Masks – An unusual introduction to the music of Sir Arthur Bliss Part II

Masks were first performed at a concert on 2 Feb 1926, by the composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin, during a 'Concert Spirituel' at the Faculty of Arts Gallery, 10 Upper John Street Golden Square, London. The recital consisted largely of music by contemporary composers. They included the first performance of Gerrard William’s Second String Quartet. This work, in spite of its good reception and apparent debt to Debussy seems to have disappeared. Miss Anne Thursfield sang ‘excellently’ five songs by Ravel and there was a performance of Boccherini’s Quintet in E.

Masks was reasonably well received by contemporary reviewers. The Times (5 February 1926) noted that Arthur Benjamin had played this work brilliantly and ‘with a glittering hardness of tone which the music seemed to demand.’ However, he did add a sting in the tail when he suggested that ‘we could not take these four pieces seriously, and probably the composer does not wish us to.’ And it gets no better: he concludes his comments with ‘...a worse fault is that we suspect some of his irrelevances to be deliberately made for the sake of being irrelevant.’  It is difficult to know what the reviewer regarded as being ‘irrelevant’ in this music but must assume that it is due to the perception at that time of Arthur Bliss being an ‘enfant terrible’ and writing music that was designed to shock and surprise rather than to entertain or inspire.

However, The Manchester Guardian (3 February 1926) was a little more positive. They report that ‘Masks... [had] a nice sense of colour and a quick intellectual grasp of epigrammatic material.’ It concludes that ‘Bliss is always witty and to the point in these four pieces but hardly knits his flashes of inspiration satisfactorily together.’

The following year a review of this work appeared in The Musical Times (1 August 1925) in an important study of recently published piano music, H.G. (Harvey Grace) wrote that:-

‘One doesn't need to look over much of the so-called 'advanced' type of new music in order to see that its composers fall into two groups. There are those who have something to say and who can say it in a manner that is genuinely novel, and yet natural and sincere. And there are the others. That Arthur Bliss belongs to the first group has always been evident to most of us. His Masks, four pieces, just published under one cover by Curwens [q.v.], strike me as being among the most significant of [the] new pianoforte works. They abound in passages that look all wrong, but sound extraordinarily right. This, of course, is merely another way of saying that the composer knows his job; and it follows that the player must know his, too. He must not only be a good man of his hands; he must be able to manage the nice adjustment of tonal values necessary for the due effect of the more dissonant passages... As is implied above, these pieces are difficult. They are not everybody's meat, but the player who is not at once repelled, and who perseveres with them, will find himself more and more attracted.’

Critical commentary disappears from the scene until the revival of interest in Bliss’ music in the early nineteen-nineties. Even then, Masks was not a work that seemed to attract much attention.

Unfortunately, there appears to be only one recording of this work. [1] In 1991 Chandos released a significant edition of the Viola Sonata with Emanuel Vardi and Kathron Sturrock. Included in this programme were the Triptych (1970), the Toccata (c.1925), the Two Interludes (1925), and Masks (CHAN 9770). The recording was well received by the critics. Michael Kennedy wrote in the July 1991 edition of Gramophone that ‘[the] most impressive [work] is the Triptych written for Louis Kentner in 1971, very much the music of the composer of the Piano Concerto. But I most enjoyed the four Masks which were composed in his avant-garde years in the early 1920s. For all their potent influence by Stravinsky and jazz, they have inventiveness, a flair that somehow seems to have left Bliss, or returned only fitfully once he had decided to become an Important English Composer.’ This CD is now out of print, but it is possible to download the work from a variety of classical music specialists on the internet.

Why do I like these pieces? Well, I think there are two main reasons. Firstly, they are very much a product of their age – Bliss was then perceived as a ‘bad boy’ of the British musical world. Yet with Masks critics began to perceive a genuine voice emerging from the musical fun and games. They were not written simply to shock. Secondly after a period of 80 years any sense of the avant-garde has largely departed from these pieces; however, the listener is conscious of an abiding sense of tongue on cheek balanced with a more profound understanding of musical expression. They have become less regarded as period pieces and more as cherished works of art as time passes.

Finally, a few years ago I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in York, where they specialise in classical sheet music. I was both surprised and delighted to find amongst the piano music the copy of Masks that had one belonged to the late Mr. Kenneth Dawkins. So, the circle was complete.

Notes

[1] Since this essay was originally published, Mark Bebbington has recorded Masks on the Somm Label (SOMMCD 0148, 2015). Andrew Achenbach (The Gramophone, August 2015, p.58) called them “exhilarating” and noted the “sense of poignancy, loss and rage in the final two Masks (marked Sinister and Military…”

Concluded

With thanks to The Arthur Bliss Society Newsletter Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2011: 12-16 where this essay first appeared.