Percy Grainger– Jungle Book

John Mark Ainsley
David Wilson-Johnson
Polyphony
Stephen Layton

Gramophone Editor’s choice/Critics’ choice

Classic CD
This disc offers a sympathetic, endearing portrait of a composer too often valued for his wackiness and eccentricity alone

Hi Fi News
Unquestionably an important and relishable release

Soundscapes, Australia
A capella singing at its very finest

Diapason, France
Ce superbe album vient confirmer l'extraordinaire intuition de Grainger pour l'écriture chorale. La perfection des solistes, des choeurs et des ensembles instrumentaux permet d'apprécier dans ces moindres nuances le sauvage raffinement de Grainger

Fanfare
November / December 1996

…One will, of course, find John Eliot Gardiner's groundbreaking Grainger program - Danny Boy with the Monteverdi Choir and the too-cutely named English Country Gardiner Orchestra - indispensably marvellous, yet I've no hesitation in giving pride of place to Polyphony's ....first complete recording of Grainger's Jungle Book and a generous offering of entrancing Grainger rarities.   Where Gardiner's brisk over-lightly touch - whether in Mozart, Berlioz or Grainger - piques attractive surfaces, Polyphony's Stephen Layton divines and reveals the essential.  I cannot bear to read Kipling often, for I become a child again, yet Grainger's settings...in striving to capture a primal moment, work renewing magic I would not be without.

Fanfare
September / October 1996

When I was going through a conventionally turbulent adolescence in the peaceful New York suburb of White Plains, little did I know that Percy Grainger also lived there. I suspect that the music teachers in my junior and senior high schools - yes, Virginia, there were still music teachers in those days - were equally unaware or surely we might have been exposed to more than just "Country Gardens," the sort of "frippery" piece (his word) that Grainger disliked among his own works.

What we hear on both these discs is a fascinating mix of solo and choral song, some of the latter a cappella. With only two items in common, there is little reason not to acquire both CDs. The first item, Shallow Brown, a sea shanty, is specifically to be sung by a man even though the words are a woman's. David Wilson-Johnson's baritone is thus more appropriate, or authentic, than the mezzo on the Philips disc, but that point may be debated, depending on whether one wants the verisimilitude of a woman singing a woman's words, or that of a man singing a sea shanty. The shimmering quality given by the mandolins, mandolas, ukuleles, and guitars is reminiscent of the sea, and then there are Berliozian moments for the strings or winds to indicate perhaps the deeper swells, more strongly after each verse as the ship goes farther away. In this instance, the less aggressive performance (and recording) on Hyperion is more effective, the sea almost palpable in the soft strumming rather than the hard sound under Gardiner.

"The Three Ravens" is a more even match, but generally Gardiner's approach is the snappier, also because some of the items on his disc display an exuberance matched only by the interpretation, like the "Scotch Strathspey and Reel" or the "Tribute to Stephen Foster." But then there are almost none of those snappy items on the Layton disc which has other aims.

Grainger set thirty-three Kipling poems, twenty-two of which were published and eleven of which form the Jungle Book settings a task to which the composer applied himself over fifty-nine years - much of his creative life - just as his contemporary Charles Koechlin also remained enchanted by the Kipling work, over an equally long period. The settings use all the possible combinations of voice and instrument and one remains in awe of the variety of emotion Grainger can portray and evoke with the simplest of means, while we remain barely aware of his use of the most up-to-date compositional techniques. The instrumental choices are often left to the performers, only the sung portions being more prescriptive. The fact that there is little dynamic variation on Layton's disc makes it one that should ideally be listened to over a few sessions, but I don't think I would go as far as John Wiser's praise with faint damn in Fanfare 19:3 of Polyphony’s earlier disc in Hyperion.

Gardiner’s disc is imperative listening as it is impossible not to be swept up by the exhilarating pieces mentioned above which more effectively set off the more reflective pieces such as "Brigg Fair" or "The Three Ravens." Listening to "The Bride's Tragedy" a setting of Swinburne, or Kipling’s "Danny Deever" calls forth comparison to Ives. The notes to both discs are excellent, Barry Peter Ould for Hyperion commenting extensively on each section, Wilfrid Mellers more general but no less perspicacious on Philips.

Gramophone
July 1996

Here now is the second disc in recent months to bring us face to face with Grainger. His music (or such music as we have in both of these recitals) resembles what I imagine to have been the effect of his physical presence. He opens doors and windows, unleashes sudden bursts of energy, compels a frank response, makes you draw your breath and know you're alive: also, he doesn't stay for long. The catalogue of his works (see The Percy Grainger Companion: Thames & Hudson: 1981) is itself a moving and astonishing record, because his life was so seemingly various and his 'works' ("dishes up", as he would say, in so many guises) were only a part of it.

