Bliss: Clarinet Quintet / String Quartet No. 2

Description

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)String Quartet No. 2 Clarinet QuintetArthur Bliss, who was half-American on his father'sside, studied at Cambridge with Charles Wood and alsofound in Edward Dent a stimulating mentor. His studiescontinued at the Royal College of Music and in 1912 hemet Elgar who encouraged his aspirations as acomposer. During the First World War he served withdistinction, and in the post-war years his career waslaunched with a series of bold ensemble works, whichoften exploited the voice, such as Conversations (1920)and Rout (1920). These were deemed to be modernistic,with the result that Bliss gained a reputation as an avantgardeexperimentalist, a view confirmed by his firstmajor orchestral work A Colour Symphony (1921-2).From 1923 to 1925 Bliss lived in the United States,where he married an American, Gertrude Hoffmann.With his burgeoning domestic happiness his musicallanguage matured rapidly, as heard in the Oboe Quintet(1927) and Pastoral (1928). In the early 1930s hismemories of the carnage of the trenches found musicalexpression in the profound choral symphony MorningHeroes (1930), while the Viola Sonata (1933) and theMusic for Strings (1935) demonstrated his mastery ofmusical structures.A characteristic of Bliss's career was his manycollaborations with major artists of his day from othergenres. In 1934-5, for example, he composed the scorefor Alexander Korda's film Things to Come based onH.G. Wells's novel; it remains a classic score for themedium and the suite drawn from it is one of Bliss'smost popular works. Ballet was also an importantmedium for him and he collaborated with Ninette deValois on Checkmate (1937) and Robert Helpmann onMiracle in the Gorbals (1944) and Adam Zero (1946),all three premi?¿res being conducted by ConstantLambert. J.B. Priestley wrote the libretto for the operaThe Olympians (1948-9), and with Christopher Hassalland Kathleen Raine he wrote the choral works TheBeatitudes (1962) and The Golden Cantata (1963)respectively.Bliss's orchestral works include three concertos allwritten for great performers, the Piano Concerto (1938-9) for Solomon, Violin Concerto (1955) for Campoli,and Cello Concerto (1970) for Rostropovich, as well asthe masterly Meditations on a Theme of John Blow(1955) and the Metamorphic Variations (1972). Hisformidable organisational talents were brought into playas Director of Music at the BBC during the SecondWorld War and from 1953 until his death as Master ofthe Queen's Musick, a post to which he brought greatdistinction. He was knighted in 1950 and hisautobiography As I Remember is a fascinating portraitof his life and times.After composing works with programmatic ordramatic subjects, Bliss frequently felt the need to writea purely abstract work. Hence the Second String Quartetcame in the wake of the opera The Olympians: as hewrote in As I Remember, 'I retreated into the intimateand private world of chamber music'. He composed thequartet in 1950 dedicating it to the members of theGriller