BBC Phil/Cell: Bliss, Miracle in the Gorps/Transformers Album Review – Plenty to Enjoy | classical music

A The ballet is set among Glasgow tenements where a girl who throws herself at Clyde is revived by a Christ-like figure, only to see him murdered by a barbershop gang, an unlikely task for the Queen’s future music teacher. Miracle in Gorbals, commissioned by Sadler’s Wells in 1944, was one of Arthur Bliss’s most daring projects, although somewhat conventional in terms of orchestration. Highlights include the almost Parisian waltzes of two young lovers and a troubled sex worker, a haunting neoclassical sarabande to accompany the drowning girl’s procession and a central survival dance filled with jazz, improvised tom-toms and all.

By contrast, Mutant Differences from 1972 is narratively abstract. Recorded in its entirety for the first time (Bliss cut two movements, and added them to the score published as an appendix), it emerges as a late masterpiece containing a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. Complex yet compelling, its extended melodic lines are often embellished with shimmering expanses of harmonious rhythms. The dancing polonaise, with its wonderfully ill-fitting castanets, is perhaps the best, but there is much to enjoy here.

Michael Seale and the BBC Orchestra reveal the contrasting beauty of each work in dynamic performances, aided by Chandos’s distinctive, cutting-edge architecture.