Prom 41: Delius-'A Mass of Life', BBCSO&SC/LPC,J.Davis/Huckle/Philip/R.Williams/Elder

[gradus]

Yes, it was on that short-lived Contour label, and later DG Privilege if I remember correctly.....how exciting to have been there, when it was cut, (where was 'there', by the way?....Germany, or was it mastered here...ie. UK?).

It was at Phonogram's factory Walthamstow(!) on a Neumann lathe operated by engineer Bill - can't recall his surname. The next job was probably Peters and Lee.

[edashtav]

I'm sorry to see that some still cannot appreciate Delius. I don't find his harmony 'directionless' at all, and I think he was a master of large-scale form, as shown in his operas particularly, but also long single-movements such as Sea Drift and Song of the High Hills.

It was a relief to hear the absence of inter-movement applause after the first outburst only five minutes in . I even wondered if the conductor had , with a dismissive gesture perhaps, signalled thme not to do it.

Please don’t push folk out of your tent, smittims, simply because they do not embrace all of Deius without reservation. How many choirs have rows of sopranos who are desperate to sing mote Delius? Delius is neither essy to sing or to play. Sopranos take fright when they have a page full of stratospheric writing including top ‘’C’s . They feel exposed. String can tire of providing murky accompaniments whilst Delius is away with the birds: upper woodwind indtruments equipped with Delius’s individual take on birdsong. Delius dreams of open skies and stars but his inspiration does not always match his vision. His harmony is never as clear and progressive as Carl Nielsen’s, Debussy showed that was not necessary but Debussy does not emulate Delius’s diffusiveness. I love many of Delius’s short works and that covers longer examples such as Brigg Fair and Appalachia which benefit so much from variation firm as structural members. There are great pages in A Mass if Life: both halves start better than the majority of British Choral works do, there are successful dance episodes and the work’s dying fall makes an impact as big as the conralto’s final song in Mahler’s Das Lied.. but then, but then there are pages which I don’t find memorable. That is untrue of Mahler’s rivetting Delius is a marmite composer with tents quite full of believers, a smaller tent of rejectionists but there , in the middle is a large tent of doubters. I can take my marmite, leavened with cheese in a sandwich but I don’t relish it on buttered toast. I do test my marmite tolerance, smittims, and have listened both to A Village Romeo and Juliet and the work presently under discussion in the last year: I found the Opera more to my taste but…

Delius, for me, is an Interesting Historical Figure but isn’t a Great Composer.

[Roger Webb]

It was at Phonogram's factory Walthamstow(!) on a Neumann lathe operated by engineer Bill - can't recall his surname. The next job was probably Peters and Lee.

Ah yes, a lot of pressings of DG (and Philips) stuff came out of there, principally in the 60s/70s.....and were, generally less favoured than those with the magic emboss 'Pressed in Germany'!......or in the case of Philips 'Pressed in Holland'

Coincidentally the first music shop I worked in was owned by a chap who, as a session man had played on many pop records of the 60s including Peters and Lee!

[Maclintick]

Please don’t push folk out of your tent, smittims, simply because they do not embrace all of Deius without reservation. How many choirs have rows of sopranos who are desperate to sing mote Delius? Delius is neither essy to sing or to play. Sopranos take fright when they have a page full of stratospheric writing including top ‘’C’s . They feel exposed. String can tire of providing murky accompaniments whilst Delius is away with the birds: upper woodwind indtruments equipped with Delius’s individual take on birdsong. Delius dreams of open skies and stars but his inspiration does not always match his vision. His harmony is never as clear and progressive as Carl Nielsen’s, Debussy showed that was not necessary but Debussy does not emulate Delius’s diffusiveness. I love many of Delius’s short works and that covers longer examples such as Brigg Fair and Appalachia which benefit so much from variation firm as structural members. There are great pages in A Mass if Life: both halves start better than the majority of British Choral works do, there are successful dance episodes and the work’s dying fall makes an impact as big as the conralto’s final song in Mahler’s Das Lied.. but then, but then there are pages which I don’t find memorable. That is untrue of Mahler’s rivetting Delius is a marmite composer with tents quite full of believers, a smaller tent of rejectionists but there , in the middle is a large tent of doubters. I can take my marmite, leavened with cheese in a sandwich but I don’t relish it on buttered toast. I do test my marmite tolerance, smittims, and have listened both to A Village Romeo and Juliet and the work presently under discussion in the last year: I found the Opera more to my taste but…

Delius, for me, is an Interesting Historical Figure but isn’t a Great Composer.

