Posted on by Christopher Sandford · 2 Comments

‘The Sentinel’

Defendants at the Nuremberg Trials
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD relives an extraordinary encounter

“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather advised me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the faculty of the nearby University of Puget Sound, joined us for lunch. This was Tacoma, Washington, about twenty miles south of Seattle in America’s Pacific Northwest, in mid-August 1975 (I was visiting from Cambridge) and thus about ten weeks before John Cleese immortalised the phrase in ‘The Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers, which I see was first broadcast on 24 October that year. Among other distinctions my grandfather ended up as the US’s oldest active full-time professor, but that aside he was always a man ahead of his time, and I think would have enjoyed the happy coincidence of this use of the line that entered into the shared folklore of my generation of Brits.

Our guest that day in Tacoma was Colonel Burton C. Andrus (US Army, Ret), and, true to his military calling, he arrived with us precisely on time. Or, to be more literally true, he didn’t. About fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, my grandfather called me over to the front window and, with an amused smile, pointed to a large-finned old Cadillac parked directly across the street. I could see a bespectacled, grey-haired man sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper. My grandfather and I then stood waiting for the hands of the living-room clock to reach exactly 12.30pm. During these minutes, the figure in the car continued reading the paper, as though he were in fact sitting unobserved in a chair in his own home, and not parked immediately opposite our front door, ten yards away. Then, precisely at 12.30pm, the man got out of the car, walked briskly to the door, and rang the bell. “Ah, Colonel,” my grandfather greeted him. “Punctual as ever.”

Colonel Burton C. Andrus

Colonel Andrus was then 83, and it was immediately apparent that he retained his decisive, soldierly approach to life. An October 1946 issue of Time, which I’d read in my grandfather’s scrapbook the previous evening, gave a rather unflattering account of our guest. It described him as “a pompous, unimaginative, if thoroughly likeable officer who wasn’t up to his job … Every morning his plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon, moved majestically around, impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet.” Now, thirty years later, Andrus retained the same crispness of dress – I seem to remember a funereally dark suit and tie – but there was little about him that was plump or inflated. He was, if anything, a trim, wiry figure who could have passed for twenty years younger than his real age (and, incidentally, nothing like the actor John Slattery, who impersonated him in the recent film Nuremberg), and I could immediately see how formidable, in fact frightening, a character he once must have been.

When introduced, the colonel eschewed the traditional handshake and instead seized my arm near the elbow for a second in a grip of steel, as if making a sudden arrest. He then gazed fiercely around the room, which he remarked, rightly, if a shade caustically, had ‘a lot of possessions’ in it. His relentlessly critical eye had been trained over the decades to spot weakness, and he could still be abrupt in noting any blemishes or other details that failed to meet his exacting standards. I was glad that I had had a haircut the day before.

Born about 300 miles away in Spokane, Washington, in 1892, Andrus had a successful early career working for Standard Oil. He volunteered for the army on America’s entry into the First World War, and an officer’s report on him even in this youthful period praised both his “iron self-will” and “ability to inspire the fighting man which endear[ed] him to their hearts.” Although not posted overseas, Andrus was to foreshadow his later career when in July 1919 he was promoted and sent to the Presidio in Monterey, California, where he served as Prison and Intelligence Officer. Various staff and administrative posts followed in the inter-war years. In September 1941, then Lt-Col Andrus was sent to Great Britain to study its air-ground operations, and did a “thoroughly conscientious” job there, as even Time acknowledged. His was a world of briefing notes, technical manuals, dockets, manifests and fussily annotated guidelines on military procedure – a gift for detail that did not diminish with age. Andrus returned to Britain in January 1944 to serve as Commanding Officer of the 10th Traffic Regulation Group in the run-up to D-Day. In December of that year, he transferred to Allied field headquarters in liberated France as a Combat Observer. In May 1945, Col. Andrus was appointed governor of the Mondorf-les-Bains facility in Luxemburg, an interrogation centre for Nazi war criminals popularly known by its code name ASHCAN. When the inmates were moved to a new prison built at the back of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Andrus joined them there as their Commandant.

Notwithstanding my grandfather’s proverbial words of warning, Col. Andrus, once settled in a chair and fortified by a dynamite-strength martini, positively enjoyed talking about the war. And talk he did. Thrillingly. At length. In a dry, crisp voice he told us how military discipline and morale among the staff on his arrival at Nuremberg had been “a joke”, and that one night early on in his tenure a fellow officer had announced that he was leaving the post with the 200 men of his battalion, as he felt they could be of more service to the Allied cause elsewhere. At that, Col. Andrus quick-marched down to the motor-pool. “I posted guards overlooking it and I said: ‘The first man to drive out of that pool tonight – shoot him.’ No one moved. That particular officer soon found himself transferred out of Nuremberg, and sent to a less desirable posting than he might have wished,”  the Colonel smiled. The two hundred men of his unit remained behind to become the nucleus of the prison staff.

Not long after that, Andrus went to deliver the formal indictments to the men in their cells. “They were a motley crew,” he remembered. “You looked at them and wondered how they could possibly have terrorised so many millions of people.” The colonel came to the conclusion that

…it was largely a matter of image. These gangsters had always strutted about with retinues of boot-licking aides. No one questioned them. They created an impression which, through newspapers, radio, and movie films, became a cult. This cult had to be lived up to. To increase their lustre, the men had to keep going forward – in the end, they so lost track of right and wrong that in prison they felt not guilt but a kind of indignation at their confinement.

The only one of the indicted men who had mildly impressed him was Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, until lately the Head of the German Armed Forces and de facto War Minister. “He at least snapped to attention when receiving the papers I handed him,” Andrus allowed.

Like other prisoners before and after them, some of the inmates at Nuremberg turned to the solace of religion. Hans Frank, the former Governor-General of Poland, and as such thought to be responsible for the deaths of up to two million Polish Jews, “used to pray at all hours of the day, and I have no doubt genuinely felt that the Church had relieved him of guilt,” Andrus said. Several others among the accused preferred the more secular consolation of the law. Keitel and his colleagues Field-Marshal Kesselring and Grand Admiral Doenitz all addressed letters to the Supreme Allied Commander that Andrus felt would almost have been comic but for the circumstances. Many quoted the Geneva Convention, and some asked that their former aides and orderlies be sent to join them in prison. Kesselring had wanted a more comfortable bed and bigger windows in his cell to alleviate his rheumatism, a request that Andrus had felt it within himself to refuse.

