Armstrong Gibbs (1889-1960)
Symphony (No. 1) in E, Op. 70 (1931-32)
Symphony No. 3 in B flat, Op. 104 "Westmorland "
(1944)
Armstrong Gibbs (he always hated his first given name,
Cecil) was one of the most prolific of his generation of British composers, but
since his death on 12 May 1960 has become one of the most neglected. His small
surviving reputation is based on a mere handful from his nearly 200 songs (a
selection are on Marco Polo 8.223458), but he also wrote operas, incidental
music, a great many choral works ranging from small unaccompanied pieces,
through a long series of secular and sacred cantatas with orchestra, to the
hour-long choral symphony 'Odysseus', instrumental and chamber music
including at least a dozen string quartets, and orchestral music embracing
symphonic poems, concertos, numerous light music suites, and the two full-scale
symphonies recorded here for the first time.
He was born on 10 August 1889 in Great Baddow, Essex. The
family was prosperous - his father was chairman of a thriving family business -
but Armstrong's mother died when he was two, and the boy was brought up in a
rambling 17th century country mansion by five aunts who took it in turns to
keep house for the widower. When still a tiny boy he evinced precocious musical
gifts including an acute sense of perfect pitch - sitting under the grand piano
out of sight of the keyboard he could name correctly all the notes of a chord,
from the top down or the bottom up. These gifts did not get much stimulation at
'The Wick', the prep school near Brighton where he was sent at the age of 10,
nor at Winchester, for which he gained a scholarship three years later. In his
last year at the College, however, he formed with his friend Steuart Wilson a
small choir which soon attained a high enough standard to give eagerly-attended
monthly recitals.
Both went up to Cambridge, Gibbs to Trinity College where he
read history and subsequently music, taking his B. Mus. in 1913. Enduring
musical friendships were formed, notably with Vaughan Williams, and Edward
Dent, who taught him composition, and through whom he also came into contact
with Busoni. Gibbs had been writing music since his schooldays, but such
manuscripts as he had submitted to publishers had been returned, and he lacked
the means to sustain himself while forging a composing career. He was thus
forced to seek employment when his university years came to an end - though
saved, ironically, from martyrdom in the trenches (World War 1 was already
underway) by his delicate health. He became a schoolmaster, from 1915 back at
'The Wick', and gradually he resigned himself to the classroom as the walls of
his future. In 1919, however, a chance to switch to a full-time musical career
came his way, and he took it. Gibbs was asked to organize a retirement
celebration for the departing headmaster, and decided on a play with music,
composed by himself. For the text he turned to Walter de la Mare, who he had
never met but whose verse he admired intensely, having already set some to
music. De la Mare agreed to write the play, and two months later a script
called Crossings arrived (four of Gibbs' song-settings from it are
performed by Nik and Rosemary Hancock-Child on Marco Polo 8.223458).
Gibbs' score was for flute, string quartet and piano, and as
he wished to play the latter part himself, a conductor had to be found. Edward
Dent had taken a lively interest in the project, and on the morning of the
first rehearsal, ushered in a tall, thin young man. His name was Adrian Boult.
The performance was highly successful, but the real import for Gibbs came
immediately after. Boult was so impressed by the music that he not only urged
Gibbs to make music his career, but with characteristic generosity offered to
pay, from his own pocket, a year's tuition fees for composition classes with
Vaughan Williams and conducting from himself, at the Royal College of Music.
The financial risks were considerable, and Gibbs' decision
was not made easier by the fact that he now had a young family. However, with
his wife's encouragement, he took the plunge, and was rewarded with almost
immediate success. Within a year he had won the Arthur Sullivan Composition
Prize, had two string quartets played in London, and an orchestral Crossings
Suite included in a Henry Wood Prom. In 1920 he completed his studies at
the RCM and was promptly offered and accepted a teaching post there, remaining
on the College's staff until 1939. Two important stage commissions came his way
at the same time: music for the 1921 Cambridge Greek Play, and for the West End
premiere of Maeterlinck's The Betrothed, sequel to the celebrated Blue
Bird. More stage collaborations followed in 1923 and 1924: with A.P.
