27 November 2017:
Prokofiev – Symphony No. 6 (1947)
Sergei Prokofiev was
riding on something of a crest of a wave in the mid-1940s. Musically speaking,
of course, as life in his native Russia was unspeakably grim due to the ravages
of World War II. His fifth symphony of 1944 had been a triumph, and buoyed by
its success he spent 1947 fundamentally revising his savaged fourth symphony,
and writing a new, sixth symphony. The fifth, written during the war, was
uplifting and largely positive. This post-war composition, however, is much
darker and reflects upon the heavy cost of Russia's victory over the Nazis.
That he chose to travel a gloomier path in this work was a particularly bad
piece of timing, as on 20 February 1948, the Soviet Central Committee secretary
Andrei Zhdanov issued his infamous decree on 'formalism' in music. As a
consequence, this symphony was immediately condemned as 'anti-Soviet' – despite
it being critically well-received at its premiere the previous October. Public
performances were banned, and the revised fourth was never to be publicly performed
in Prokofiev's lifetime.
It is, of course, a
magnificent work, and together with its predecessor and successor it forms a
trilogy of quite exceptional quality with which Prokofiev would round off his
career as a symphonist. The opening movement is a sombre elegy to the war dead,
while the soaring beauty of the central Largo plays on the composer's greatest
strength – his extraordinary gift for melody. There's nothing especially
'formalist' about the bright and breezy finale, which leads one to believe that
Zhdanov didn't actually listen to the whole work. The 'posthumous vindication'
he received five years after his (and on the same day, Stalin's) death was
welcomed, but it remains tragic that Prokofiev was denied the acclaim at home
he deserved in his lifetime.
Day 332
28 November 2017:
Mozart – Symphony no. 40 (1788)
Probably the
best-known of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's final three symphonies, all of which he
composed during a frantic two-month period in the summer of 1788. And while
there are many who would make a case for his last (the 'Jupiter') being the
greatest, this has the benefit of familiarity to those of us of a certain age
due to its first movement being a Top 30 hit single in the UK (in two different
versions) in 1971. Not 'arf, pop-pickers.
It is known as the
'Great G Minor', to distinguish it from his other symphony in the same key: the
'Little G minor' No. 25 (see Day 86). It is odd that the only two minor key
symphonies he ever wrote should share the same key; maybe like Spinal Tap's
affinity with D minor, he considered it 'the saddest of all keys'. The work's
opening is unusual, with its famous main theme being heard a few bars into the
work over the top of murmuring strings, rather than announcing itself from the
off. It's a device that would barely attract a second thought within a couple
of decades, but it was another of the many symphonic innovations for which
Mozart was responsible. Despite its minor key designation, it’s far from a
tragic work, rather more wistful, and its popularity has seldom waned in the
two centuries since its composition.
Bohuslav Martinů is
composer I know far less about than I should, and in picking just his fourth
and sixth symphonies this year I feel I've really just scratched the surface of
his output, and may even have chosen two quite unrepresentative works. This is
the last of six symphonies that wrote in an eight-year period immediately upon
emigrating to the US after the war. He began working on the piece in New York
in 1950, before returning to it three years later in Paris. The Only Fools and
Horses fan within me wishes he could have completed it in Peckham.
It's a work that
Martinů himself described as 'without form', stating that 'something holds it
together, but I don’t know what'. It opens with a disorientating flurry of
notes from flutes, trumpets and strings that could easily have been lifted from
an aleatoric piece by Lutosławski. It soon occupies more familiar mid-twentieth
century territory with neo-classicism rubbing shoulders with atonality in
constant unease. There's some wonderful lyricism in amongst the unsettling
bustle of the central Poco allegro,
while the finale evolves from a four-note theme taken (and reversed) from the
opening of fellow-Czech Dvořák's Requiem
(and also, as it happens, the opening of Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 4, although it's quite
unlikely Martinů would have encountered it). I now feel obliged to hear the
rest of his symphonic output. There are times when my stated aim this year to
close some of the gaps in my music listening, seems to have actually opened up new
ones.
Day 334
30 November 2017:
James MacMillan – Symphony No. 4 (2015)
I mentioned at the
time when I featured Silvestrov's eighth symphony (see Day 315) that it was the
most recent symphony featured so far. Well a couple of weeks later, along comes
the latest symphony by James MacMillan to usurp that position. Premiered at The
Proms just two years ago, and released on CD as recently as October 2016, this
really brings us bang up to date in symphonic terms. It's also appropriate to
feature some music by a Scot to mark St Andrew's Day.
I think this is
absolutely magnificent. He is, in my opinion, Britain's finest living composer,
and I'd go so far as to say that it is my favourite symphony of the 21st
century so far. In common with most of his works, the string writing is
absolutely phenomenal, and percussion also plays a prominent part – most
notably at the end when a carillon of bells are sounded to produce an
astonishing aural effect. Another brilliant feature is the use of quotations
from the Scottish Renaissance composer Robert Carver's Missa Dum Sacrum Mysterium, which are woven into the complex
texture of the work. I watched its Proms premiere on BBC Four – brilliantly
conducted by Donald Runnicles, for whom it was effectively a 60th birthday
present – and immediately watched it again on iPlayer, so blown away by it was
I. Every listen seems to reveal a new layer of wonder.
There is precious
little of Minna Keal's music available, and the only recording of this symphony
comes from an LP given a title that she used to describe her own career – A Life In Reverse. Hers was an
extraordinary life. Born London as the eldest daughter of a family of
Russian-Jewish immigrants, she attended the Royal Academy of Music and studied
composition with William Alwyn (see Day 93). Sadly, she was persuaded by her
family to leave the college to run the family publishing business, and she gave
up composition completely for 46 years. After retiring at 60 from the clerical
job she was by then employed in, she took up piano teaching, and a fortuitous
meeting with the composer Justin Connolly provided the impetus for her to start
composing again, which she did in her mid-sixties. Treating her pension as a
form of student grant, she set about picking up where she had left off almost
half a century earlier and studied composition with Connolly and, subsequently,
Oliver Knussen.
This symphony, was
only her third with an opus number and was her first orchestral work. It was
given its first concert performance at the 1989 Proms, conducted by Knussen. By
the time of this performance, she was the ripe old age of 80! It was somewhat
unfortunately programmed in the same Prom concert as the world premiere of John
Tavener's The Protecting Veil, which
became one of the most commercially successful pieces of music of the
late-twentieth-century. Up against this, Keal's work was overshadowed more than
it needed to be, although her story was of sufficient interest to BBC News, who
ran a piece on Keal that day. It is a fine work and a tantalising glimpse of
the talent that was lost for nearly 50 years.
Day 325
21 November 2017:
Arnold – Symphony No. 9 (1986)
Of all the symphonies
I've listened to this year, I think this devastating final symphony from
Malcolm Arnold may be the one that has had the most profound effect upon me. I
found listening to this to be a deeply moving experience, knowing just how much
of an effort it must have been to compose the piece at all. In the work, he
sought to reflect upon the 'five years of hell' he'd just suffered; his ongoing
mental illness had caused him to spend long spells in a psychiatric hospital. The
end result is the most extraordinary symphonic score, with huge swaths of it
written for just a few instruments at a time – almost like a 45-minute long
two-part invention. How much of this is due to his declining mental facilities
we may never know. We do know that it was entirely what he intended, and, in
his own words, he hoped it would be the last thing he ever wrote.
The second movement,
with its repetitive chaconne theme and sparse orchestration reminds me of the
bleak slow movement of Shostakovich's eighth symphony, and even if it is more
abstract than DSch's desolate post-war landscape, the effect is no less
humbling. This, however, pales into insignificance against the vast final Lento. Nothing I've ever heard conveys
such emptiness as this sombre 23 minutes of virtually nothing. Slow-moving and
sparsely orchestrated, the gossamer-thin material winds its way almost
painfully through the hollowed-out shell of where a grand symphonic finale
should be. It's an incredibly bold artistic statement, and the effect is
staggering.
