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 Sadler’s 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: Lambert’s imaginative selection of excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s 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 Purcell’s 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 Walton’s, 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 Sitwell’s 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 Walton’s 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 Sadler’s 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 Sadler’s Wells and soon was renamed the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Five years after Lambert’s 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 Sadler’s 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 Sadler’s 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 Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, the London Philharmonic (downright dazzling performances of the Overture to Delibes’s opera Le Roi l’a dit and overtures by Auber and Offenbach, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and other concert works) and the City of Birmingham SO, listed as simply "Symphony Orchestra" in Tchaikovsky’s 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 Borodin’s Second Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, and still more from Sleeping Beauty.

If that Tchaikovsky ballet played a large part in Lambert’s 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 Beauty’s London premiere in 1921, but with numerous cuts. The Sadler’s Wells production introduced under Lambert in February 1939 was the first outside the composer’s homeland to be performed complete. Diaghilev had presented it under the title The Sleeping Princess; Sadler’s 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 Sadler’s Wells began using the title The Sleeping Beauty. This ballet, in a new production, opened the company’s 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 company’s first American tour -- and a great personal triumph for Lambert.

What distinguished that 1939 Sleeping Beauty recording as much as Lambert’s 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 Tchaikovsky’s 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 Fairy’s 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 Lambert’s performance, even now, one might well share his stated opinion of

this music as Tchaikovsky’s "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 Lambert’s 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 score’s creator.

And indeed, his own life was touched by the sort of thing that fired Tchaikovsky’s 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 Sadler’s 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 composer’s 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 Boyce’s contemporary Thomas Rowlandson. The ballet has in fact been revived from time to time (it was performed at Dame Ninette de Valois’s 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 Walton’s Façade, the Chabrier/Lambert Ballabile) -- and on the new disc presents all of his recordings with the Sadler’s Wells Orchestra. The belated restoration of the Sleeping Beauty material is easily worth the asking price on its own. Lambert’s 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 Rossini’s William Tell had not. The transfers, from very well preserved 78s, are excellent, and Stephen Lloyd’s 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