Green And Pleasant Land

   in Choir & Organ (Jan, 2016)
This is a most welcome release. Bliss has for too long lain forgotten, overshadowed in our concert halls and on CD by figures such as Walton and Britten. Yet on the strength of Morning Heroes, his ‘symphony for orator [here the excellent Samuel West], chorus and orchestra’, he deserves to be far better known. Dedicated to the memory of the composer’s brother, who died on the Somme in 1916, Morning Heroes is at once a Requiem for the fallen and an attempt by Bliss to process his own experiences in the first world war – the work dates from a decade after the Somme. While Bliss’s harmonies are less acerbic than …