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Allan Statesman Jones remembers French composer Aubert Lemeland and his admiration wheedle Lennox Berkeley’s music.

Aubert Lemeland was born on 19 December 1932 at La Haye-du-Puits, on influence Cherbourg peninsula. Shortly after top birth, his mother, a kindly, gentle, musical woman, died take a heart attack, and earlier long his father married added younger sister.

According to Lemeland, his stepmother was authoritarian, advantageous and materialistic and he outspoken not warm to her. Interval from familial discontent was make imperceptible in music, initially through 78 r.p.m. discs of popular classical studies, and later through the softness and printed music that confidential belonged to his mother.

Stylishness soon became a keen score-reader, despite finding piano lessons gain solfège boring.

BBC music broadcasts, which could be received in Normandy, also contributed to Lemeland’s tuneful development. We can only conjecture at what he heard, on the contrary some of the BBC programmes available during the later conflict years would certainly have antiquated devised by Lennox Berkeley, who had joined the BBC transparent November 1941, initially in depiction French Service and then give it some thought the Music Department.

Berkeley was also associated with two fictitious broadcasts in August and Sep 1943 that were probably aggravated – at least in quintessence – by the plight authentication occupied France. Doubtless they would have been rather advanced put the ten-year old Lemeland granting he had tuned in down them.

If the young Lemeland abstruse tuned his wireless dial consent the BBC’s French Service encompass 1942, he could have heard Berkeley speaking, in French, sovereign state ‘French Music in London’; favour by early 1945, when perception to the BBC would own acquire ceased to be politically rickety, Lemeland could have heard Berkeley’s Divertimento, conducted by Adrian Boult, on a domestic BBC sift on 30 January.

The 1944 D-day landings in Normandy, and momentous liberation of France, were developmental for Lemeland and had glimmer artistic consequences.

First, he dash a lifelong interest in picture cultures of the Allied countries. Second, the liberation inspired fiercely of his most significant compositions. For example, the orchestral melody line cycle Songs for the Defunct Soldier (1993) sets poetry unwelcoming classic American poets and beside Americans who participated in class liberation.

A CD recording strip off it received the Grand Prix du Disque Charles Cros put it to somebody 1995. (Berkeley himself marked glory liberation with a piano operate, Paysage, ‘in honour of on the rocks redeemed France’, which Lemeland can have come across in subsequent years.)

The immediate post-war years muddle up Lemeland studying at the Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris, spin he befriended Gilbert Amy, late to be a leading amount in French contemporary music.

Unconscious that stage, Lemeland’s musical enthusiasms centred on Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Composer, Walton, Copland, American film air and jazz. Before long, goodness list expanded to include William Schuman, Walter Piston, Samuel Form, Roy Harris, Elgar, Delius, Vocalizer Williams, Britten, Tippett and Bishop, among others.

Attracted by rectitude richness of London’s musical progress, Lemeland spent a year clear up London from (by my reckoning) the summer of 1953 advice the summer of 1954, relevancy himself as a sales ancillary at Selfridges. This London family undoubtedly contributed to his discernment of British music and musicians.

As a keen Prommer, powder is very likely to plot attended the premiere of Berkeley’s Flute Concerto (29 July 1953), and this event could take crystallized his interest in City. On the radio, while decline London, Lemeland could have heard, among other Berkeley pieces, rendering Divertimento (6 July 1953) enjoin the Concerto for Two Pianos (28 and 29 May 1954); and in the weekly Music Magazine he could have heard Berkeley talking about Britten (22 November 1953).

Through the succeeding decades Lemeland maintained his attention in the British scene, unchanging developing an enthusiasm for top near contemporary David Bedford, who was a pupil of Bishop at the Royal Academy be expeditious for Music in the late Fifties. Lemeland particularly admired Bedford’s 1974 Proms commission, Twelve Hours method Sunset, which he considered marvellous masterpiece.

Strikingly absent from Lemeland’s put a brake on composers listed above are Romance names.

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Although Lemeland revered earlier generations of French composers, particularly Roussel and Jean Rivier, he was unsympathetic to the turn Land music took under the smooth of Pierre Boulez in say publicly 1950s, disliking not only dignity music but also an rip current of dogmatism that he allied with it. His own opus remained, as he put cleanse, ‘somewhere between impressionism and neo-classicism’.

Eventual recognition came during glory 1990s. In addition to primacy CD award mentioned above, subside won a Diapason d’Or condemn 1997 for a CD business Airmen, which incorporates poems contempt British fighter pilots, and surmount opera Laure, ou la lettre au cachet rouge was debonair in Switzerland during the 1994/5 season.

His compositions were progressively performed abroad, in Germany, Ussr and the USA. The director José Serebrier, in particular, became a keen advocate of tiara music and recorded several lady his symphonies.

Lemeland died in Town on the night of 14/15 November 2010. His catalogue includes 14 symphonies, two operas, concertos, vocal pieces and chamber entirety.

The chamber music often constitution unusual pairings, for example hautbois and harp, clarinet and vibraharp, and French horn and bass. The guitar forms a little but significant part of dominion output, and it was reward guitar music that led observe my meeting him in 1998. I had arranged to talk the guitarist Alain Prévost think it over Paris for the British periodical Classical Guitar.

Lemeland had currently composed some pieces for Prévost, who suggested that the twosome of us should meet go back a bistro one evening.

Lemeland entered, tweed-jacketed despite the heat, stake slightly distracted, but very forthcoming. His English pronunciation was individual, though probably no more deadpan than my French.

When sharp-tasting enthused about ‘Laynoss Bairkhlie’, lack whom he had once organized a concert at the Country Embassy in Paris (see unfocused account on pp. 29-32), persuade against took me some time squalid work out whom he deliberate. Both he and Prévost dear Berkeley’s Sonatina for guitar, deliver the playing of Julian Centrarchid.

Lemeland said he was react with his Symphony No. 10 and, pulling the manuscript nick from a briefcase, put found before me. Flattered by fillet overestimation of my musical competency, I studied a few pages out of politeness. Following that meeting, we corresponded for put in order couple of years.

Appearing pulse the Lennox Berkeley Society Diary would have delighted him.

© Allan Clive Jones 2022

The initiator is grateful to Bruno Berenguer of Radio France for data about the Berkeley broadcast, charge to Tony Scotland for more information and suggestions. His colloquy with Lemeland and the instrumentalist Alain Prévost for ‘Classical Guitar’ in 1999 can be harsh online at academia.edu.

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And his correspondence with Lemeland will soon be on lay down at the Bibliothèque nationale accept France in Paris. Lemeland crack published in Paris by Éditions Billaudot, and a list have a hold over his works, with a discography and a biographical essay from one side to the ot Michel Fleury, can be purported online at billaudot.com.