Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Confessions of a Music Critic Christopher Morley
Brewin Books 174pp (pb) £11.95 Confessions of a Music Critic opens with a description of a last-minute press trip to Milan, where the critic Christopher Morley was whisked off to see The Flying Dutchman at La Scala in 1988. These firsthand accounts of the ‘good old days’ are catnip to millennial journalists who may have been lucky enough to catch the tailend of healthy marketing budgets and anathema to aspiring Gen Z critics who may never know such opportunities. Having notched up over 50 years in the classical music industry, Morley has seen it all. He once reassured the notoriously prickly Stockhausen before the
1992 Birmingham performance of Sternklang and, while watching a performance from the wings of the Teatro La Fenice, saw Bernstein nip out in-between applause to take a drag on a cigarette and sip a Scotch, proffered by an ever-ready assistant. As the chief music critic for the Birmingham
Post, Morley’s recollections on the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (and its conductors) are well formed; as are his accounts of Symphony Hall. But, with the exception of the odd anecdote, the tone is not particularly confessional: ‘Memories of a Music Critic’ might have been a better title.
Claire Jackson ★★★
Dweller in Shadows –
A Life of Ivor Gurney
Kate Kennedy
Princeton 512pp (hb) £30
As Kate Kennedy’s admirably detailed and perceptive biography makes clear, Ivor Gurney was one of the greatest of that generation of British musicians decimated by the First World War. Despite the very real horrors he encountered on the Western Front, he survived, and his career as composer and poet enjoyed a brief efflorescence, hobnobbing with the likes of John Masefield and Robert Graves while earning the life-long respect of his teacher at the Royal College of Music, Vaughan Williams. But Gurney’s inability to keep a job, and so escape the need of material support from friends and family, undermined his self-confidence to the point of becoming suicidal. His unsympathetic brother, Ronald, had him committed to a mental asylum, where Gurney gradually lost his sanity, finally dying from tuberculosis in 1937.
Kennedy examines in some detail the extraordinary depth and talent of Gurney’s creative genius – she is particularly illuminating in talking about his poetry – while being candid about his erratic behaviour and impractical approach to adult life, from which the army served as a temporary respite: as Gurney’s sister Winifred wryly noted, ‘the army, it would have been good for him, had he not had to go to war.’ Daniel Jaffé ★★★★
The Edge of Beyond –
Ralph Vaughan Williams in the First World War
Stephen Connock
Albion Music 242pp (hb) £25
Forever tight-lipped about his music, Vaughan Williams gave barely a clue as to how his harrowing Great War experiences – first as a medical orderly and then an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery – transmuted into such works as
A Pastoral Symphony, The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Riders to the Sea and Sancta Civitas.
As a result, Stephen Connock’s fascinating new study can only shed so much light on the precise significance of such music. However, this immaculately researched handbook to the composer’s war will enhance many a listening experience. Connock has visited the Western Front theatres where Vaughan Williams served on numerous occasions, and delves deeply into the available information about the relevant ambulance unit and artillery brigade. This is woven skilfully around such details of Vaughan Williams’s war as are known. With the general reader in mind, Connock sets this account within an overview of the composer’s life and work. Not the least of the attractive features is a veritable photographic treasuretrove. This is a milestone work in the Vaughan Williams biographical corpus. Andrew Green ★★★★★
The Life of Music –
New Adventures in the Western Classical Tradition Nicholas Kenyon
Yale 360pp (hb) £18.99
This book comes garlanded with praise from some of the biggest names in the contemporary musical scenes – Rattle, Dudamel etc. It is extremely ambitious in scope, from 40,400 years ago with some putatively primitive pipes up to now, with popular contemporary composers celebrated and a work by each listed, whether it’s Reich or
Adès, though composers who are less avant-garde get short shrift, whatever their quality (Robin Holloway, for instance). In between there is an increasingly speedy traversal, the most interesting part being what is still I think called
‘early music’, that is up to about the middle of the 16th century. Once we get to more familiar ground, the pace becomes breathless, with often more than one indisputably major figure after another crowded onto the same page. The closer Kenyon gets to the present, the more conventional his account becomes, so that it is unclear what his envisaged audience is. There are some signs of wokeness – women composers are well represented – but otherwise a feeling of routine; and the book concludes with a list of 100 works, ranging from a four-minute Intermezzo by Brahms to five hours from Philip Glass. Michael Tanner ★★★