Day 326
22 November 2017:
Shostakovich – Symphony No. 14 (1969)
I probably shouldn't
have put this one in to bat immediately after yesterday's austere symphony from
Malcolm Arnold. Following that with Dmitri Shostakovich's bleak setting of
eleven poems on the subject of death might just have us all reaching for the
Prozac. Anyway, Shostakovich 14 it is, and I think it's fair to say this one of
his lesser-known symphonies. It may well be that the subject matter is
off-putting, because its modest scoring for strings, percussion, plus soprano
and bass soloists is not especially demanding.
While it may not be a
great hit with concert audiences, Shostakovich himself held it in high regard,
saying, 'everything that I have written until now over these long years has
been a preparation for this work'. It sets works by four poets: Federico García
Lorca, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Guillaume Apollinaire,
with the latter accounting for more than half of them. It is a protest against
death, and specifically unnatural death – be it suicide (No. 4), murder (No. 6),
or war (no. 5), Indeed, all of the poets featured met untimely ends themselves.
In truth, it's no more a symphony than On
Wenlock Edge, but the importance placed on it by the composer, who saw fit
to designate it a symphony, demands that we dismiss it at our peril.
Day 327
23 November 2017:
Penderecki – Symphony No. 8, 'Lieder der Vergänglichkeit' (2005)
The choice of this
today means I've ended up with back-to-back symphonies that could quite easily
have been passed off as song cycles. Krzysztof Penderecki's eighth symphony is
a quite different proposition to yesterday's Shostakovich. It is a choral symphony,
so could, of course, have been considered for the traditional Sunday slot.
However, as today is his 84th birthday, then this seems a fitting work to mark
the occasion.
I was absolutely blown
away by this. I love Penderecki's work, and have done ever since I heard his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima as
an impressionable A level music student back in the Early-Eighties. Many of his
generation (I'm looking at you, Górecki and Kilar) re-invented themselves as
Sacred Minimalists. And while Penderecki too moved away from the extreme
avant-garde writing of his early career, the direction he took was far more
interesting. Aligning himself with the Late-Romantics, he evolved a style that
seems to imagine what Bruckner or Strauss would be writing if they were still
alive now, but with a century of extended techniques behind them. So here we
have a song cycle that, on the face of it, belongs to a lineage from Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, but
with modernist twists such as tone-clusters and glissandi in the mix. The
result is a richly coloured, and at times extremely powerful work. The closing
bars where the final chorus notes glissando up almost beyond the range of human
hearing is a stunning piece of writing.
Day 328
24 November 2017:
Orrego-Salas – Symphony No. 2, "To the Memory of a Wanderer" (1954)
One of the down sides
of opting to challenge myself to a symphony a day, as opposed to any old random
piece of classical music a day is that I am, obviously, restricted to listening
only to symphonists. So that means that while eminent names from music history
such as Ravel, Delius, Wagner, Verdi, Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, and Bartok don't
get a look in, obscure composers such today's subject Juan Orrego-Salas are
given a little bit of limelight. I'll come clean and admit that I may not have
discovered him at all had this not popped up on my smartphone a few months ago
as a YouTube recommendation!
This symphony is the
second of six from the Chilean-born composer, who is, at the time of writing,
14 months away from his 100th birthday. The 'wanderer' of the title was a
friend of his: a Swiss photographer called Werner Bischoff, who died at the
Machu Picchu site in the Peruvian Andes shortly after Orrego-Salas started
working on this symphony. As one might expect from a South American composer,
there are Latin rhythms a-plenty, although as Orrego-Salas studied in the US in
his twenties, and eventually relocated there permanently, there is a North
American sensibility to his work too. Aaron Copland, one of his teachers at the
Tanglewood Music Center, was said to be a big fan of his work, and it's not
fanciful to suggest that Orrego-Salas was an influence upon his eminent
teacher.
Day 329
25 November 2017:
Bruckner – Symphony No. 9 (1896)
Another unfinished
symphony, although Anton's Bruckner's final symphonic statement was actually
far closer to being finished than many other more famous works that have gone
on to be completed by others after their deaths. With three movements complete,
Bruckner died while composing the finale, and rather like Schubert’s 8th
(see Day 310), it has become accepted into the symphonic canon in its curtailed
form. It's a fabulous work, and the fact that the stupendous Adagio is the final completed movement,
and thus the last we hear of Bruckner the symphonist, seems strangely apt –
even though it was clearly not meant to be that way. The fourth movement was,
however, a long way down the line with around 600 bars of ordered, orchestrated
music extant. Some sadly were lost when souvenir hunters ransacked Bruckner’s house
after his death, but there is far little work required to complete it than the
fragments that were somehow fashioned into Elgar's 'third symphony'.
The question over what
to do with this final movement for most of the last 100 years or so has been to
simply pretend it doesn't exist. There has been far less compulsion within the
industry to complete this work than there has with, say, Mozart's Requiem or Mahler's tenth symphony.
Various attempts have been made, with perhaps the most convincing being the
completion by a quartet of musicologists led by Nicola Samale, and recorded in
2012 by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil. I listened to this for the first (and
second) time today and while I cannot doubt its authenticity and the sincerity
of the effort of those involved, it just didn't sit right with me for some
reason. I can only put this down to my being too used to it ending after
movement three. Time will tell if this four-movement version becomes accepted
as the norm. Given the myriad of versions of his earlier symphonies, and the
consequent debate over their definitive versions, I can see no reason why not.
Day 330
26 November 2017:
Berlioz – Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840)
Almost certainly the
earliest example of a symphony written for wind band, Hector Berlioz's Great Funeral and Triumphal Symphony is
an extraordinary piece of work from a composer who just didn't do ordinary.
This was his fourth venture into the field, following the dazzling and
ground-breaking Symphonie fantastique
(see Day 45), the symphony-cum-viola-concerto Harold en Italie (see Day 134), and the gargantuan dramatic
symphony/concert opera Roméo et Juliette
(see Day 260).
This is actually a
much more modest affair in terms of length, although it was intended as grand,
ceremonial music and scored for a wind band of about 200 players. And the fact
that it features an optional choral finale part means it becomes the latest instalment
in Choral Symphony Sunday. It was commissioned by the French Government, for
the tenth anniversary of the Second French Revolution, which saw King Charles X
overthrown. Berlioz was no supporter of the revolution though, and perhaps
showed his contempt by spending a mere 40 hours fashioning the symphony from
existing incomplete works. It opens with a funeral march, taken from his Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des
hommes illustres de la France. There is then a Funeral oration, featuring a
solo trombone part, which started life as an aria from an abandoned opera Les francs-juges. The triumphant Apotheosis finale sets words by Antony
Deschamps in a brilliant choral setting, and although Berlioz later revised the
symphony to add a part from strings, it is in its wind band version that it continues
to be performed today.
As we approach the end
of the year, there will an increasing number of final symphonies, and today we
have the last symphony composed by Danish composer Carl Nielsen. After the
hugely popular fifth (see Day 256), Nielsen decided to produce something completely
different from its predecessors. The original idea was to strip everything back
to basics, to produce music that was idyllic and 'gliding more amiably', and
thus he initially entitled the work Sinfonia
semplice. Quite what happened to that concept, we may never know, but the
finished product turned out to be anything but simple and actually left its
audience rather bemused.
For all he intended this
to be a departure from his earlier works, the opening of the symphony is
readily identifiable Nielsen. It does take some undeniably strange turns
thereafter though, not least in the bizarre Humoreske
second movement, in which a trio – well, more of an argument really – for
triangle, glockenspiel, and side drum holds sway, while woodwind instruments
attempt to keep the music together and a slide trombone interjects disdainfully
from time to time. The contrast between this and the intense writing for
strings that follows in the third movement couldn't be more stark. The finale
is a theme and variations, in which the theme is stated on a solo bassoon, with
variations that range from sparsely orchestrated chamber groups, through an orchestral
waltz, a section for percussion alone reminiscent of Britten's Young Persons
Guide to the Orchestra, to a final light-hearted conclusion. The sixth symphony
is as rarely heard as the fifth symphony is ubiquitous, but it's certainly
never dull.
