Ralph Vaughan Williams Notturno after Bach (1932)
(1872-1956) Chorale & Chorale Prelude
Ach, bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ

Sir Edward Elgar Concert Allegro (1901)
(1857-1934)

E J Moeran Irish Love Song (1926)
(1894-1950)

Sir Arnold Bax Second Sonata (1919)
(1883-1953)

Roger Quilter Three Studies Op.4 (pub 1915)
(1877- 1953)
Three Pieces Op.16 (1916)
Dance in the Twilight
Summer Evening
At a Country Fair

Constant Lambert Sonata (1929)
(1905-1951)
Allegro molto marcato
Nocturne
Finale

David Owen Norris writes:
This recital [English Music Festival, Dorchester Abbey, Oxon, May 23rd 2009] comes almost exactly thirty years after my first performance of Bax’s Second Sonata, in the Purcell Room in June 1979 (a fact kindly recorded in Lewis Foreman’s book Bax: his life and times, to the second edition of which I had the honour of contributing the Foreword.) The lives of the composers represented in this programme will be familiar to readers of this note, but I shall remind you of a few details.

One of the characteristics of Englishness, I have long thought, is a contradictory duality founded in the stresses and strains of our history. Our friends (and we ourselves) have historically perceived this as an admirable capacity for compromise. Our enemies have seen it as the duplicity of Perfidious Albion. Both are right. (English Society’s present picture of itself is confused by a pervading neglect of both our history and our customs, but that’s another matter, though one that EMF is doing its bit to rectify.)

We should bear this English duality in mind when we consider Elgar’s purely fortuitous Roman Catholicism, and his country-gent disguise. The most purely English-sounding of these composers, Vaughan Williams and Roger Quilter, are the ones who studied abroad. Bax’s poetic alter ego, Dermot O’Byrne, took in the Dublin literary establishment completely, and brought about the irony that the same man was officially banned during the First World War, yet Master of the King’s Music during the Second. (His love-affairs were equally complex, as his long-time mistress Harriet Cohen discovered after the death of Bax’s wife. Suggesting they marry at last, Harriet was aghast when Bax revealed that she had been usurped some twenty years before.)

Even Lambert, who seems a typically uncomplicated cosmopolitan (his Piano Sonata was largely composed in Toulon), has a particularly English habit of hiding his contradictions. His Sonata provides the clearest example of how English dualities may be expressed in music. First, it reconciles the processes of jazz with those of late Beethoven. I’ve played the piece for many years, but only recently took the plunge of memorising it, for a performance in Chicago. This internalising process has allowed me to realize that the key to such reconciliation lies in melody, and that Lambert’s technique is thus linked very closely to Elgar’s. Jazzy snippets – one might almost call them riffs – pervade each movement, especially the trumpet fanfare he heard when Florence Mills and the Plantation Orchestra took London by storm in 1923: many of Lambert’s works open with a memory of this flourish. Along with this basis in melody, the Sonata obsesses over certain pitches. It begins in a modal D minor, quickly swept aside. After four pages of shifting harmonic sands, the notes G and then C appear as completely unjustified accented discords – minims, the longest notes we have yet heard. The movement pursues its course to end in F. The Nocturne again passes through many keys, until at the dissonant climax the long notes C and G are hammered out over and over again. The movement takes the hint, and ends in C, and it’s here that the Finale starts too, though this C turns out to be the dominant of F. After several Beethovenian fugues, a monstrous G arrives in the bass (‘Twice as slow’, says Lambert), and duly reveals itself as the dominant of C. The music makes increasingly frantic efforts to escape this key, but the dominant G recurs, so that the one-page Coda is simply a magnified recapitulation, in C, of the opening – until the very last bar, where Lambert pulls off one of music’s most daring coups, and reminds us that the Sonata started on a D.

Bax’s Second Sonata plays a grimmer game with the pitches of F sharp and G. It fights its way towards G major for the ‘brazen and glittering’ eroico theme, but quickly collapses into a introverted theme harping on G – F sharp – E until the music alights on a note that can’t decide between F sharp or G. The ensuing slow theme (which shows a command of jazz harmony that Lambert must have admired) chops and changes those pitches, with decidedly blue effect. In the recapitulatory section of this single movement sonata, the odds are stacked still higher against G, with the note F sharp reinforced by the whole tonality of F sharp at the return of the slow section. The longing harmonies here show Bax sorely tempted to throw in his lot with F sharp, and damn the consequences – but the last page pulls him back to G, though a G constantly assaulted by F sharp till the penultimate bar. It was not until long after I had tracked the drama of the competing pitches that I realised that the right hand’s first notes are G preceded by an F sharp acciaccatura!

