Great Conductors: Sir Thomas Beecham
Delius
The earliest contact that Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-
1961) had with the music of Delius came in 1907, when
the conductor first made the composer’s acquaintance
and then heard his Appalachia at a concert in London.
Electrified by musical sounds that he considered ‘unlike
any other’, he immediately began his own investigation
of the scores and, with his initial impressions
substantiated, within a year had performed Paris, Brigg
Fair, Appalachia, Sea Drift and Over the Hills and Far
Away. During the next half-century he explored
incomparably all the music of Delius’s best period
(1900-15) as well as other pieces outside it which
sufficiently appealed to him, using his personal
magnetism and authority to promote it in concert-halls
all over the world. He staged three of the six operas,
unearthed and edited early and forgotten pieces,
arranged others and recorded much of the Delius canon
as many as two or three times as recording techniques
advanced and were able to do greater justice to its
magical sound-world. Towards the end of his life he
began editing a model edition of the scores, and he
completed a full-scale biography of the composer.
The pieces contained on this disc were all recorded
between 1946-52, some at the time of the second Delius
Festival that Beecham organized in London in October-
November 1946. The Festival was longer and grander
than the previous one he had arranged (1929) and it
coincided with the founding of his last orchestra, the
Royal Philharmonic, which actually made its London
début at the Festival. In parallel with the concerts he
began the systematic recording of much of the
repertoire that had been heard at them. The recording
dates show that Marche Caprice and Brigg Fair were
both captured at this time, and On hearing the First
Cuckoo in Spring begun (though it was not completed
until later).
Marche Caprice is the earliest Delius music to be
heard on this disc. It dates from 1889-90 and is the third
of a suite of three pieces entitled Morceaux
Caractéristiques, all typical of the 28-year old Delius’s
formative style. It had not been performed before
Beecham rescued it for inclusion in his 1946 festival.
Over the Hills and Far Away is another early piece
(1897), though a more substantial one, and for this
Beecham had a special fondness that extended to
recording it altogether three times at various stages of
his career. He described it as ‘an actively and at times a
vigorously happy sort of piece’, pointing out that with
Delius, whereas serene contentment or lively impulse
informed most of his music, the two moods rarely
coincided in the same piece.
The next music in order of composition is Brigg
Fair (An English Rhapsody), completed in 1907. Delius
was introduced to the folk-song that gives the work its
title by his friend, the Australian composer and pianist
Percy Grainger, a hugely enthusiastic and inveterate
folk-song collector, who had come across it in the
Lincolnshire town of Brigg during his travels and set it
himself for unaccompanied male voices. In Delius’s
score the tune is heard on the oboe, after an atmospheric
‘scene-setting’ introduction involving flute, clarinet and
harp supported by horns and strings, and developed in
varied orchestration before giving way to a magical
interlude featuring a long slow string melody; then the
folk-song is subjected to further harmonic and rhythmic
changes, and a huge climax is built up before the music
finally dies away into silence.
If the inspiration for Brigg Fair came from
England, it was to Norway and the music of its greatest
composer that Delius turned when conceiving On
hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. After they met in
1887, Delius became Edvard Grieg’s closest English
acquaintance and they enjoyed a friendship of almost
twenty years, broken only by Grieg’s death in 1907. In
1912 Delius alighted on a Norwegian melody, ‘In Ola
Valley, in Ola Dale’, which the older composer had
introduced many years earlier in his Norwegian Folk-
Tunes, Op. 66: Delius acknowledged his own usage in
the inscription ‘Introducing a Norwegian Folk Song’
which appears at the head of his score. A curious feature
of Beecham’s record is the fact that the two 78rpm sides
were recorded two years apart. This came about
because, having recorded both parts of it in October
1946, he remade the second side in the December; but
then he decided that he also wanted to repeat the first
side, and for one reason or another the new attempt was
not made until May 1948. By this time several key
players in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra had
changed and the orchestral balance in the studio was
different: the most obvious aural difference is in the
clarinet’s ‘cuckoo’ calls, which are much more
prominent as heard from Jack Brymer on side one
(before the record turned over at 3’43”) than afterwards
from Reginald Kell.
The first of Delius’s two Dance Rhapsodies dates
from a little earlier (1908-9). As in Brigg Fair there is
an orchestral prelude to set the scene, in this case
featuring soulful meanderings by the bass oboe. A
peremptory gesture from the full orchestra dismisses it,
however, and then from the oboe is heard an original
tune (labelled ‘bewitching’ by Arthur Hutchings, one of
Delius’s biographers) upon which Delius bases a set of
variations employing the full orchestra. These
culminate in a most glorious rhapsody for solo violin
(played by David McCallum, leader of the RPO at the
time) over muted string harmonies; the voice of the bass
oboe is heard again before the piece whirls to a decisive
conclusion.
Mention of the bass oboe in Delius’s score recalls
the singular occasion of the work’s first performance, in
1909, which Delius himself conducted. Though
Beecham was not present, he subsequently pieced
together the string of unfortunate circumstances that
befell the hapless composer, describing them in his
autobiography A Mingled Chime in a style that has
made it a classic of Delian literature. Beginning by
suggesting that Delius was perhaps a little unwise to
incorporate into his score ‘an instrument which, like
Lucy, there were few to praise and very few to love’,
Beecham described how Delius had further accepted the
services of a young lady player of the instrument of
semi-amateur status who had volunteered at short notice
to see what she could do with it. ‘Now the bass oboe’,
Beecham went on, ‘is to be endured only if manipulated
with supreme cunning and control … a perfect breath
control is the essential requisite for keeping it well in
order, and this alone can obviate the eruption of sounds
that would arouse attention even in a circus. As none of
these safety-first precautions had been taken, the public,
which had assembled … in anticipation of some pensive
and poetical effort from the most discussed composer of
the day, was confounded by the frequent audition of
noises that resembled nothing so much as the painful
endeavour of an anguished mother-duck to effect the
speedy evacuation of an abnormally large-sized egg …’
Though he was born in England, Delius was of
German parentage. It was supposed that he would
graduate into the family wool business which his father
had established in Bradford, but he soon turned to music
and went his own way, living virtually the whole of the
rest of his life in France. Thirty years after the break
with England he was inspired to recall in music the
Yorkshire where he had spent his formative years. His
North Country Sketches consists of four movements,
three of which are graphic nature studies depicting
autumn, winter and spring in that part of the world,
while the fourth is a seemingly unconnected ‘dance’ (a
dance of the spirit, in the opinion of the composer’s
amanuensis Eric Fenby, ‘as if only with thoughts of
recurring spring can the heart in winter exult in dance’).
Beecham introduced the work in 1915: always the most
acutely sensitive interpreter of Delius’s music he
immediately perceived the change in the composer’s
direction (which was to be confirmed by the few
remaining orchestral works that came from Delius’s pen
before blindness and paralysis overtook him, notably
the orchestral ballad Eventyr with its stark imagery of
trolls and demons); at the same time, Beecham could
not help regretting the loss of the intimate moods of
earlier works such as Brigg Fair and In a Summer
Garden, suspecting that the spirit that had animated
them had gone for ever.
When Beecham made his only commercial
recording of North Country Sketches in 1949 he
interchanged the position of the central movements
Winter Landscape and Dance, presumably because the
changed order suited the layout of the 78rpm sides
better. The present reissue conforms to all other reissues
subsequent to the 78s in following the order of the
printed score.
Lyndon Jenkins