Day 318
14 November 2017:
Lennox Berkeley – Symphony No. 2 (1958)
I've been a fan of
Lennox Berkeley for as long as I can remember. His Serenade for Strings is fantastic, and, as a guitarist, I've been
familiar with his lovely Guitar Concerto
for quite some time. I fell slightly out of love with him when I decided to
perform his fiendish Theme and Variations
for Guitar, Op. 77 for a class test at University, but that was more down
to my own incompetence as a performer. Ironically, I got on far better with his
son Michael's Worry Beads a couple of
years earlier. Anyway, I digress. His symphonies have escaped me up until now,
and to be honest, the reviews I'd read of them didn't fill me with much hope.
The criticism most
frequently levelled at Lennox Berkeley is that he was a miniaturist. The
composer Hugh Wood referred to him as 'only a divertimento composer', and his
symphonies are about as large-scale as anything he wrote. This is the second of
four, premiered by the CBSO, as it happens during the brief period when Andrzej
Panufnik was their musical director. The ten-minute-long Lento would seem as if to set the tone for a work of grand scale,
but whenever it develops any kind of momentum or drama, Berkeley seems to rein
the music in, which can make for a frustrating listening experience. A brief
jaunty dance-like Scherzo is much
more in his comfort zone, and this is bookended by another Lento, one that is far more impressive than the one that opened the
symphony. The Allegro finale is
energetic enough, but feels like a bit of a lightweight ending, and just adds
support to the view that Lennox Berkeley just didn't do grandeur.
Day 319
15 November 2017:
Rosetti – Symphony in G min, A42 (1787)
Francesco Antonio
Rosetti: names don't come more Italian than that. So it comes as a surprise to
most, including me, to discover that he was in fact Bohemian, having been born
Franz Anton Rösler in Litoměřice, now part of the Czech Republic. If asked to
list composers of the classical period, Mozart and Haydn would trip off the
tongue fairly easily. After that, maybe Clementi, Boccherini, Bachs JC and CPE,
and then a bit of head-scratching. Rosetti's name probably wouldn't be
immediately forthcoming. He did, however, compose about 50 symphonies, very
much in the three-movement early-classical tradition.
This is probably the
best-known, and certainly most-frequently recorded, of the bunch. Remarkably,
this is the only surviving one in a minor key – although the catalogued A50 was listed as being in A minor, but
has been lost. It is a splendid little piece, and one that employs a broad
tonal range, especially in the first movement where the music passes through
several keys over its seven-minute duration. There is even an example of
bimodality at one point; highly advanced stuff for the 1780s. He’s always going
to struggle to find concert airtime against his Viennese counterparts, but
certainly worth hearing more of than we do at present.
Day 320
16 November 2017:
Panufnik – Symphony No. 10 (1988)
Another final
symphony, this time from Andrzej Panufnik. Not only was it his last – written
when he was 74 years old – but it was also his shortest symphony, and
represents something of an anomaly in that was only one of his symphonies to be
numbered rather than titled. The work was commissioned by his old friend Sir
Georg Solti for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s centenary. Panufnik completed
it quite quickly, however, and it was premiered in 1990 – the Chicago SO's 99th
year. The premiere was probably brought forward to ensure the first performance
preceded its inclusion in that year's Warsaw Autumn Festival, in which
Panufnik, following the fall of communism, felt able to end his voluntary
exile, and made a triumphant return to Poland for a series of concerts of his
music.
Having initially
formed the idea of writing something akin to a concerto for orchestra, Panufnik
decided instead to showcase their supreme sound quality, through different
instrument combinations. He was drawn back to familiar themes: three-note cells
and geometric forms. In contrast to the Sinfonia
della Speranza (see Day 285), however, Symphony
No. 10 is a tightly argued single-movement work of about 17 minutes’
duration. It represents a neat full stop to his symphonic life. Having made his
celebratory return to the land of his birth, the following year he received a
knighthood from his adoptive homeland. Sadly, by then he had been diagnosed
with inoperable cancer, and died just weeks after receiving it.
Day 321
17 November 2017:
Vaughan Williams – Symphony No. 8 (1955)
I haven't made much of
a secret of my love of Ralph Vaughan Williams over the course of this year, but
I have to confess that when I started hoovering up recordings of his symphonies
back in the mid-1980s, this one left me a bit cold at first. It took me a while
to fully appreciate it, but the invention and orchestral colour on display in
this work is really quite something, especially given the composer's age when
he wrote it. RVW completed this when he was 83, showing that as his years
advanced, his powers were far from waning. Long gone was the folk-music
influenced early style, and instead there's an appetite for experimentation
where there would have been every justification for a degree of end-of-career
laurel-resting.
It's the shortest of
RVW's symphonies, and strangely the first to which he gave a number – the
previous seven having all been given either titles or simply a key designation.
The central movements are of particular interest, with a brief militaristic Scherzo scored only for wind instruments
followed by a gorgeous Cavatina for
strings alone. The finale unleashes 'all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the
composer', to use RVW’s words, in a percussion-driven Toccata that is so-far removed from The Lark Ascending it is scarcely recognisable as the work of the
same man. And the remarkable thing is that there was yet more to come from the
affable octogenarian!
Day 322
18 November 2017: CPE
Bach – Symphony in G major, Wq 182:1 (1773)
When I last featured
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, it was with one of his Wq 179 symphonies; a collection of nine known as the 'Berlin
Symphonies' (see Day 157). About ten years later, CPE Bach moved from Berlin to
Hamburg, where he succeeded his godfather, Telemann (from whom he also acquired
his middle name, Philipp) as Kapellmeister. While in Hamburg, Bach wrote a
major set of six string symphonies, which were not published in his lifetime, primarily
because they were commissioned by a Baron van Swieten, who intended them for
private use. Nevertheless, they became popular after his death, and are
considered important in his body of work, as the central group of a total of 18
symphonies that are known to have survived to the present day.
This is the first of
that set of six, and it was an appropriate choice for today, given that I'm
singing his Magnificat this evening
with Newcastle Bach Choir. It is short, as all symphonies of the time were, and
follows the standard three-movement design – fast-slow-fast – adopted from the
Baroque concerto. The thematic development is distinctly classical though, and
the emotionally charged passage in the middle of the finale seems to echo the Sturm und Drang style being explored at
the time by Haydn elsewhere.
Day 323
19 November 2017:
Mahler – Symphony No. 9 (1910)
Over the last 30 years
or more, my opinion on which of Mahler's symphonies is the greatest has tended
to vary. At one time or another I've held No. 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8 in the highest
regard. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it's this symphony I'd take
to my Mahler-only Desert Island. Having circumvented the so-called Curse of the
Ninth by designating Das Lied Von Der
Erde a symphony (see Day 288), Mahler then moved straight on to this work
and confronted the very real prospect of his imminent demise head on. It was to
be the last work he completed (he died while writing his tenth), and in the
finale, he seems to be composing his own death.
Apart from its vast
scale – performance time averages around the 80-minute mark – it's about as
conventional as Mahler symphonies get. It's purely instrumental, the orchestral
forces called for aren't especially large for the Late-Romantic era, and it has
a four-movement structure, albeit a non-standard one with the outer ones being
two huge slow movements. Where it leaves all of its peers behind, however, is
in the sheer intensity of its musical language. No less a judge than Alban Berg
described the first movement as 'the most heavenly thing Mahler has written'.