The prisoners themselves weren’t the only ones to suffer the particular stress of life at Nuremberg. To my surprise, Andrus told us that when he arrived,

…most of the rest of the jail was already occupied by German civilian prisoners. It would have been easy for any of them to infiltrate our wing, and the prospect kept me awake at night until I finally got permission to erect a barrier. For that matter, the security outside the compound wasn’t any better, and if some fanatical pro-Nazis had taken it on themselves to load a truck with TNT and send it speeding through the outer wall to the cell-block itself, we would all have been blown sky high.

Andrus had also been worried about the morale of the Nuremberg jailers, or ‘sentinels’ as he called them. “These men were often 19 or 20 years old, and they were to stand in shifts in dark concrete walkways watching the prisoners day and night. It wasn’t a job for sissies. Over my whole term of duty, I experienced a 600 per cent turnover in staff,” Andrus remarked, not bothering to hide a faint snort of derision. Adding to the sombre atmosphere, two of the Nuremberg inmates, the so-called Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti, and head of the Labour Front Robert Ley, committed suicide in captivity, while the Luftwaffe chief and Reichsstatthalter of Prussia (though he acquired offices of state almost at will) Hermann Goering later cheated the hangman by biting down on a cleverly concealed cyanide capsule only hours before his scheduled execution in October 1946.

But by far the most enigmatic – and troublesome – of Col. Andrus’s charges at Nuremberg was the former Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was then 51, and had been in Allied hands since famously flying to Scotland in an apparent solo attempt to broker peace with the United Kingdom in May 1941. Was he mentally unhinged, as his bizarre flight, and subsequent real or feigned amnesia, seemed to suggest?
The colonel’s first encounter with “this beetle-browed little man who arrived in a grey suit and a crumpled felt hat” was far from promising. Hess was being marched down a corridor in the jail when he saw Goering and his guard coming towards him. “Conveniently forgetting to forget, he immediately snapped to attention and threw up his arm in the Nazi salute to greet his old comrade.” The black comedy of the scene struck me, and I asked the colonel what he had done. “I instructed Hess, ‘Do not raise your arm like that again. I consider it a vulgar gesture.’ ‘The Nazi salute is not a vulgar gesture,’ he said. ‘It is now,’ I told him.”

“I knew right away that he was faking it,” the colonel continued. When later questioned about his family, “Hess was able to answer in very great detail about events that had happened 40 years earlier. The fact that he was reading two highbrow books a day while in custody also told me that he must have retained some of the background of his education in order to understand them.” A US Army psychiatrist examined all the Nuremberg prisoners. His report found that Hess was “passive, suggestible and naïve … Like the typical hysterical personality, he was incapable of facing reality and escaped by developing a functional disorder” – in this case, selective amnesia. “I looked him in the eye and told him I knew he was a sham. Hess just glared at me. He was ‘mad’ all right, mad at me for disbelieving him,” the colonel said.

As for Goering himself, ‘he came to me as a 300-pound hophead,’ Andrus remarked, employing the terminology of the day. “He had sixteen suitcases, wore a Cartier watch, and his fingernails were painted bright red.” After several months of the colonel’s regimen, Goering was cured of his morphine addiction, and his weight was down to something approaching normal. Even so, the table in his cell was deliberately built so that it would have collapsed had he tried to use it to reach the small barred window with a sheet or towel as a possible means of suicide. Andrus admitted that he had found Goering “a cunning and not always disagreeable internee, whom you could never turn your back on.” One morning in March 1946, the Nuremberg prisoners were being taken out of their cells to be marched to the nearby courtroom. “Goering took the opportunity to reach out and strike the sentinel several times on his arm and shoulder. The soldier hit him back with his billy-club. Goering then went loco and started screaming in German, and using his hands with incredible speed to lash out at the man. It took four GIs to subdue him.” A few years later, I was uncomfortably reminded of this incident when I sat watching the scene of Hannibal Lecter maniacally attacking his guards in The Silence of the Lambs.

After being condemned to death, Goering had made a request to face a firing squad rather than the gallows. The Allied control commission rejected his petition. “In my mind, that was the moment he took the decision to kill himself,” Andrus said. The colonel would not be drawn on the rumour that a sympathetic GI had palmed the cyanide capsule to his prisoner, and rather stiffly repeated the formal conclusion of the enquiry that “Goering had the poison in his possession when apprehended”, that “he may have hidden it in an obscure recess in the inside of his toilet under the overhanging rim,” and that “no blame for dereliction of duty is ascribed to any prison guard.” The colonel repeated the words verbatim, and I could tell that the matter still rankled all these years later. To have lost three men at Nuremberg by their own hand was the one obvious regret of this proud and supremely capable soldier. Twenty years after the event, the colonel received a letter out of the blue from the National Archives in Washington, DC. It attached a photocopy of the suicide note Goering had personally addressed to him. This, too, concluded: “None of those charged with searching [for the cyanide] is to be blamed, for it was practically impossible to find it. It would have been pure accident. [The army psychiatrist] informed me that the control board has refused the petition to change the method of execution to shooting.”

Given our continued fascination both with the Nazis and with prison dramas, it’s hard to imagine anything that could make the events of the early hours of 16 October 1946 more morbidly compelling. The execution by hanging of ten condemned men at Nuremberg (Goering was to have been the eleventh) had it all: a long walk through a rainswept prison yard into a starkly lit gymnasium, where one by one the condemned men were escorted up the steps (there were thirteen) to the gallows. Colonel Andrus read the formal sentence to each one moments before the end, and even he admitted that “It was a terrible task.” The Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first to be dispatched and, like most of the others, he met his fate with a certain dignity. “My last wish is that Germany’s unity shall be preserved and that an understanding be reached between East and West,” he said. As the rope was then tightened around Ribbentrop’s neck, he turned to the army Lutheran chaplain at his side and whispered: “I’ll see you again.”

