‘Lutyens in Liverpool’

In april 1964 the Liverpool Sandon Music Group gave the premiere
of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Encomion, a piece for mixed chorus, brass and
percussion, in the crypt of the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral,
built by her father Sir Edwin Lutyens. As an unusual concert underneath
the unfinished Cathedral, the event adds to our growing understanding of
1960s music making, particularly of the ‘modernist’ sort, outside London.
The decade also of the Manchester School’s founding of the Wardour
Castle Summer School and the Pierrot Players, the 1960s could be hailed
as a time when the larger community of British composition engaged with
European trends on broad levels and in greater numbers. This premiere
encapsulates this new mix of experiment with tradition, but also that of
music with architecture, modernism with community music making, and
not least Lutyens with Lutyens – Elisabeth with Sir Edwin.
Although there was a Radio Merseyside reporter present and some
players remember the concert, the 55 years since have obscured many traces
of the event.1 Nevertheless, three routes back into Encomion’s world present
themselves: via the composer, location and performers.