It has the feel of a long farewell, both to his own time on earth and to the
passing of the symphonic tradition to which he belonged. A trademark Scherzo follows, given the very specific
marking of Im Tempo eines gemächlichen
Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb (In the tempo of an easygoing
Ländler, somewhat heavy footed and very vigorous), although the main theme is
in fact a rhythmic transformation of a theme from the first movement. The pent-up
venom and anger is poured into the Rondo-Burleske
third movement, which is about as dissonant as anything Mahler ever wrote. With
all ire spent, the scene is set for the final movement, which I rarely manage
to get through dry-eyed. I've never heard anything that matches its searing
beauty and power, and the closing section, where every ounce of life force is
squeezed out until all that remains is silence, is at once heart-breaking and
life-affirming.
6 November 2017:
Schubert – Symphony No. 8, 'Unfinished' (1822)
We'll probably never
know why Franz Schubert didn't finish this symphony. It's not as though he died
in the middle of writing it, as Mahler, Bruckner, and Borodin had with their
10th, 9th, and 3rd symphonies respectively. He went on to live for another six
years, during which time he completed his Symphony
No. 9, the 'Great C Major'. Speculation has abounded over the last couple
of centuries as to what caused Schubert to abandon it after completing the
first two movements and sketching out a Scherzo.
Perhaps the most persuasive is that he felt unable to match the quality of the
first two movements. Some musicologists have pointed out that all three
movements for which music exists are in B minor and triple time, which may have
created a problem Schubert felt incapable of resolving – either have the fourth
movement follow the pattern making it sound samey, or buck the trend leaving
the finale seem incongruous.
Whatever the reason,
we have been left with two of the greatest symphonic movements ever written, which
are actually perfectly capable of standing on their own as a concert piece.
I've never heard any of the completions of the Scherzo and nor do I intend to, as I generally find that such
realisations are a disappointment. The perpetual wonder over how Schubert might
have completed this is part of its mystique, and I still find it hard to
believe that music written in the early 1820s could be this intense. This is
one of the first pieces of classical music I ever got to know. My father (by
the bye, whose 80th birthday it would have been today) didn't have many
classical records but he did have an LP of this, so I've known and loved it
from a very young age. As such, it's one of my life-long go-to works.
Day 311
7 November 2017: Arvo
Pärt – Symphony No 4, 'Los Angeles' (2008)
I featured Arvo Pärt's
third symphony back in April (see Day 114), which was a work written on the
cusp of the transition between his old avant garde style and his newer, more
simplistic language. I said at the time that, as a consequence, I found it the
most satisfying of his orchestral pieces. Pärt didn't write another symphony for
37 years, and when he did revisit the form in 2008, he was fully immersed in
his tintinnabuli system. Tintinnabuli (from the Latin tintinnabulum, "bell") is the
name Pärt gave to the musical language he evolved from the mid-seventies
onwards and is characterised by slow arpeggiated triads and stepwise melodic
lines. Edgar Allen Poe similarly invented the word tintinnabulation to indicate the lingering sound of a ringing bell
in his poem The Bells: the sound Pärt
aims to evoke.
The public penchant
for what has been dismissively termed 'holy minimalism' has led to Pärt's
music, along with the stylistically similar Tavener and Górecki becoming hugely
popular. The recording of this symphony by the LA Phil (who jointly
commissioned it, hence the name) under Esa-Pekka Salonen was nominated for a
Grammy, although it didn't win (beaten by Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto, as it happens).
It's a perfectly pleasant work, but while the tintinnabuli style lends itself to smaller pieces, here Pärt
employs it over a 35-minute symphonic span and quite frankly, it becomes
tiresome.
Day 312
8 November 2017:
Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 5, 'Reformation'(1830)
The Lutheran faith
celebrates its 500th anniversary in 2017; a fact I have to confess I was
blissfully unaware of until it cropped up on the news last week. Thus, without
thinking, I very nearly managed to schedule Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's
commemoration of the founding of it for the anniversary itself (I missed by 8
days). It only ended up being this end of the year by virtue of being No. 5 of
five symphonies the composer wrote. The misleading, posthumous numbering of
Mendelssohn's symphonies by his publishers often gives rise to the mistaken
belief that this was his final symphony. In fact it was written second when he
was just 22 years old – the actual sequence in order of composition 1–5–4–2–3.
It's a work
Mendelssohn went on to disown and refer to as juvenile. It was never published
in his lifetime, and it seems that on the few occasions it was heard, the
critical response had been less than favourable. The fact that it was completed
too late for the tercentennial Augsburg
Confession celebrations, for which it was intended, may also have resulted
in Mendelssohn turning his back on the work. Thankfully, it was eventually
published some two decades after the composer's death, and it's a very good, if
rarely heard, symphony. The Protestant tradition is represented in the outer
movements, with the finale featuring Luther’s chorale Ein feste Burg, having previously been hinted at in the opening.
The first movement also periodically employs a cadence known as the Dresden Amen, which again has
connotations with the Lutheran church. The brief inner movements are less than
memorable, but do not detract from the overall whole.
Day 313
9 November 2017:
Gloria Coates – Symphony No. 7, 'Dedicated to those who brought down the Wall
in peace' (1990)
Today being the 28th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, here we have the seventh symphony
by the American-born-German-resident Gloria Coates. Regular readers will be
fully aware by now that I've become quite evangelical about Coates's music and this
is the fourth of her symphonies I've featured this year. She was in the process
of writing this work at her home in the then German capital of Munich when the
news of events in the former capital broke. Inspired by this, Coates gave the
composition the title it now bears, and also the name 'Symphony'. It was part
of a re-evaluation process that saw her revisit six of her previous works and
re-designate them as symphonies, with the result that this became No. 7 at the
same time as Music on Open Strings (see
Day 184) became No. 1 and Illuminatio in
Tenebris (see Day 283) became No. 2, and so on.
The selection of those
works to be classified together as a symphonic canon is an interesting one. In
her own words, she "decided to take the ones that satisfied several
criteria ... and the fact that they were introverted but had an emotional
expression." There is certainly the unifying feature that they all make
use of her trademark glissando writing, and use of microtones, although they're
hardly the only seven of her works up to that point that could be characterised
by that alone. This work rather distinguishes itself from its predecessors in
its greater use of brass and percussion, and that the central movement employs
a mirror canon in almost conventional chorale-like writing. At least one
regular Twitter follower has become a huge fan of Gloria Coates's music as a
result of my featuring some of her output this year, and this really pleases
me.
Rather as Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole (see Day 229) is a violin
concerto in all but name, this is really a piano concerto, and a particularly
fine one at that. What possessed Karol Szymanowski to call it a symphony is a
mystery. Lalo does at least call his work Spanish
Symphony, which is more of an abstract title than anything directly
descriptive. Even if Szymanowski had left it as Symphonie Concertante I probably would have passed over it, as I've
excluded a few of those this year on the grounds of ambiguity. But no, he
consciously chose to call it Symphony No.
4, so in it comes.
A clue as to why
Szymanowski avoided the designation piano concerto might be gleaned from his
correspondence, in which he confesses to fellow-composer Stanisław Wiechowicz
that he wrote the piano part with a view to making it easy enough for him to
play himself. Thus by calling the work a symphony, he may have drawn away the
expectation that a concerto would showcase a degree of virtuosity that he
clearly did not possess. Spurious titles aside, it's a marvellous work. There
is a beautiful slow movement that bears a close resemblance at times to the
corresponding movement in Ravel's Piano
Concerto in G major, written the previous year. The final movement is a
blaze of colour that features an oberek:
a lively Polish dance in quick triple time, which brings the symphony (or
concerto – whatever) to a rousing conclusion.
Day 315
11 November 2017:
Silvestrov – Symphony No. 8 (2013)
Valentin Silvestrov's
eighth symphony was composed just four years ago, and as such this is the most
recent symphony featured so far (although, there is a more recent one coming
later). Silvestrov, is another of those composers who has been a great personal
discovery for me this year. His timeless musical language is probably best
described by the composer himself; “I do not write new music. My music is a
response to, and an echo of, what already exists.”
This symphony is a
perfect example of his art. There is music that appears to be entirely
original, but from the slow-moving, almost primeval world he creates, faintly
recognisable details emerge. At around the 12-minute mark a delightful waltz
tune emerges, then just after half-way there is a piano tune that sounds
suspiciously like Chopin, and towards the end, a tune of seemingly Debussian
origin is heard doubled between the flute and celesta. The way that this
seemingly pre-existing, but actually original, music seamlessly emerges and
then disappears into the fabric of the symphony is what makes Silvestrov's
music so appealing to me.
Day 316
12 November 2017:
Borodin – Symphony No. 3 (1887)
Alexander Borodin was
born 184 years ago today, so to mark the occasion here's his final contribution
to the symphonic repertoire. As with the Schubert featured six days ago, this
is an unfinished work. However, while there is ongoing speculation as to why
Schubert left his eighth in a state of incompletion, Borodin's remained
unfinished for the perfectly understandable reason that he died while he was
writing it. He actually died quite suddenly, so had made no attempt to sketch
out other movements in anticipation of being unable to complete the work. What
remained was a completed second movement (written, as it happens, five years
earlier), and a sketched-out first movement that, as luck would have it, he
played to Glazunov prior to his demise, who went on to complete what remained.
The orchestration is
pure Glazunov, and thus we have to assume it was his decision to give the
beautiful opening theme of the first movement to a solo oboe, which is joined
in harmony by the whole woodwind section. It's a wonderful beginning to a
sweetly orchestrated lyrical movement that is among Borodin's finest. A
brilliant Scherzo in 5/8 meter
follows, and this features a reflective central section – a trio of sorts – and
related in feel to the first movement. Both movements were originally intended for
string quartet, and there is a small-scale delicacy about the piece that belies
its designation as a symphony. What might have followed, we can never know, but
there's enjoyment enough to be had from the 18 minutes or so that Borodin left
us with.
30 October 2017: Ellen
Taaffe Zwilich – Symphony No 3 (1992)
I think it's fair to
say that Ellen Taaffe Zwilich will not be a name familiar to many, especially
not outside her native America. She does, however, have a number of significant
firsts that mark her out as a special talent whose music should be better
known. As a student at Juilliard School of Music, she became, in 1975, the
first woman to earn a doctorate in composition. Then, in 1983, her Three Movements for Orchestra (Symphony No.
1) earned her the honour of becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer
Prize in Music.
Today's symphony dates
from ten years after her prize-winning first, and is the third of five she has
completed to date. It was written for the New York Philharmonic's 150th
anniversary, and as a string player herself, she chose to focus on the
virtuosity of the orchestra's normally overlooked viola section. It is in two
distinct sections, although the second half is effectively a second (Molto vivace) and third (Largo) movement played without a break.
Musically, Zwilich's later style (of which this is typical) involves the tonal
treatment of atonal material, rather as earlier composers such as Frank Martin
have done in the past. It's an outstanding piece, with the tension set up from
the outset, as the aggressive chords that open the work always threaten to
disrupt the more lyrical music that follows. The soaring, impassioned string
writing that closes out the symphony is breathtaking, with the tension
seemingly taking an eternity to be released. Quite brilliant.
Day 304
31 October 2017:
Rimsky Korsakov – Symphony No. 3 (1874)
Another third
symphony, although a very different one to yesterday's. Given that none of
Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov's are especially well known, I did debate whether
featuring all three might be a bit excessive. They have, however, turned out to
be among my more pleasant discoveries this year. If nothing else, with Rimsky,
you know you are going to get dazzling orchestration and wonderful use of
colour, and this is no exception. That I was able to hear any of this through
my St Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra reading, which sounds like it was
recorded in a cave, is a minor miracle.
Although Rimsky began
working on this symphony in 1873, he gave himself something of a head start by
making use of a Scherzo previously
composed some ten years earlier, and matching it with a Trio dating from the year before – written, as it happens, while he
was on honeymoon. You'd have thought he might have had better things to do. He
follows this at-times odd movement, in the unusual time signature of 5/4, with
an Andante of occasionally searing
beauty, and the finale sees the themes of the opening movement return. And it
is that opening movement that is the symphony's highlight in my view. It's one
of his finest pieces of writing, with its hushed ending being particularly
exquisite.
Day 305
1 November 2017:
Schnittke – Symphony No. 1 (1974)
It is to my eternal
shame that it has taken me 305 days to get to the music of Alfred Schnittke. I
am probably compounding that shame by going with this, his first symphony, as
it really isn't very typical of his symphonic output. By rights, I should have
also selected a later symphony for balance, but I doubt I'll be able to squeeze
it in now. You'll just have to take it from me that if this isn't to your
taste, his rather more conventional later music might be.
Conventional is
certainly not a word you could apply to this work though. As first symphonies
go, this is absolutely bonkers! After some very early works in which he
experimented with Serialism, Schnittke evolved a technique that he termed
'polystylism'. This involved throwing all musical styles from history into a
big pot and revelling in the collisions and juxtapositions it throws up as a
consequence. It's interesting that this symphony should come up exactly 100
years after yesterday's Rimsky Korsakov, as pretty much everything that
happened in music in the intervening century is covered here – and much of what
preceded it. So we have quotes from Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto in B flat minor sitting alongside a Grapelli-esque
improvisation for violin and piano; Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries competes with what might well be Jelly Roll
Morton. It's not an entirely new idea – Charles Ives took a comparable approach
in his Symphony No. 4 (see Day 123),
and Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (see Day 223) inhabits similar territory. At a monumental 75 minutes in length, I can't
pretend it’s an easy listen, and the wholesale lifting of material does give
this a feel of a musical collage at times rather than a work of composition. It
is a piece that demands your attention though, and it's certainly never dull.
Day 306
2 November 2017:
Mozart – Symphony No. 39 (1788)
There are many myths
and mysteries surrounding Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and possibly the most
intriguing of all regards what it was that inspired him to compose what turned
out to be his final three symphonies in an intense two-month spell in the
summer of 1788. Usually, Mozart worked to a commission, and had little spare
time to compose music for the sheer hell of it, least of all three major
symphonies that had no apparent prospect of performance at a time when his
financial position was particularly perilous. Recent research by H.C. Robbins
Landon may have solved the mystery, suggesting that they were, in fact,
performed in his lifetime after all at a series of subscription concerts. There
is also further first-hand evidence from an audience member at a concert in
Hamburg, describing the opening of a Mozart symphony that seems to correspond
with this one. From Mozart's own correspondence and available documentation,
however, there is no certainty that any of these three symphonies were performed
before his death three years later.
As for the work
itself, it is rightly viewed as one of Mozart's masterpieces. In his later
career, he had begun to look back to the contrapuntal style of his predecessors
Bach and Handel, and Symphony No. 39
demonstrates this neo-Baroque (for want of a better term) sensibility better
than most, particularly in the final movement. It begins with an extended slow
introduction, just as his previous symphony the 'Prague' had (see Day 284). The
introduction is so long in fact that the Allegro,
when it finally kicks in, almost seems like an afterthought. The Adagio is surprisingly dark at times for
a Classical slow movement, while the Scherzo
is typically Mozartian, with its rising, arpeggiated main theme. The joyous
finale is similarly brief but brilliant in its display of contrapuntal
wizardry.
Day 307
3 November 2017:
Bantock – Celtic Symphony (1940)
Having featured Sir
Granville Bantock Hebridean Symphony
back in May (see Day 130), here we have him again returning to Hebridean
folksong in this his fourth symphony. The Celtic
Symphony, is a late work, written when the composer was 72, but there is no
evidence of his powers diminishing here. I had the pleasure of attending a rare
performance of this work at the Proms in 2013, sitting perfectly between
Sibelius's Violin Concerto and
Elgar's Enigma Variations. That it
was its first performance at the Proms was saddening, but typical of a dropping
off of interest in Bantock around the time of this work's composition. Bantock
has been performed at the Proms on 107 occasions, but only a handful of those
came after his death in 1946.