“The military men went to their deaths impeccably,” Col. Andrus said. When his turn came, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, formerly Chancellor of Austria and later Nazi commissar of the occupied Netherlands, remarked in a level voice: “I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and I hope that out of this disaster wisdom will inspire the people, which will result in understanding between the nations and that peace on earth will be finally established. I believe in Germany.” Then he, too, was hanged. The only difficulty had come in the case of the former publisher of the rabidly antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher – a “very shapeless man in a baggy suit with a large bald head and short legs.” Once at the scaffold, Streicher had screamed “Heil Hitler!”, and then made some further unappreciative remarks about the Jews. As the executioner stepped forward to the lever, the condemned man had hissed at him through his black hood: “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” After these blood-chilling events, Andrus insisted that the bodies, including Goering’s, had been taken to Dachau and cremated in the same concentration camp ovens where tens of thousands of Jews and others had met their end, although some historians doubt this detail. The ashes were secretly dispersed in a river. The colonel had nothing to say on the long-standing rumour that the executions had been botched, meaning that some of the men had fallen with insufficient force to snap their necks and had instead slowly suffocated to death.

I was then a remarkably vain and self-absorbed 18-year-old, but even so I like to think I realised how lucky I was to be included at the lunch table that day. The time seemed to fly by. Precisely at 2.30pm, Colonel Andrus stood up, thanked us for our hospitality, and announced that he would now go home for his scheduled nap and a walk. You saw again the rigid self-discipline, and remembered that this was a man who had lived his whole adult life in a world ruled by punctuality, professionalism and unswerving devotion to duty. As he left, the colonel seized my arm once more and looked me hard in the eye. “I hope I haven’t bored you too much,” he said. I assured him he hadn’t.

Colonel Burton Andrus died on 1 February 1977, at the age of 84. It’s said by his son that his last recorded thoughts were of Nuremberg. “I think that it haunted him … ‘Goering has committed suicide. I must report it to the Commission,’ he said. I told him it was the middle of the night, and it could wait until morning. Four hours later, my father died.”

Posted on by Stuart Millson

From the sunbaked south to Nordic shores

The Spanish vega from Caceres. Image: Derek Turner

STUART MILLSON enjoys music by Granados and Ginastera, Alfvén and Rautavaara

New from the ever-exploring divine art label comes a collection of often sultry songs by a group of 20th-century Latin composers, beginning with a name that is, perhaps, not at all well-known: Fernando Obradors (1897-1945) a Catalan conductor who, in his relatively short life, does not seem to have strayed far from his native Barcelona.

Six of his short songs, from a large-scale collection – Canciones clásicas españolas – launch the CD, and we are at once in a world of captive hearts, “kisses as unaccountable as the number of hairs on my head”, passionate beating hearts, “rash and painful love”. This is music to mirror a landscape, a climate, a temperament, but also demonstrates the desire of a Spanish national – or nationalist? – composer to establish a lieder/songbook tradition for his country. However, without an equally passionate interpretation of the work, the stories distilled into these intriguing songs would probably not communicate quite as well. That is why we would do well to celebrate the CD’s artists, two US West Coast-based musicians: Esther Rayo, a dramatic soprano voice, accompanied by Sydney-born pianist, Peter Grunberg, who clearly holds the piano part here to be a voice in its own right. Sometimes shimmering, as if in the world of Ravel, or at other times with all the ease of a cabaret song, the piano emerges on this album as belonging to the centre of the stage.

Yet it is Esther Rayo’s voice which leads this CD of seduction – a voice known in the world of opera (Tosca and La Bohème in Italy) and sacred oratorio – an instrument able to switch between the sighs of the song, El majo celeso (“From the lovely person I’m falling for”) to the painful, fatal love of La maja dolorosa (The Sorrowful Woman) by Enrique Granados (1876-1916) – a composer fascinated by the Spain of Francisco Goya. A more modernist vitality informs the music of Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2022) and two of the South American composers who are also featured on the album, Mexico’s Consuela Velazquez (1916-2005) and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) – the latter composer actually having heard the young Peter Grunberg toward the start of his career performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

The spirit of Spanish folk-poetry is again to the fore in six songs by Manuel de Falla, possibly the best-known of the composers featured here – a figure often spoken of in the same breath as Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy, whose earthy ballet suites combine all the energy of The Rite of Spring, yet mixed with the dances and raw emotions of the rural folk of Iberia – at least, the folk who live in our and the composer’s imagination. This journey through a culture and people ends with the song from which the CD takes its name: Estrellita – Little Star – by Mexico’s Manuel Ponce (1883-1948) – in which the singer implores the light shining in the heavens to: “Come down and tell me if he loves me a little, because I cannot live without his love”.

I listened to these works and wrote this review as the snow settled in early January, the weather service announcing the movement of a “cold front across the country”. But closing one’s eyes and sinking into the warm hillsides and dusty village streets of Spain, Mexico, Argentina, it was as if music had the power to take me to another dimension. The CD, a firm recommendation.

Image: Derek Turner

Yet the cold front did come, musically, too, in the form of a release by Chandos Records of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Neeme Jarvi, summoning us on a sleigh ride to the cold Baltic/Nordic coastal areas of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus arcticus, written in 1972, and involving slow-moving clouds of orchestral sound, occasionally interrupted by the flight of flocks of birds – their calls, recorded, and played over the sound of the Gothenburg orchestra. The composer helpfully demarcates the score with headings such as: The Bog (Think of autumn and of Tchaikovsky) and Swans migrating. Rautavaara seems to bridge the time-span between the world of Sibelius and our own era, responding to the powerful imagery and sounds of Nature in a way which suggests the contemporary preoccupation with ecology, conservation, and an attempt – not to imitate birds – but to make them a living part of music.

Rautavaara’s drifting rhapsody and meditation, though, seems slightly out of place alongside the other two pieces presented by Chandos: the much more 19th-century-sounding ceremonial music of Hugo Alfvén’s Festpel (Festival Play) – all trumpets and courtly pride – and a score to historic derring-do at the time of the Thirty Years War, the Suite to a theatrical production from 1932 of Gustav II Adolf. A sense of national destiny flutters like a battle-standard throughout this telling of the story of the heroism and death of Sweden’s great monarch. The Gothenburg players rise to the occasion, with fervour and brassy pride – but also with some of the clouds and laments of men facing death the next day on the battlefield, but still able to fortify themselves with a tankard and a lively folk-dance.

With orchestral colour and a definite sense of place – and with a cover picture of Northern snows, migrating swans and forests of fire trees – no lover of rich orchestral music would want to be without this excellent Chandos recording.

