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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s Box of Delights

22 Monday Dec 2014

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Birmingham Town Hall, Carol Symphony, CBSO, Christmas, Leslie Heward, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Wolverhampton

So here it is, Merry Christmas, and we have it on unimpeachable authority that everybody is having fun. Forgive me: I lived in Wolverhampton for eight years (well, it was good enough for Percy Young) and Noddy Holder is like a god there.

I’m not the world’s greatest fan of seasonal pop music. But I am, however, a fan of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony – a work with a deep connection to the English Midlands, and not just through its association with successive dramatisations of The Box of Delights. Here’s a blogpost I wrote in 2009 about the music and its (largely forgotten) composer. When it was first published I was delighted to receive a charming and kindly email from the composer’s then-78 year old son Christopher, who was living in Ludlow. Hopefully he still is. Happy Christmas!


Hely-Hutchinson

Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-1947)

When I was 11, my younger sister and I were both captivated by the BBC’s TV adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. She liked the fantastic story, and the Christmassy atmosphere; I liked the steam trains. But one thing that we both loved, and which seemed to capture the whole wintry magic of the thing, was the signature tune – which we could tell, even then, was “proper” music, not just a typical children’s TV theme (this being the early 1980s, the lack of synthesizers was the giveaway). Here’s that title sequence in full (warning, unseasonably noisy Youtube advert may play first!).

I asked my father if he knew what it was – not realising that a pre-war radio dramatisation of The Box of Delights, with the same music, had become a seasonal classic for an earlier generation. Or that my father – at much the same age – had asked exactly the same question. He pulled out a Classics for Pleasure LP with a snowy landscape on the cover. The piece on it was called Carol Symphony, and the composer was Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

Carol Symphony cover 1

Sleeve art the way it used to be.

The record-sleeve told us that he’d been born on Boxing Day 1901, and had been Regional Director of Music for the BBC in Birmingham. It wasn’t very easy to find out much more back then, but it is now, and for the full story, there’s an excellent online biography by his son John. In short, Christian Victor Hely-Hutchinson was born in Cape Town, studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford and Donald Tovey, and at the age of 12 played a Mozart piano concerto with the LSO. In 1933 he landed the Birmingham job, and rapidly involved himself with every part of the city’s musical life – not least the 13-year old City of Birmingham Orchestra and its then music director Leslie Heward.

Hely-Hutchinson never held an official post with the CBO – but he was a tireless supporter of the Orchestra throughout the 1930s and 40s. The CBSO’s performance record-cards from that period are dotted with the initials VHH – indicating that he’d written the programme notes for a particular work. He gave pre-concert lectures (he took a doctorate in 1941, though he’d held the Chair of Music at Birmingham University since 1934). He appeared as piano soloist with the orchestra, notably in Mozart concertos, and in 1944 he performed his own rhapsody The Young Idea (intriguingly subtitled “cum grano salis”) with George Weldon conducting. It’s recently been recorded by Dutton.

And he did it all with consummate professionalism. The CBO’s manager Gerald Forty (of the piano-makers Dale, Forty) remembered that:

His quiet confidence was most reassuring. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at my desk. He knocks out a half-smoked pipe, his inseparable companion: fills it, lights it, takes a few puffs – finds it won’t draw – scrapes it out, refills it, wastes more matches – and so on da capo. While my ashtrays were being filled, his mind was concentrated on the matter at hand, and with a remarkable economy of words, he stated his views and recommended a solution.

Leslie Heward

Leslie Heward

But it was during wartime that Hely-Hutchinson gave his greatest service to the CBO. In early 1940, while working as a volunteer Air Raid Precaution warden, he performed (from memory!) a complete cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas at the Birmingham and Midland Institute – in aid of Orchestra funds. Meanwhile, he corresponded regularly with Leslie Heward, then recovering in Romsley Sanatorium from the TB which was to kill him just three years later. When Heward died in May 1943, Hely-Hutchinson rallied to the support of the CBO. As Forty recalled:

birminghamtownhall

Birmingham Town Hall in wartime. Hely-Hutchinson took part in ARP fire drills on the roof.

The problem of finding another conductor at short notice and of maintaining a full complement of players with War staring us in the face, was one of extreme perplexity; but Victor solved it by the apparently simple expedient of doing the entire job himself – including the compiling of programmes, rehearsing the orchestra (which he did anonymously and gratuitously for many years), conducting the concerts and dealing efficiently and decisively with the innumerable emergencies…

Hely Hutchinson was initially unconvinced by Heward’s successor, George Weldon, but with typical fair-mindedness was happy to revise his opinion after Weldon had settled into the post a year or so later:

“I want to tell you how right I think you were about George Weldon – and by the same token, I was wrong – eighteen months ago” he wrote to a colleague in June 1944. “As a pure musician, I cannot think him the equal of Leslie, but then, practically nobody is, and some of George’s performances – notably of Mozart – made me feel that he has the root of the matter in him”.

