Messages

I'm blushing, gentlemen!

Your wish is my command, Alan!  Cliffe wrote his second symphony in 1892, and it was first performed at the Leeds Festival in that year under Sir Arthur Sullivan, Cliffe's former composition teacher and the Festival Director between 1880 and 1898.  Jürgen Schaarwächter, in his essay about Cliffe's symphonic music on Musicweb-international.com, tells us that it was also performed at Bournemouth on 13 November 1902, but that he has been unable to detect any later performances.  Given the quality of the work, this is astonishing.  As far as Patrick and I are aware, our edition represents its first publication and printing.  The MS is housed in the library of the RCM.

The movements are entitled, respectively: At Sunset, Night, Fairy Revels, and Morning.  'At Sunset' is a powerfully refulgent picture – it has real sweep and richness that might, at some moments, make listeners think they are hearing something of Delius (the two composers were born not many miles apart, of course).  'Night' starts and finishes quietly mysterious but in between there is a good deal of sinister rustling and chirruping produced by the use of some orchestral techniques which, although definitely pre-Bartok, are surprisingly modern for the time!  While 'Fairy Revels' can't avoid some Mendelssohnian overtones (the principal tempo being Presto leggierissimo), the repeated alternations of metre would have had Felix reaching for the sal volatile (and which must have kept Sir Arthur on his toes).  There is a representation of sunrise at the start of 'Morning' but it only lasts 19 bars (marked Poco lento) and Cliffe is obviously keen to be up and doing since thereafter the movement bustles brightly along in a hive of activity (with scarcely a hint of a minor key shadow) until a final Maestoso peroration rounds matters off.

The piece (especially the finale) needed some editorial work to get it into a performable shape – there were some cuts, which we have opened out, and emendations in hands other than Cliffe's (some of them involving trumpets in startlingly vulgar taste) which we've removed!   I hope everyone will have the opportunity to hear this gorgeous piece and while we all know how long the lead-times on recording can be, I have fingers crossed for a performance or two sometime soon.

As I said in an email to my co-conspirator, Patrick Meadows, "The other pieces on the disc (the Concerto and a 'Poeme' by Baron 
Frederic d'Erlanger) are schmalzily ear-tickling in their own way and the concerto, while it has some nice tunes and some felicitous bits of orchestration, is a ramshackle, jerry-built affair; it sounds pretty impressive until you hear the Cliffe Concerto (which comes last on the disc) and then you realise that one was a real composer and the other just a very gifted dilettante".  And so say all of us, it seems!

Many thanks, Alan - Chris has been in touch!  Thanks also to everyone else for the pointers towards Chris and Sterling.

BTW, the 2nd Symphony's still in manuscript, so some begging letters to Chris Fifield and Bo Hyttner/Sterling, coupled with some offers of cash would probably do the trick...

Patrick Meadows and I have recently completed a type-set edition (score & parts) of Cliffe's 2nd Symphony if anyone has a tame orchestra and conductor willing to give it an outing.  It's every bit as good as the 1st and the Violin Concerto (for which we have also prepared a type-set score & parts).

There's a gorgeous VC by American composer Arthur Foote written in 1893.  It's not been recorded so far as I know but Patrick Meadows has loaded onto IMSLP the full score of the edition that he and I recently prepared  for anyone who's interested.  http://imslp.org/wiki/Cello_Concerto,_Op.33_%28Foote,_Arthur%29

While I agree that it was enterprising of Classico to record these symphonies (and the Coleridge-Taylor is to my mind the more interesting piece by far) neither of them is well served by the blandness of the interpretations, the reverberant acoustic or the undernourished string sound.  Better advocacy is needed: didn't someone say of Beecham that one of his great gifts was to make second-rate music sound as if it were first-rate?  Where is today's Tommy?