CD details

Estrellita, Esther Rayo and Peter Grunberg, piano, divine art, ddx 21145

Alfvén, Festpel, Suite from Gustav II Adolf; Rautavaara, Cantus Arcticus, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi. Chandos Super Audio CD: CHSA 5386

Posted on by Rahul Gupta

“Not unless bound with a chain” – an introduction to Dróttkvætt

RAHUL GUPTA explains the history and tradition of a venerable poetic form. This article was first
published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 8, Fall 2025, focusing on modern English poems imitating Old Norse and Icelandic forms, and is reproduced with permission

Gupta Drottkvaett FGRDownload
Posted on by Stuart Millson

Musical winter warmers

Silver buckthorn under snow. Image: Derek Turner

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, orchestral works, SOMM CD 0713

E.J. Moeran, Symphony and Violin Concerto, SOMM ARIADNE 5045

Arlene Sierra, Birds and Insects, BRIDGE 9599

Vaughan Williams, Mantegna, ALBCD067

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a man of half-English and African descent, a composer in a monocultural Britain who was championed by those quintessential musical knights, Sirs Edward Elgar and Malcolm Sargent, and who was thought to represent a vital new generation in our cultural life. Yet Samuel died in poverty – and still in the prime of life. Who knows where his musical star might have guided us?

But on a new recording from the ever-adventurous SOMM label, we are able to savour an orchestral march – championed by Sir Henry Wood – that could easily slot in alongside Elgar’s famous contribution to the military oeuvre. In Coleridge-Taylor’s Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, we find – not a piece about mystical African Emperors, their cult and country’s ability to defeat European outsiders – but a touching story-in-music about a slave in the Carolinas – named Ethiopia – giving thanks to the Stars and Stripes, as flown by the Union Army in the latter stages of the American Civil War. Of course, there are many Southerners who have not forgotten the scorched earth policy of General Sherman as he ‘liberated’ the country known as Dixie, but historical controversies aside, listeners have the chance to savour Coleridge-Taylor’s semi-Elgarian style – not to mention the rich tone of the Ulster Orchestra, under the baton of Charles Peebles.

Other works on the disc also capture the Victorian-Edwardian period feel of the music, with Rebecca Murphy, soprano, the soloist in Zara’s Earrings, Op. 7 – A Moorish Ballad, with text by John Gibson Lockhart (Walter Scott’s son-in-law, and biographer). Ioana Petcu-Colan relishes the solo part the quarter-of-an-hour in length Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor. A Brahmsian lyricism, but somehow sweeter than the original tones of the great Johannes, is never far from the surface. Lovers of the music of the English Musical Renascence will enjoy this collection enormously.

E.J. Moeran, who died during a storm on the coast of Eire in 1950, was a symphonist and tone-poem writer, able to establish an immediate atmosphere of landscape and folklore in his music. Of Irish descent, Moeran was born in England, and absorbed all the loneliness of the East Anglian coastal marshes and sands, earning the praise of fellow composer, Lowestoft-born Benjamin Britten. Yet despite Moeran’s Englishness of fen and meadow, and a beery period of mugs of ale and madrigals in the North-West Kent village of Eynsford with characterful composer, Peter Warlock, it was to an almost imaginary Ireland that E.J. – or ‘Jolly Jack’ – was drawn. His Violin Concerto, completed in 1938 and inspired by Kenmare Bay, seems to assemble every part of his character, and it is the one major work of Moeran which concert-programmers turn to on the rare occasions that the composer is even thought of these days. On a new CD from SOMM Recordings, founder and director, Siva Oke (with painstaking audio restoration from Lani Spahr) brings a 1946 live broadcast from St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, into the sound-world of 2025 – with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloist, Albert Sammons, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Longer than the concerto by some 15 minutes, the CD also features the Symphony in G minor, a piece that is filled with lyricism and impetuous outbursts of energy – again, mirroring the composer’s stormy and unpredictable character. Those familiar with Bax’s Celtic twilight symphonic output will relish the Moeran, enjoying along the way the muscular playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra of 1949 (again, under Boult) and a finale every bit as exciting as that found in Sibelius Fifth and Walton’s First symphonies.

Sarus Crane, Cornish Bantam, Thermometer Cricket, Lovely Fairywren – these are the magical titles of short pieces which comprise Books 1, 2 and 3 of Arlene Sierra’s collection devoted to Birds and Insects. A walk through a modern Natural History Museum, or a contemporary-music, natural-history sound-installation, Arlene’s music casts a strange spell – as if you were about to disappear into a fantasy of Nature. Arlene is an American composer, but London-based and has enjoyed many collaborations with leading orchestras in Britain, Japan and America. Although very much her own, distinctive, modern yet approachable style, the music seems to stand alongside similar evocations of birds by, for example, Messiaen or Ravel; and a feeling created for the listener, very much like the Japanese composer, Takemitsu, in A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden. As complex and miraculous as the delicate bodies of the creatures it represents – the music wafts from the trees, canopies and cover of the forests and woods where its inspirations live their lives. In the hands of pianists Steven Beck and Sarah Cahill, I can think of no better album of contemporary music this wintertime.

Finally, great hymn tunes abound in a CD from Albion Records – Mantegna – so named because of the 15th-century artist, painter of The Agony in the Garden. The atmosphere of Passiontide and Gethsemane is very much to the fore, in Vaughan Williams’s setting of Sidney Lanier – an American author and poet who served in the Confederate Army in the Civil War: “Into the woods my master went,/Clean forspent, forspent;/Into the woods my master came,/Forspent with love and shame… ‘Twas on the tree they slew him, last,/When out of the woods he came.’

All People That on Earth Do Dwell (the ‘Old Hundredth’) – RVW’s famous arrangement, used at the Coronation of Elizabeth II – and the tune King’s Lynn make for inspiring listening, with the words of G.K. Chesterton: “O God of earth and altar,/Bow down and hear our cry,/Our earthly rules falter,/Our people drift and die…’ Although the son of a Gloucestershire clergyman, Vaughan Williams – though inspired by Christian culture and belief – remained an English agnostic for all his days, yet even in his deep, harmonic hymnody, misty mornings near coastal East of England churches, the Norfolk Rhapsodies and the horizons of Wenlock Edge are never far away. William Vann, the Dulwich Choral Society and the London Mozart Players (the ensemble due to open the 2026 English Music Festival) give a full-bodied and well-recorded performance.

Posted on by Samuel Martin

Art for art’s – and civilization’s – sake

Argonaut (for RC), by Alexander Adams, 2025

How to Start a Dissident Art Movement

Alexander Adams, Imperium Press, pb., 233 pps., £16.23

SAMUEL MARTIN welcomes a valuable ‘handbook’

Alexander Adams starts his book with a warning – “If anyone is in need of a practical manual of how to organise a counter-cultural vanguard, this is not the book you want.”

