The surprising thing about this music is the orchestra chosen for this recording. Few would have expected the CBSO to have beaten the Halle to present this music to the world.
John Foulds was born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra, he himself played as a cellist in promenade and theatre bands before joining the Hallé cellos in 1900; curiously some of the records I've seen on the orchestra's website spell his name Fouldes.
Foulds had been composing since childhood. During his years as a cellist in the Hallé at the beginning of the 20th century he wrote piano music, string quartets, symphonic poems and a vast 3-part ‘concert opera’ for soloists, chorus and orchestra called The Vision of Dante, based on The Divine Comedy. Only a few of these actually got played.
As early as the 1890s he’d experimented with quarter-tones as a kind of intensification of chromaticism, but the general style of Foulds’s early works descends very much from the German Romantics such as Brahms and Wagner, though with features that suggest from his cello desk in the Hallé he was absorbing much from contemporaries such as Elgar, Sibelius and Richard Strauss. His relative lack of success with such pieces, striking though they seem to us today (when they get played), was one reason Foulds turned his hand to lighter music and theatre scores to keep the wolf from the door. On the other hand, it’s clear he had a spontaneous musicality, an ear for a good tune and a great sense of fun, so the light music might well have come naturally to him anyway.
The conductor Hans Richter gave him conducting experience. Although Henry Wood presented some of Foulds's early orchestral compositions at the Queen's Hall Proms, he became best-known as a successful composer of light-music, such as the once-famous Keltic Lament (1911) which appeared a few years back on Hyperion. He was also a leading composer of theatre scores, especially for his friends Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike (the most famous was Foulds's music for the original production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, with Thorndike in the title role).
This CD from Warner Classics features four works by John Foulds:
| City of Birmingham Youth Chorus |
| Susan Bickley |
| Daniel Hope |
| City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - Sakari Oramo |
It was during the 1920’s that Foulds worked on a mysterious Sanskrit opera Avatara which in the end he abandoned as unfinished and destroyed, leaving the preludes to the three acts. These preludes are the Three Mantras which together create a visionary triptych. In Foulds’s mind these were evocations of the terrestrial, celestial and cosmic realms of ancient Sanskrit teaching.
In his sleeve notes Malcolm MacDonald describes the first of these as an “ardent, furiously energetic toccata.” The second incorporates a wordless female chorus. The final Mantra contains some of Foulds’s most barbaric music, culminating in "a shattering explosion of controlled orchestral power.".
A highly unusual genre – a full-fledged Concerto, with cadenzas and ritornellos and so on, for female voice without words and orchestra. Maybe Foulds had in his mind and ear the image of the lone Celtic singer, the bard, the singer of lullabies, of croons, of spells, of songs to the seals, of songs by the seashore and on the shieling – and decided to distil this image to its essence and make a concert work out of it.
It’s also clear he had a specific voice, a specific singer in mind: his wife, Maud MacCarthy.
She was a remarkable musician, Irish by birth, whose early career was as a virtuoso violinist and then, when her playing was restricted by neuritis, she developed as a singer, especially in oriental music. So she was adept at chants, vocalizations, western songs, and was a singer of both Irish and Scottish songs in the home. She was also one of the leading Western authorities on Indian music in the early part of the 20th century, having collected folksongs in person on the subcontinent and studied its music closely.
One of her more unusual talents was the ability to sing in the 23-tone microtonal scale of classical Indian music, that’s 23 tones, microtones, to the octave. The idea that Foulds had her specifically in mind is reinforced by the fact that this vocal concerto is written for the kind of range that Maud MacCarthy had. And of course she was Irish – so one might well speculate that in one sense Lyra Celtica (the title is of course Latin for the Celtic Lyre or harp) is a portrait of the woman whom Foulds often considered his muse, and who he presumably imagined might be its first singer.
This work was dedicated to the memory of the great Austro-Hungarian violinist-composer Joseph Joachim (who the composer's wife once heard playing a Beethoven quartet and one of his strings broke !). It is probable that Foulds met Joachim during his time with the Halle.
The work is in one movement, subdivided into five sections, the third of which contains allusions to both the Brahms and the Beethoven violin concerti.
On this recording the violinist is Daniel Hope.
When completed in 1910 Mirage was his most ambitious orchestral work up to that time. Some have likened it to Also Sprach Zarathustra in that it contains differing sections (Curious that when this work was performed in Birmingham it was coupled with the Strauss work !)
These works were recorded in the days immediately following the performance of Mantra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham.