This review is folllowed
by a recording session report.
A musical tribute to
a choreographer is an interesting concept.
While the music selected is obviously
of incredible importance to the choreographer,
it only becomes associated with him
through an ephemeral, transitory experience
of production on stage. This album,
a collection of four ballets either
choreographed or re-choreographed by
Sir Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) contains
works that would normally not coexist
on a musical program, but which can
be considered to be rather tightly interrelated.
Only one of these four works (Madame
Chrysanthème) was originally
composed as a ballet for Ashton’s work.
However all four are much associated
with Ashton in the dance world. His
work has been resurrected in recent
times by the Royal Ballet companies.
Against this background these choices
seem singularly appropriate.
The question then becomes,
is the music strong enough to stand
alone, totally separated from the dancers
and choreography? Happily, the works
here are all strong musically, and stand
up well in their own right. Taken as
a unit, they are not so dissimilar as
to cause distraction, nor are they so
similar that they create monotony. Musically
this is in fact a well conceived and
contrasting program, and the happenstance
that brought them together becomes just
that much more serendipitous.
The first work, Les
Deux Pigeons, is a full-length ballet
in two acts, lasting over an hour. The
music is lovely, mostly light-hearted,
and very well recorded. It feels very
much like a symphony in 21 parts: a
myriad of short inter-related works
designed for each of the dance vignettes.
Dante Sonata,
the second selection, is a piano feature
very unlike the other selections here.
It feels much more contemporary, more
energetic, and perhaps a bit more cohesive
than the longer works. The pianist,
Jonathan Higgins, is at the top of his
game, and gives an inspired performance.
This is perhaps the highlight of the
over-two-hours of recorded music. This
reviewer would have difficulty not recommending
the album just on the strength of this
one work.
Happily the second
disc is just as wonderful as the first.
Madame Chrysanthème makes
use of the mezzo-soprano voice, which
while uncommon in dance works, makes
this stand out from the general repertoire
of dance music, and nearly puts it in
the camp of music for music’s sake.
Additionally the performance is again
excellent, with Judith Harris doing
a masterful job when called upon, as
the orchestra beautifully executes each
of the eight movements. Much like the
Dante Sonata, this is a very strong
work on its own, sounding thoroughly
modern without alienating any of the
audience through overtly atonal constructions
or experimental techniques.
The final work is Harlequin
in the Street, a ballet orchestrated
from works originally composed for the
harpsichord by François Couperin.
This serves as a wonderfully interesting
collection of pieces that sound more
like works from the Romantic era than
the Baroque or late Renaissance: endlessly
delightful, elegant and refined. There
are more than a dozen short pieces orchestrated
in this manner, and each one is a treat.
Taken as a whole, this is a joyous and
enjoyable ballet of lovely music to
which one is far too infrequently exposed.
Generally speaking,
this is an excellent disc of music.
The fact that it is tied together through
its association with Sir Frederick Ashton
is nice if you are familiar with that
presentation of these works. If you
are not familiar with the dances, you
will still find this an excellent collection.
While not an essential album, it is
certainly an excellent collection of
lesser-recorded works, and as such would
be a generally solid addition to any
CD library.
Patrick Gary
Madame
Chrysanthéme:
a recording
session report
Philip Lane
When I knew I would
be producing a recording of Alan Rawsthorne’s
ballet score, Madame Chrysanthéme,
I thought it would be rather like
shaking hands with a long lost friend.
As it turned out, it was more akin to
meeting a distant relative of this old
friend, and for the first time! I discovered,
as a schoolboy, the suite from the ballet
on an old Pye Golden Guinea LP where,
with the addition of Street Corner,
it shared company with two other
British ballet suites from 1953, conducted
by their respective composers -
Carte Blanche by John
Addison, and The Great Detective
by Richard Arnell. They had originally
been separate Nixa EPs and in 1993 they
all came together again, this time on
CD, completed by the suite from Bliss’s
Checkmate and Arnold’s Grand
Grand Overture from EMI’s own catalogue,
following that company’s purchase of
the rights to the Nixa label.
We recorded, for the
first time, the complete Madame Chrysanthéme
ballet score as part of a double
CD set to commemorate the centenary
of the birth of Sir Frederick Ashton,
to be issued by Sanctuary Classics White
Line label in January 2004. (For this
Tribute to Sir Fred I also chose
to include Messager’s The Two Pigeons
in the version by the late John
Lanchbery, Liszt’s Dante Sonata orchestrated
by Constant Lambert, and a wonderfully
‘non-politically correct’ Couperin/Gordon
Jacob concoction from 1938, Harlequin
in the Street.) The sessions took
place in early July 2003 at the Sony
Music Studios in London’s West End,
with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia and their
musical director, Barry Wordsworth.
Increasingly unusually
for these days, the orchestra was playing
from the original, hand-written parts,
rather than from the ubiquitous ‘Sibeliusengraved’
material that professional players are
now invariably used to seeing. As a
producer, I always allow up to twenty
five per cent more time to record from
old, hand-copied parts -
from bitter experience! As it
was, the material was pretty clear,
but as with even the most established
of classics, there were copying errors
and anomalies - the
odd additions in the full score that
had not found their way into the parts,
and vice versa. We restored five and
a half bars cut from ‘Chrysanthéme’s
Solo Dance’ - a
excision presumably made late on in
pre-production, as there is no equivalent
cut in the rehearsal piano score. Constant
cross-referencing between piano and
orchestral scores sorted out a
number of queries,
luckily before the sessions took place.