Herbert on The Blue Peter - which won a Carnegie Award - and a play
entitled Midsummer Madness by Clifford Bax, brother of the composer
Arnold Bax. And distinguished collaborations were not confined to the stage. In
1923 he wrote an Oboe Concerto for Leon Goossens, who gave the first
performance in 1927.
In 1922 Gibbs founded the Danbury Choral Society - an
involvement which ended only with his death in 1960 - and, following his
choir's entry for the 1923 Essex Festival, he joined the executive of the Essex
Musical Association. This in turn led to a close involvement with the Festival
Movement, not only as an extremely active and well-known adjudicator for nearly
30 years and Vice-President of the British Federation of Music Festivals from
1937-1952, but also the composer of a great deal of (as the New Grove
Dictionary puts it) 'utility music' for choirs and amateur orchestras. He
became, in fact, a pillar of British musical orthodoxy, with an increasing
distaste for modernism, and it is hardly surprising that when anew and very
different musical establishment came to the fore in the 1960s - symbolised, perhaps,
by William Glock's regime at the Proms - much of the music that typified its
predecessor was swept out of earshot.
It is also worth observing that the organizational and
compositional duties of Gibbs' official positions probably did little for the flowering
of his original muse, though equally one should not imagine him a frustrated
genius. For all that he stood for overtly 'wholesome', 'decent' and 'healthy'
values in his art and life, (as stated unequivocally in his unpublished
autobiography 'Common Time') - a 'small c' conservatism whose very terms of
reference and vocabulary must seem anachronistic and laughable to many today - he
was in fact a sensitive, often unwell, insecure, highly gifted, and utterly
sincere man whose niche suited much of his creative personality perfectly. What
he might have achieved with a less publicly busy life is signalled, perhaps, in
his symphonies - by far the most substantial and ambitious of those works
seemingly not written to any kind of 'order'.
'The New Grove' lists three orchestral symphonies by
Armstrong Gibbs: a 'No. 1', No. 2 in E, and, No. 3 in B flat, Westmorland. The
latter is indeed so numbered on its score, but the manuscript of the Symphony
in E is headed just that, without number, and in the absence of any evidence
for the earlier 'No. 1', it seems safe to dismiss that as a cataloguing error
and regard the present work as Gibbs' First, the 'official' No. 3 status of the
Westmorland being explained if we assume that Gibbs privately regarded
the unnumbered choral Odysseus, composed in 1938, as his 'Second
Symphony'.
Gibbs' reputation as a miniaturist whose talent most readily
responded to the challenge of word-setting has almost certainly militated
against his large-scale abstract works being taken up - or even taken seriously
at all - but the undoubted confidence with which he tackled the ultimate
musical challenge of the symphony when he began what we should now call
Symphony No. 1 in E in September 1931 becomes somewhat less surprising given
that the long series of string quartets which both pre- and post-dated it
rendered him no stranger to 'pure music'. One of the former (in E, op. 18,
1918) achieved a Carnegie Prize, whilst one of the latter (in A, op. 73, 1933)
the Cobbett Gold Medal for Chamber Music. (This work even managed to get a
complete recording on 78s by the Griller Quartet.)
The Symphony was completed in May 1932 and had its first
performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult in a broadcast on
29 October the same year. Such was Gibbs' then eminence that it rated a review
to itself in The Times two days later, which described it as 'a work of
spontaneous vigour as well as of the lyrical beauty that one would expect from
so sensitive a songwriter... While it makes free use of passing dissonance and
psychologically expresses a frame of mind that is consonant with the temper of
the times, it is founded in tradition. It is modern in that it indulges no
grand manner, but goes directly to its point...' Rather more questionably in the
current politically correct climate, the review went on to opine that 'it is
English in that it equally avoids Teutonic long-windedness, Gallic niggling,
and Celtic obscurity.' A year after the premiere it had its first public
performance under the composer's baton in Bournemouth, where it was again give
in 1939, but there seem to have been no subsequent performances until the
present recording.
