January 1, 2009
Lambert's Sleeping Beauty, Awakened at Last
A new disc of reissues from pre-war
78s, on the British label Somm, goes into the "Keepers" file immediately, and
very near the top of many lists, because it is a long-delayed answer to the prayers of
many a collector whose frustration has been deepening for more than a half-century. SommCD
080 is devoted entirely to ballet music recorded in 1939 and 40 by the Sadlers
Wells Orchestra under Constant Lambert. Chief among its contents are two of the most
sought-after recordings of the early postwar years, each of which had circulated in the US
on 78s by RCA Victor: Lamberts imaginative selection of excerpts from
Tchaikovskys score for The Sleeping Beauty, and his own arrangement of music
by William Boyce as music for The Prospect Before Us. For those who came in late, a
bit of background will be in order by way of explaining why this -- particularly the Sleeping
Beauty material -- still matters.
In the second quarter of the 20th century, a time the world
of music was very generously peopled by fascinating and important figures, Constant
Lambert was by any reckoning among the most remarkable. Despite the Gallic implications of
his name, Lambert, who died in August 1951, two days shy of his 46th birthday, was an
Englishman of Australian parentage. He was an imaginative composer, a superb conductor, a
formidable commentator, and a productive influence on his associates. In 1946 the
respected musical scholar and critic Edward J. Dent, who collaborated with Lambert on a
modern edition of Purcells opera The Fairy Queen, described him simply as
"the best all-round musician we have in this country." As Dent was definitely
aware, such luminaries as the conductors Beecham and Boult and the composers Walton and
Britten were active then.
Lambert was a friend of Waltons, and of the literary
Sitwell siblings, and collaborated with them on several levels. Walton dedicated his Façade
to Lambert, who contributed a few measures of his own to it and at age 20 took part in an
early performance of the work -- not as conductor but as reciter of Edith Sitwells
verses, in alternation with the poet herself; they subsequently recorded the piece, with
Walton conducting. Lambert is understood to have prepared the orchestra for many of
Waltons early performances and recordings as conductor, among them a recording of
the music Walton arranged from works of Bach (chosen by Lambert) for the ballet The
Wise Virgins, with the Sadlers Wells Orchestra.
In his own creative efforts, Lambert worked in almost every
genre but opera and symphony. He composed concert music, film scores, chamber music, piano
music, a song-cycle on poems of Li-Po (which he dedicated to the actress Anny May Wong).
Before he was out of his teens, he became the first English composer to write for the
legendary ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev (Romeo and Juliet, produced in 1926),
and, although they had a famous falling-out, the connection apparently influenced his
subsequent activity as both a composer and conductor. In 1930 the Camargo Society
appointed him its conductor, and in the following year, as he turned 26, he joined with
the dancer/choreographers Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton to form the Vic-Wells
Ballet, which performed at Sadlers Wells and soon was renamed the Sadlers
Wells Ballet. Five years after Lamberts death it became the Royal Ballet. (Valois
died as recently as 2001, at age 102; Ashton in 1988, at 84.)
Lambert composed music for three ballets while music
director of Sadlers Wells (Pomona; Horoscope; Tiresias) and
created more than a dozen additional ones by arranging music of earlier composers, the
most celebrated example being Les Patineurs, using material from Meyerbeer operas.
He brought still other scores into being by selecting pieces and assigning the actual
arranging to such associates as Walton, Robert Irving and Gordon Jacob.
Early in his tenure with Sadlers Wells, Lambert wrote
Music Ho! (subtitled "A Study of Music in Decline" and published in
1934), in which, among other insightful observations, he focused on the genius of Emmanuel
Chabrier and devoted his final chapters to the importance of Sibelius. One of his very
last recordings, from sessions with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1950, is of his own
title contribution to the composite ballet score Ballabile, for which he selected
music by Chabrier and involved several colleagues as arrangers. He recorded other pieces
by Chabrier, but nothing by Sibelius.
