Bantock: Omar Khayyám

Day 285

Granville Bantock: Omar Khayyám

Soloists

BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra

Norman Del Mar

I have enjoyed listening to quite a bit of the orchestral music of Granville Bantock - the Hyperion series of CDs conducted by Vernon Handley has been a source of real pleasure. I’ve also heard a couple of his symphonies for unaccompanied voices, which are perhaps a bit more of an acquired taste.

I knew about Omar Khayyám  - his massive 3-hour long setting of the complete Rubaiyat in the Fitzgerald translation - but had not got round to listening to it. But this project seemed like an ideal opportunity so I devoted a considerable part of the day to listening to the whole thing.  What an extraordinary piece it is. Rambling is one way to describe it. There is a great variety of styles in the peice. Some of it is highly sophisticated in a post Straussian idiom with some complex chromatic harmonies but some of it can only be described as naive - indeed some of the more overtly ‘oriental’ music seems to be straight out of the shool of Albert Ketelby’s In a Persian Market. Nothing wrong with that of course - I rather like Ketelby’s music but it hardly a model for this sort of serious work.

But nonetheless I found a great deal to enjoy. Some of the choral writing is thrilling - it is a sign of just how virtuosic amateur choirs could be at the beginning of the 20th century. There are also some passages of great intensity - Bantock certainly had a strong sense of how to drive the music forward. His lyrical writing can be highly effective - his sense of word setting is much more intuitive than in some of the 20th century English music that I have listened to in this project. 

Of course the whole thing is quite impossible. It is hard to imagine that there will be anything but a very occasional revival as a special festival event and even that seems unlikely. I don’t suppose that I will listen to the whole thing again for a long time (if ever) but I am very glad I did devote the time to it today. Bantock music is certainly worth hearing and the best parts of Omar are I think as good as anything else that was being written in England at the time. But only the very greatest of composers can sustain consistently high level music invention over a three-hour period.