So it is with unexpected pleasure that I listen to this lovely and gentle symphony that, as Tom points out, is a bittersweet memoir of the First World War. That war was horrific for the British as so many of their best and brightest lost their lives in the trenches. Among the officer corps the casualty rate was approaching 90%. For a good sense of what it was like, read Robert Graves' autobiography Goodbye to All That.
Tom gives us an adequate introduction but falls prey to his usual failing of setting up a straw man that he can vigorously attack for most of the essay instead of getting to the actual music. In this case it is the nickname Vaughan Williams himself gave to the symphony: "Pastoral". Tom just can't stop chewing over how misleading this is:
In this essay Tom's approach seems to have been dictated by the views of Constant Lambert and Daniel Grimley. I kind of wish that occasionally he would just listen to the music and talk about that. Then we might get more than just a brief mention of the trumpet solo in the second movement and the offstage soprano in the last. One thing he does not mention is the influence of English folk song on the melodic idioms (such as that soprano solo) and the English jig on the coda to the third movement.It’s easy to see where the confusion comes from: here is that master of nostalgic evocation calling a piece “pastoral”, immediately asking audiences to hear it – you’d have thought – as the acme of all things quaintly, gently rustic, the sound of an imagined idyll of English landscape turned into sound.So perhaps the symphony’s mixed reception is partly Vaughan Williams’s own fault: had he originally called it simply Symphony No 3, he wouldn’t have planted that pastoral seed in the minds of his listeners and his critics. Constant Lambert said that its four movements – nearly all of them slow, lyrical, and strange – have a “particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood [that] outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form”.But it’s not just Vaughan Williams’s testimony that should make us realise that the landscape of A Pastoral Symphony isn’t some Arcadian part of Surrey – if it is about landscape at all, it’s rather the blasted terrain of the fields of horror of the first world war.
But I am grateful for the introduction nonetheless. Lots of lovely music here and the orchestration has that particular English freshness without any Teutonic heaviness. Let's have a listen:
Vaughan Williams is a curious case of a composer who looms larger in the CD world (at least when there was one) than in the concert hall. He is fairly well represented in the UK if we look at Bachtrack but elsewhere we see the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending and little else. Yet there are probably a dozen symphony cycles issued on LP and CD. Apparently he was Frank Sinatra's favorite classical composer also.
ReplyDeleteWhen younger I liked his music but later I made the mistake of looking at some of his symphonic scores. In the end they do sound like good quality film music for B pictures and travelogues. I was surprised therefore when Hickox recorded the very first version of the London Symphony (No.2). VW quickly withdrew it and the only version recorded later was the heavily revised one. This first version was actually reasonably interesting music. However everything that was interesting was removed in the revision!
Other than the Tallis fantasia the only VW left in my library is the US premiere of Sym 9 conducted by Stokowski. What a difference a great conductor can make as this Sym sounds rather muddled elsewhere.
On the same CD was a performance by Stoky of Magic Mountain by Alan Hovhaness. Again only he makes this proto New Agey music compelling.
Hovhaness is another composer who really is absent from the concert hall, but has page after page of Amazon listings. He was also very media savvy writing music about whales and Mt St Helens etc.
Composers like Vaughan Williams and Hovhaness are largely ignored these days (though with a following among audiophiles, as you say), but that likely makes them ideal candidates for revival twenty, thirty or fifty years from now.
ReplyDeleteI guess the question raised by your comment about revivals is what revivals would there be of them? They are already well represented in the CD catalogues far more than many better composers. Arvo Part is another composer with little presence in the concert halls but a big presence on the net. What difference would it make for them to show up in concert halls 30 years from now played by musicians with no recording contracts and net visibility?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that these composers are illustrating an increasing split between listeners who don't go to classical concerts and probably don't buy much classical particularly with Hovhaness and Part. Yet they have followings on the net that dwarf modern classical totals. Just on a quick check Messiaen, Salonen and Korngold had a lot fewer views on their top displayed youtube links.
NB I meant Mysterious Mountain not Magic Mountain.
I suppose that "revival of interest" in my book means new recordings as opposed to reissued older ones, more concert performances, perhaps an academic conference or two as well as new monographs and some scholarly papers.
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