The parallel with Debussy, Delius’s almost exact contemporary, is very instructive, particularly as Deryck Cooke’s 1962 vindication refers to the formal accomplishments of the two composers as if they were comparable achievements. While there are obvious similarities in that both arrive at their own version of post-Wagner chromaticism, I feel Debussy never lets the listener down in finding a perfect form for his ideas, or descends into aimlessness. Cooke anchors his thesis with a very persuasive analysis of Delius' Violin Concerto, which I love and consider one of his most successful works, so it appears i'm a semi-convert, after all. Hooray !

When considering the formal aspects of a piece of music, I always remember the "innocent ear" precept of Deryck Cooke's friend and colleague Bob Simpson, who maintained that a listener without any formal analytical musical training should be able hear and feel intuitively whether a composition succeeds in providing a sense of its inevitability. Being untrained in this aspect, for instance, I find this in spades in a piece such as La Mer, or Sibelius's 7th, despite having little idea of how these two geniuses did it. Perhaps comparisons are odorous, but Delius doesn't really come close.

[Master Jacques]

When considering the formal aspects of a piece of music, I always remember the "innocent ear" precept of Deryck Cooke's friend and colleague Bob Simpson, who maintained that a listener without any formal analytical musical training should be able hear and feel intuitively whether a composition succeeds in providing a sense of its inevitability. Being untrained in this aspect, for instance, I find this in spades in a piece such as La Mer, or Sibelius's 7th, despite having little idea of how these two geniuses did it. Perhaps comparisons are odorous, but Delius doesn't really come close.

I'm all for "innocent ear" hearings, in the Simpson mode.

There's only a problem, when we try to use our minds to impose somebody else's musical template over what we're hearing. As I've said before, the comparatively conventional Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto of Delius do use more familiar structures, but generally we'll resist him if we're trying to listen in "modified sonata form mode".

As with Takemitsu, I think it helps to listen vertically to Delius's music, for what's going on in the moment - rather than horizontally, to attempt to force it to progress in time. That's the only way to be fair to his best music, and Deryk Cooke was quite right to view Debussy's and Delius's achievements as (I would say) incomparable but at similar artistic levels.

Personally, I never ever get tired of either of them, but they could hardly be more different in many ways.

[oliver sudden]

Being untrained in this aspect, for instance, I find this in spades in a piece such as La Mer, or Sibelius's 7th, despite having little idea of how these two geniuses did it. Perhaps comparisons are odorous, but Delius doesn't really come close.

I am not untrained in this sort of thing and I know no theoretical explanation for why La Mer’s form in particular sounds so magically inevitable. But it absolutely does. (On the other hand I don’t know if even Debussy managed to pull it off to quite that extent anywhere else. Not even Nocturnes is quite on that level.)

[Maclintick]

I am not untrained in this sort of thing and I know no theoretical explanation for why La Mer’s form in particular sounds so magically inevitable. But it absolutely does. (On the other hand I don’t know if even Debussy managed to pull it off to quite that extent anywhere else. Not even Nocturnes is quite on that level.)

Pelleas ? Currently listening to the Prom, where Tchaikovsky, an incontestably great composer, is failing to persuade me to concentrate on his second piano concerto with any attention as it is so boring. Seems he feels he has to be in competition with Liszt, whose concertos I could adequately dispense with, but with the proviso that I find the B minor Sonata and the Années de Pelérinage indispensable..

This cultist approach, where, if you don’t view every single composition of your favourite as exceptional in every aspect, then you must be in somewhere lacking, does neither composers nor listeners any favours.

[Roger Webb]

I am not untrained in this sort of thing and I know no theoretical explanation for why La Mer’s form in particular sounds so magically inevitable. But it absolutely does. (On the other hand I don’t know if even Debussy managed to pull it off to quite that extent anywhere else. Not even Nocturnes is quite on that level.)

