Composer: Roberto Gerhard, Igor Stravinsky, William Turner Walton
Performer: National Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Tristan Fry, Alfred Flaszynski, Grahame Whiting, John Price, Gervase de Peyer, Erich Gruenberg, Gary Brennan, Argo Chamber Ensemble
Orchestra: National Symphony Orchestra Washington, London Sinfonietta
Conductor: Antal Dorati, Sir William Walton, Gennady Zalkowitsch
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Eloquence
Catalogue: ELQ4842200
Release: 2021
Size: 552 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
Gerhard: The Plague
01. “Oran! Town without any trees or gardens”
02. “They’re coming out, good and proper..Next morning, on my round of visits”
03. “On the fourth day”
04. “By dint of perseverance”
05. “So they got alarmed, at last”
06. “The mother greeted me”
07. “During all that summer”
08. “The boy had been put in a small ward”
09. “The’re coming out again! The rats!…The official communiqués”
Walton: Façade – An Entertainment
10. 1. Fanfare; Hornpipe
11. 2. En famille
12. 3. Mariner Man
13. 4. Long Steel Grass
14.5. Through Gilded Trellises
15. 6. Tango – Pasadoble
16. 7. Lullaby for Jumbo
17. 8. Black Mrs. Behemoth
18. 9. Tarantella
19. 10. A Man from a Far Countree
20. 11. By the Lake
21. 12. Country Dance
22. 13. Polka
23. 14. Four in the Morning
24. 15. Something Lies Beyond the Scene
25. 16. Valse
26. 17. Jodelling Song
27. 18. Scotch Rhapsody
28. 19. Popular Song
29. 20. Fox-trot “Old Sir Faulk”
30. 21. Sir Beelzebub
Stravinsky: L’Histoire du Soldat
31. The Soldier’s March – “Through the rugged countryside”
32. “No one about”
33. Music for Scene 1: Airs by a stream – “While the soldier’s been playing”
34. “Your violin – give it me”
35. The Soldier’s March – “Down the street where he was born”
36. “It’s over, at last I’m home”
37. Music for Scene 2: Pastorale
38. “Ah, villain, black-hearted knave”
39. Music for the end of Scene 2
40. “He set about reading the book”
41. Airs by a stream – “The things of summer”
42. “The poor have everything”
43. Music for Scene 3: Airs by a stream
44. The Soldier’s March – “Through the rugged countryside”
45. “Now the scene changes to another country full of strangers”
46. The Royal March
47. “The music struck up, the king himself received me”
48. The Little Concert – “Princess, now please rest assured”
49. “The bedchamber, where the Princess lies pale and unmoving” – Tango – “The Princess opens her eyes”
50. “The Princess dances” – Valse
51. “The Princess smiles” – Ragtime
52. “The Devil himself has entered”
53. The Devil’s Dance – “The Devil dances”
54. Little Chorale
55. The Devil’s song – “You may think that you have won”
56. Great Chorale – “Don’t try to add to what you now have”
57. Triumphal March of the Devil – “You can’t have everything”
A trio of twentieth-century classics, sardonic and timely tales, in long-unavailable Decca/Argo recordings from the 1970s.
Roberto Gerhard’s imagination was immediately fired by reading Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, La Peste, about a French-Algerian town in the sudden grip of bubonic plague. He determined to make a musical setting (The Plague), and after its premiere in 1964 few were left unmoved, or in any doubt about the work’s significance as a bitter, retrospective allegory on the evils of Nazism so recently extinguished.
Now that Gerhard’s score has taken on a new and unwonted relevance, this reissue of its first recording on Argo should win new converts to his music. It is led with remarkable sympathy by Antal Doráti, the Hungarian-born conductor who had become a friend of the composer as well as a mainstay of the Decca and Mercury catalogues. It was through Gerhard that Doráti met William Glock, who engaged him as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Also originally issued by Argo, the 1972 recording of Walton’s Façade enjoys a unique authority as the composer’s only stereo version of the score, featuring Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield as narrators. Though Walton arranged and revised the score many times after its scandalous premiere in 1922, for the Argo recording he returned to his 1951 version scored for the original combination of six instruments. Ashcroft – in the tradition of Façade’s author and first narrator, Edith Sitwell – and Scofield declaim the absurdist texts with all their famed resources of nuance, timing and eloquence.
To record The Soldier’s Tale in 1975, Decca acquired the services of Glenda Jackson, known worldwide at the time for her Oscar-winning performance in Women in Love (1969) and Ken Russell’s next film, The Music Lovers (1970), in which she played the unfortunate wife of Tchaikovsky. She was joined in Decca’s Hampstead studios by the Irish actor and founder of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, Micheál Mac Liammóir, and none other than Rudolf Nureyev, who gave a somewhat stilted, authentically arch performance as the Soldier of the tale. They were backed by a small ensemble of expert London-based musicians, headed by the former leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, Erich Gruenberg, in a rare, complete recording of Stravinsky’s original version of the score, with a new translation of the narrative.