As far as 20th-century British music was concerned, Lyrita was one of one of the most significant record labels of the 1960s and 70s. It made available, in immaculately performed and engineered recordings, a huge range of works, many of which have never been recorded since. When CDs superseded vinyl in the 1980s, Lyrita was slow to respond. The company’s founder, recording engineer Richard Itter, regarded the sound quality of the digital format as markedly inferior to analogue, and the company went into eclipse. Only over the past decade or so have many of its most important recordings finally been issued on disc.
Since Itter died two years ago, there has been a resurgence of interest in the label, too, as it has begun to explore the wealth of high-quality private tapes, mostly of music by British composers, that Itter assembled over half a century from BBC broadcasts. Many document works that have never been available commercially. Phyllis Tate’s opera The Lodger, choral pieces such as Arthur Bliss’s The Beatitudes and Peter Racine Fricker’s The Vision of Judgement, and symphonies by Arnold Cooke, William Wordsworth and Arthur Butterworth, have already been painstakingly transferred to disc in the Itter Broadcast Collection.
Now comes the first-ever complete recording of Granville Bantock’s magnum opus, Omar Khayyam, based on the studio performance conducted by Norman Del Mar that the BBC put out in 1979.
In 2007, Chandos released a fine recording of Bantock’s setting of Edward FitzGerald’s rather free translation of the collection of Persian poems. But that performance, conducted by Vernon Handley, cut about 20 minutes of music; Del Mar’s loving account, with the BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra and a superb trio of soloists – contralto Sarah Walker, tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson and baritone Brian Rayner Cook – includes every note, almost three hours of music, in what is much more than serviceable stereo sound.
Those who enjoy Bantock’s rather rich late-romantic soundworld will revel in every bar of this score, which was completed in 1908. Like the Gothic Symphony by Havergal Brian (who was a huge admirer of Bantock) it’s one of the monuments in British music that needs to be heard, occasionally at least. There are certainly some genuinely striking passages in Omar Khayyam, in a style that seems to hover between post-Wagnerian opera and turn of the 20th-century English oratorio, but there are also stretches in which one begins to wish Bantock had been more selective, and composed a more compact work; the structure is dramatically ramshackle and overall shape just a bit too amorphous.
Omar Khayyam takes up two and half of the four discs in the Lyrita set. There’s also room for Del Mar’s 1968 performances of Bantock’s overture The Pierrot of the Minute, and two more substantial pieces, the half-hour tone-poem Fifine at the Fair, and the huge orchestral song cycle Sappho, with contralto Johanna Peters as soloist. Three of the nine Sappho settings are omitted, though the complete work is included in Hyperion’s Bantock collection. But those who want to hear Omar Khayyam in all its glorious monumentality will need to buy the Lyrita set.