Gibbs' credentials as a natural symphonic thinker are most
impressively demonstrated by the first movement, an elaborate sonata-rondo
marked Allegro con fuoco. There are no 'big tunes', but an array of
trenchant motives that go to work from the first bar (though the 'con fuoco'
remains well-mannered by the side even of the work's British
contemporaries). The first subject group is introduced by a decisive trumpet
motif [1/1], elements of which are immediately explored by woodwinds and
strings. Contrast comes with a wistful second subject melody on oboe [1/2]; a
solo violin enters - cousin to Vaughan Williams' 'Lark' - rhapsodizing over the
oboe melody now transferred to cor anglais. Renewed determination comes over
the music; the strings stride purposefully downwards and then up to a dissonant
climax where a decisive modulation precipitates the development. This, however,
begins with a new fanfaring figure in the trumpets [1/3], followed by a steely scalic
ascent of trombones against descending horns. Woodwind and strings again
converse, and a particularly striking development of the first subject comes on
solo flute [1/4], which later is recapitulated with a gentle jazz inflection.
The Poco lento e semplice slow movement [2/1]
is a far simpler structure (indeed the pattern of a complex first movement
succeeded by progressively simpler ones is characteristic of all three of Gibbs'
symphonies). Dreamy, rocking, slightly Delian chords in muted strings alternate
with a wayward flute melody which later gets passed between the other woodwind.
This exchange gives way to a strong, modally inclined statement [2/2] that
functions rather like a ritornello. An un-muted solo string quartet enters, and
the remainder of the movement is built upon alternations of these elements,
amongst which fragments of the first movement's second subject appear on an
oboe.
The Allegro con brio scherzo [3] is a
will-o'-the-wisp affair, with groups of brief motifs tossed from instrumental
family to instrumental family with an almost Ravelian insouciance. There is
barely a hint of a trio section and no formal restatement of the scherzo
material. Structurally the finale is even simpler. The symphony's cyclic
credentials are established by both the Lento introduction to the
movement [4/1] and the succeeding Tempo di marcia solenne [4/2] being
based on the first movement's principal themes. This latter half of the
movement, somewhat like a junior cross between Vaughan Williams' 'Hunger march'
in the finale of his London Symphony, and Respighi's Roman legions
tramping up the Appian Way, comes to a triumphant conclusion with a new, bold
melody.
For all its clever thematic interplay (not to mention
crystal-clear if 'safe' scoring which certainly does not sound like the work of
a stranger to the orchestra), this symphony is an emotionally neutral,
objective work - emphatic not the case with its successor. The Symphony in E is
the work of a securely-employed musician living in a comfortable home on his
native territory. By the time Gibbs came to compose his Symphony No. 3 Westmorland,
he and his family were evacuees in the Lake District - refugees, virtually,
from the comfortable home now requisitioned for war purposes - with an income
by no means secure, and stricken by wartime tragedy. Their son David had been
killed in action on 18 November 1943, and it is impossible not to feel that
this eloquent and moving work - perhaps Armstrong Gibbs' masterpiece, and
certainly his most considerable purely orchestral composition, though written
for a slightly smaller orchestra than the Symphony in E -is music both of
mourning and of consolation.
The first movement (headed 'I will lift up mine eyes')
begins with a 44-bar Moderato introduction [5/1] which nevertheless has
a numbed funereal quality, with quiet drumbeats and rolls underlying a climbing
figure on horns and trombones, full of foreboding. Timpani crescendo to a decisive
thump on the dominant, F, and an accelerando for the full orchestra unleashes
the Allegro Deciso first subject [5/2], which unfolds purposefully until
it slows and cadences into D flat major for a long (18-bar) second subject
melody [5/3] of great beauty and immediacy, introduced on the cellos. So
memorable is it, indeed, that from here on its influence permeates the movement
and indeed the remainder of the Symphony - not so much in a strictly thematic
way (though it does come back literally at the end of the work), but as an
emotional centre of gravity , an idealised place to be, to which the work
strives to return. The melody is repeated, with richer orchestration, but its
circular structure necessitates a huge effort to tear away from it and move into
the development [5/4] of full. The first subject group lends itself to
extension by overlapping entries, fruitful dismemberment, and redistribution
amongst the orchestra; after a pause, the big tune comes back, but only its
opening phrase, as a kind of feint. A passage of rushing strings seem to herald
its full restatement, but instead sidesteps into a recapitulation of the first
subject [5/5] - but of course then the second subject, in full, pealing panoply
[5/6]. There is a general pause, and the music collapses back into the mood of
the opening, a hushed postlude that dies away in the same muffled drumbeats.