One may argue that Adams could’ve chosen a more accurate title. That would however be uncharitable. While not a “practical manual,” Adams nonetheless tries to show what works (or doesn’t) as derived from his own personal experience. The work isn’t a manifesto produced at the inaugural meeting of revolutionaries, declaring their intention to begin the world over again, but the progress report of a soldier who has been in the trenches for a while.

Specifically, the book is a compendium of essays, speeches, and letters by Adams in his crusade against ‘State Art.’ The term State Art is never explicitly defined, although it’s immediately clear what Adams is talking about – aesthetically heterogeneous but ideologically homogenous work arbitrarily foisted upon the public it simultaneously despises and depends on for subsidy.

Adams is however not a populist in either a political or aesthetical sense. His writing shows a clear minoritarian, elitist bent – lauding the handful of innovators, dynamos, and deviants who drag society kicking and screaming into the future. Adams regards himself (and the movement) as being revolutionary, and, like all good revolutionaries, seeks to capitalise on popular discontent, especially where it aligns with the movement’s objectives.

While this might invite accusations of opportunism, it’s clear that if Adams truly is motivated by self-interest, he’s chosen a terrible line of work as an outlet, something he outlines frankly to like-minded artists: “Any dissident arts centre will attract the ire of the governing elite… from media hit pieces and petitions to zoning-regulation alterations and de-platforming from banking systems should be expected.” It is for this reason Adams proposes a Moltke-esque ‘plans never survive contact with the enemy’ approach to dissident organisation.

In conjunction with his disdain for State Art, more cynical and reductive critics may dismiss Adams as speaking out of both sides of his mouth – nominally seeking to remove politics from art while vying to supplant one caste of ideologues with another, utilising art for a different set of political ends. But while Adams states that he’s not part of the ‘Left,’ his work forms a running argument that the enemy is not progressivism per se, but the incremental bureaucratic capture of imagination – the slow domestication of art into a credentialed, subsidised, token-dispensing machine. Progressivism is not so much an eternal enemy, but something that presently, circumstantially, stands in the way of art itself.

In that sense, his criticism of State Art is less a partisan swipe than a structural diagnosis; once art depends on public subsidy and ideological gatekeeping, risk evaporates, and merit is denounced. This is why he can simultaneously praise Old Masters, defend bad folk art, and encourage radical innovation—he sees them all as living vital expressions.

The charge that he is merely swapping one ideological caste for another misunderstands this point. Although he doesn’t seek to equivocate the marginalisation of Right-leaning artists with the liberals of yesteryear, Adams does not offer a checklist of acceptable themes or styles; his ultimate red line is that art be judged on its intrinsic qualities, not on the demographics or politics of its maker. “To be deemed a dissident,” he says, “all it takes (potentially) is being committed to art being judged on its intrinsic qualities and refusing to assess art according to the demographic characteristics of its maker or performer.” Adams’ funniest description of the prevailing art establishment view – and one that is oddly prescient in the light of highly charged current politics – goes as follows  “An arts administrator in the UK would be as likely to programme a stage play – provocative but with artistic merit – that was sympathetic towards white nationalism, as he would place a live explosive in proximity to an audience…”

Self-portrait in full sunlight, by Alexander Adams, 2025

Adams’ determination to avoid sounding like a flippant curmudgeon place his work far ahead of other writers on this subject; he can credibly claim to having a vested interest in art, not merely acknowledging it when it gets caught in the crosshairs of political punditry. In this respect, Adams’ book is timely and useful. It can serve as a powerful counter to the pseudo-profound but popular notion that because art is made in society, and society is a compound of political decisions (past and ongoing), that all art is political.

This really matters. If all art is political, then the distinction between art and propaganda is entirely arbitrary – a figment of power to perpetuate the status quo. This not only makes it legitimate to reject technically sophisticated art for political reasons, but gives licence to work that, if hung in any place other than an established gallery, would be regarded as lowest-of-the-low slop. Just as telling truth in a world of lies becomes a political act, making art in a world of propaganda too becomes a political act – if not political in the eyes of the maker, then in the eyes of those who regard the artist as some kind of ideological enemy.

Adams’ core principle – art first, politics second – means that even when he speaks of “working for your people” or “building parallel institutions,” he is not calling for counter-propaganda but for the creation of conditions in which genuine creativity can flourish on its own terms. The most politically proficient thing one can do create good art – not as political art, but as art itself.

Adams’ twelve ‘rules’ for artists stand out as the work’s backbone: (1) Take yourself seriously (2) find friends (3) look at and talk about art seriously (4) work for your people (5) balance group interest and self-interest (6) make, destroy, monitor (7) keep records (8) write letters (9) art is a social business (10) find homes for your art (11) take risks and 12) take responsibility, suffer well.

There is a refreshing moral seriousness and sincerity to these rules that is rare in either art or politics – perhaps especially in dissident circles, where grifting and Internet histrionics are too often present. Dissecting these rules individually is beyond the scope of this review – which is unfortunate, because they constitute good advice not only for dissident artists, but for anyone with any kind of creative, intellectual, moral or political imperative.

As a writer, the rule to “Destroy a lot” stands out in particular to me. I have known this intuitively for a while, yet never thought to express in such indulgently brutal yet intimate terms:

It does you good to destroy your work and relinquish the substandard. Reuse your material when you can. Without the ability to be ruthless, you will accumulate too much and will be unable to see your achievements clearly. You will incur costs that will burden you with preserving the poor and thereby prevent you from making the better. Take pride in the best you have done and do not become too sentimental regarding the weak, secondary or superseded. Preserve samples of preparatory materials, experiments and unfinished pieces, but preserve sparingly.

These rules are the closest Adams gets to a coherent system of comportment. It’s at this point one begins to realise that Adams’ movement – for all the words he spends justifying its necessity, not to mention shopping list of logistics and strategic pointers – lacks a name.

Drawing on the Impressionists, Adams notes they had no explicit creed or aesthetical guideline beyond opposition to what was ‘the system’ at their time of formation. Here, Adams’ use of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the essence of art could have been tied more explicitly into his views on strategy. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger viewed Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as emblematic of everything rational, detached, and sterilising we associate with the Enlightenment – contaminating all ensuing intellectual development, including the arts, with a litany of -isms (subjectivism, individualism, scepticism), by presupposing the existence of an “I.”