No, there is no explanation, the work is sui generis, as is the best of Delius....and in works such as An Arabesque, Sea Drift and In a Summer Garden the 'form' is dictated by the work itself. Theory cannot hope to explain why masterpieces like La Mer and those Delius works mentioned are perfect. Theoreticians have always tried to explain 'art' by examining the 'craft' involved in its production. To judge a work's success merely by measuring it against some established norm...of form, say, is to miss the point when confronted with works that don't conform, but generate their own. Such theorists need to read R G Collingwood's Principles of Art.

[edashtav]

No, there is no explanation, the work is sui generis, as is the best of Delius....and in works such as An Arabesque, Sea Drift and In a Summer Garden the 'form' is dictated by the work itself. Theory cannot hope to explain why masterpieces like La Mer and those Delius works mentioned are perfect. Theoreticians have always tried to explain 'art' by examining the 'craft' involved in its production. To judge a work's success merely by measuring it against some established norm...of form, say, is to miss the point when confronted with works that don't conform, but generate their own. Such theorists need to read R G Collingwood's Principles of Art.

… as is the best of Delius...well, lobbing a live grenade like that should blow heads of the legless, doubting Thomas’s to smithereens.
Freeform rules, O.K!

[Maclintick]

No, there is no explanation, the work is sui generis, as is the best of Delius....and in works such as An Arabesque, Sea Drift and In a Summer Garden the 'form' is dictated by the work itself. Theory cannot hope to explain why masterpieces like La Mer and those Delius works mentioned are perfect. Theoreticians have always tried to explain 'art' by examining the 'craft' involved in its production. To judge a work's success merely by measuring it against some established norm...of form, say, is to miss the point when confronted with works that don't conform, but generate their own. Such theorists need to read R G Collingwood's Principles of Art.

I'm not a musical theorist or analyst, but I've internalised the contributions of powerful communicators whose opinions I imbibed on R3 in my youth -- Deryck Cooke, Hans Keller, Anthony Hopkins et al -- trusted guides of yore, if you like. Clearly not up-to-speed in terms of today's academic analyses, but as these are invariably opaque to non-specialists, I'll have to admit ignorance on whether this-or-that flavour of analytical approach holds any meaning for the majority of that despised species "music-lovers" .
FWIW, I've yet heard a Delius composition which comes near any of Debussy's from La Demoiselle Élue onwards -- & I do enjoy much of FD's oeuvre.

[Master Jacques]

I'm not a musical theorist or analyst, but I've internalised the contributions of powerful communicators whose opinions I imbibed on R3 in my youth -- Deryck Cooke, Hans Keller, Anthony Hopkins et al -- trusted guides of yore, if you like. Clearly not up-to-speed in terms of today's academic analyses, but as these are invariably opaque to non-specialists, I'll have to admit ignorance on whether this-or-that flavour of analytical approach holds any meaning for the majority of that despised species "music-lovers" .
FWIW, I've yet heard a Delius composition which comes near any of Debussy's from La Demoiselle Élue onwards -- & I do enjoy much of FD's oeuvre.

Delius would doubtless take it as a great compliment that he was nowhere near La Damoiselle élue, as he heartily despised such soppy, Pre-Raphaelite high jinks! He was a hard man and a harder artist.

At the risk of repeating myself, it is a question of how you're listening, don't you think? Delius's Requiem and his late opera Fennimore and Gerda do different things, in ways which Debussy could never have attempted. Surely it should be possible for "music-lovers" to appreciate two such radically different composers, without resorting to league tables?

You might give Paul Guinery's book a try: he analyses Delius's music without jargon, in a way you might appreciate. And it might open some half-closed doors for you.

[Roger Webb]

I'm not a musical theorist or analyst, but I've internalised the contributions of powerful communicators whose opinions I imbibed on R3 in my youth -- Deryck Cooke, Hans Keller, Anthony Hopkins et al -- trusted guides of yore, if you like. Clearly not up-to-speed in terms of today's academic analyses, but as these are invariably opaque to non-specialists, I'll have to admit ignorance on whether this-or-that flavour of analytical approach holds any meaning for the majority of that despised species "music-lovers" .
FWIW, I've yet heard a Delius composition which comes near any of Debussy's from La Demoiselle Élue onwards -- & I do enjoy much of FD's oeuvre.

I suddenly wonder why we are comparing these two incomparable composers?....because, superficially they appear similar I suppose: contemporaries; both what is loosely termed 'Impressionist'; both outside the establishment to some extent.

Their paths did cross (not to mention their swords!) in Paris, but they hardly knew each other: Delius in his early years in Paris, sociable, having many friends amongst both musicians...Fauré, Messager, Ravel, and artists......Rodin, Gauguin, Munch.....Debussy, much more insular.

I love both, and have spent half a lifetime studying and listening to their music, and, to me, to even ask the question which one is the better is irrelevant and quite painful. I can think of no works from the earliest by Debussy or Delius that it would be useful to compare....for a start Delius wrote almost no piano music - although the Five Preludes are almost Debussian! The scope of Delius's songs are far wider than Debussy's, encompassing more 'national' styles. Debussy's Verlaine settings are incomparable, Delius's, charming and beguiling (it was over these, swords were crossed!).

Did Delius write anything 'like' La Mer? No. It's hard to imagine that Delius hadn't heard Prélude à l''aprés midi before he composed In a Summer Garden, but Delius denied he had. Which one's 'best'? I can't tell you! Which father can say which child he loves more?!

One area where Delius excelled, and Debussy hardly dipped a toe, is in choral works. What are Debussy's equivalents to Song of the High Hills, Sea Drift, Appalachia, Songs of Sunset, Requiem, Mass of Life!

Chalk and cheese?........Wensleydale and Brie, perhaps!

[Master Jacques]

No, there is no explanation, the work is sui generis, as is the best of Delius....and in works such as An Arabesque, Sea Drift and In a Summer Garden the 'form' is dictated by the work itself. Theory cannot hope to explain why masterpieces like La Mer and those Delius works mentioned are perfect. Theoreticians have always tried to explain 'art' by examining the 'craft' involved in its production. To judge a work's success merely by measuring it against some established norm...of form, say, is to miss the point when confronted with works that don't conform, but generate their own. Such theorists need to read R G Collingwood's Principles of Art.

Hear, hear! I suppose the problem some listeners have with Delius is that in letting content dictate form to the extent he does, he was bound occasionally to come a cropper. But even his failures are more fascinating than some other composers' "successes". Quality control is for accountants, not artists. It can sometimes be a limitation. Measurement - especially against established norms - blinds us to what's there, in focusing us on what isn't.

I was studying his early and almost unknown The Magic Fountain lately, for a couple of writing/speaking projects, and was amazed to find how much was there, provided I put aside my own limited ideas of "how an opera should go". Wexford are reviving it in October, and I'm fascinated to see how it does. Not fascinated to read the reviews, though, as we know what they'll say ("it's not as good as Siegfried" - well, ladies and gentlemen, it's not trying to be!)

[Roger Webb]

Hear, hear! I suppose the problem some listeners have with Delius is that in letting content dictate form to the extent he does, he was bound occasionally to come a cropper. But even his failures are more fascinating than some other composers' "successes". Quality control is for accountants, not artists. It can sometimes be a limitation. Measurement - especially against established norms - blinds us to what's there, in focusing us on what isn't.

I was studying his early and almost unknown The Magic Fountain lately, for a couple of writing/speaking projects, and was amazed to find how much was there, provided I put aside my own limited ideas of "how an opera should go". Wexford are reviving it in October, and I'm fascinated to see how it does. Not fascinated to read the reviews, though, as we know what they'll say ("it's not as good as Siegfried" - well, ladies and gentlemen, it's not trying to be!).

No, but they might say it's trying to be Tristan und Isolde!

Thanks for your support above.....whew! Hard being a Delian sometimes.......and I agree about Paul Guinery (and Lee-Brown's excellent Delius and His Music.

[Master Jacques]

... whew! Hard being a Delian sometimes.......

Indeed so. But my goodness, he's worth it!