Westmorland is a potent reaction to wartime peril,
personal loss, and natural beauty, but the Lento second movement
[6/1] is the only one inspired by a specific place in the Lake District. After
introductory exchanges on horns and woodwind, 'Cartmel Fell' is evoked first by
an eloquent principal subject on divided lower strings (its opening descending
quavers borrowed from the first movement big tune); then a cooler, questioning
second motif first heard on a solo oboe [6/2], and finally a rather Elgarian
third main idea [6/3] whose passionate intensity erupts like a crag through the
surrounding sylvan beauty at each appearance.
Gibbs specifically labels his Vivace con fuoco third
movement, 'Weathers', a scherzo, though again there is no formal ABA
structure with a central trio. Bold opening timpani [7/1] introduce a string of
vigorous, short-lived ideas. A swinging, singing violin tune [7/2] is the
closest thing the movement has to a trio, but rather than leading to a
restatement of the opening material (though the solo timps do return), it keeps
the lion's share of the end of the movement to itself.
The finale [8/1], entitled 'The Lake', is another slow
movement: 'A day of early June, without cloud or mist. At my feet the water
lies mistily blue.' For this vision Gibbs dispenses with tuba, trumpets,
triangle, and cymbals throughout, and trombones apart from a few bars near the
end. Oscillating thirds in clarinets frame the picture. A long main theme, unmistakeably
consolatory in mood, emerges on oboe; a pause, and then a solo violin picks up the
melody. Another pause, and then the cellos introduce what at first seems like
anew idea but then transforms itself into an unmistakeable reminiscence of the
first movement second subject. Like a recalled chain of thought, ominousness
returns with tolling timpani, and then the clouds part to reveal the finale's main
theme now on violins [8/2], the oscillating thirds transferred to violas. The
first movement melody returns, darkened by trombones, and then the timpani, but
at the last the solo violin soars clearly aloft into the June sky.
Though Gibbs' superscription is unambiguous, the end of the
finale is marked 'Finished "ad majorem Dei gloriam" Windermere November 4th 1944'. The catharsis had taken almost a year to arrive at creative fruition.
The first performance came relatively quickly, by BBC forces at Manchester on 23 August 1945, but apart from one further BBC performance, at Glasgow in 1956, the
Symphony seems not to have been heard again until the present recording. The
large audience that exists for the music of his greater mentor, Vaughan
Williams - probably overlapping a good deal with that which has eagerly seized
upon their younger contemporary , George Lloyd - will now surely take it to
their hearts.
© 1994 David J. Brown
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland
The RTE Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1947 as part of
the Radio and Television service in Ireland. With its membership coming from France,
Germany, Britain, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Russia, it drew together a rich
blend of European culture. Apart from its many symphony concerts, the orchestra
came to world-wide attention with its participation in the famous Wexford Opera
Festival, an event broadcast in many parts of the world. The orchestra now
enjoys the facilities of a fine new concert hall in central Dublin where it
performs with the world's leading conductors and soloists. In 1990 the RTE
Symphony Orchestra was augmented and renamed the National Symphony Orchestra of
Ireland, quickly establishing itself as one of Europe's most adventurous
orchestras with programmes featuring many twentieth century compositions. The
orchestra has now embarked upon an extensive recording project for the Naxos
and Marco Polo labels and will record music by Nielsen, Tchaikovsky, Goldmark, Rachmaninov,
Brian and Scriabin.
Andrew Penny
Andrew Penny was born in the East coast English city of Hull
and initially studied clarinet at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester,
where he also worked as a conductor with the Opera Unit. The newly established
Rothschild Scholarship in Conducting led to study with Sir Charles Groves and
Timothy Reynish and work as assistant conductor with Sir Charles Groves,
Richard Hickox and Elgar Howarth. Winner
of the prestigious Ricordi Conducting Prize, he achieved his first major
success when he conducted the Vaughan Williams opera Riders to the Sea at
Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. In 1982 he became conductor of the Hull
Philharmonic Orchestra and has appeared with many orchestras, including the BBC
Philharmonic and the Ulster Orchestra.