Adams is determined to avoid punishing self-definition, in order to allow for flexibility. Should dissident artists tell us immediately exactly what they believe and intend to create, they will labour under the pressure to do so, jeopardising their solidarity, and as a result, extinguish themselves.

In the end, we discover that the title isn’t a misnomer but a subtle hint. Adams’ movement isn’t something you announce with a press release. It is something that shows itself gradually in the work, piece by piece, until the proponents of State Art realise it exists. By then, it’ll be too late to stop.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

A tale of three cities

A house on the Appian Way

STUART MILLSON enjoys music linked by metropolises


The 2025 season of the BBC Proms was in its final furlong on Sunday 7th September, with an 11am performance of three highly descriptive works from the early part of the 20th-century – Respighi’s ‘Technicolor’ 1924 description of the Eternal City, The Pines of Rome (sun-drenched, but with a perfumed nocturne at its heart), Milhaud’s jazzy and wine-overflowing Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and the immediate pre-Great War London Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
All connected by the theme of great cities, each work was given a velvety performance by the ever-euphonious, silky-toned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (but with additional antiphonal brass to set those Roman Legions marching in the Respighi). And relishing the writing of each musical postcard was the RPO’s conductor, St. Petersburg-born-and-educated, Vasily Petrenko, an expressive, energetic conductor of the younger generation.
Ottorino Respighi was the greatest film-score composer — who never wrote for the movies! He should have really been there for those great directors of the past, with their Xanadu grandeur and appetites for the mass-drama of the ancient world, but instead his epic scores accompany the picture-house of the mind: the rush and swirl of a heady city, full of the dust of the past, as children’s games in the park open his Roman pines holiday.

The Stravinsky-like opening, with its dainty little fanfares and marches, builds to a brazen crescendo — and suddenly the audience is plunged into a sepulchral atmosphere of ruins, remains, skulls, catacombs; and like an incantation from Roman worship, with seers and soothsayers never far away, the movement slowly lurches forward like a procession of colour plates from a history-book, come to life. The warmer, sensuous sounds of the night then waft into the score in The Pines of the Janiculum Hill, switching the panorama to one of soothing, delicate ultra-romanticism — the sweetness of the warm darkness crowned by a recording of a nightingale’s song played over the loving woodwind and strings. Respighi was right: not even a composer or first-class orchestra could imitate the such a bird.
Finally, a theme of some disquiet begins to rise and rumble on the horizon of the Via Appia — the occasional glint of sun on a shield, the faint sense of Legions’ standards coming into view. With batteries of brass and percussion standing by, the RPO made the slow, yet unmistakably glorious march to the capital of one of the world’s great empires, before the full weight of dazzling orchestral sound — reinforced by the hundreds-strong pipes of the Royal Albert Hall organ — brought Pini di Roma to its blazing finale.

Josephine Baker, by Paul Colin. 1930

Mid-20th-century Gallic wit, insouciance, even surrealism is the heady cocktail for Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur Le Toit — the jazz-age scena (with orchestral, rather human voices) which sparkles on the dance-floor of a nightclub named, bizarrely, ‘The Ox on the Roof’. This is carnival time, 1919, in a fictitious bar, a ballet of weird characters tapping their feet in time to jazzy tunes and dancing the night away — although a night-spot did open in Paris, using this very name, and they made the bon viveur Milhaud a member. Even though our Proms performance was nearing noon, the Royal Philharmonic made us all feel as though we were in a late-night, Bogart-type bar, with the Gitanes-smoke smouldering in the dark corners and the hedonists relishing every syncopated note on the dance-floor.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1917


When the English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams takes an audience to a place — whether a lark ascending over the downland, or the oceans of A Sea Symphony — you can bet that there is more to it than just a portrait coloured in by an orchestra. The lark soars to an unknown region, or you steer, not for the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, but navigate around your own deepest thoughts in the dark night of the soul. In the composer’s A London Symphony, written just before the Great War, we find ourselves seeing through the clearing of the morning mist, just like Wordsworth’s vision of the city from Westminster Bridge — or in the elegiac nocturne, the autumn leaves in Bloomsbury Square. But it is, too, a city of dreadful night — music which in its final movement Betjeman chose to accompany his 1977 television poetry anthology, but using the music for scenes of the stark grandeur of wintry hills, rather than the town: a sense of the life-cycle of the year — of us all — meeting the maker of our being.
Maestro Petrenko felt every pulse of this most English journey, bringing forth playing of nervy beauty in what is a complex, enigmatic, deep-water score. The finale, inspired by a passage from H.G. Wells’s novel, Tono-Bungay, depicts a vessel sailing by night along London’s river, to the Thames estuary and open sea… “London passes, England passes… all the old certainties glide astern…” — and here, the RPO’s woodwind and sepia strings conjured a Time Machine feel of dates, time, reality, all dissolving and meaningless as the city fades into a memory.
A Proms concert that won’t be easily forgotten, in this, my 44th year at these concerts.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Call of duty

Duty of Care 

Directed by Asa Bailey, co-written by Asa Bailey and Jack Marsden, starring Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

In the world of film and cinema today, it is something of a relief to find, not just a story without improbable car chases through Los Angeles, AI-generated explosions or extreme-weather calamities, but which centres itself upon the quiet north Wales town of Llandudno and the lives of two men: army veteran, Major Harris, and his carer, Gary.

It is the kind of film at which our country excels – slow-burn, minimalist drama, set against the background of ordinariness – the result being the sense of an even more acute build-up of tension than one would find in any blockbuster. It is a simple enough idea: the retired soldier, looking back on a life of action, but unable to adjust completely to the banality of everyday life, coming into contact and conflict with the equally tedious world of care and social services. Gary (played by BAFTA winner, Jack Marsden*) – volunteer carer, dressed in casual clothes – knocks at the Major’s door, and at once there are the unmistakeable signs of an impending personality and culture clash. Gary seems domesticated enough and willing to help, but Harris is accustomed to his own household rituals and his emotional short-fuse (the result of his war-experiences) leads to a grand bust-up.

Jack Marsden

Taking the role of Major Harris is the well-known Coronation Street star, Bruce Jones, who brings something of the all-in-a-day weariness of a ‘soap’ character to the story. And yet, because of the pauses, the silences, the sense of brooding, anxiety, misery in the Major, the viewer is given far more than a low-budget film with an efficient, half-hour TV script. Jones’s performance is worthy of the highest accolades – and this is because he is completely believable in his role, so much so, that you – the viewer – may find yourself wanting to reach out and help him.

