So now to Bliss, and A Colour Symphony.

This is a piece that I have loved for years and years, and I’m
so glad we’ve finally got the chance to give it a fairly rare outing. Sometimes pieces get played once a
decade because that’s about as much as anyone wants to hear them, but this is one of those
anomalies; a truly great creation, masterfully written, full of emotion, ideas, colour and honest
expression that in my opinion should be in programmes all over the world, all of the time but for a
various reasons hasn’t managed to establish itself firmly in the repertoire. Well, we are going to do
our best to try to turn the tide on this situation.

I’m more interested, as perhaps you are too, with the music than with the backstory but it’s worth
saying for reasons that will become clear that the year is 1921, and the war is most certainly in
recent memory. This was a war in which Bliss was wounded more than once, gassed, mentioned in
dispatches, and lost many of his friends and family. It haunted him. And so this ‘Colour symphony’
isn’t really about colour, it is in fact two steps removed; connotations of the meaning of colours in
heraldic terms and far more importantly, what those things mean to a man who has been through so
much. This is not “Sir Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queens Music”, drenched in gold leaf,
aristocratically sauntering from one country estate to another, that’s not the real Bliss. This is
Arthur; genius musician, compositional whizz, firebrand, raw talent, loyal friend and enfant terrible,
a few years after being in the middle of the greatest tragedy to hit the Western world.

Now here’s some music, and bear with me but I think it’s worth taking our time dissecting this a
little, but the piece is only half an hour long so we’ll still have time for a few drinks after, and we’ll
need them.

It starts fairly calmly but under the surface of a kind of Elgar-esque majesty is there also a hint
already, a foreshadowing, of a funeral march in the trudging timpani and basses?

There follows a wonderful kind of introductory section which explores the whole orchestra before
opening into something altogether more grandiose; is it royalty? Perhaps, but there’s also a military
element, the trumpets adding a kind of call to arms under which is a rich and luscious body of sound.

Behind all that pomp and gorgeousness, what is there though? It’s certainly a nod to Elgar, but even
he struggled with the piece, finding it a bit modern for his ear. Draw back the fake gold-leafed
curtain and there is darkness and doubt; here the ominous cellos and basses, a warning of ‘things to
come’, (there’s a line for the Bliss enthusiasts amongst you) and dreadful doubt in the trombones,
like a kind of ghostly echo of the “Last Post” the trumpets offer from time to time. Purple, for all its
royalty and pageantry is of course also inextricably linked to Death:
The strings try to take off again, and again Bliss furnishes us with gorgeous melody, but its
confidence is gone, it stutters and ends totally unresolved

To the second movement then and a change of scene; we’re into the world of magic, fire, courage,
wine and Stravinsky. Red is a frantic, white-knuckle movement. I remember hearing this when I was
about 16, and it was the most exhilarating music I’d ever heard, I think it probably still is.

It’s not all raging furnaces though, there’s also great melody and a zinging second section which
sparkles. There is truly great melody here too, when the madness subsides, a heroic and aspirational
theme tries to take hold. It’s not long before calamity takes hold again, but again the lyricism tries to
break through (it’s a battle you see) this time, the resolution is in that ‘zinging’ section I mentioned
earlier.

To my mind Bliss was as good and inventive an orchestrator as Ravel, such is the variety of colour he
can find in the orchestra. You’ll notice we already have the unusual set up with two sets of timpani
drums, and while you may not consciously hear this in the midst of everything else going on, at the
end of red, enjoy the most unusual deployment of three piccolos (because you can never have
enough upper-frequency hearing damage) adding the glimmer to the last section.

In the third movement, Blue, we plunge into deep water. There’s a stillness here, save the flickering
of sunlight perhaps off the surface with the most wonderfully deft flute solo. Different shapes start
to appear as our eyes adjust, but in the midst of this superficial calmness, we forget that there is also
melancholy in Blue. The melancholy in Bliss’s psyche is raw though, the vision of such savagery
hasn’t left him.

There is an extraordinary juxtaposition of deep sadness and calmness in this movement, to me as if

searching for peace, but just as you feel you’re getting somewhere, some image distracts you,
whether fanfare, horror, nostalgia. It ends calmly but in the calmness of someone at the end of their
life. Sorry it’s not all doom I promise.

Now I’ve bored the orchestra with this before, but in my foolish youth (before I had given any
thought to the deeper meaning of the piece) I did once have an idea about this piece which was to
swap Red, the second movement, with Green, the last movement because I thought it would offer a
more bravura ending. I see now that I had totally missed the point because I hadn’t ‘got’ the last
movement, so let me offer you my thoughts – only my thoughts of course not necessarily those of
the composer – but something that resonated with me.

So Green is supposed to be about hope, youth, joy, spring and victory. How do these feelings sit with
someone who has been first-hand witness to the destruction of youth, the eradication of all joy, and
at the end of it been told there has been a supposed ‘victory’? At the beginning he’s not sure, so
starts ‘academically’ with an attempt at fugue; a well-established musical form, often worked out
with discipline and calm considered thought. But it is cold, inhuman, almost mechanical, weird, as
you hear here at the beginning; this is the machine.

Then to the human in my imagined face-off, after the fugue’s opening gambit, here comes the
passionate, romantic, person; beautiful, lyrical, driven forward by the brass, but remember this
theme; it’s key to me that this is the human caught up in the mad haze of the last movement.

You hear it cut off rudely at the end. The ugly seep of the machine starts to take control again and
almost as if knocked unconscious, we fall into this little eye of the storm; it’s kind of playful, childlike,
maybe a flashback? It actually starts to get somewhere though, it’s like we’re beginning to see
through the fog.

But here, amongst a kind of half-celebration, the trumpets are poking their noses in, kind of
terrifying in their ‘wrong-noteness’? To me it’s like reality calling; “Hello, have you forgotten where
you are?”

And so it all starts to come crashing down. That first ‘academic’ – which really meant authoritarian –
theme that was so meek in the strings at the beginning is back, the mechanical has decimated the
human, who is there suffocating in the midst of overwhelming destruction. That ‘human’ theme is
still there, still passionate and fighting, but it’s fighting a losing battle. Everything is conspiring to
destroy this, civilization. I find this now the most wrenching piece of any work, it’s so
overwhelmingly powerful both in sheer volume of sound, but also in meaning, the subsuming of
humanity in its own created monstrosity.

This is why I was so wrong to even consider Red as the final, victorious movement. Green, the
movement I found hard to come to terms with, is exactly that. For all its emeralds, youth, spring and
hope, ultimately all these once positive words are been twisted and shattered to mean precisely the
opposite. Youth has been stolen from those on all sides of this stupid, mindless violence, hope
shattered, ‘victory’ supposedly won, but at a cost which is unspeakably terrible.

And on that note it just remains for me to say thank you for a wonderful 10 years with Orchestra of
the City, and here’s to the next 10… See you in half an hour.