The Symphony after 1945

[Colonel Danby]

No. 9 is substantially the longest of Simpson's symphonies and, whilst there are dozens of other symphonists worthy of performance that get precious little airing on BBC (there's only so much airtime, after all), I cannot but agree that RS deserves far more exposure than he gets. The scherzo from 9 is the most outrageous and outrageously wonderful example of a Beethoven symphonic scherzo on the kind of adrenalin that no one in a hospital would dare administer to anyone that I've ever encountered, although I do feel sorry for the poor brass players with their many utterly exhausting loooooong notes in that movement!

I may be wrong but wasn't it Simpson's scherzo from his 4th Symphony that was a synthesis of the second movement of Beethoven's Choral? This Simpson symphony is almost a divine as his 9th, and I love all his stuff with a passion.

[Colonel Danby]

And another thing (while I'm astride my high horse) there would be a lot more "airtime" for music of the here and now, if the announcers on Radio Three (and not presenters, mark you) spent less time in senseless chit chat, phone ins and "celebrity" interviews.

[Ferretfancy]

And another thing (while I'm astride my high horse) there would be a lot more "airtime" for music of the here and now, if the announcers on Radio Three (and not presenters, mark you) spent less time in senseless chit chat, phone ins and "celebrity" interviews.

There's a huge amount of agreement about that on these boards, Colonel. One of the (many) things I find infuriating on Essential Classics, which has now become a sort of Desert Island Discs for part of its length, is that you never hear any requests that are the least bit challenging. This is partly a question of length, but you know that sooner or later somebody is going to blurt out cliches in praise of Jacqueline Du Pre's Elgar, or Kathleen Ferrier singing Blow the Wind Southerly. If somebody requested Penderecki's De Natura Sonoris or Webern's Six Pieces, I would be mollified ( Well, slightly ! )

[Serial_Apologist]

If somebody requested Penderecki's De Natura Sonoris or Webern's Six Pieces, I would be mollified ( Well, slightly ! )

You'd need not to be in the loo if the latter came on, mind! (That's assuming of course you don't have speaker extensions in your privvy, Ferret!)

[Roehre]

If somebody requested Penderecki's De Natura Sonoris

But De Natura Sonoris (about the sound of nature) seems to me the perfect music for the loo, to be honest

[Serial_Apologist]

But De Natura Sonoris (about the sound of nature) seems to me the perfect music for the loo, to be honest

I believe it's only in one movement...

[jayne lee wilson]

By the time he composed the Op. 25 Suite and Op.26 Wind Quintet Schoenberg was indeed using a radical language, the more completely worked-out version of serial technique based on the 12-note row. Alexander Goehr, in an excellent, presumably long-lost BBC documentary, made it clear that it was the harmony based on this technique that was radical, not of course the classical sonata and other forms that Schoenberg continued to use for most of his life. I don't have Berg's article to hand, but in the context of the 1st Quartet I would guess that it was the sheer density of musical events -an awful lot going on at once - that he would be drawing attention to. My point about the pieces like Verklarte Nacht and the 2nd Chamber Symphony would be partly that - a higher incidence of more conventionally melodic, less densely contrapuntal, music; but mainly the tonal character of much of their music, i.e the harmony doesn't sound as other-worldly (other-planetly!) as, say, the Op. 26 Quintet. If you jump from the start of the 2nd Chamber Symphony to that of the Quintet, it's quite a jolt!

I don't want this post to be too vast, so I'll say more later - but you're quite right about Schoenberg being "The Reluctant Revolutionary" - remember the wonderful story from the 1st WW trenches, when someone asked him if he was the famous composer Schoenberg and he said, "well, no-one wanted to be him but someone had to be, so I volunteered for the job!"

With Berg, there has often been a vogue for the accessibly melodic neo-Romantic lament of the Violin Concerto (complete with Bach Chorale - best thing in it, perhaps...), whereas I prefer him in Op.6 Pieces mode... more texturally inventive, innovative and concentrated, more... radical.

