ABSTRACT
‘Enfant terrible’ was the cry when Arthur Bliss produced his pungent, iconoclastic pieces in the years immediately following World War I, and in the context of the English scene at the time, no doubt he was. Bliss recalled seeing Tamara Karsavina’s Oiseau de feu, and the Russian contralto, Zoia Rosovska, sang Rout in July 1921 during one of the interval recitals at which Diaghilev took a pride in introducing new music to his ballet audiences. Bliss gratefully recalls Henry Wood’s endorsement of Melee, and it is a measure of the impact he was making within a few short years of the war’s end that Wood invited him to conduct the first performance at a Promenade Concert on 13 October 1921. There are five principal large-scale works for orchestra, which virtually span Bliss’s entire output: A Colour Symphony, two sets of quasivariations, Meditations on a Theme by John Blow and Metamorphic Variations, and two string concertos, for violin and for cello.
