In an age where the cult of individual celebrity has poisoned just about every cultural phenomenon from sport to the fine arts, it is difficult to imagine the astonishing world represented by this album, a world in which Sir Arthur Bliss - already well-known for his score to Korda’s film Things to Come (premièred in 1936, which also saw the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by Lopokova’s husband, J.M. Keynes) - has dinner with Tamara Karsavina and comes up with the idea for Checkmate; in which Constant Lambert, aged 29, writes Music Ho! (1934), narrates performances of Walton’s Façade, conducts the ballets, writes Rio Grande, corresponds with Louis Kentner, delegates arranging work to Gordon Jacob and meets with Augustus John and Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) to name but a few. His co-conductor is Geoffrey Toye, who also arranges for the D’Oyly Carte, and writes The Haunted Ballroom.

Russians, Mayonnaise and being Thirty-Something in the 30s
And Gavin Gordon? Yes, not only did he write The Rake’s Progress and other ballets, (having studied with Vaughan Williams, who composed Job), but he is also that actor and singer as well. This is also the age where Stravinsky’s wife sends Lord Berners a powder to turn his mayonnaise blue, when Humphrey Searle performs Rio Grande with Joseph Cooper (piano) and Robert Irving (percussion) at Oxford, and arranges Chopin for a ballet given by the Oxford University Russian Club.

The list goes on, a roll-call of some of the greatest names in music, literature, film, art, ballet, academia and politics, all connected in some way, all engaged in dialogue and collaboration. And at the time that the music on this CD was written, all the composers (except Bliss, who was 46) were in their mid-thirties, as was de Valois at the time of Haunted Ballroom.

The music
All the ballets on Tribute to Madam should be listened to with this background in mind. Too much acquaintance with Harry Enfield’s brilliant satires of old public information films might lead one to think that there was something equally twee and quaintly English about ballet in the 30s.

The humour and pace in Gordon’s score, for example, is Shostakovich’s humour, not a tabloid cartoon; the drama resonates with Cohen’s Green Table, the historical allusions learn from Lully and foreshadow Stolze’s Taming of the Shrew. Lambert’s Prospect Before Us is a brilliant appropriation of Boyce, both in concept and execution, though of all the ballets, perhaps the least enjoyable without being able to see the ballet. Likewise, it is a good idea to visualise the set of Checkmate in order fully to enjoy the drama of the score.

The Haunted Ballroom
For me, though, The Haunted Ballroom is the piece for which I would buy the whole double album. As Brahm’s knew, and Shostakovich proved, a good waltz is a work of genius, not hackery. Not only is the central waltz in The Haunted Ballroom consummately well-constructed and poignantly delivered, but the work as a whole is an eerily dramatic deconstruction of the waltz, as was Ravel’s La Valse. Unlike La Valse, (of which Diaghilev is reputed to have said "Ravel, it’s a masterpiece. But it’s not a ballet, it’s a picture of a ballet") Toye’s work as ballet music is a real dance of death; the very opening distant adumbration of the theme already has the sickly smell of decay about it, so that when it reappears in full, the rich, lush harmonies and sweeping contours of the melody are painful, a musical smile before dying.

This continues a tradition of using the waltz as a vehicle for irony which perhaps begins with Giselle (1841) and continues through La Valse (1920), up to the bar scene in The Green Table (1932). Though Toye is often classified as a ‘light’ composer (ASV have issued this recording on their White Line Light Classics label) it would be a mistake to ignore the cultural and historical context in which this ballet was created, or to forget that Lambert and Poulenc were champions of popular music, despite their usual association with high art; the neo-medieval stratification of musical genres to which we unwittingly adhere is very un-30s.

The Recording
The Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Barry Wordsworth presents all these works with all the devotion and integrity that the word Tribute implies; this is an album conceived, played and recorded with the respect and reverence that these remarkable personalities deserve. Buy it, and write to ASV to demand more of the same.