Thursday 26 November 2020

Lennox Berkeley: A Diminutive Vignette from 1950

Whilst researching Benjamin Frankel’s Overture: May Day, I came across a small article in the highly respected journal, The Stage (31 August 1950). The sentiment expressed here is largely universal amongst composers. However, his prognostications about the future of music were a little out of kilter. 

VIEWPOINT: LENNOX BERKELEY, without wishing to suggest that he feels personally aggrieved at being omitted (for he insists that he has had generous treatment in the past), thinks it a pity that so few contemporary composers figure  in this season's ‘Proms’. Maintains that it is not enough for a young composer's work to have the honour of a first hearing; new works must be repeated. to give listeners a chance of becoming familiar with them. An important composition can rarely be appreciated in a single performance. Says that the crop of young people seeking a career in music is as likely as ever to produce outstanding talent, which ought not to be forced in any one direction. A creative bent will always reveal itself. Agrees, however, with Ravel, that it is a mistake for young people to dabble in composition until they have mastered the technicalities. His own training was based on a long and intensive study of the classics. Thinks the present-day trend in music is to avoid strident discordances. ‘Shock tactics’ have had their day. A greater simplicity in harmonic patterns will mark the style of the new musical period we are now entering. (The Stage 31 August 1950, p.12)

It is correct that Lennox Berkeley did not feature in the 1950 Promenade Season. To be fair, over the years he has had some 37 performances at this Festival. And ‘recently’ he had works included in the 1949 and the 1951 seasons.  In 1950 Berkeley completed his Sinfonietta, his Elegy and Toccata for violin and piano, op.33/2 and the rarely heard Theme and Variations op.33/1 for solo violin.

There were surprisingly few ‘novelties’ at that year’s Proms. Only one has remained in the repertoire: Bartok’s Viola Concerto (currently, some 20 recordings listed on Arkiv). British premieres included Bax’s Concertante for orchestra and piano solo (left hand), the above-mentioned Overture: May Day by Benjamin Frankel, Gordon Jacobs’s Symphonic Suite for orchestra and Elisabeth Lutyens Viola Concerto. These are typically known only to enthusiasts of each composer. Even Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on the Old 104th Psalm Tune for piano, chorus and orchestra is hardly one of his most popular and successful pieces. From abroad, Leo Sowerby’s Organ Concerto and Arthur Honegger’s Prelude, Fugue and Postlude are rarely heard, despite being of considerable interest.

It is difficult to argue with Lennox Berkeley that it is desirable that young composers master the technicalities before presenting their masterpieces to the musical public. That said, there is a school of thought the says technique is elitist. Just compose… I think Berkeley is correct.

Lennox Berkeley misjudged the progress of music in the following decade. He did not seem to forth-tell Darmstadt, Boulez, Integral Serialism, Indeterminacy, and the rise of the avant-garde so prominent in the succeeding 30 years.  ‘Shock Tactics’ certainly predominated for better or worse during this period. Listeners had to wait until the 21st century to be ‘beguiled’ by ‘a greater simplicity in harmonic patterns’ so prevalent in the insipid music of Einaudi and his cohort. To be fair to Lennox Berkeley, some of this ‘simplicity’ was foreseen by the Minimalist composers, who began their experiments in the early 1960s but flowered during the 1970s. Then the whole field of modern music exploded into a multiplicity of diversity: Rock/Pop/Classical/Jazz Fusions, Eclecticisms, Neo-Romantic and Neo-Classical, New Complexity, Ambient, Computer Music…

It would have taken a well-connected fortune-teller to have predicted all this.

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