And it is Gary, the casual care-worker – a man who resides in a mobile home – who doesn’t even know his next step in life, who wants to give Harris the assistance he clearly needs. Rejected, though, and ordered out by the old soldier, Gary seems to pass from the story. A new carer arrives, a cheerful-enough girl (played by Sophie Anderson), this time, wearing a uniform; more what you would expect a care-assistant to look like, but it is soon clear that she, too, is just drifting in our modern Britain. Gary, meanwhile, breathless and in disarray, and unable to find any other work, tries to cling to his identity: ‘I’m Gary, I’m Gary,’ he says – as if trying to prevent himself from tipping into complete despair. Yet at this point, we discover something of his own identity: he, like Harris, has a past, but one which he hardly talks about and acknowledges to himself only in moments of extreme emotion.

Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

The film, recalls Jack Marsden, was first premiered in Liverpool, in the presence of HM Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool – to a standing ovation, with many ex-servicemen in the audience clearly profoundly moved by the screenplay. Jack also notes the role played by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, the founder of a Manchester-based charity concerned with suicide among men; and it was Anthony’s wide knowledge of this problem which helped Jack to shape his on-screen character.

Jack had also worked with Bruce Jones, prior to Duty of Care, on Ken Loach’s Cannes award-winner, Raining Stones; and it was with great pride that all those involved with the new film received the praise and endorsement of the senior filmmaker. Yet it is also the town of Llandudno that stars in Asa and Jack’s compelling work: a place, perhaps, of sleepy anonymity, where Major Harris and Gary spend so many of their hours looking out to sea, churning over the past and wondering what the future holds…

*Jack Marsden, BAFTA award-winner for his role as PC Rylance in The Cops

Posted on by Richard Dove

Music from around the sphere

River Dove by Gordon Hatton. Wikimedia Commons
RICHARD DOVE is carried away by music

On my first listen to Kenneth Hesketh’s Hände Music for Piano (Paladino Music) I could not get the image of a river out of my mind. Not just any river, but the River Dove as it winds through Dovedale in Derbyshire. There are fast flowing torrents, shallow rapids, gently flowing over rocks and around stepping-stones. On consulting the excellent sleeve notes, I see that Hesketh has composed Uncoiling the River. Clearly, flowing water is an influence on his compositional style. It rumbles, splashes, ebbs and flows. The pieces are performed by Hesketh’s friend and collaborator, Clare Hammond. There is both virtuosity and empathy evident in the playing, with subtle use of pedals and piano strings to add to the palette of sounds.

I listened with my study windows open, and birdsong floated into the pauses sand silences. Chorales and Kolam is a particular highlight with composer and performer seemingly merged in harmonic unison.

“Both Hesketh and I share a certain frenetic mental energy,” says Hammond. Quite so, but there are profound contemplations amidst the frenzy. Hesketh and Hammond are a formidable pairing. A symbiotic, sonic experience.

Map of South America in 1593, by Gerard de Jode

In contrast to the fast flows and gentle streams is Vibrant Rhythms, with Bolivian pianist Jose Navarro-Silberstein demonstrating the full range of South American rhymes and rhythms. Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera’s Suite de Danzas Criollas sets us on a South American journey making extravagant use of zamba, chacarera and malambo folk dances alongside Bartok and Stravinsky. An exciting mix of cultures and styles.  The playing is assured without being flamboyant.

We travel across regions of Brazil in Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Cicolo brasileiro. If one can imagine Debussy playing a samba you get the sense of this particular sonic landscape. Tiny rhythms seem to dance in the sultry air in these virtuosic movements.

The real highlight for me is the interpretations of fellow Bolivian composer Marvin Sandi, where folk tunes meet polytonality. These four short pieces seem to belong to a sound world of their own. Sandi gave up music for philosophy eventually. On the evidence of these pieces he really could have combined both disciplines to great and lasting effect.

The CD closes with the precise waltzes of Robert Schumann, where wild and impulsive pieces give way to dreamy singing. There is a balletic tonality which encouraged me to go en pointe in my well-worn slippers.

‘West Coast of Ireland’ by Robert Henri West, 1913

The Devil’s Dream is a new release on the Metier label by Irish composer Sean Doherty. It is an outstanding work exploring Donegal fiddle traditions where “the tunes are as stark as the bogland and the bowing as jagged as the cliffs,” according to the accompanying notes. This is vast, swirling music for a dense and dowdy landscape – the music of quiet resistance and brutal victory. Somehow there is both defiance and acceptance. It is both uncomfortable and deeply inspiring. Do yourself a favour and spend an hour immersed in this stunning performance by the Sonoro Quartet and the wonderful soprano, Dr. Sylvia O’Brien.  

Kenneth Hesketh, Hände – Music for Piano, Clare Hammond, Paladino Music, PMR0137

Vibrant Rhythms, Works by Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, Sandi and Schumann, Jose Navaroo-Silberstein, Genuin, GEN23845

The Devil’s Dream, Chamber music by Sean Doherty, Sonoro Quartet, Metier, Mex 77135

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

From searing symphony to Paradise Garden

STUART MILLSON enjoys a rhapsodic favourite as well as world premieres at the English Music Festival

Friday 23 May 2025 marked the beginning of the eighteenth English Music Festival, a much-looked-forward-to annual event in the classical calendar and a testimony to the considerable organisational and fundraising skills of its founding director, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck. Despite receiving no support from the Arts Council of England, no help from the ‘Department of Culture, Media and Sport’ and no visit or encouragement from Government ministers (either Labour or Conservative – save for one brief appearance by Boris Johnson in the early days), the Festival has managed to galvanise a loyal following of supporters, benefactors and artists – thus ensuring the continuation, not just of the main four-day event, but a host of other concerts, events and recording initiatives.  A lesson in self-reliance and self-belief, the EMF must be considered as one of the most remarkable events of its kind – not least because of its presentation of a forgotten part of our national musical heritage.

Usually when one thinks of an English music concert, works such as Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ or Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending come to mind, and many such prominent works are indeed to be found in the Festival’s programmes. But what distinguishes the EMF is its patient work – hours spent in archives and in tracking down lost scores – reconstructing a lost world of English music. Thanks to the musicological detective work of figures such as Martin Yates, the conductor of the opening-night’s concert, audiences are taken way beyond the usual boundaries.