The ballet premiered
at Covent Garden on 1 April 1955, conducted
by Robert Irving. The sets and costumes
were by Rawsthorne’s wife, Isabel, and
the reviews that did appear (there was
a newspaper strike on at the time) were
generally favourable. The American performances,
that autumn, drew an even more enthusiastic
reception. Ashton had devised the scenario
with Vera Bowen from Pierre Loti’s novel,
eliminating passages that would have
cluttered up the story-line, and hindered
the plot development. A French sailor,
Pierre, enters into a ‘temporary’ marriage
with the young eponymous Japanese girl,
but finds that communication of all
sorts is difficult between them, mirroring
the general theme of discomfort in the
meeting of East and West. Pierre has
to leave Nagasaki and comes to say farewell
to Chrysanthéme, only to find her testing
the coins with which he bought her by
tapping them with a hammer and dropping
them into a bowl to test their genuineness.
In the studio, the
proceedings had the air of a journey
of rediscovery, largely since I was
not able beforehand to talk to anyone
connected with the original production,
musically or choreographically; and
neither could Barry Wordsworth, nor
the veteran critic and writer Noel Goodwin,
who attended some of the sessions, prior
to compiling the ‘sleeve notes’ for
the whole album. Unusually for such
a project, we recorded the score in
strict chronological order. This seemed
to make sense since many of the numbers
are segue. So it came as an even
bigger surprise to discover that it
was not until a hundred pages of full
score had elapsed that any music familiar
to me presented itself —and
when it did, its sound and progression
were not as anticipated.
Rawsthorne created
a suite from the ballet for concert
performance, premiering it at the 1957
BBC Promenade Concerts under his own
baton. However, little of the suite
appears as such in the ballet proper;
and in addition there are very obvious
instrumentation changes. These may have
come about as a practical proposition
(the original is strangely scored for
3 flutes, oboe, 2 bassoons, 2 horns,
three trumpets, piano, celesta, timpani,
percussion, harp, strings, and mezzo-soprano),
but also from the fact that the actual
orchestration of the ballet is the work
of three hands: Rawsthorne, Gerard Schurmann
(veteran of many Rawsthorne film scores),
and Denis Aplvor. It may well have been
that Rawsthorne wished to stamp entirely
his own signature on the suite as time
finally allowed. (In the same way, Lord
Berners claimed to have re-orchestrated
much of The Triumph of Neptune after
the initial performances, replacing
work done by Walton and Lambert.)
We came to the project
with the well documented views of John
McCabe and Ashton himself very much
in our minds. Ashton thought the score
lacked real distinction, and his own
treatment of the story, with its sardonic
ending rather than the more melodramatic
one favoured by Puccini, did not appeal
to the public. Certainly, the music
is rarely forthrightly assertive —
apart from the ‘Sword Dance’
and, to a lesser extent, the ‘Hornpipe’
- but it is
skilfully crafted and in places positively
luxuriant. Above all, it conjures up
wonderfully the oriental world without
any recourse to Hollywood cliché
The one dig-in-the-ribs Rawsthorne allows
himself is the distinctive opening chord
of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ (even
in the original key) as a punctuation
mark in Scene 3, when Chrsyanthéme is
‘married’ to Pierre and the agreed sum
of silver dollars is handed over to
her parents.
Rawsthorne’s choice
of instrumentation has not been fully
explained as far as I know (he had the
massed forces of the Covent Garden orchestra
at his disposal, had he wanted them.)
Why, for example, did he use three flutes
when a clarinet could often have ‘aped’
the lowest flute and in addition given
him an extra solo colour elsewhere?
Why three trumpets and no trombones?
The choice of piano, celesta, and harp
is somewhat clearer, given the ‘eastern’
setting. The percussion parts however
are quite prosaic, given the ambience
of the piece, with little attempt at
an ethnic ‘feel’. Throughout, it is
unmistakably Rawsthorne, his style rigidly
coming to terms with the unusual surroundings.
My mind occasionally wandered to another
exotic ballet score that appeared just
two years later —
Britten’s The Prince of the
Pagodas - where
the ethnic Orient certainly has its
place in the aural landscape, with mock
gamelan orchestra, et al. Both
works suffered years of unforgivable
neglect following their first performances,
although Britten’s masterpiece has
been finally been rehabilitated
by means of a new scenario and choreography.
Barry Wordsworth and
I pondered on whether this new (and
first) recording of Madame Chrysanthéme
might excite a company somewhere
to revive the ballet. Ashton’s work
was not recorded choreologically, so
any revival would depend on the varying
memories of surviving dancers -
as recently with Dante Sonata
- or on
new choreography being created. As a
listening experience, I have to say
that I find the sound world constantly
engaging, but in the same way as many
of Rawsthorne’s film scores are: on
the surface, understated compared with
some by his contemporaries. The score
probably lacks the dramatic edge overall
to appeal to ‘the gallery’. Despite
that, I hope this new performance helps
to fill a gap in the recorded œuvre,
and lets us hear one of Rawsthorne’s
most substantial works for the first
time in nearly fifty years.
©Philip Lane 2003
This
article first appeared in The Creel
Vol5 No.1 Autumn 2003 - the Journal
of the Rawsthorne
Society.
Jonathan Higgins, piano 