Moeran’s Anglo-Irish double world was less clearly defined than Bax’s, and his love life less satisfactory. Both facts may have contributed to his choice of this Irish Love Song to harmonize. The opening strain returns at the end, which is not unusual. But the second and third strains are identical to each other too, which somehow reminds me of that dream where one is running – away? towards? – on legs too weary to carry on. Moeran employs all his harmonic virtuosity to disguise this aspect of his theme: in fact the whole of the first verse is disguised, hidden inside the harmonies and entrusted to the thumbs. (He uses the notation for this device pioneered by Percy Grainger in 1911 in his setting of the Irish Tune from County Derry, of big notes for the tune and little notes for the harmony.) The dedication to Peter Warlock, who hovered menacingly over Lambert and Bax as well, is food for thought.

Roger Quilter, like Grainger, is a master of internal voices at the piano. The sheer sensual satisfaction of playing Quilter is incomparable: the gratified performer is seduced into producing a more beautiful sound than he has ever produced before. The key to Quilter’s solo piano music, as to his songs, is the syntax of the English language. The rhythms of his songs must reflect the stresses of the words, and this same sensitivity to declamation is carried into his music without words.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s transcription of an evening chorale and prelude by Bach would appear to offer little scope for any display of Englishness, and indeed the chorale sounds Vaughan Williamsy rather than English (though that’s practically synonymous by now, I suppose), thanks to his habit of turning single lines into parallel triads. But the chorale prelude is unmistakeably English, though it includes almost every note of the three-voice ‘Schubler’ chorale prelude on which it is based. What lies at the root of this ‘English’ sound? RVW’s general procedure, of adding expressive, mildly dissonant, descending lines, is clearly audible; but when we look more closely, we make some remarkable discoveries.

The first really sharp dissonance is produced by a tied E flat. When the chorale melody enters (in parallel triads) the bass shyly drops out when the word ‘Jesu’ is reached, and in the ensuing interlude, E flat again features in a grinding discord. After the part of the melody that speaks of ‘clear light’, VW adds sharp dissonances that involve E natural, immediately contradicting it with an E flat not found in Bach, and repeating the un-Bachian duality in the next two bars. At the words ‘don’t let the light go out’, VW astonishingly deletes Bach’s contrapuntal resolution, changes his brightening A natural into a dark A flat, and proceeds to an agonising series of discordant 7ths and 9ths absolutely not present in the original. Now Bach repeats four bars from the beginning that replace E flats with E naturals. RVW omits these completely, and writes instead one bar that strongly emphasises E flat.

E flat – three flats – is the symbolic key signature of the Trinity in music from Bach to the present time. It seems to me that RVW’s treatment of the note E flat, along with the absent bass under the word ‘Jesu’, conveys a hesitant aching to believe. After all, he has chosen to arrange the chorale ‘Ah, stay with us, Jesus’, and (unlike any other text-based piece in the Bach Book for Harriet Cohen from which this is taken) he has had the words printed in the score. The final touch of English deception – or reticence – is that the translation (by Robert Bridges) very much diminishes the simple urgency of the German. ‘Don’t let the light go out’ becomes ‘Thou that canst never set’ – a confidence that Vaughan Williams may have wished he could share.

I have spoken and written of Elgar’s Concert Allegro very often indeed, not least in this Festival. He wrote it for Fanny Davies, whom he did not meet until the mid-1920s, at a cocktail party in Birmingham. The premiere was slated by the critics, and Elgar managed to be absent from all her few performances of the piece, including the one at his own Concert Club in Malvern. More details can be found in the notes to my recording. Here it will suffice to say that Elgar’s most substantial piano piece is now universally agreed to be a corker, but remains unpublished (except in an inaccurate, shortened travesty) 108 years after its composition.

An unsolved mystery, worth raising in this context of significant pitches and a knowledgeable company: Elgar invests the note A flat with meaning of some sort, in the Concert allegro, The Dream, In the South, and (therefore) in the opening of the First Symphony – and doubtless elsewhere. But, what meaning?

Eureka! Some months after posing this question, I remembered that Elgar tuned pianos. And when you tune pianos, or indeed any keyboard instrument, A flat is called ‘the wolf note’, because if you’re not careful, it howls, as it decides whether you want it to be a G sharp instead. So for Elgar the tuner, A flat would have been a sinister note, above all, an ambiguous note. Which casts a new light on the tonal ambiguity of the First Symphony.