Composer: Constant Lambert
‘Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of “sonorities”, and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.’
His output was fairly small, but every work possesses some unique delight. The deliberately simple, undemanding Two Songs are as characteristic of his genius as The Rio Grande, the power of Tiresius or the profound and elaborate Summer's Last Will and Testament. So precocious was his genius, so meteoric his rise to stardom in the '20s that we must force ourselves to remember we was born the same year as Michael Tippett and Alan Rawsthorne. It is a groundbreaking, endlessly inventive composer that we remember Lambert best today, but for him art, life an culture were indivisible.
