Discs

But her commercial recordings began in earnest in 1953 with a Decca disc, Songs of England, that proved an enduring success – ‘a model to all’ said Records & Recording when it was reissued in 1971 – and included the kind of baroque repertory to which her bright, transparently agile singing was a gift.

Covering four centuries of song from Purcell and Arne to Vaughan Williams, Quilter and Britten, it issued around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and one version of the sleeve design carried a crown to mark the event. The pianist was Ernest Lush (1908-1988), a well-known broadcasting accompanist who played for leading musicians – including Jacqueline du Pre in her debut recital. Reissued on Decca Eloquence, it was packaged with more songs sung by the contralto Norma Proctor.

Gramophone magazine (Feb 1954) compared Vyvyan’s approach to singing here with that of Kathleen Ferrier, noting her ‘flawless’ technique, ‘exquisite artistry’, and ‘ability to describe situation and character by subtle inflections of her voice’. Musical Events was impressed by her ‘intelligence’ and ‘technical prowess’. And Shell Magazine’s recorded music column called her ‘one of the most exciting and satisfying of contemporary singers’, commending the disc as a ‘must’.

Years later, in 1970, she took part in a recording of Britten’s reduced and reordered concert version of the same piece, with the English Chamber Orchestra and Britten conducting, now on Decca Eloquence.

In its own time it was welcomed with astonishment. And the title role – a desperate, sensual, anxious character who nonetheless provides a moving death scene – was a perfect fit for Vyvyan’s voice, which combined clarity and brilliance with the humanity of what critic Richard Wigmore called ‘luminous’ sound. The Guardian noted Vyvyan’s ‘breathtaking fioritura’ and the Gramophone observed that she ‘negotiates the florid passages of the mirror aria with almost uncanny lack of labour…Her tone is limpid, the line as steady as a ‘wonderboy’ cathedral treble and all in all her performance grows in stature as it proceeds’.

When Andrew Porter made a survey for the Gramophone of the four available Messiahs on disc in 1954 – the others being Beecham on HMV from 1947, Scherchen on Nixa, Sargent on Columbia – it was the Boult/Decca version that he opted for, commending its smaller forces in the choir and singling out Vyvyan’s solo singing of If God be for us.

As Gramophone declared two decades later when the set reissued, it ‘blazed a trail that others have followed’, standing out because ‘the rival versions did not come anywhere near what Handel intended and this one did’. And though the Gramophone’s critic Alan Blyth thought it now (in 1971) sounded ‘elderly’, he made an exception for ‘Jennifer Vyvyan’s firm, clear singing of the soprano solos: her I know that my Redeemer is still among the most accomplished on disc’.

Also looking back in 1971, Records & Recordings agreed that it showed its age, but thought nevertheless that ‘of its kind this performance was a classic ‘ , observing that ‘Isobel Baillie’s mantle had obviously fallen on Jennifer Vyvyan and she couples beautiful tone and vocal agility with a sensitive response to the words’.

The broad critical response was that what Beecham did here was ‘outrageous’ but justified (up to a point) by the dimension, power and electricity in the reading.

Paradoxically for such an interventionist approach, he anticipated the direction of latterday historically-informed performance by using a relatively small professional choir that, as the Gramophone remarked, carried no passengers. And though the same review thought Vyvyan’s singing more secure in the earlier Boult recording, it praised the beauty of her solo Rejoice greatly.

‘Her easy projection of florid run lends a lightness and joyfulness to the aria which few other sopranos could hope to match’, continued the review. ‘At her best Miss Vyvyan sings like a highly intelligent and exceptionally gifted choirboy, her tone containing a generous proportion of white and a consequent clarity in fioritura’.

Beecham certainly liked what she did: her diary for 26 June 1959 notes ‘Sir Thomas said Rejoice Greatly was a tour de force & gave me a cigar’. Around the time of the recording he asked her to be involved in several Delius projects he was planning, including Songs of Sunset and Koanga – though as things turned out, she didn’t get involved.

Thomas Beecham’s 1959 disc of Beethoven’s Mass in C – a work always overshadowed by the later Missa Solemnis in D – was for many years the benchmark version. Made for HMV with the RPO and Vyvyan as the soprano soloist, it was primly described by London Musical Events as ‘very serviceable’, though the review goes on to call Vyvyan’s ‘ethereal legato is beautifully reproduced, though she does seem to enjoy the benefit of a slightly better-placed microphone than the other soloists’. A mark perhaps of Beecham’s fondness for her.

Peter Maag’s 1957 recording of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn was another classic of its time, included as such in Gramophone’s then influential Classical 100. Vyvyan was one of the two sopranos on the disc, alongside Marion Lowe.

Jumping several centuries, when it came to Britten she was in her element; and as Andrew Porter wrote in the FT, reviewing Decca’s release of Owen Wingrave in 1971, her Britten roles collectively ‘form a portrait of Jennifer Vyvyan’s high-strung artistic personality and voice; to some extent she is their ‘creator’ in a fuller sense that just that of being their first performer’.

Chief of these roles on disc is the Governess in Turn of the Screw where the intensity of her neurotic stage persona is brilliantly captured in a recording made in 1955, soon after the first stage production and using the original cast.

Gramophone wrote that her ‘portrayal of the Governess is a classic characterisation, her vocal subtleties illuminating every facet of the role’.

Vyvyan doesn’t appear on the original commercial recording of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, despite her involvement in the stage premiere at Aldeburgh. But there is now available, on the Testament label, a transfer to CD of the radio broadcast made from that premiere in June 1960. With digitally remastered sound, it picks up the chamber-scale circumstances of the first performance, in the seafront Jubilee Hall which seated at that time no more than 300, and with an orchestra of just 27.

It explains a great deal about Britten’s compositional decisions, which rely on clarity of textures that enable the small voices of boy-soloists to come through (as they rarely do in larger spaces and with bigger orchestras).

We know that Vyvyan wasn’t in good respiratory health at the time, but her fierce, neurotic, sharply focused characterisation is still striking – Gramophone magazine called her ‘a Tytania of pinpoint subtlety’, and the pearly brightness of moments like ‘Come thou a roundel’ with its piercing top notes is a model of its kind.

The pity is that Vyvyan never recorded Britten’s War Requiem, which became a frequent feature in her concert repertoire. But she appears on two 1960s versions of his Spring Symphony – one, a live recording from 1963 with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and another (cleaner and better) by Britten himself. Music & Musicians admired the ‘infectious spirit of joy and delight’ in her singing on the Britten disc.

She also features in the first recording of Cantata Academica…

…although that doesn’t seem to have been a happy experience.

Her diary for 17 Mar 1961 reads: ‘record Ben’s new cantata for Oiseau Lyre for 25gns. No one seemed particularly grateful. Owen [Brannigan], Helen [Watts] and I went and drank gin to cheer ourselves up’.

Her last stage role for Britten – another case of high anxiety as the neurotic Miss Julian in Owen Wingrave – survives on audio disc as well as DVD taken from the original TV film. Whether consciously or not, Britten provides here with a role here that’s not entirely unrelated to her actual experience as the poor relation/hanger-on in a grand family with an ancestral house.

Two other recently issued CDs taken from radio broadcasts are both works by Arthur Bliss. One, from Dutton, is his large-scale cantata The Beatitudes which originally aired on the BBC Home Service in a direct transmission from the premiere performance in Coventry, 25 April 1962.

The other, on Lyrita, is of his chamber pieces for voice and instrumental ensemble Madam Noy and Rout, broadcast from Wigmore Hall on 31 March 1958.

For more on these works, see A Repertoire – Bliss