In A Nutshell/Warriors/Country

What to make of Percy G. and his music? Actually, the man--piano virtuoso, maker of innovative musical instruments, ethnomusicologist, racist, anti-Semite, alleged sado-masochist--is more interesting to many people than is the music. And the music has just as much of a split personality as the man. The fascinating ballet "The Warriors" is surely more wildly Stravinskian in its use of polyrhythms and emphasis on the percussion section than any other music coming out of England when it was written (1916). Listen to the first movement of "In a Nutshell" from the same year, and you think that this must be the most perfect evocation of the sound of a gamelan orchestra by a Western composer: a fascinating bit of musical orientalism in the vein of Debussy, anticipating the Britten of "Prince of the Pagodas" by four decades or so. But stay tuned for the next movement, and you're in an Edwardian music hall. And we never do get back to the amazing mood of that forward-looking first movement.

There is the visionary "Train Music" (1901) written when Grainger was only 18. Then again, there is Grainger's greatest hit, the orchestral arrangement of his much earlier piano arrangement of "Country Gardens," a lollipop of a work he came to despise.

Probably the most successful music on this disc is "Lincolnshire Posy," a classic suite for military band given its premiere, of all places, in Milwaukee. It's a fine work in the tradition of Gustav Holst's wonderful band suites. But somehow, the regularity of this work doesn't hint at the wayward genius that Grainger evinces in the other large works on this CD.

Rattle and his band take Grainger very seriously, which you need to do in order to produce convincing results. And Grainger would be easy to patronize, but Rattle doesn't do that. Instead, he concentrates on capturing the extraordinary sense of orchestral color Grainger had. He's supported by the bright, wide-ranging sound that always seems to emerge from Birmingham's Symphony Hall. A fascinating disc that, I see, is no longer available from EMI. We can only hope they'll reissue it soon on their budget label.

This is far from my favorite Grainger disc -- many of those in Chandos' multi-volume traversal of the composers tunes and their many variations have a better shot at that distinction, and there are also individual performances of particular works conducted by Dennis Wick and Frederick Fennell that shine more brightly than those directed here by Rattle -- but there are some portions of this release that work well enough. I've never been overly fond of The Warriors, but Rattle and the BSO give a good rendition of it, though the performance falls a bit short of that conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, I think. Grainger's short orchestrations of works by Debussy and Ravel are okay, but I don't find them intrinsically special, and the edition of Country Gardens performed on this disc is one of my lesser liked alternatives, and though the performance of Lincolnshire Posy is adequate, for me it pales next to the rendition by the London Wind Orchestra under the aforementioned Dennis Wick. The suite In a Nutshell perhaps comes off best of all, so it's appropriate that the album itself bears that title. This is music of Grainger that does well in arrangement for orchestra rather than band, and it's worth a listen. As for the rest, well, in my opinion either the music and/or arrangements are less than inspired or the performances are adequate but not optimal, and I don't know that I'd recommend this disc on the basis of the one composition alone. But it's okay.