<<  -- 12 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

Gurney's Quartet in F (1919) was due to receive its (presumed) world première from Chamber Domaine at the Imperial War Museum in November 2002, as an adjunct to this major exhibition, but was unexpectedly replaced (by the ensemble, due to copying and time factors) with the less cogent and wandering Quartet in A minor (1922), one of four such complete quartets (there are further quartet movements) unearthed when Finzi was at last permitted to unravel Marion Scott's cluttered Gurney archive during 1937 -- the very year of Gurney's death. A hearing of the F major (a key Gurney's letters reveal he felt much at home in) is awaited still, and hopes for an ASV recording must remain on ice.

Another disc, Severn meadows : Songs by Ivor Gurney, featuring 25 of Gurney's best songs sung by the tenor Paul Agnew, recently issued by Hyperion (CDA 67243) includes the John Masefield setting By a Bierside [listen : Hyperion disc track 5 'By a Bierside', 1:32-2:50 fade], taken from Masefield's collection The Chief Centurions and composed in August 1916, just weeks after the disastrous first stages of the Somme offensive.

That song, further recorded by Luxon on Chandos, is also to be heard in its orchestral version (by Herbert Howells) in another yet finer Hyperion recording, English Orchestral Songs, by Christopher Maltman (CDA 67065). A new collection including some of the hitherto unpublished songs, sung by Garry Magee, will appear on the (appropriately named) Somm label early in 2003.

That disc includes a hitherto unrecorded cycle of Edward Thomas's poetry, Lights Out; Thomas, the oldest of these twelve 'war' poets, was a key influence on Gurney, as can easily be seen from Gurney poems like The Lock Keeper and Hedger. The title poem of Lights Out ('I have come to the borders of sleep, the unfathomable deep forest, where all must lose their way ...') features in the exhibition's room devoted to Thomas and Gurney, as do other significant Gurney items : the piano belonging to his 'adopted' Chapman family, and originally housed in their home in High Wycombe (where Gurney was church organist before and after the war), on which he composed much of his best music of 1919-21 [listen : Hyperion disc track 20 'An Epitaph' 0.00-0.57]; and the original headstone (bearing the inscription 'A lover and maker of beauty') from Gurney's grave at St Matthew's, Twigworth, north of Gloucester (towards Tewkesbury), where he was buried following his death in the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford -- close by the present Dartford Bridge and Tunnel -- on 26 December 1937.

Continue >>