series
to be devoted to the composer and we can hear some grand Empire voices
ring out - Peter Dawson, devotional and passionate in The Sacred
Hour; Florence Smithson, agile with an expressive coloratura, a
real operetta soprano with some dazzling high notes; Dennis Noble, stepping
forward to the microphone (literally so, I think, to convey the movement)
in In the Mystic Land of Egypt; Nellie Walker, a pocket
Clara Butt, without the fog horn of a chest voice; Robert Easton, of
blessed memory, with a voice like a nanny goat in pain; and then Oscar
Natzke, with his dark, black bass, sounding Russian and menacing In
a Monastery Garden. Violin fanciers will yield to Albert Sandler
playing Algerian Scene with its composer at the piano
and lovers of the genre will be pleased to find Ray Noble conducting
and sometime pianist and stalwart of the 78, Henry Geehl, doing a similar
job for Natzke.
Ketèlbey’s music covers a wide range of styles
– from the descriptive, the pastoral, the languorous, waltz, ballet
music a la Tchaikovsky, operetta à la G&S to topical Egyptiana,
eighteenth century pastiche, coloratura fireworks, cod Eastern hi-jinks
with vocal "effects," (as they used to put it on the 78 labels)
not forgetting sentimental Victoriana, fireside carols and an awful
lot of tubular bells. Sleeve note writer Tom McCanna quotes the recent
biography of the composer written by John Sant regarding the programmatic
nature of Sanctuary of the Heart in which an English theme, said
to represent Ketèlbey himself, fuses
melodically with Kol Nidrei, representing the composer’s Jewish wife,
Lottie Siegenberg, in an act of musical embrace. Some Dvořák and
Tchaikovsky influences haunt In a Fairy Realm, a rather
charming suite – usual models, these, for a composer of Ketèlbey’s
generation. Some of his instrumentation does tend to the overblown,
but he has a canny and practised hand in the third of the suite, The
Gnomes’ March.
The earliest records here are Fairy Butterfly
and King Cupid, 1917 Columbias and rather – though not ruinously
– worn. These are deft, fluent and stylistically apt voice settings
which show that, but for his extravagant musical and financial successes
elsewhere, he could have followed a career in the theatre – along with
his many triumphs in the silent cinema and the concert hall. In the
Mystic Land of Egypt reminds one of the enormous vogue for Egyptiana
– this is Wilson, Kepple and Betty music owing much of its evocative
naughtiness to the discovery of Tutenkhamen’s tomb only a few years
earlier. Ketèlbey was a good pianist and plays the solo part
in Wedgwood Blue, all rococo charm and delicacy and a spice of
brio too. A marvellous little piece. The most famous of the recorded
items is In a Persian Market, first described in 1920 in promotional
material as, of all things, "an educational novelty." It
is as crisp, absurd, and downright hilarious as ever.
Yes, there are some strange orchestral contributions,
and an instinct for the garish does sometimes tend to occlude his judgement.
But what’s that set against so much sheer verve, so much outpouring
of lyrical and life-affirming music. Enthusiastically recommended.
Jonathan Woolf
See also review by Ian
Lace
Peter Dawson, bass-baritone