Contemporary Classical - Thea DerksElisabeth Lutyens Piano Works: British modernism imbued with French perfume
In the autumn of 2021 the British pianist Martin Jones released the first volume of his recording of the complete piano works of Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983). She was a flamboyant personality who challenged the misogyny of the music world and fought like a lion to get her compositions performed. She was the first British composer to embrace twelve-tone music – though not through Schoenberg, as she claims, but by her own efforts, by studying Henry Purcell’s Fantasias.
Be that as it may, her love for atonal music was not taken kindly to, and she was meekly called ‘twelve-note Lizzy’. Conversely, she harboured deep contempt for composing peers such as Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Arnold Bax, whose music she described as ‘the cowpat school’. Due to the constant lack of appreciation, Lutyens became somewhat embittered; of necessity she composed a lot of film music. – And so, through the back door, she managed to make atonal music salacious after all.
Elisabeth LutyensLATE RECOGNITION
However, in the 1950s and 1960s she gained late recognition, when she was discovered by a younger and more adventurous generation of composers, the most famous of whom were Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. They rebelled against the conservative curriculum at the Manchester Conservatoire and travelled to London to seek inspiration from Lutyens. They have gone down in history as the ‘Manchester School’.
As a child Lutyens had been taught piano by an aunt whose teacher had herself been a pupil of Clara Schumann. All her life, Lutyens continued to compose for the instrument, and Martin Jones is now recording all her piano pieces on CD. Curiously, he begins with music from the last decade of her life, when she confided to an acquaintance: ‘I have resigned myself to composing for myself, my friends, and to pass the time’.
The five pieces performed by Jones, however, do not make the impression of being obligatory pastimes at all. The Seven Preludes for Piano opus 126 from 1978 are sparkling and lively, recalling Debussy’s preludes in their clarity, thanks in part to Jones’ fine playing. Five Impromptus opus 116 (1977) and the seventeen minute long The Great Seas opus 132 (1979) also have a dreamy atmosphere, despite some occasional pounding chords.
SPATIALITY
Lutyens does not clog up her scores, but lets her music breathe from beginning to end; often her tones seem to float freely in space. Only intermittently do we hear the large intervals that are so characteristic of atonal music, and always there is this luxurious feeling of spatiality.
Perhaps the most radical is the oldest piece on the CD, Plenum opus 86, which she composed in 1974. It subtly demonstrates her mastery of serial composition techniques. The 12-tone row she posits at the beginning returns as a palindrome at the end. It moreover illustrates she was well acquainted with contemporary playing techniques, for at times the pianist plucks the piano strings directly.
Elisabeth Lutyens does not clog up her scores, but lets her music breathe from beginning to end; often her tones seem to float freely in space.
The concluding La natura dell’Aqua opus 154 (1981) is riddled with written-out silences, which give the music a meditative atmosphere. However, this is regularly interrupted by eruptions of fast, short strings of notes that aptly evoke the image of a gurgling fountain.
Martin Jones effortlessly switches between a fairy-tale velvet touch to brisk, firm banging when the music demands it. He is the ideal performer of Lutyens’ piano music, an interesting mix of sweet impressionism and abrasive severity – British modernism imbued with French perfume.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2bvZAciZ1g
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Daniele Neander Mancini
