Bliss

The Beatitudes; Introduction and Allegro, F117; God Save the Queen Emily Birsan (soprano), Ben Johnson (tenor); BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/andrew Davis Chandos CHSA 5191 (hybrid CD/SACD) 66:29 mins Bliss’s The Beatitudes was written to share centre stage with Britten’s War Requiem at the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962. But when the Requiem began eating up rehearsal time, Bliss’s work was shunted to an evening slot in a nearby theatre, prefiguring the obscurity it has slipped into since.

This new recording of The Beatitudes, the first made under studio conditions, may prompt a reassessment. In terms of sound it comfortably eclipses the two rival CD versions, both conducted by Bliss himself – one is the 1962 premiere, the other a Proms broadcast from two years later.

Both are mono, and pale beside the spatial sophistication of Chandos’s engineering.

Comparing the performances is more complicated. There is no doubting Sir Andrew Davis’s grasp of The Beatitudes, and he steers a broadly authoritative performance, with incisive, committed playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The singing, though, is slightly uneven by comparison. ‘The lofty looks of man’ is dispatched with relish by the choir, although the beginning of ‘Come, my Way’ is more strained and tentative. Both soloists are stretched by Bliss’s often high-lying and f lorid writing: the ‘Epilogue’ does not quite take wing as it can do.

Davis’s punchy, urgent account of the Introduction and Allegro, composed in 1926 and first conducted by Bliss that year in London’s Queen’s Hall before being revised in 1937, is useful as this is another piece not easy to come by on record. Bliss’s arrangement of God Save The Queen is claimed as a premiere recording, but the Arthur Bliss Archive at Cambridge University Library suggests there have already been two others.

Terry Blain

PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★