Discovering Bliss. BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 26 February 2025. 4✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo of Sir Arthur Bliss by Frank Woods.

Discovering Sir Arthur Bliss. BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 26 February 2025.

4✩✩✩✩   Review: William Ruff.

“An expedition to discover Bliss – but it was easy to get lost on the way.”

Sir Arthur Bliss died 50 years ago.  He was Master of the Queen’s Music and famous for writing music for films and for state ceremonies.  What could be more straightforward than that?  And why devote a ‘Discovering’ concert to his music?

Well, the truth is that hardly any of Bliss’s music is played these days, apart from a very well-known march that he wrote for the Alexander Korda/H.G. Wells sci-fi film Things to Come.  By the time he died he had become a pillar of the musical establishment and was soon ousted by a younger generation of composers who forgot that Bliss had written some shockingly unconventional music in his youth and that his life was in many ways not what you would have expected from a British cultural icon.  For a start he was actually half-American.

This 50th anniversary year is a good time to re-evaluate his work, especially in the form of a lecture/concert.  There has been an annual ‘Discovering’ concert at the Royal Concert Hall for many years now and this year’s followed the usual pattern: presenter Stephen Johnson giving an illustrated lecture about the man and his music (with the BBC Philharmonic supplying the musical extracts), followed by a performance of the pieces in full.

The programme included that famous march as well as the Overture to Miracle in the Gorbals, a ballet created during the dark days of World War II and reflecting the social and economic hardships of the time.  The storyline is bleak: a woman, driven by despair, takes her own life by jumping into the river. Her death then sets off a series of events that bring both tragedy and redemption to the community.  The Overture is very brief but, even so, Stephen Johnson showed how it blends dramatic intensity and lyrical beauty, vividly underscoring the emotional landscape of the ballet.

The bulk of the programme, however, concentrated on one of Bliss’s major compositions, his Metamorphic Variations, a very rare visitor to the concert hall and a piece which really needs an anniversary if it is ever to be rescued from oblivion.  It’s a hugely demanding, highly technical work, even the evening’s conductor, Michael Seal, confessing to finding it baffling at first.  Stephen Johnson did his best to shed light on its many complexities – but its secrets lie buried well beneath the surface and you need technical language to dig them out.  For non-musicians in the audience it wasn’t always easy to follow the explanations – and it didn’t help that the Concert Hall’s amplification system was less than ideal.

Yes, the work is a set of variations, but it’s a more stealthily organic set than the name normally implies.  It was Bliss’s wife Trudy, a keen amateur geologist, who suggested putting ‘Metamorphic’ in the title as more in keeping with processes familiar from the world of rocks and crystals.  The variations tend towards extremes: enormous power, passion and violence balanced by gentleness, whimsy and bravura, with scoring ranging from the massively saturated to the utmost delicacy.  Each variation has a title: Assertion, Speculation, Interjections, Contemplation, Cool Interlude, Affirmation, amongst other things.  These titles are an integral part of the composition, so it’s a pity there was no printed programme to make them available to the audience.

The BBC Philharmonic and their conductor Michael Seal certainly earned their money on Wednesday evening.  The largely unknown score must be extraordinarily difficult to play, hence the cheers for the virtuosity and stamina of the players at the end. 

Discovering Bliss: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.  Michael Seal (conductor), Stephen Johnson (presenter)