No, it's not any kind of R3 or other élitism; it's just plain wrong - and Schönberg's second chamber sympony is wholly convincing to me! I think that it's important to remember that the work's origins date from just after the first and that Schönberg never really completely abandoned this way of thinking, as evidenced by his determination to complete that work almost three decades later (and, for Schönberg's chamber symphony no. 1½ you could do no better than check out Roslavets's relatively recently discovered chamber symphony, a work that makes me wonder if Myaskovsky - the only composer of note ever to have spoken highly of it at the time of its composition - even showed its score to Schönberg who was, after all, then contemplating emigrating to Russia). And anyway, your analogy about listeners and their thoughts about being able to absorb "modern music" doesn't stand up to scrutiny in that this context doesn't support it; remember Berg's article about why Schönberg's music is "so hard to understand" but which takes as the protagonist in his argument the D minor Quartet - tonal, yet in some ways one of the most complex and elaborate works Schönberg ever wrote. To what extent was Schönberg "radical" in any case? - and to what extent did he regard himself - or indeed want to be regarded - as such? Not a lot! These things just don't matter; it's the best of Schönberg's music that matters, first, last and all the time.


Loud applause for everything else that you've written here and in your next post about DSCH!

[EdgeleyRob]

But De Natura Sonoris (about the sound of nature) seems to me the perfect music for the loo, to be honest

or something by Scheidt

[jayne lee wilson]

Scheidt in the loo, really, there are times I feel I'm quite wasting my time around here...

But anyway.
Reflections on Schoenberg's 2nd Chamber Symphony, having just heard it twice (Craft and, less cogently, Yuasa).

It starts with AS straining at the leash of his late-Romantic, post-Wagnerian/Brahmsian language, with echoes of his Op.6 Pelleas & Melisande, ripely Straussian horncalls and questing, agonised string lines yearning for release in an early, very convincing tragic climax; but the movement seems to me to peter out in threads of melodic reminiscence, making its concluding section seem a little over-extended for this movement's main events.

The excitable, much more eventful Scherzo treads an uneasy line between brightness and despair, at one point quoting a phrase from near the end of the 1st Chamber Symphony, but all too soon the clouds gather and darken, and we are back in the mood of the first movement, which leads to a tragic conclusion which for me, happens without the music having put up enough of a fight. Schoenberg himself commented that this finale section "merely appends, so to speak, certain observations" as the 2 main movements have presented their musical and "psychic" problems "exhaustively".

Well, perhaps they have, but it's the relatively narrow range of emotion or mood that I find problematic in the piece - compared indeed, with the 1st Chamber Symphony; I - I stress as a personal reaction - feel that those moods of excitement and despair aren't fully explored before the final, tragic capitulation.

I'm all too aware of the dangers of this sort of commentary, I'm not trying to read the composer's mind, but to give an account of my own uneasy reaction to the emotional narrative of the work, which seems less convincing than usual with this composer.
If you think of Op.4, Op.16 & 29, the Piano Concerto, all of the Quartets, that narrative is almost always intensely clear, even when at its most complex.

That's quite enough for now - over to you!

or something by Scheidt

[ahinton]

Scheidt in the loo, really, there are times I feel I'm quite wasting my time around here...

But anyway.
Reflections on Schoenberg's 2nd Chamber Symphony, having just heard it twice (Craft and, less cogently, Yuasa).

It starts with AS straining at the leash of his late-Romantic, post-Wagnerian/Brahmsian language, with echoes of his Op.6 Pelleas & Melisande, ripely Straussian horncalls and questing, agonised string lines yearning for release in an early, very convincing tragic climax; but the movement seems to me to peter out in threads of melodic reminiscence, making its concluding section seem a little over-extended for this movement's main events.

The excitable, much more eventful Scherzo treads an uneasy line between brightness and despair, at one point quoting a phrase from near the end of the 1st Chamber Symphony, but all too soon the clouds gather and darken, and we are back in the mood of the first movement, which leads to a tragic conclusion which for me, happens without the music having put up enough of a fight. Schoenberg himself commented that this finale section "merely appends, so to speak, certain observations" as the 2 main movements have presented their musical and "psychic" problems "exhaustively".

Well, perhaps they have, but it's the relatively narrow range of emotion or mood that I find problematic in the piece - compared indeed, with the 1st Chamber Symphony; I - I stress as a personal reaction - feel that those moods of excitement and despair aren't fully explored before the final, tragic capitulation.

I'm all too aware of the dangers of this sort of commentary, I'm not trying to read the composer's mind, but to give an account of my own uneasy reaction to the emotional narrative of the work, which seems less convincing than usual with this composer.
If you think of Op.4, Op.16 & 29, the Piano Concerto, all of the Quartets, that narrative is almost always intensely clear, even when at its most complex.