It's a lovely work,
written for a string orchestra plus six harps, and echoes some of the works for
strings written by his near contemporary, Vaughan Williams. In fact, the
opening chord did lead me to immediately think I'd put on RVW's Tallis Fantasia by mistake! The
Hebridean folk tune used in this work is An
Ionndrainn-Mhara (Sea-Longing) and is heard on a solo cello around the
mid-point of the work, roughly where the slow movement would be, were the
movements not all linked into one 18-minute whole. There are memorable moments
aplenty, not least near the end of the work when all six harps are released
into a glissando frenzy – and if you had six harps at your disposal, why on
earth wouldn't you do that?
Day 308
4 November 2017:
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 5 (1888)
Within classical music
circles, I don't think it's ever been cool to like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The fact that, as music critic Harold C. Schonberg put it, he had a 'sweet,
inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody' just made him very much the ABBA
to Mahler's Joy Division. This has, of course, led to his music becoming hugely
popular in concert halls, with this in particular being one of the more
frequently performed symphonies. It may well be that his hogging of orchestral
repertoire time has led to a degree of resentment among fans of other
composers, and perhaps with some degree of justification. Then again, if
writing great, popular tunes was easy, we'd all be able to do it.
The fifth symphony
represents Tchaikovsky's best example of cyclical form, with the opening theme,
first heard in the clarinets, returning at various points throughout the
symphony as a kind of leitmotif,
transforming as it does from initial solemnity to a triumphant march. The slow
movement is beautiful with luscious themes tumbling over each other from the
off. The first of these strongly resembles the first few notes of John Denver's
Annie's Song, although it's probably
coincidental. Denver certainly seemed surprised when the similarity was pointed
out to him. A delightful waltz, or rather a series of waltzes occupies the
third movement, but it is the finale that really divides opinion. The
false-sounding triumphalism of the final march caused Tchaikovsky himself to
admit, after a couple of hearings, that ‘it is a failure’. It's the only
section in the symphony that misses a beat for me too, but given the splendour
of the rest of the work I can forgive him this momentary lapse in taste.
Day 309
5 November 2017:
Casella – Symphony No. 3 (1940)
Alfredo Casella had a
complex relationship with the symphony. He wrote three, although the composer
himself would probably say he only wrote two. He effectively disavowed his
first symphony (see Day 102) to such an extent that he re-used an entire
movement in another work he called a symphony three years later – now
universally referred to as Symphony No. 2.
Even that was a piece Casella subsequently dismissed as unoriginal, actually
saying as much in a spoof advertisement trying to sell both resolutely
neglected symphonies. Today's work, written some 30 years later
(coincidentally, completed in the same year as Bantock's Celtic Symphony featured on Friday) was simply published as Sinfonia per orchestra, Op. 63, still
seemingly unsure as to whether to count the first two. The fact that it took
him three decades to produce a third (or second!) symphony is probably
indicative of his ambivalence to a form that very few Italians were tackling in
the first half of the twentieth century.
I've always heard in
his music the influence of Mahler, especially in his work’s highly emotional
content, but I hadn't realised until quite recently that there was actually a
direct link between the two in that Mahler had commissioned Casella to produce
a two-piano arrangement of his seventh symphony. Casella was a tireless
champion of Mahler's music, something for which the Austrian was always
grateful. One can detect influences of Stravinsky – especially in the music for
oboe and bassoon that opens the work – and Shostakovich in the mix, but the Scherzo is almost unashamedly Mahlerian.
Likewise, the exuberant finale with its bouncing horns owes a debt to his idol.
It's a genuinely uplifting ending, and it is unsurprising that it was this
symphony that triggered a recent rekindling of interest in Casella's work after
decades in the wilderness, caused mostly by his toxic support for Mussolini's
regime, which he had renounced by the time of this symphony.
My listening schedule
for this year does, at times, throw up little clusters of symphonies that lend
themselves to being considered together. It did this week, when a trio of
eighth symphonies found themselves in close proximity, so here they are as a three-day
sequence, beginning with Anton Bruckner's Symphony
No. 8. This was the last one Bruckner actually completed, his ninth
remaining unfinished at his death in 1896. As you've no doubt noticed, I tend
to put the year of composition in parentheses in the title above, but this is
often problematic for works that are later revised or written in stages. In
Bruckner's case, it's never more than a vague approximation given his obsessive
revision mentality. This was composed in 1884-85, orchestrated in 1886-87, the
completed score was then sent to the conductor Hermann Levi, who rejected it,
it was then revised in 1889-90, and finally first performed in 1892. The
version widely accepted as definitive is the 1890 revision, so
that's what I'm going with.
That it was only
revised once indicates the notoriously self-critical Bruckner was at least
reasonably happy with it. Rightly so, as it is a magnificent work. Performance
times for Bruckner symphonies vary so much that it's hard to say which is the longest
– this alone varies on record between 71 minutes (Leinsdorf) and 104 minutes
(Celibidache), which is a remarkable difference. It's safe to say it's a
contender to be the longest, however, and its profundity of tone affords it an additional
gravitas. I have occasionally seen this symphony given the subtitle
'Apocalyptic', and although it is of dubious origin, is does seem to fit. The
first movement bucks the trend he set himself by shying away from the usual
blaze of glory conclusion in favour of a quiet and reflective ending. Following
the pattern of Beethoven's ninth, Bruckner reversed the usual slow
movement–scherzo order of inner movements. This does give the whole a greater
sense of balance than, for example, the seventh symphony that preceded it,
where the two huge opening movements heavily outweighed the latter two. The vast
Adagio of the eighth is one of
Bruckner's finest slow movements, while the finale was apparently influenced by
a visit to Vienna by the Cossacks, with brass and military music the order of
the day. As the work draws to a close there is an almost desolate feeling of
all energy spent, yet somehow one final push is summoned to produce a mighty
denouement with the final chord being played out over a whole minute of music. It
was the last final symphonic chord Bruckner was to write, and a fitting way to
sign off.
Day 296
23 October 2017:
Beethoven – Symphony No. 8 (1812)
The second of my trio
of 'No. 8's is the shortest symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Sitting
as a rather unloved sibling between the mighty seventh and the epic Choral
symphony, Beethoven's eighth is something of an oddity. It even left its
audience cold back in the time of its first performance, with a contemporary
account stating, rather euphemistically, that it 'did not create a furore' –
unlike the aforementioned seventh (see Day 251), which was ecstatically
received and was also performed to a greater reception at the premiere of this
work.
It's a perfectly good
symphony of course, but rather like the similarly squeezed fourth, its relative
insignificance only comes about because of the works it sat alongside
chronologically. The opening movement stands as an equal to any of the others
he wrote, but the movements that follow are all shorter and more lightweight.
Its lack of a slow movement was also highly unusual, with a coquettish,
four-minute Allegretto scherzando
taking its place. The lively final movement bears some similarity with the two
final movements of the seventh, with its insistent rhythms throughout. It also
features a remarkable coda that includes a modulation of a semitone from F# to
F which was an utterly outrageous manoeuvre in the early 19th century. After
producing symphonies at fairly regular intervals throughout his career,
Beethoven would leave the genre alone for ten years after this one. It's fair
to say he would come back with a bang.
Day 297
24 October 2017:
Dvořák – Symphony No. 8 (1889)
To complete my trio of
'No. 8's, here we have Antonin Dvořák's late masterpiece. When I featured his
seventh a few weeks ago (see Day 255), it kicked off a little Twitter debate
over which was the greatest of his symphonies. Certainly the ninth is the most
popular, but there was a lot of love for No. 7 and similar amount for this
work. It came very quickly to the composer, who took little more than a month
to complete the piece, seemingly driven by a determination to write a symphony
different from its predecessors.
