A rare performance of Arthur Bliss’s Morning Heroes… Musical Director, Martin Schellenberg, must have [..] been delighted with the standards reached Network, January 2009 (magazine of Making Music West Midlands)
Music for Remembrance 8/11/08
Shrewsbury Choral Society’s Remembrance Day Concert made us wonder why was it that novelists and poets should have been so active in the years following the First World War, when, apart from Elgar’s For the Fallen, composers were so notably silent?
It was a rare performance of Arthur Bliss’s Morning Heroes, on 8th November in the Abbey, that made one ponder. Bliss wrote the piece as a Symphony for Orator, Chorus and Orchestra, and it was the tragic death in the battle of the Somme of his brother, Kennard, together with his own war experiences, that found expression in this work. In Morning Heroes, the composer takes different sources for his text and, in each of the five movements, he juxtaposes the harsh images of trench warfare with epic heroes of Ancient Greece, and the parting of wives from their soldier husbands, before moving, in the final movement, from the general to the particular, as the Battle of the Somme is evoked.
This is taxing music, and both choir and the enlarged Oswestry Sinfonia met the challenges of the score with commendable fervour and, although there were occasions when greater familiarity would have led to more freedom in this richly coloured music, it was a performance in which the essence of Bliss’s heroic work came over strongly. Another question posed is, why did the composer write for speaker, rather than singer? In Robert Hardy’s finely delivered opening narration of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, we had the answer. Here, there was a dramatic intensity, which would only have been possible through the spoken word.
Musical Director, Martin Schellenberg, must have worked very hard at the score, and been delighted with the standards reached in both the Bliss and the preceding Lark Ascending, in which Robert Bishop was the impressive soloist. The one downside of the concert was the failure to print the words of the Bliss piece – shame on the Wilfred Owen Society, who seem to have promoted the concert, for they must know how vital it is to hear and understand the words in such a complex piece.
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