Stanley Bate

This year, we were treated to the enigma and variations of Stanley Bate’s Second Symphony – Bate, a pupil of Vaughan Williams and the German composer, Hindemith, yet who has been practically forgotten by the musical establishment in this country. The presentation of his searing four-movement symphony from the late 1930s amounted to a posthumous world-premiere for a potentially great but tortured figure, who died tragically before his time. It also brought home to the audience (and performers) just how avant-garde English composers could be – resetting our idea of our native music, as something that could be as Shostakovichian as pastoral or romantic.

Bate’s work had some radiant moments within its taut structure, like an exhalation of breath amid the angst, but on the whole, some of the febrile nature (and phraseology) reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony made it a muscular, physical, challenging – even shattering – musical experience. The beginning of the last movement brought to mind the stretched tonality and astringent string writing of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, making the piece very much the province (you would have thought) of BBC Symphony Orchestra repertoire, those specialists of 20th century music. But I doubt that any ensemble could have rivalled the faultless, totally-committed rendition given at Dorchester by the BBC Concert Orchestra – musicians who seem to have the gift of versatility, allowing them to roam from show music to popular classics, and the pinnacles of British music of the last century.

William Alwyn

Alongside the Stanley Bate, the BBC CO gave us an injection of springtime energy, in the form of William Alwyn’s The Innumerable Dance – An English Overture. This was a vision of sensuality and radiance, every bit as transcendental as a Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde. It was followed by Delius’s well-known The Walk to the Paradise Garden, although the setting is Switzerland rather than our own land. The rich, expansive acoustic of Dorchester Abbey, full of reverberation and ‘air’ was just right for the Delius, as it was indeed for the Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, an early work (1901) by Vaughan Williams, the monumental conclusion of which included the magisterial tones of the Abbey’s organ, ringing out over and through the orchestra.

The Festival paid tribute to Sir Arthur Bliss, in this the 50th anniversary year of his death, with another exceptional interpretation, the Cello Concerto of 1970, a piece premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival under the baton of Benjamin Britten. Originally written for the Russian cellist Rostropovich, the Dorchester performance was given by one of the greats of our own era, Raphael Wallfisch, who brought this neglected, fine and fluent score to life. Having performed Finzi’s Cello Concerto at the Festival some ten years ago, Wallfisch has the full measure of English music – bringing a warmth, detail, spirit and true authority to another part of England’s music that has tended to languish in a backwater. Sitting as I was on the second row, I found myself admiring the chamber-like detail of the cello playing, the soloist given a full spotlight of sound, thanks to the sensitive accompaniment of Martin Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Rupert Marshall-Luck and Peter Cartwright
Image: Stuart Millson

The next day at the Festival’s Saturday morning recital, the official chamber players took centre-stage – violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and pianist, Peter Cartwright, a powerful partnership dedicated (again) to works and composers who have become distant to us. First was Norman O’Neill’s (1875-1934) Suite in B minor for Violin and Piano, and then Alan Rawsthorne’ s 1933-34 Violin Sonata. Rawsthorne attained fame as a film composer in the 1940s and ‘50s, but his Violin Sonata is little known. In fact, the recitalists were giving the first public performance of the work in the United Kingdom. Both violinist and pianist were as skilled in delivering the foot-tapping finale to the Rawsthorne, as they were in the gentler, dreamier lines of Delius’s Sonata in B major and the Cradle Song by Herbert Howells (the latter, another premiere, thanks to the determination of the EMF) – confirming them as two of our country’s very finest performers and advocates of English chamber music.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

From the Fens to Ayrshire – and Stravinsky’s dark times

The Lugar, by David Johnston. Image: Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON wanders imaginatively across peaceful marshes and rivers, to glimpse a world at war

Composers are not necessarily good conductors of their own works — too fussy, sometimes, or just without the conducting charisma of a professional baton-wielder, more accustomed to the stage and the adulation of an audience. Not so in the case of composer-conductor, Sir James MacMillan, a native of Scotland whose musical outlook and versatility brought such intense playing from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in that most English of works, Vaughan Williams’s early-20th century symphonic impression, In the Fen Country. 

Sir James — who as we were to find out in his new euphonium score later in the programme — has a natural feel for music which puts man in his place in the midst of a landscape where remoteness and the movements of cloud banks and sunlight over water allow your mind to wander fantastically. So the Vaughan Williams unfolded, carrying us far from Swansea’s Brangwyn Hall, like a fen-tale recounted by a local on a warm May evening (which indeed this was) — orchestra and conductor carefully finding all the threads and patterns of the lonely land so beloved by Vaughan Williams.

A similar ‘genetic heritage’ flowed into Sir James’s Where the Lugar meets the Glaisnock, a picture of the confluence of two Ayrshire rivers — part tone-poem, part euphonium concerto. Seldom has this bold solo brass instrument sounded so subtle and ‘at one’ with the soft magic of strings – the writing for the latter section of the orchestra suggesting the half-light melancholia of Vaughan Williams, but through a twenty-first century prism. At one point in the score, I picked up in MacMillan’s Ayrshire filaments of sound from distant Estonia, where a passage brought to mind the mystical, frozen-in-time style of composer, Arvo Pärt. Our solo euphonium player, David Childs, certainly gave a thrilling performance of what was a successful, deeply meaningful MacMillan world-premiere.

Igor Stravinsky

Thoughts of war (for Stravinsky, the stark image of goose-stepping machine-armies) were never far away in the composer’s emphatic, barbed, relentless Symphony in Three Movements, although the unsettling whirl of world events dispels quite uncannily in a surprising, eccentric, but warm and friendly little gavotte-like dawdle in the second movement — as if Pulcinella or Petrushka were never far away. The orchestra’s woodwind and brass produced pinpoint ‘Technicolor’ virtuosity — qualities which were centre-stage, too, in the shortish diversion (though with a clever, inventive sharpness) that is Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments.

The concert began with another compact and engaging mini-masterpiece, by Vaughan Williams’s composer-colleague, folk-song collector, and walking, hiking, inn-visiting friend, Gustav Holst — his Capriccio, a short work for full orchestra, with some magisterial trombone writing (Holst’s own instrument) and a foot-tapping march right in the middle of it. Yet the work seems to begin in Vaughan Williams’s fen and marsh, or the Ayrshire of MacMillan, another mysterious signpost of the continuum element in the music of these islands.