Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Checkmate	Arthur Bliss	Listen
Mêlée Fantasque	Arthur Bliss	Listen

Reviews

• Within recent years, Naxos has been steadily building a valuable and impressive catalogue of recordings of the music of Sir Arthur Bliss. With this exceptional new CD we find the conductor David Lloyd-Jones, who has demonstrated his affinity with Bliss’s trenchant yet warmly expressive character several times on disc, placed in virtual competition with himself. The score in question is Bliss’s vastly impressive first ballet, Checkmate, dating from 1936 and first performed in Paris during the English season held there to mark the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937. Lloyd-Jones has already recorded the concert suite from this ballet for Hyperion with the English Northern Philharmonia.
  
  ‘Virtual competition’, please note, not direct competition, for here with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra he conducts an excellent performance of the complete ballet, which will surely come as something of a revelation, even to those Bliss admirers who have had only the concert suite made available on disc before. I have long thought that this ballet is, on balance, Bliss’s masterpiece in orchestral music – much as I admire his Piano and Violin Concertos – for the work’s overall duration of 53 minutes, although falling into 12 sections, is inherently symphonic and should be performed with rather more regularity in full in concert than, say, Stravinsky’s complete Firebird. Checkmate is inherently symphonic because of the musical (as opposed to the merely theatrical) impact the theme associated with the Black Queen – insidious, implied, always either hovering in the background or up-front in fiercely dramatic fashion – has on the progress of the music (and, of course, on the chess match being played out in dance before us). Bliss is in his element in the music, and the chance of hearing the complete score, rather than the concert suite, should be taken at once.
  Robert Matthew-Walker, International Record Review, 01 January 2006
• ...the demented music of the finale is breathtaking in these potent performances.
  Philip Clark, Classic FM Magazine, 01 November 2005
• Once again Naxos and David Lloyd-Jones put us in their debt with a first-class performance, at bargain price, of an otherwise unobtainable classic of British music. The suite of dances which Arthur Bliss extracted from his ballet 'Checkmate' is comparatively familiar, but it represents less than half of the score. This is the only available version of the full ballet, and while one can see that not all the other numbers lend themselves to extraction as set pieces, almost all the music is to the same high, full-blooded standard: there's vey little filling, and as a whole it bears comparison with its near-contemporary, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. From the start of the 'Attack' movement to the 'Checkmate' finale [...] this is thrillingly exuberant and colourful music at Bliss's highest level.
  The early Melée Fantasque is much more than a makeweight: written in memory of the artist Claude Lovat Fraser and one of Bliss's first characteristic pieces, it was one he remained very fond of and recorded with the LSO for Lyrita. Lloyd-Jones's tempos are fater than the composer's, but there's no lack of expansiveness in the elegaic slower episodes that punctuate the effervescent throng. Superbly alert and responsive playing from the RSNO make this disc a real bargain.
  Callum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine, 01 October 2005
• Lasting some 53 minutes, [Checkmate is] a mightily impressive achievement, scored with sumptuous skill and crammed full of first-rate, colourful invention... David Lloyd-Jones and the RSNO respond with a commendable polish and ebullient swagger that excite admiration.
  
  The Mêlée fantasque makes a delightful curtain-raiser, with Lloyd-Jones extracting just that bit more vitality from this by turns exuberant and touching dance-poem... one to snap up without delay.
  
  EDITOR'S CHOICE - October
  Andrew Achenbach, The Gramophone, 01 October 2005
• Of his ballet music, Checkmate is perhaps the most enduring. Premiered in Paris, it is a score of dramatic atmosphere, striding rhythms and vivid orchestration. This Naxos release is the first recording of the complete ballet - all 53 minutes of it. The length is sustained admirably, the choreography not missed due to the music's memorable melodic contours and palpable theatricality: the responsive listener can invent their own images and scenario.
  
  David Lloyd-Jones and the RSNO give a vital account in clear and full sound. Mêlée Fanatasque, from 1921, also has visual associations: artist Claude Lovat Fraser is remembered and celebrated in music of animation and fond reminiscene.
  , Muso, 01 October 2005
• The Mêlée Fantasque was his first orchestral work to be performed publicy (in 1921), and is audibly inspired by the energy and colour of Stravinsky's Russian ballet scores. But by the time he wrote Checkmate for the Vic-Wells ballet in 1937 (Ninette de Valois supplied the choreography to Bliss's scenario about a game of chess) the sharper edges of his music were being replaced by more romantic shapes. A bit of Stravinsky (and Prokofiev too) remains in the ballet but, as David Lloyd-Jones's performance shows, the occasional acerbic moments never outweigh the lyrically expansive ones.
  Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 16 September 2005