Only two items are common to this and John Eliot Gardiner's programme on Philips. One is the famous Shallow Brown, and once heard never forgotten. In this, Stephen Layton and Polyphony secure an immediate advantage over Gardiner by virtue of their soloist. Of course we suppose, as Grainger was told, it is the song of a woman newly parted from the sailor she loves and for whose fidelity she pleads: and it is possible that with a woman singer of genius, a Baker or (think of it!) a Butt, it could be a knockout. But the song is what Grainger called a chantey a song of men among men, transferring their own emotion in a way that satisfies both it and their masculine vanity. At all events it sounds better that way. And what a song it is! In Grainger's arrangement, it is as mesmeric as the sea itself: play it in the morning and you're still hearing it at night. With Gardiner, the waves swell and crash more inexorably and the chorus suggest a harsh jeer on the face of coarse reality. But it us this new one that goes to the heart. The soloist is David Wilson-Johnson, who in the book mentioned above contributes the article on Grainger's songs. He opens with a reference to Shallow Brown, "the first... I heard, and I thought its intensity was amazing", and that thought is echoed as he sings it now with all its due complement of passion.

It is, as he also says in that chapter, "difficult to follow in a programme", yet here it serves as a prelude to the Jungle Book songs, which have their vitality in plenty. Rich in harmonies and sonorities, they date from almost any time between 1898 and 1947, and they are wonderfully well performed. In what follows, every item, would bear separate comment, and they all deserve something more than our modern listening habits are likely to give them. We do better with Grainger (as with Webern) to take ourselves back to the days of 78s, listen for three or four minutes at a time, think it over, replay, savour afresh.

A feature of the Hyperion publication that assists in this process and gains another advantage over Gardiner and Philips, is the helpful layout of the booklet: information about each item is given where you want to find it, with the text. A first-rate job has been done by Barry Peter Ould, and if this is an inaugural volume then its successors cannot do better than follow the example of this excellent original.

John B Steane

Green Guide
1996

"The worth of my music will never be guessed or its value to mankind felt, until the approach to it is consciously undertaken as a pilgrimage to sorrows." So wrote Percy Grainger, a composer whose music we normally associate with the dandified frivolity of Handel in the Strand or English Country Gardens.

Stephen Layton and is fine choir Polyphony do Grainger a great service by making this disc essentially a "pilgrimage to sorrows".The moving rendition of the sea shanty Shallow Brown on the first track shows Grainger's superb ability to plumb the depths of human sorrow.  Its moaning and wailing accompaniment of harmonium, guitars, mandolins, ukeleles and the like sounds very much like a raging storm at sea.

At the heart of this recital lie Grainger's Jungle Book settings.The pervasive melancholy of Kipling's verse seems to have released Grainger from his more stock-in-trade style and allowed him greater freedom in harmony and orchestration.  Particularly effective Jungle Book settings include the elegiac Beaches of Lukannon, with its mirage-like middle section, the baying Red Dog so well realised by John Mark Ainsley and The Only Son, where Grainger and Polyphony are at their sinuous and sensuous best.  Layton has also included Grainger's settings of folk songs and other texts by Kipling, whose famous Recessional is set in a fervently "proper" Edwardian style, suggesting Tories-at-prayer.

Tony Way

Chicago Tribune
1996

Collections of the music of Percy Grainger usually emphasize its energy and spriteliness. Not this one. Preceding the first complete recording of his choral settings from Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book" is a "sea shanty" filled with the heartbreak of many of Grainger's miniatures, revealing a depth his reputation as a jolly eccentric might not have suggested.

The suffering that underlies several of the pieces is the agony of a grown-up clinging to childhood. It's the poignance of Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose" music but more direct, naked. Few composers identified with the purity and vulnerablilty of youth as completely as Grainger, who in pieces seldom more than four minutes long conveyed the outsize intensity of childhood feeling.

All forces on the present recording are one with Grainger's spirit. If not as varied as the programs Benjamin Britten presented on LP, Stephen Layton's is more consistently fragile and touching. It will move a receptive listener to the very core.

Alan G Artner 

Diapason
January 1997

Aprés la belle anthologie de Gardiner (Philips), ce superbe album vient confirmer l’extraordinaire intuition de Grainger pour l'écriture chorale. Il met aussi en lumière une profonde affinité avec Kipling. Une infatigable énergie, la foi dans l'homme (plus particulièrement si c'est un anglo-saxon aux yeux bleus), une même fascination pour le faste verbal, la faculté de concilier la sophistication de l'art décadent du début de ce siécle avec une spontanéité non exempte de sauvagerie: autant de traits communs aux deux artistes. Le cycle du Livre de la Jungle regroupe des pages écrites à différentes époques de la carrière du compositeur australien. Le chromatisme richement évocateur de la Chanson de l'aube dans la Jungle fait surgir des images magiquement synchronisées aux visions du poète, tandis que les quintes parallèles des Plages de Lukannon affirment un instinct harmonique trés sûr habitué à trouver l'équivalent sonore le plus approprié à un paysage maritime.

