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Track(s) taken from CDA67239

Salome. Suite

composer

The Nash Ensemble, David Lloyd-Jones (conductor)
Recording details: September 2000
Henry Wood Hall, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Andrew Keener
Engineered by Antony Howell & Julian Millard
Release date: March 2001
Total duration: 9 minutes 17 seconds
 

Reviews

‘Eleanor Bron and Richard Stilgoe make an excellent pair of reciters, and the recoding in a natural acoustic balances them well. [Stilgoe] is the most fluent Façade reciter I have ever heard, with phenomenally clear articulation, starting with a virtuoso display in the opening poem, "Hornpipe" … Under David Lloyd-Jones the brilliant sextet of players from the Nash Ensemble … could not be more idiomatic, with rhythms delectably pointed’ (Gramophone)

‘The Nash, as one would expect, is second to none in this music, extracting every last whiff of wit and textural audacity’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘Eleanor Bron and Richard Stilgoe make excellent reciters. The Nash Ensemble could not be more idiomatic in pointing the young Walton's sparkling parodies’ (The Guardian)

‘I can’t imagine a clearer, more virtuosic account of the score’ (International Record Review)

‘There have been several excellent recordings of Façade, but Hyperion's now moves to the head of the class’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘The playing of the Nash Ensemble is quite outstanding. Eleanor Bron, as one might expect, purrs her way contentedly through her texts’ (Hi-Fi News)

‘This outstanding group of musicians has recorded a definitive and, for the first time on disc, totally complete Facade. David Lloyd-Jones, one of the great conductors of British music, elicits fabulous playing from The Nash’ (Yorkshire Post)
While staying in Paris in 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salome in French. In June of the following year rehearsals for a production with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role at the Palace Theatre, London, were well advanced when the Lord Chamberlain banned it, not because it was mildly scandalous but because it contained biblical characters. However, in 1894 it was published in an English translation by Wilde’s friend Lord Alfred Douglas, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.

Salome was eventually first staged in English at the Gate Theatre club on 27 May 1931 with a distinguished cast that included Margaret Rawlings, Robert Speaight, Flora Robson and John Clements. Choreography was by Ninette de Valois, and this may explain why the task of composing and conducting the incidental music that was required was given to the 25-year-old Constant Lambert, for they had already worked together. Lambert was anyhow already famous as the composer of The Rio Grande (1929).

The musical numbers are short, even scrappy, for this is all that was needed to link the scenes and events of the play. The one exception is, of course, the Dance of the Seven Veils, for which something more extended was required. Fresh from his close association with Façade, and doubtless on a tight budget, Lambert selected an ensemble consisting of just four of the six players used by Walton, that is to say clarinet, trumpet, cello and percussion, the latter with a decidedly exotic tinge. The autograph, and the instrumental parts copied by Lambert himself, languished in the BBC Music Library until 1998 when the composer Giles Easterbrook decided to put the material into performable shape by slightly reordering and connecting it up to form the Suite that here receives its first recorded performance.

The Suite comprises three sections. The first has an arresting prelude, after which there is an extended clarinet recitative which sets the sultry, moonlit atmosphere of the play’s opening. At the end there is a loud interruption, depicting the noise of revelry coming from Herod’s banqueting hall.

The second section consists mainly of sombre, reflective music, including that heard immediately after the young Syrian captain of the guard, infatuated with Salome, kills himself.

The longest section is the third in which a brief introduction gives way to the Dance of the Seven Veils. Inevitably this doffs its hat to the famous parallel section of Richard Strauss’s opera. After the dance’s climax we also hear music that accompanies the executioner’s descent to Jokanaan’s cistern, and the energetic passage following Herod’s final cry to the soldiers, ‘Kill that woman!’.

from notes by David Lloyd-Jones © 2001

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