Prom 33: Elgar / Holst / Stanford / Vaughan Williams, BBC SO, Maltman / Brabbins

[Pulcinella]

VW actually lived in Chelsea when he was writing the symphony so he must have heard Big Ben countless times. I remember especially hearing it several times about 6 pm. when crossing the bridge from the 'work ' part of London (offices in Horseferry Road to the 'leisure' part (i.e. the Festival Hall Cafeteria, on my way to a South Bank Concert) , so I have happy memories of it.

Love it!
Not very accurate then?

[LMcD]

That said... why can't people at least try and cover up/mute their coughing? Lots of wonderful hushed playing last night, but far too many intrusions. That's before getting on to people dropping their mobile 'phones (at least two of which went off during the performance). I don't think we had someone knocking their metal water bottle over with a loud clang last night but, if not, that's the first time in four concerts I have attended where that has not happened.

The price you pay for being there I suppose.

... not to mention scattered, muted, almost embarrassed applause after the first AND second movements.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for the detailed clarification
If Brabbins always plays the 1920 then I’ve definitely heard it before. It was a wonderful performance with the BBCSO strings particularly outstanding. The London Symphony is supposed to take its title from Tono-Bungay one of the great largely unread novels. I’ve been trying to cut and paste the relevant para where the anti hero George sails his (no doubt shoddily built ) new X20 destroyer down the Thames. He steams through the “Third movement of the London Symphony “ - it’s docklands. In essence the majesty and pageantry is all a sham - London is corrupt and decaying - the capital of an Empire built on exploitation and commercialism. A similar feel to the Thames in Heart Of Darkess. Far from being a celebration of Edwardian London the symphony can be read as an insight into its dark though vibrant even exultant heart. The game is up and RVW like Wells and Indeed Kipling and Conrad at the other end of the political spectrum knew it,

Tremendous insights there, EH, for which many thanks.

[Serial_Apologist]

VW actually lived in Chelsea when he was writing the symphony so he must have heard Big Ben countless times. I remember especially hearing it several times about 6 pm. when crossing the bridge from the 'work ' part of London (offices in Horseferry Road to the 'leisure' part (i.e. the Festival Hall Cafeteria, on my way to a South Bank Concert) , so I have happy memories of it.

Would it be possible though to hear Big Ben from Cheyne Walk, where VW lived, even accounting for there having been less ambient noise in pre-WW1 London? I must try and remember to check the next time I visit Cheyne Walk, for me a place of pilgrimage.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Tremendous insights there, EH, for which many thanks.

My pleasure . I may have overstated the case but I re-read the final chapter this morning. Some don’t like or aren’t convinced by the downbeat ending but I think it’s tremendous. It’s interesting that Simon Heffer , the interval interviewee last and believe me no socialist , pretty much condemns the Edwardians for their complacent, self indulgent neglect of both Empire and Home Nation in his very lengthy one vol history . That’s pretty much what I get from the novel and , to a lesser extent, from the sense of decay in the symphony.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Would it be possible though to hear Big Ben from Cheyne Walk, where VW lived, even accounting for there having been less ambient noise in pre-WW1 London? I must try and remember to check the next time I visit Cheyne Walk, for me a place of pilgrimage.

I would have thought so - I was born in Southwark and wanted to know idly one day whether I was born within the sound of Bow Bells and thus technically a Cockney and apparently I am. Though the chances of hearing them there now are slender - except poss early Sun morning with an easterly. The problem at Cheyne Walk is the incessant traffic on the embankment.

[Serial_Apologist]

My pleasure . I may have overstated the case but I re-read the final chapter this morning. