A ballet set among Glasgow’s tenements where a girl who throws herself into the Clyde is resurrected by a Christ-like figure, only to see him murdered by a razor gang, seems an unlikely assignment for a future Master of the Queen’s Music. Miracle in the Gorbals, commissioned by Sadler’s Wells in 1944, was one of Arthur Bliss’s most audacious projects, although harmonically it is fairly conventional. Highlights include lilting, almost Parisian waltzes for two young lovers and a troubled sex worker, an aching neoclassical sarabande to accompany the drowned girl’s cortege and a central jazz-infused Dance of Deliverance, improvised tom-toms and all.
By contrast, Metamorphic Variations from 1972 is abstract in narrative terms. Recorded in its entirety for the first time (Bliss cut two movements, adding them to the published score as an appendix), it emerges as a late masterpiece containing the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime. Complex yet persuasive, its extended melodic lines are frequently adorned with glittering swathes of tuned percussion. The prancing Polonaise, with its splendidly inappropriate castanets, is perhaps the standout, but there’s much else here to enjoy.
Michael Seal and the BBC Philharmonic unfurl the contrasting beauties of each work in dynamic performances, aided by Chandos’s signature state-of-the-art engineering.