The following year, Hely-Hutchinson was offered the post of Director of Music for the BBC in London, and swapped his home near Droitwich for one in St John’s Wood. But he remained a familiar face in Birmingham music, and there was genuine shock in the city in March 1947 when the news arrived that he had died of pneumonia, aged just 45. The CBO paid its own tribute three weeks later, when Weldon conducted the first performance of Hely-Hutchinson’s recently-completed Symphony for Small Orchestra. (The concert was broadcast, and an incomplete recording survives in the CBSO archive).

Somehow, in this short but full musical life, Hely-Hutchinson found time to compose around 150 original works. The best known (by a country mile) is the Carol Symphony, from 1927, but there’s also an irresistible setting of Old Mother Hubbard “in the style of Handel”, which amusingly skewers the absurdities of baroque vocal style; and two shorter works, the Overture to a Pantomime and The Young Idea. Both have recently been recorded. They all show superb craftsmanship, a masterly ear for orchestral colour and a warm, thoroughly engaging sense of musical humour. They’d all merit an outing in the concert hall.

But the Carol Symphony has never quite left the repertoire (the most recent Birmingham performance was in December 2000). Far more than a mere seasonal medley, it’s actually a lovely and very English folk-song sinfonietta in four movements, in the spirit of Moeran, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland.

It’s packed with good things: the bustling mock-baroque figuration of the first movement (a sort of chorale-prelude on O Come All Ye Faithful), the jazzy, Walton-esque verve of the scherzo (God Rest Ye Merry); splashes of Handel, Elgar, and polytonal Stravinsky; the way Here We Come A-Wassailing trips in on the woodwind as the fugal finale bounds towards its grand, horn-trilling finish. And above all, that slow movement, in which Hely-Hutchinson sets the Coventry Carol to bleak, frozen harmonies that anticipate Vaughan Williams’ Sixth – and then, with dancing harp, muted strings and finally full orchestra, lightens our darkness with the gentlest and most enchanting setting ever made of The First Nowell.

A Box of Delights, indeed. Whatever else we remember him for, in the Carol Symphony Victor Hely-Hutchinson gave us something very special, and enduringly beautiful. Hely-Hutchinson’s CBO colleague and friend Gerald Forty, once more:

The Carol Symphony has become a standard Christmas piece for the City Orchestra: may it long continue to figure in those programmes as a reminder of the well-loved man to whom the City of Birmingham Orchestra and the Birmingham musical public owes so much.


Any copyrighted material is included as “fair use” for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Countertenors and tubas at Lichfield Cathedral

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Birmingham Post, Handel, Lichfield, Lichfield Cathedral, Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, Messiah, Staffordshire Band

Selwyn tomb

This picture comes from the tomb of the 19th century Bishop Selwyn of Lichfield. It’s in the Lady Chapel at Lichfield Cathedral, and this tiled rendering of a pit on the nearby Staffordshire coalfield is the backdrop to a fabulous Victorian confection of stone Gothic tracery, brass lettering and a gleaming, life-sized marble effigy of the great Bishop himself. No-one saw anything odd about putting this image in a mock-Medieval tomb in a real Medieval cathedral. The scene – so recognisable to members of the Bishop’s flock – was part of the flesh and blood of his life and ministry; being truthful, it couldn’t be incongruous. (At the other end of the tomb, similar painted tiles show a Maori war-canoe and tree-ferns – Selwyn spent much of his career in New Zealand).

It came to mind because on Saturday night, Birmingham Post business (and to be honest, a fair bit of personal pleasure) took me to a performance of Part One of Handel’s Messiah by the Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, accompanied by the Staffordshire Brass Band. My review of the performance is here; but even before the night, I was surprised by the way musical friends reacted to the very notion of a brass band accompanying Handel. “Christ, no!” exclaimed one. “This is all wrong” declared another. At which I could only think: how could something wrong, sound so right?

Wasn’t Handel’s music once the staple of amateur ensembles across the UK, performed with enthusiasm by groups of all sizes and skills? Isn’t that still the case – and isn’t that a good thing? Aren’t we glad that performers and listeners feel able to co-opt a great work of art into their own musical lives and traditions? And talking of traditions, haven’t we all now accepted that the brass band movement in this country is our very own, original, “Sistema” – a grass-roots, community-based musical movement capable of producing virtuoso players of international calibre, and an inspiration to composers from Holst to Robert Simpson?