Les poèmes de Kipling sent complétés par quelques arrangements de chants populaires. An nombre des plus réussis, Shallow Brown permet un rapprochement avec le disque de Gardiner. Ce dernier confiait les lamentations de l’épouse restée à terre à une femme. Conformément aux recommandations du compositeur, Layton les fait chanter par un baryton: cette piece est un vrai chant de marin, et les plaintes de l’épouse répondent à l'image flatteuse qu'ont d'eux-mêmes ces matelots prêts à jouer de leur charme pour remplacer momentanément leur "légitime" par de belles indigènes. Cette pièce imprégnée de l'ivresse des grands départs en acquiert une portée irresistible: longtemps l'âpre et sauvage mélopée vous tournera dans la tôte.

La perfection des solistes, des chœurs et des ensembles instrumentaux permet d'apprécier dans ses moindres nuances le sauvage raffinement de Grainger, à la lumière des notes poètiques et richement documentées de Barry Ould.

Michael Fleury

Répertoire

Le vaste cycle Jungle Book occupa Grainger pendant rien moins que cinquante-neuf ans ; exactement de 1898 à 1947 ! C'est dire l’intérêt qu'il portait aux textes magnifiques des deux Livres de la Jungle de Kipling. Le compositeur les a conçus soit pour chœurs mixtes a cappella, soit pour solistes et chœurs, avec une orchestration plus fournie, soit encore avec un simple accompagnement orchestral des meux choisis, comme celui des cordes et de l'harmonium, dans la partie centrale de The Beaches of Lukannon que Grainger considérait à juste titre corner la perle rare de son cycle.

Ce disque comporte d'ailleurs d'autres folk songs tout aussi passionnants, mais dont ce n'est pas le premier enregistrement, puisque The Three Ravens trouvait déjà une traduction idéale dans le récent disque de Gardiner et Lord Maxwell's goodnight dans le disque Decca dirigé par Britten. Il n'empêche que cette majorité d'inédits au disque réserve de très belles surprises, comme The Only Son, plein de sortilèges inquiétants, avec ses mystérieux hululements lointains, on la berceuse très glamour, Good bye to Love, accompagnée par un chœur à bouche fermée.

Remarquablement interprété par un chœur souple et polymorphe (écoutez ces basses dans The Running of Shindland), des solistes très inspirés (cf. les interventions très habitées et touchantes de John Mark Ainsley, par exemple Willow, Willow sorte de double du célèbre "air du saule" de Desdémone), ce disque est tout aussi enrichissant que celui de Gardiner: tous deux donnent enfin leurs lettres de noblesse aux mélodies d'un compositeur encore trop mal connu, tant l'arbitraire frontière entire musique "sérieuse" et populaire a, comme nombre de préjugés, la vie longue. A l'instar de Bartók, de Kodaly, de Britten ou de Berio, Percy Grainger a su montrer que beaucoup de ce qui avait été composé, au fil des époques, dans l'ombre et l'anonymat était digne de trouver sa juste consécration. Mais, contrairement à eux, Grainger fut un véritable "compositeur-de-musique-populaire" : appellation entachée d'illogisme, peut-être, mais la preuve est là dans toute son authenticité.

Xavier de Gaulle

Xavier Cester
1996

La música de Percy Grainger parece vivir un reflorecimiento, al menos discográfico, ya que poco después del soberbio disco de John Eliot Gardiner en Philips nos llega este nuevo empeño del grupo Polyphony que, afortunadamente, sólo tiene dos coincidencias con el anterior registro: el impresionante Shallow Brown, en una lectura cuyo impacto no tiene nada que envidiar al conseguido por el coro de Monteverdi, y la canción popular The Three Ravens. La razón de ser del disco está en la fascinación que sintió durante toda su vida Grainger hacia la obra de Ruyard Kipling, y que se manifestó en un gran número de obras entre las que destacan las basadas en el clásico Libro de la selva, compuestas en un periodo tan amplio como entre 1898 y 1947. La especial capacidad armionizadora y tímbrica de Grainger halla en los versos de Kipling una ocasión única para manifestarse, y Stephen Layton así lo entiende, con versiones que sacan el máximo provecho de la calidad de su coro y de una orquesta reunida para la ocasión, sin olvidar la labor de los solistas, en especial un inspirado John Mark Ainsley, por ejemplo en la serena tristeza de Willow, Willow. La exhaustiva documentación es un elemento más para valorar de forma muy positiva este registro.

Xavier Cester
 
Fono Forum
November 1996

Hierzulande ist der amerikanische Musen-Allrounder Percy Grainger (1882-1961) bestenfalls als exzentrischer Wanderer zwischen den Welten bekannt. In angelsächsischen Gefilden hingegen hat er sich einen gewissen Namen bewahrt. Aufführungspraktisch bereiten seine Werke insofern Schwierigkeiten, als Grainger die Instrumentierung häufig den Ausführenden anheimstellt. Laytons Interpretation läßt den einzelnen Stücken des "Dschungelbuchs" Raum für suggestive Klangentfaltungen. Spröde a cappella-Rezitation und lautmalerische Vokalisenschleier lassen das Resultat in seiner schillernden Uneinheitlichkeit gut zur Geltung kommen. N. Ra.

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