The work opens with a
long theme for the cellos, and it is they who drive the melodic content of the
symphony. It is melody that drives this piece forward, something for which
Dvořák had a great gift. The result is that his symphonies generally take a
unique shape compared to the classical tradition, not feeling the need to
burden himself with a first subject–second subject approach that would, after
all, limit him to just two tunes! The darkly chromatic slow movement was indeed
quite unlike anything Dvořák had written before, with an almost Sibelian
bleakness that is at odds with the joyful nature of the rest of the work. A
delightful allegretto soon gets
things back on track, before a bright fanfare signals the start of the
magnificent finale. Those prominent cellos return with a glorious melody that
even by Dvořák's standards is pretty memorable, and after a reflective section
towards the end of the movement, there's a sudden acceleration towards a
suitably triumphant ending.
With fifteen
symphonies, Dmitri Shostakovich is the composer I've featured most often this
year. I've gone through them mostly chronologically, but have broken the
sequence for his third, subtitled 'The First of May', which I obviously had to
feature on the first of May (see Day 121), and this symphony, subtitled 'To
October', which commemorates the October Revolution of 100 years ago. Now,
there is something of an anachronism here, as the October Revolution took place
on 25 October 1917, but in the New Style calendar this corresponds to 7
November. It is universally known as the October Revolution though, so I'm
going with the old date in the new calendar, or something like that.
As for the symphony
itself, well it's not his greatest work. It's mercifully short, at around 17
minutes, but after the brilliance of his first symphony this clumsy piece of
Soviet propaganda makes for a poor listen. It starts promisingly enough, with
some of the earliest usage of tone clusters in twentieth century music, and some
typically skittish writing for smaller ensembles within the group. In the days
before Socialist Realism had raised its ugly head, we are able to hear in this
music the direction Shostakovich would have taken but for political
interference. The choral finale that occupies most of the second half of the
work is, however, an abomination. Beginning with a factory whistle summoning
the workers, there follows a clumsily scored hymn in praise of Lenin with the
final line 'This is the slogan and this is the name of living generations:
October, the Commune and Lenin', being shouted by the choir at the end. Subtle
it ain't.
Day 299
26 October 2017:
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1939)
I haven't been keeping
count, but Arnold Schoenberg might take the record for the longest time to
complete a symphony that I've featured this year. Brahms took over 20 years to
produce his first symphony, Rimsky Korsakov finished revising his first 25
years after beginning it, and Balakirev and Kodaly took around 30 years to
complete their first contributions to the symphonic repertoire. In taking fully
33 years to realise the final version of this symphony, Schoenberg may take
some beating. To be fair to all the aforementioned, none of them spent every day
working on their troublesome work, and all produced other compositions in the
meantime. Nevertheless, the importance of the symphony as a public statement
can be gleaned from such procrastination.
What makes this of
particular interest is the sea-change that happened in Schoenberg's style
between this work's start date of 1906 and its completion in 1939. At the
outset, the composer was pushing the fringes of tonality within a Late-Romantic
idiom. In the intervening years, he effectively invented serialism, abolishing
tonality in favour of 12-tone technique. By the time Schoenberg revisited Chamber Symphony No. 2, he had emigrated
to America following the rise of the Third Reich, and had started to allow
tonality back into his music after three decades of hardcore serialism. The
result is extraordinary; a piece that hankers back to the Romanticism of his Verklärte Nacht, but is imbued with the
atonality that permeates his subsequent work.
Day 300
27 October 2017:
Rautavaara – Symphony No 7: Angel of Light (1994)
I would have included
more symphonies by Einojuhani Rautavaara this year, but recordings of some of
them are quite hard to obtain. Hence, I've had to make the jump from number
three (see Day 119) to number seven with a degree of reluctance. This really is
a thing of beauty though, and thankfully there are some very fine recordings
out there, including a Grammy-nominated one by the Helsinki Philharmonic
Orchestra under Leif Segerstam. It has rapidly become a favourite of mine, and
is a worthy way to bring up the triple century in my Symphony a Day journey.
The apparently
free-moving music is actually drawn from a theme that has its roots in the
commission that gave the work its original name The Bloomington Symphony. It was commissioned by the Bloomington
Symphony Orchestra, and Rautavaara extracted the letters of the orchestra's
name that can be notated musically, B–G–S–H–C–H–E–S–A (German notation for B
flat–G–E flat–B–C–B–E–E flat–A). These notes initially appear in fragmentary
form on glockenspiel and vibraphone, before emerging in full played by the
brass section. His ability to take such unpromising material and turn it into
deeply spiritual music is what marks Rautavaara out as one of the great
composers of his generation and the overwhelming beauty of sections of this
work is instantly appealing.
This is quite
magnificent. Hubert Parry wrote five very fine symphonies, all studiously
ignored by the orchestras of this great nation, but the neglect of this work is
particularly shameful, given that it is the best of the lot, in my humble
opinion. Yes, it followed hot on the heels of Elgar's second and probably
seemed a bit lightweight in comparison, but it is still a considerable work of
high merit. At around 27 minutes, it is comfortably his shortest symphony, but
its terse, interconnected structure with four linked movements represents
Parry's most mature orchestral work.
Parry had been in ill
health when he composed this work, something which had caused him to resign as
Professor of Music at Oxford. Ironically, this freed up more of his time for
composition and the fifth symphony was one of a batch of late works that represent
the best of his output. He also wrote a book, Instinct and Character, which was rejected by his publishers and to
the best of my knowledge remains unpublished. The book was an expression of his
ethical views, and these lent themselves to the individual movement's titles – Stress, Love, Play, and Now. The second movement, Love, contains one of the most
wonderful melodies Parry ever wrote, and as such is the glowing heart of a work
that oozes class and style.
Day 302
29 October 2017:
Malipiero – Symphony No. 10, 'Atropo' (1967)
Italian composer Gian
Francesco Malipiero was something of a late-flowerer of a composer. He was born
in 1882, the same year as Stravinsky, Szymanowski, and Kodály, and yet he feels
like a more modern composer than any of those, primarily because most of output
was written in his later years. This symphony, for example was the tenth of
eleven to which he gave numbers, all of which were written after he'd turned
50, as too were three other works he called symphonies – Sinfonia in un tempo, Sinfonia
dello Zodiaco, and Sinfonia per
Antigenida. Stylistically, his music is an interesting mix of contemporary
techniques inflected by a strong influence of pre-19th-century music from his
homeland.
This short symphony,
with a running time of around 13 minutes in the only recording that I'm aware
of, is dedicated to the German conductor Hermann Scherchen, who was a champion
of his music. The name ‘Atropo’ comes from the ancient Greek goddess who ended
the life of mortals by cutting their thread. It's a very fine symphony, and a
poignant tribute. The opening woodwind theme is almost certainly a quoted
melody from early music, although I can't identify it. This is heard over a
ground bass, but the mood soon changes as the music moves into the angular
contrapuntalism that readily identifies his style. A lovely but all-too-short
Tranquillo slow movement again opens with a delicate theme – for strings this
time – over a ground bass. The closing moments of the finale are especially
pleasing with the woodwinds intoning in a madrigal style against a backdrop of
unsettling harp and celesta accompaniment, before low brass chords add a
suitable full stop.
16 October 2017: Haydn
– Symphony No. 94, 'Surprise' (1791)
You're probably aware
that, with one or two date-specific exceptions, I've been working through
composers' works in chronological order. So you may be wondering why, after
featuring Josef Haydn's Symphony No. 100
last month (see Day 247), I've suddenly jumped back to number 94. Well I'm
afraid I can offer no more adequate explanation than the fact that I simply
forgot about this one!
