Notes and novels

A Lord Berners shopper’s guide Until the 1970s, the small field of Berners recordings was dominated by Thomas Beecham’s two accounts of the suite from The Triumph of Neptune: music that still provides the friendliest entry point for Berners’s delightful art. There’s a spirited 1986 account of the suite by Barry Wordsworth and Liverpool forces (Cala), with sparkling earlier orchestral scores in support; the complete ballet is available from David Lloyd Jones in the series of Berners CDS issued some 20 years ago by Marco Polo. Others, conducted by Kenneth Alwyn, offer convenient if not stellar accounts of his later ballets, including the idiosyncratic A Wedding Bouquet.

For the more avant-garde core of Berners’s output, Heritage’s two-disc Lord Berners Collection is indispensable, uniting the contents of two splendid surveys of his piano music and songs from Peter and Meriel Dickinson (1977) and Felicity Lott and Peter Lawson (1996).

Nor should you forget

Berners’s books. The most immediately beguiling are First Childhood, A Distant Prospect, The Chateau of Résenlieu and Dresden, four small drily observant and witty autobiographical volumes. Sample sentence: ‘The English are seldom at their best at breakfast time and when they are it is even more depressing.’ The same American publisher, Turtle Point Press, also offers his Collected

Tales and Fantasies, a handy bundle of six entertaining short novels, variously concerned with a camel, a composer’s problem finishing a symphony, and Cleopatra’s nose.

Reading about Berners’s life and circle is also essential. Mark Amory’s Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric is an elegant, sympathetic biography. Sofka Zinovieff’s lavishly appointed The Bad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, a wider family history, enjoyably expands our knowledge (sometimes alarmingly, too). And there are multiple insights in Peter Dickinson’s Lord Berners Composer, Writer, Painter, a wonderful compendium of comment, facts, facts, fascinating interviews, and 32 colour pages of Berners’s art.