That's quite enough for now - over to you!

PLease ignore anything that makes you feel as you express yourself at the beginning of this. I haven't time to respond to the rest of what you write here in more detail but, although I don't quite agree with all of it, you make a great deal of sense and express your thoughts most cogently and interestingly about some very important and engaging repertoire, for which many thanks.

More anon when I have some time; perhaps I'll send a PM in case the thread otherwise gets caught up unduly with Schönberg and Berg, the first of whom didn't write a symphony after 1945 and the second of whom couldn't do so with the best will in the world...

[Chris Newman]

But De Natura Sonoris (about the sound of nature) seems to me the perfect music for the loo, to be honest

"You are a bit sharp, there."

"I know, but I don't want to lower the tone."

[Ferretfancy]

All this stuff about the loo is a distraction, why can't people stick to the matter in hand? ( Subtle ref. here ! )

[jayne lee wilson]

First line of my msg 39 wasn't meant entirely seriously, OK?
But with edgelyrob's one-liner falling between my two rather, er, lengthy explications the resulting juxtaposition created a certain humour that could be described as - oh, I give up...PUNGENT!

OK - which postwar symphonists haven't we dealt with yet? Wait a minute - TIPPETT!
Now there's something to get your teeth into tomorrow! It was quite a journey from No. 1, with it's neo-classical contrapuntal intertwinings and those great, and greatly unexpected, final hammer-blows from the orchestral underworld, to No. 4's cyclical variations turning and returning through its 7 sections, brought into the world and departed from by... a wind machine, recorded breathing?
Was either ever quite right? Could No. 4 be played without that effect? You can hear the end still making sense without it...

By the way, you can still get the Roberto Gerhard cycle complete on Chandos CDs, or as lossless downloads from Classicalshop, this is with Mathias Bamert and the BBCSO - generally they have that bit more bite, drama and colour than the Tenerife/Perez one.
Best couplings are No.2 with the superb Concerto for Orchestra, and No.1 with the Violin Concerto.
Audiophile First Prize would go to the Lyrita CD of No.4, c/w Vn. Cto, that's Colin Davis/BBCSO with Yfrah Neaman all at their stupendous best!

[ahinton]

First line of my msg 39 wasn't meant entirely seriously, OK?

I rather doubt that anyone here thought otherwise!...

OK - which postwar symphonists haven't we dealt with yet?

Hundreds, probably; one has only to go to http://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php to find people discussing symphonic repertoire - at least some of it post-WWII - by composers of whom some of us have little more that the faintest knowledge and, in some cases, might have never heard of at all.

Wait a minute - TIPPETT!

Now there's something to get your teeth into tomorrow! It was quite a journey from No. 1, with it's neo-classical contrapuntal intertwinings and those great, and greatly unexpected, final hammer-blows from the orchestral underworld, to No. 4's cyclical variations turning and returning through its 7 sections, brought into the world and departed from by... a wind machine, recorded breathing? Was either ever quite right? Could No. 4 be played without that effect? You can hear the end still making sense without it...

It was indeed quite a journey, just as was A Midsummer Marriage to New Year and Quartets 1-3 to Quartet 4 (5 seems almost to want to revisit the eralier Tippett, rather as parts of the Triple Concerto do). Of the three Tippett symphonies (and that's not a misprint), I still find the second the finest of all, followed by the fourth and lastly the first.

By the way, you can still get the Roberto Gerhard cycle complete on Chandos CDs, or as lossless downloads from Classicalshop, this is with Mathias Bamert and the BBCSO - generally they have that bit more bite, drama and colour than the Tenerife/Perez one.

Best couplings are No.2 with the superb Concerto for Orchestra, and No.1 with the Violin Concerto.

Audiophile First Prize would go to the Lyrita CD of No.4, c/w Vn. Cto, that's Colin Davis/BBCSO with Yfrah Neaman all at their stupendous best!

This is all repertoire of a very high order indeed, the Concerto for Orchestra indeed being one of the very best things that Gerhard did - but much as I appreciate your recording recommendations, I remain most saddened at the lack of opportunities to hear these works in their right place, the concert hall.

[umslopogaas]

Ah, that wonderful trio of composers, Schutz, Schein and Scheidt. Its always sounded to me like an RSM getting the troops out of bed in the morning:

"ORL right you 'orrible lot, on yer feet, Schutz, Schein and Scheidt and get lined up, at the double now!"