Review
". . . I suspect that if Lambert had possessed even the most elementary degree of technical accomplishment in the direction of colour or design he would have been a painter rather than a musician. There is something eminently pictorial in his most characteristic works . . . " the critic and composer Cecil Gray wrote in 1948, looking back over a lifetime's friendship. Gray is thinking of "the Rio Grande, with its rich, opulent, deciduous colouring" and "the dark, black, Célinesque quality of the piano sonata," though his observation applies
a fortiori to the delicate line drawing of the Eight Poems of Li-Po. These airy, sketch-like numbers, utilizing translations from the verse of China's greatest poet by Shigeyoski Obata, were composed for voice and piano between early 1926 and late 1929, and later scored with an accompaniment of flute, oboe, clarinet, string quartet, and double bass. The set is dedicated to the silent film actress Anna May Wong -- remembered now (if at all) for a supporting role in Douglas Fairbanks' Thief of Baghdad -- whom Lambert courted briefly and with disillusioning results. The young
Arthur Bliss, it should be noted, was also attracted to Obata's translations, several of which he had set in 1923 as The Women of Yueh. Lambert's first settings are contemporary with his sudden notoriety in having been commissioned by Diaghilev for the ballet Romeo and Juliet before his twentieth birthday. It premiered at
Monte Carlo on March 4, 1926 while he was still a student at the Royal College of Music. And the last settings follow the phenomenal success of
The Rio Grande early in February 1928, which consolidated his position and established him as one of the leading English composers of his generation. The final settings, in fact, are contemporary with, yet in marked contrast to, the brittle, mirthless gaiety of the jazz-inflected Piano Sonata -- the collection is all of a piece. Indeed, these brief, bright evocations -- the longest playing not quite three minutes -- are the last of Lambert's works untouched by tragedy, which descended with the suicide of his boon companion Philip Heseltine (known to all lovers of English song as
Peter Warlock) in December 1930. In their combination of effusiveness and serenity, the Eight Poems of Li-Po loom as attractive objects rife with brilliant detail, concise and accomplished, and admirable rather than moving. As the great English musicologist Deryck Cooke noted, "The subtle simplicity and exquisite fragility [of Li-Po's poems] . . . are beautifully reflected in Lambert's cool, fragrant, allusive settings." ~ Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide
Albums with Complete Performances of the Work
