Some of the music I am playing over my eight hours' journey was not familiar even to me — such as a beautiful early piano work by Dame Ethel Smyth. Most of the rest are pieces I do not feel I have heard on Radio 3 for a very long time. Each programme features a long work and a number of other shorter ones. No composer features more than once, which allows us to delve into the undergrowth of such people as Constant Lambert, Malcolm Arnold, Gordon Jacob, Hamish MacCunn and Sir Hamilton Harty.
The big names are there too: but since I felt there was no merit in airing works with which all would be familiar, I tried to find relatively unknown ones that would extend the listener's understanding and appreciation of the range of the great men. Vaughan Williams is represented by his ravishing song-cycle "Four Poems of Fredegond Shove", the words written by his wife's niece. Elgar appears through some of his songs set for orchestra, emotionally unrestrained and sounding rather like Puccini, his great contemporary — or perhaps it is Puccini who sounds like Elgar. Herbert Howells, famed for his church music, also wrote two fine piano concertos, part of one of which will feature in a programme.
The four long works are all masterpieces that deserve to be in the main repertoire: I hope some concert programmers will be listening. The first is Bliss's Colour Symphony, which used to turn up in concerts all the time, and then about ten or twenty years ago stopped doing so. The second is Patrick Hadley's symphonic work "The Trees So High", from 1931, something that sounds derivative of his teacher Vaughan Williams but is remarkably and radically different from, and in many ways more articulate than, anything VW had written at the time. The third is the last movement (the whole symphony is well over an hour long) of the Fourth Symphony of my dear and much-missed friend George Lloyd, written as he recovered from shell-shock in 1945 and described by one eminent critic as like a missing symphony of Tchaikovsky. Finally, and appropriate for a year that sees the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games, there is Sir George Dyson's cantata "Sweet Thames Run Softly", written in Coronation year and a setting of Spenser.
The point of the exercise is to open ears, and minds. British music has for too long been a guilty pleasure for some of us. I hope, if you listen to these four programmes, you will agree that we can at least now do without the guilt.