Haydn was very fond of
the crowd-pleasing gimmick. Whether it was the musicians leaving the stage
one-by-one in the 'Farewell' (see Day 62), a bagpipe drone effect in 'The Bear'
(see Day 151), or Turkish percussion and trumpet fanfares in his 'Military' Symphony No. 100, the desire was always
to get the crowd on their feet and give the reviewers something to write about.
The 'Surprise' features probably the most famous device of them all. The slow
movement begins very quietly with an almost nursery rhyme theme, then suddenly
at the end of the first repeat there is a fortissimo chord that must
have made the audience at the first performance collectively crap themselves.
It has to be said that it's an otherwise forgettable symphony, that probably
wouldn't be considered one of his greatest compositions. But as ever with
Haydn, it was all about giving the punters what they want.
Day 290
17 October 2017:
Sibelius – Symphony No. 6 (1923)
Sandwiched between his
mighty fifth and sublime seventh symphonies, Jean Sibelius's sixth is by no
means his most popular. It is nevertheless an enigmatic work many consider his
best. All three symphonies were, in fact, worked upon almost simultaneously in
the years after World War I. Sibelius references all three in a letter of 1918,
although his ideas for this symphony and the seventh were far removed from how
they eventually turned out. In the letter, he described this work as 'wild and
impassioned in character' while the final product is rather more restrained. It
is both traditional, in the sense of having a conventional four-movement
structure, and yet breaks with tradition in its use of the Dorian mode –
seemingly as a consequence of his developing interest in the music of
Palestrina at the time.
Sibelius himself
referred to the symphony as 'pure cold water', drawing attention to its
contrast with the extravagances occurring elsewhere in the musical world at the
time, notably in Vienna and St Petersburg. Possibly because he was concerned at
all aspects of the world seeming to accelerate out of control, time seems to
stand still in this piece, the tone having been set by the exquisite, clear as
crystal opening with strings and woodwinds interweaving beautifully in modal
lines. This may well have seemed like a palate-cleanser, with serialism and
expressionism holding sway at the time. The ending is incredible with hesitant
phrases eventually dwindling away to emptiness; not for nothing was Michael
Tilson Thomas's 1988 TV essay about this symphony entitled Journey Into Silence. For a work of such clarity of purpose, it
still takes a few listens to fully absorb its intricacies, and therein is the
mark of great art.
Day 291
18 October 2017:
Magnard – Symphony No. 3 (1896)
I bloody love this
symphony. There have been many (far too many) works that I have featured this
year whose neglect has dismayed me, but the fact that performances of this are
as rare as hen's teeth actually angers me. It's a quite magnificent work,
written, as it happens, in the same year as he was married, which may go some
way to explaining the moments of sheer bliss that permeate throughout.
A sublime, slow-moving
chorale opens the first movement, which probably contributes as much as
anything to the lazy nickname he's acquired over the years of 'the French
Bruckner'. This opens out into a glorious piece of Late-Romanticism, with
wondrous sweeping melodies that at times are quite Mahlerian. After a lively
scherzo featuring what sound like French country dance themes, there is an
exquisite Pastorale that alone could
ensure the work's immortality. The crowning glory is the closing section of the
finale when the opening chorale returns fully orchestrated; an absolute
masterstroke.
As for why he
continues to be neglected, well he had the misfortune to be born in the same
year as Sibelius, Nielsen, and Glazunov (1865), and this symphony dates from
the same year as Mahler's mighty third. I've considered in these pages before
that the late-nineteenth century produced so many magnificent composers that
many perfectly good ones have ended up as B-listers. One doesn't need to scratch
too far below the surface to discover more wonderful music from this period,
and Magnard – and this symphony in particular – is worthy of higher ranking.
Day 292
19 October 2017: Bax –
Symphony No. 6 (1935)
As with his fifth
symphony (see Day 252), Arnold Bax composed this in his remote retreat in Morar
on the west coast of Scotland. It is dedicated to Sir Adrian Boult, and it was
the legendary conductor who imparted an indirect influence over the direction this
composition took. Boult had long championed Bax's music, but occasionally
criticised its lack of formal discipline. Bax thus set about producing a more
structurally controlled, and ultimately very satisfying, piece. Of his seven
symphonies, this was reportedly Bax's personal favourite. And although I'm also a
fan of his third symphony, I'm inclined to agree with his assessment.
I've always tended to
view Bax as an English Sibelius, and there are a number of parallels between
the two composers. Apart from the coincidental fact that they both composed
seven symphonies, they both had an interest in depicting the environment around
them in music, Bax dedicated his fifth symphony to Sibelius, and in this work
Bax even went so far as to quote Sibelius. At around the mid-point of the
lengthy final movement the strings quote a theme from Sibelius's Tapiola – a work that reduced Bax to
tears on first hearing – and the theme evolves constantly towards a triumphant
climax. This then subsides into a beautiful, peaceful epilogue that features a
part for solo horn that seems closely related to the trumpet solo in the slow
movement of Vaughan Williams's Pastoral
Symphony. I’d argue this is Bax’s finest symphonic movement, and as a whole
I find it the most sharply focussed of his symphonies
Day 293
20 October 2017:
Hindemith – Symphony in B flat for concert band (1951)
Paul Hindemith's
contribution to the symphonic canon is significant, if largely ignored.
Depending on how you count them, there are between six and eight, comprising
six works called symphonies (my definition for the purposes of this diversion)
plus a set of Symphonic Dances, and
his famous Symphonic Metamorphosis of
Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. The first of those was his Symphony: Mathis der Maler, which I
featured earlier in the year (see Day 131), which was an ambitious work based
on music from his opera of the same name. Eighteen years later Hindemith took a
very different approach to the concept of a symphony with this work written for
concert band (one made up entirely of woodwind, brass and percussion).
In the intervening
years since Mathis der Maler,
Hindemith had been driven out of his native Germany by the Nazis and had taken
up permanent residence in the US. Indeed, Symphony in B flat was written for
the U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own", and Hindemith's genius for
understanding the characteristics of the groups of instruments he was composing
for shines through. This cornerstone of the wind band repertoire, features a
distinct jazz influence undoubtedly drawn from his adopted home, especially
when the saxophones are prominent early in the middle movement Andantino grazioso. The final movement
makes use of the rather more conventional device of a fugue, or rather a double
fugue, which drives the piece to a raucous conclusion.
Day 294
21 October 2017:
Górecki – Symphony No 3 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs' (1976)
Way back in the
mid-Seventies, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki – a composer little-known outside his
native Poland – began writing his third symphony, as he continued to set his
career along a simpler harmonic path, having turned his back on the avant-garde
style for which he had become known. It was universally panned. According to
one story reportedly emanating from the composer himself, one early performance
was attended by Pierre Boulez who loudly exclaimed 'Merde!', as the final chords faded out. Fast forward a decade and a
half, and in 1992 (incidentally, the same year that, as a student at Keele
University, I wrote my graduate dissertation on contemporary Polish Music
featuring Górecki as something of a bit-part player alongside his more famous
compatriots Lutosławski and Penderecki) Elektra-Nonesuch released a recording
of the 16-year-old symphony, capitalising upon the fact that it had found its
way onto the regular playlist of the then-recently launched Classic FM. That
recording has, to date, now sold over one million copies.
The biggest-selling
record of a symphony of all-time? Almost certainly. The greatest symphony of
all-time? Absolutely not. It was a phenomenon that went to the very heart of
what is good and what is popular. This music clearly struck a chord with huge
numbers of people, and it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a
critically mauled work of art found its way into the hearts of its intended
audience. I will confess to having some disdain for the work's popularity at
the time, and recall attending a performance at the South Bank in about 1994
where I was bewildered by the thunderous ovation the (to my ears) thoroughly
mediocre piece was receiving. In listening to it today, I did so for the first
time in about 10 years. There's no denying that it has a hypnotic beauty I
underestimated at the time, and I can certainly appreciate what others see in
the symphony. Still prefer his early work though!