Lambert made his first recording as a conductor as early as
1929, for Columbia, in his breakthrough composition The Rio Grande (text by
Sacheverell Sitwell), with the Hallé Orchestra, whose conductor, Sir Hamilton Harty, not
only offered him the use of the orchestra but took part as piano soloist. Ten years later
he began recording in earnest for HMV (recordings issued in the US by RCA Victor), with
the Sadlers Wells Orchestra, the London Philharmonic (downright dazzling
performances of the Overture to Delibess opera Le Roi la dit and
overtures by Auber and Offenbach, as well as Tchaikovskys Fifth Symphony and other
concert works) and the City of Birmingham SO, listed as simply "Symphony
Orchestra" in Tchaikovskys Romeo and Juliet. During the war his
allegiance was transferred to Columbia for recordings with the Covent Garden Orchestra,
the Philharmonia and the Hallé Orchestra, ranging from his own Horoscope and Pomona
to Borodins Second Symphony, Tchaikovskys Fourth, and still more from Sleeping
Beauty.
If that Tchaikovsky ballet played a large part in
Lamberts career, and that of his company, he must be credited with a similarly large
role in establishing the work in its splendid complete form. In Music Ho! Lambert
devoted considerable space to his admiration for this work, emphasizing the importance of
its melodic strength in particular. In one of his BBC radio talks in 1936 (excerpted in
another Lambert collection, on Dutton CDBP9761), he referred to Tchaikovsky as "the
greatest composer of music for the ballet," and to The Sleeping Beauty as
"possibly his greatest creation in any genre." Diaghilev had given The
Sleeping Beautys London premiere in 1921, but with numerous cuts. The
Sadlers Wells production introduced under Lambert in February 1939 was the first
outside the composers homeland to be performed complete. Diaghilev had presented it
under the title The Sleeping Princess; Sadlers Wells continued that practice,
and the excerpts that Lambert recorded a week after the premiere were issued in the UK
under that title -- which is used also in the labeling of the new Somm reissue. It was not
until after the war that Sadlers Wells began using the title The Sleeping Beauty.
This ballet, in a new production, opened the companys first postwar season in
its new home, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1946, and three years later it was
the capstone of the companys first American tour -- and a great personal triumph for
Lambert.
What distinguished that 1939 Sleeping Beauty
recording as much as Lamberts persuasive way with the music was the imaginativeness
he showed in choosing the excerpts. Instead of the so-called suite assembled by hands
unknown well after Tchaikovskys death and circulated as "Op. 66a," those
six 78rpm sides gave us the Introduction, with its contrasting of the wicked Carabosse and
the benevolent Lilac Fairy; then the Variations of the Six Fairies (with an exquisitely
balanced handling of the Bread-Crumb Fairys variation); the famous Briar Rose Waltz;
the Rose Adagio; the wedding entertainment characterizations of Puss-in-Boots, the Silver
Fairy and the Diamond Fairy; and finally the Mazurka and concluding Apotheosis (based on
"Vive Henri Quatre").
Hearing Lamberts performance, even now, one might
well share his stated opinion of
this music as Tchaikovskys "greatest creation in
any genre." Although we have had splendid recordings of the entire ballet score under
Doráti and Rozhdestvensky, and more generous helpings of excerpts served up by the likes
of Stokowski and Monteux, no one has quite matched Lamberts apparently instinctive
gift for taking us, along with his musicians, into the altogether enchanted world
Tchaikovsky evoked in this music. He did it not with eccentricity or self-aggrandizement,
but with an elegance, assurance and all-out involvement that were as characteristic of him
as of the scores creator.
And indeed, his own life was touched by the sort of thing
that fired Tchaikovskys imagination, and his own: a childhood marked by loneliness,
illness, frequent surgery and abandonment of the family by his father. Lambert, the master
of orchestral textures, was deaf in one ear; the enabler of dancers was himself to some
degree lame.
