George Dyson - The Canterbury Pilgrims, In Honour of the City - Soloists, London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Richard Hickox

George Dyson: The Canterbury Pilgrims, In Honour of the City

Yvonne Kenny, Robert Tear, Stephen Roberts,

London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Richard Hickox

1997 Gramophone Award Winner

for sound engineering

1. Overture: At the Tabard Inn
2. The Canterbury Pilgrims
3. In Honour of The City of London

Hearing Dyson's Canterbury Pilgrims - an open, heart-warming work and a favourite at Three Choirs Festivals in the 1930s - it seems extraordinary that it has had to wait so long for a premiere recording. Earlier issues from Chandos, notably of the Violin Concerto with Lydia Mordkovitch (9/95), have alerted us to the thoughtful strength of Dyson's music, and this superb recording from Hickox of his full-length cantata based on the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales bears out its reputation as Dyson's masterpiece.

From a Yorkshire working-class background, Dyson was a teacher who revolutionized the study of music in public schools, and was later knighted as an educationist, not as a composer. He wrote The Canterbury Pilgrims in 1930 when still Head of Music at Winchester, and maybe with that background it is not surprising that his approach to Chaucer is very Victorian. In the way he misses the ironic side of the Prologue, Chaucer's delightful way of having a sly dig at his characters, I was reminded of the Rev Lord Henry d'Ascoigne, as impersonated by Alec Guinness in the film, Kind Hearts and Coronets, when he says of the West window of his church, that it has "all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities". Dyson even omits the delectable line about the French accent of the Prioress (here described simply as The Nun) being of "Stratford-atte-Bowe", not of Paris, but once that is said, this is a fresh, openly tuneful work, aptly exuberant in its celebration of Chaucer.

Following the scheme of Chaucer's Prologue, Dyson in his 12 movements, plus Envoi, presents a sequence of portraits, deftly varying the forces used, with the three soloists well contrasted in their characterizations and with the chorus acting as both narrator and commentator, providing an emotional focus for the whole work in two heightened sequences, the sixth and twelfth movements, moving and noble portraits of the two characters who aroused Dyson's deepest sympathy, the Clerk of Oxenford and the Poor Parson of a Town. If the idiom is undemanding, with occasional echoes of Vaughan Williams's A Sea Symphony and with passages that remind me of Rachmaninov's "The Bells", the cantata sustains its length well, better in this recording than it did at the live performance at the Barbican which preceded the sessions.

Sensibly, At the Tabard Inn, the concert Overture which Dyson wrote in 1943, basing it on themes from the cantata, is given first, though I am inclined to think that Dyson's original one-minute Prologue works better as an introduction to the whole work, getting things going more quickly. Outstanding among the soloists is Robert Tear, who took over at the Barbican performance at the last minute, and not only characterizes brilliantly but sings with a fullness and warmth that matches any of his recordings of 20 years and more ago. The beautiful, fading close, when Tear as the Knight begins the first tale, moving slowly offstage, is most atmospherically done. Yvonne Kenny and Stephen Roberts sing well too, but are less distinctive both in timbre and expression. As ever, the London Symphony Chorus sing with incandescent tone, superbly recorded against the helpful acoustic of the Blackheath Concert Halls, and with the orchestra under Hickox - an ideal advocate - bringing out the clarity and colourfulness of Dyson's instrumentation.

In Honour of the City, written two years before the cantata, provides the perfect fill-up. Like the main work, it uses a modern-language version of a middle-English text, the poem by William Dunbar that William Walton set nine years later in 1937 in its original form in his coronation cantata of the same name. The idiom is very similar to that of the Chaucer work, music designed for a good amateur chorus, fresh, direct and tuneful, again with Hickox drawing glowing sounds from chorus and orchestra.

EG (Gramophone, July 1997, p.91)

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