The performance was sincere, the playing bright, precise and wonderfully fresh; I’m ashamed to say that I heard harmonies in the overture that I’d never noticed before. But then, I’ve been a gigging cellist. I know how under-rehearsed scratch string ensembles feel about the annual Messiah with their local choral soc. This was very different.

I’m not saying that I’d always trade a smart, sensitive period-instrument orchestra for a brass band or even a Beecham-esque full symphony orchestra; just that no one performance style or tradition can ever have the final word on a work as limitless as Messiah. Also that it’s not every day you get to hear a really cracking countertenor singing against tenor horns and cornet. Plus, those tubas sounded like they were having the time of their lives. It felt right; it felt real; and I think that’s a feeling that Bishop Selwyn – not to say Handel himself – would have understood.

Seventy-word Season.

15 Monday Dec 2014

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Blurbs, Copywriting, Glazunov, Twitter, Verdi

It’s December, and that means that the annual classical music copywriting season is roaring away from the starting line. I’m a lucky to have a range of great clients, each with distinctive needs and preferences for their promotional copy. No two orchestras or promoters are quite the same, of course, and while some send their annual season brochures to print shortly after Christmas, others work on them right through to Easter.

That suits me fine: it gives me the chance to focus on each client individually, and really get into the swing of their preferred style and length. Some like their text bubbly and informal, others prefer a more specialist tone. Some have space for 100-150 words per concert; others need it all wrapped up in 60 words (copywriters always have to be mindful of the designer’s needs). Increasingly, clients want tweetable summaries too – a whole concert outlined in 140 characters. After writing a few bits of copy, in a certain style and length, it starts to flow – and before you know it you’re even writing Facebook updates and Christmas letters in zippy 70-word paragraphs.

It’s tremendously stimulating work, and it’s a privilege to get a confidential preview of what some of my favourite orchestras and venues are planning over the next twelve months. And it’s enormously rewarding to act as an advocate for some really glorious music-making. To have the chance to persuade thousands of people that they’ll love Glazunov’s The Seasons, to hear what a new conductor has to say about a Beethoven symphony, or to overcome their fears about Schoenberg.

There’s just one downside to writing these “blurbs” (as absolutely everyone ends up calling them). Months later, after the work’s been done and they’re all in print, they have a tendency to draw friendly fire. That’s summed up for me by the national critic who took issue with my 70-word summary of a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Prompted by a friend from the non-classical world who habitually refers to all choral music (whether Tallis, Haydn or Orff) as “the death music”, I’d written that Verdi’s great, pulsing, blood-and-thunder blow-out “isn’t exactly what you expect from religious music”. “Over 40 years I’ve seen every one of Verdi’s operas” huffed this gentleman on Twitter, “and the Requiem IS exactly what I’d expect”.  

But, but (as I tried to cram into 140 characters) that’s the whole thing about blurbs. I know that. You know that. You’ve seen every one of Verdi’s operas, and doubtless a Requiem a year for the last four decades. You don’t need to be told what to expect. In fact, you don’t need a descriptive blurb in a concert brochure or on a website at all. Like many really seasoned concert-goers, you’ll have been able to form a good idea of what to expect from the name of the piece and the listing of the performers alone. No piece of prose, however enthusiastic or erudite (or both) is ever likely to alter the well-informed judgment you’ve made for yourself.

That being the case, dear sir, does it not perhaps occur to you that…it might have been written for someone else?

Tŷ Cerdd: Williams plays Jones

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Alun Hoddinott, Daniel Jones, Dylan Thomas, Fiona Maddocks, Grace Williams, Llyr Williams, The Guardian, Ty Cerdd, Wales, William Mathias, Wrexham

I’m ashamed to say that it took this round-up of the year’s musical “firsts” by Fiona Maddocks to alert me to the existence of this new disc – the label’s first – from Tŷ Cerdd. Any new recording of the music of the remarkable Welsh symphonist Daniel Jones (1912-1993) is good news, as is anything from Llŷr Williams, with whom I’ve twice been privileged to share a concert platform in Wrexham.

Welsh music is unquestionably neglected in the rest of the UK (there are some horribly condescending remarks about it in John Drummond’s otherwise terrific memoir Tainted by Experience) but you’d think that Daniel Jones’s influence on post-war literature, quite apart from his powerful, poetic and fiercely intelligent music, would be enough to make him a figure of UK-wide interest. Apparently not. Let’s hope this leads to a higher profile – wonderful, and fitting too, to see Jones paired with Bartok here.