The additional material from The Sleeping Beauty that
Lambert recorded for Columbia with the Covent Garden Orchestra was less striking than the
longer and more vibrant sequence on HMV/RCA, but at least kept in circulation for a time
in the early years of LP, while the peerless pre-war set was ignored. The new Somm CD is
the first reappearance of the peerless Sadlers Wells recording since the retirement
of the 78s -- except for an early LP that went unnoticed because it was mislabeled.
In 1953 RCA Victor revived its Bluebird label, not for the
popular dance bands with which it had been identified in the 78rpm era, but for the
reissue of classical recordings from that era and also for a few new ones by the likes of
the pianist Ania Dorfmann and the conductor Erich Leinsdorf as well as some recent
material from its soon-to-be-ex-partner HMV. One of the very first Bluebird LPs, No. LBC
1007, was a Tchaikovsky pairing: the aforementioned Lambert Romeo and Juliet with
some unspecified Sleeping Beauty excerpts ascribed to Nicolai Malko and the
Philharmonia Orchestra. The Sleeping Beauty side was a single track and
there was neither any annotation nor anything on the disc label or the jacket to specify
which excerpts were presented -- and Malko had nothing to do with it: it was in fact the
sought-after Lambert recording. The first few measures of the Introduction gave it away,
and the contents themselves, so different from the usual assortment, made the
identification unmistakable.
Letters to RCA Victor in New York brought sympathetic
replies, but there was neither a second production run, on which the labeling might have
been corrected, nor any public statement from the company about the erroneous labeling,
and before long the entire Bluebird classical series was abandoned. Surely this LP would
have been welcomed enthusiastically if it had been accurately labeled, but it is only now
that this unforgettable recording is back in circulation, in any format and under any
name, for the first time in more than 50 years.
England was at war when The
Prospect Before Us was introduced, in 1940, but the score was recorded promptly after
the premiere. An interest in the music of William Boyce led Lambert to prepare the first
modern performing editions of that 18th-century composers eight little symphonies
and a few other works; from these he drew his material for The Prospect Before Us,
whose period-piece scenario, involving two rival dance companies, was based on the
drawings of Boyces contemporary Thomas Rowlandson. The ballet has in fact been
revived from time to time (it was performed at Dame Ninette de Valoiss centenary
gala in 1998), but the lively, colorful score has otherwise been bypassed in favor of the
little symphonies themselves.
Since CD became the standard medium for recorded music, a
good deal more attention has been given to Lambert the composer, and that is certainly a
good thing, but his own recordings as conductor ought not to be neglected. Somm has
earlier brought out his very last recordings -- all with the Philharmonia in lighter fare
(Waldteufel waltzes, Suppé overtures, the ballet suite arranged from Waltons Façade,
the Chabrier/Lambert Ballabile) -- and on the new disc presents all of his
recordings with the Sadlers Wells Orchestra. The belated restoration of the Sleeping
Beauty material is easily worth the asking price on its own. Lamberts uniquely
authoritative recording of The Prospect Before Us has actually appeared on an
earlier CD, but on a label in less than conspicuous circulation. The four brief excerpts
from Les Patineurs have also turned up before, but the Ballet Music from
Rossinis William Tell had not. The transfers, from very well preserved 78s,
are excellent, and Stephen Lloyds exceptional annotation gives us a great deal of
pertinent information on Lambert, his associates, and their time that is fascinating in
its own right.
Curiously, Somm has laid out the brief Introduction to The
Sleeping Beauty on three tracks, but put the separate dances for the Diamond Fairy and
the Silver Fairy in a single one, and listed them in the reverse of their actual order.
The Six Fairies in Act I are also in a single track, and are not identified by name. The
four sections of the William Tell ballet music get the same treatment, and the
cover photograph of the very young Lambert is strikingly uncharacteristic (though a later
picture is inside). But such oddities are not likely to be regarded as flaws when
everything that really matters is carried off on so high a level.
. . . Richard Freed
richardf@ultraaudio.com
|