Refurbishing the Image of Percy the Odd

In an age when novelty is increasingly demanded to attract new audiences to classical music, the name of Percy Grainger is returning to currency. Could he be enlisted to bridge the gap between not-quite-committed classical lovers (the kind, perhaps, who grew up on a mix of Judy Collins and Vivaldi) and the musically educated listener in need of occasional relief from the Great 19th-Century Classics? A young pianist could do worse than to include his music on a recital program, and there’s terrific encore fodder here.

Grainger (1882-1961), the Australian-born, German and British-educated, naturalized-American pianist-composer-folklorist-teacher, is perhaps best known in this part of the world for having been married on the Hollywood Bowl stage, before an audience of 15,000, in 1928: the centerpiece of one of his own concerts.

His abilities as a pianist were attested to by Grieg, of whose concerto he was the foremost exponent for decades. His works were posthumously revived by Benjamin Britten, and there wasn’t a between-wars audience, irrespective of taste or education, not familiar with the art and handsome visage of this delightful, gifted eccentric.

At the time of his death in New York in 1961, however, he was both broke and broken, his considerable wealth having gone to help the U.S. war effort and to support his ethnomusical museum in Australia. His final years were spent in a fruitless attempt to devise a new music, independent, we are told, of such archaisms as pitch, rhythm and harmony. A quixotic end for one who dedicated his life to making music accessible.

To tell us more than we’ve ever previously known about the man’s art, the Nimbus label has embarked on a multi-issue Grainger project to include all his works for solo piano, to be called--in the composer’s own parlance--”Dished Up for Piano.” The performer is Britisher Martin Jones, an artist of consequence who has in recent years given us superior recordings of Debussy and Mendelssohn.

Volume I (NI 5220) contains original, once widely circulated works that in the proper hands--certainly Jones’--are sure-fire doldrum-dispellers: “Handel in the Strand,” “Mock Morris,” “The Gum-Suckers March” and “In Dahomey” as well as “To a Nordic Princess,” which he wrote for and played at his Bowl wedding.

The “Grainger problem”--aside from the fact that his music is such fun (which to certain observers is always suspect)--has to do with whether it’s “classical” or not. What Englishman doesn’t consider “Handel in the Strand” or “Country Gardens” traditional tunes?

Thus, Grainger has suffered a curious relationship with audiences: He was better known during his lifetime as a performer than as a composer, yet so much of what he was playing, and with which he was giving infinite delight, was of his own creation.

Volume II (NI 5232), devoted to Grainger the arranger, is a different proposition. Here, one asks, is he sending up the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto by cramming it into 3 1/2 minutes and dispensing with the orchestra? Actually, he is inflating that hyper-familiar opening theme, creating a gigantic miniature even tougher to play than the original. To these ears it’s huge fun, and Jones brings it off with stunning bravura.

Elsewhere among the arrangements, Grainger can be the incarnation of delicacy, as in his soulful reminiscence of Dowland’s “Now I Needs Must Part”; a conjurer of an unearthly array of pianistic color in his exquisite “Ramble” on the final duet from “Der Rosenkavalier.” Or a purveyor of salon kitsch, as in his super-gloss on Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze”; and we don’t need his tremolando-ridden, piano-bar Gershwin arrangements.

In all, however, Grainger, with Jones as his dedicated intermediary, provides great pleasure, to be repeated and amplified, we trust, in subsequent releases, which will include more of his ‘traditional’ tunes, e.g., “Molly on the Shore” and “Country Gardens.”

That Grainger was better suited to this sort of miniaturism than to large forms is indicated by a release of his big orchestra works, handsomely performed by the Melbourne Symphony under Geoffrey Simon (Koch 7003).

“The Warriors: Music to an Imaginary Ballet” (1917) depicts, according to Grainger’s colorful program note, “Ghosts of male and female warriors . . . together for an orgy of warlike dances, a Valhalla gathering of childishly overbearing and arrogant savage men and women of all ages: old Greek heroes, shining black Zulus, flaxen-haired Vikings, squat Greenland women. . . .”

It’s a long 18 minutes, in spite of some daring devices, such as--a half-century before “aleatory” techniques enjoyed their brief vogue--passages wherein orchestral groups “ignore the conductor’s beat” and go off on improvisatory tangents. The result sounds less contemporary than like mildly skewed Delius.

Koch’s program of orchestral Grainger further includes a flossy orchestration (not by Grainger, so why bother?) of a Chinese folk song better known from its use in Puccini’s “Turandot” and more effective in Grainger’s own solo-piano version, included by Jones in Nimbus II, and a popsily sentimental Grainger orchestration of the folk tune from County Derry known as “Danny Boy.”