But anyway, here’s the moment I first discovered and fell in love with Jones’s music: the programme note I wrote for an all-Welsh programme by the Wrexham Symphony Orchestra in 2004 – a sort of general introduction to the Welsh orchestral tradition (and my first programme note to be published bilingually, in English and Welsh). It was a glorious evening of music. Alun Hoddinott, William Mathias, Grace Williams, Daniel Jones…ten years on I’m still exploring the riches we uncovered that night.


Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation. Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood

In a land with a thousand-year musical heritage, Welsh orchestral music is still a relatively new flower. The oldest piece in this concert is just 64 years old; and two of the five composers on the programme are still very much alive and writing. And yet this short period – barely more than a generation – has seen the birth of an entire national repertoire, and, what’s more, the creation of a new and unmistakably Welsh musical language. Not one of these pieces sounds like it could have been written in any other country. How can a piece of music “sound Welsh?”

An obvious way would be for it to use folksongs – obvious, but not the answer. The Shropshire-born composer Edward German used Welsh folksongs in his Welsh Rhapsody of 1904 – and the result sounds like pure Elgar. While Elgar, of course, sounded utterly “English” without using a single folksong in his life! Although Welsh composers have drawn inspiration from Welsh literature, and traditional techniques like penillion singing, folksongs are noticeable by their absence from most (but not all) of tonight’s programme. Likewise – there’s that most Welsh of instruments, the harp. All these composers use the harp brilliantly but sparingly – that’s not the key to musical Welshness either. In any case, for all its bardic associations, the harp came to Wales only in the 17th century – from Italy. When Felix Mendelssohn encountered Welsh harpists in a Llangollen inn in the 1820s, they were playing hits from recent Italian operas! He preferred the lead-miners’ dances he heard at Loggerheads.

Please, no national music! Here I am in Wales…and a harper sits in the vestibule of every inn and never stops playing so called folk-melodies, that is, infamous, common faked stuff. Felix Mendelssohn: Letter to Carl Zelter, 1829

But Welsh music has always been receptive to outside influences, and its history before the 20th century is far richer than just a folk tradition. Wales’s folk-dances were cast aside during the religious revivals of the late 18th and 19th centuries, but folk-songs survived, filtered through chapel hymns, choral singing, the cult of the harp and the brass-band tradition of the new industrial regions. All of this can be heard in the music performed tonight – the rich, dark harmonies of chapel choirs and the craggy brilliance of brass bands run like mineral seams through the music of Mathias, Hoddinott, Williams and Jones.

Celtic consciousness is both rhetorical and lyrical; on the one hand darkly introspective and, on the other, highly jewelled, dance-like and rhythmic. William Mathias

So too do the influences of Sibelius, Bartók, Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich – hardly icons of Welsh culture! But the Welshness of tonight’s composers is more than the sum of all these parts. Above all, Welsh orchestral music is a music of landscape. Sometimes it’s explicit – Grace Williams dedicated her Sea Sketches “To my parents who had the good sense to set up home on the coast of Glamorgan”, and Mathias headed his Harp Concerto with lines from R.S. Thomas’ poem Welsh Landscape.

More often, though, it’s simply implicit in the colours, the shapes and the powerful sense of atmosphere in all this music. You’ll hear dark, overcast passages suddenly illuminated by shafts of musical light, mountainous masses of sound offset by soaring blue-sky melodies, the chime of bells, as well as a boisterous, rough-cut exuberance as these composers re-invent Wales’ lost dance heritage. It’s outdoor music – and its freshness, rawness, grandeur and lyricism place it in a very particular outdoors.

If Beethoven had been born in the vale of Merthyr in 1770, he would have written no symphonies. John Edwards

One more thing. Wales had, and still has, a “grass-roots” musical culture that is the envy of English musicians. The great flowering of Welsh orchestral music since the Second World War is largely due to amateur musicians and music-lovers – in fact, along with the BBC Welsh Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, and the Universities, it was the youth orchestras and amateur musical societies that made it possible for a composer to have a career in Wales at all. And each of the composers in this concert was deeply involved in the cultural life of the nation. Daniel Jones edited the poetry of Dylan Thomas; Grace Williams made groundbreaking radio programmes; Mathias and Hoddinott both ran University departments and founded major music festivals. (Thanks to Mathias’ North Wales International Music Festival at St Asaph, he was a well-known figure to many members of this orchestra).

But above all, they wrote music to be played and enjoyed by the people amongst whom they lived. There’s no “squeaky gate” music here – none of the fads and mannerisms that make contemporary classical music a fringe interest in the rest of the UK. Many members of the Wrexham Symphony Orchestra (and not only Welsh members) grew up with this music in their youth orchestras; and many present tonight will have met Alun Hoddinott, Gareth Wood or William Mathias. Tonight’s concert is a celebration of a proud, and living, tradition.

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