Arthur Bliss called Morning Heroes a “symphony for orator, chorus and orchestra”. But that factual description hardly conveys the full personal significance for Bliss of the hour-long, five-movement work, first performed in 1930. Dedicated to the memory of the composer’s brother, who died on the Somme in 1916, and to “all other comrades killed in battle”, it is effectively both a requiem and Bliss’s attempt, at a decade’s distance, to come to terms with his own experiences of the first world war, in which he had been wounded and gassed.
Like all of Bliss’s music, Morning Heroes is now not heard as often as it deserves. But as Andrew Davis’s performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its chorus showed, it remains one of the finest British choral works of its time. By the time he composed it, Bliss was no longer the enfant terrible of British music he’d been a decade earlier, but had nudged much closer to the between-the-wars British mainstream; there’s just the occasional acid-tinged harmony as a reminder of the world his music had once inhabited.
The texts are an anthology of the effects of war from different epochs and cultures – there are extracts from the Iliad, and from Walt Whitman’s poems, while the final movement is built around first world war poems by Wilfred Owen and Robert Nichols. The speaker (here, the excellent Samuel West) delivers the long opening passage from Homer over quietly unfolding orchestral themes, and Owen’s Spring Offensive, accompanied only by timpani and drums, to begin the finale. The shape is convincingly symphonic – slow outer movements, and a pair of sharply contrasted martial scherzos enclosing another slow movement. The prevailing mood is less elegiac than reflective; it’s a restrained work of remembrance rather than an angry or effusive one. Davis got that mood exactly right, and both the orchestra and the chorus did everything that he asked of them.
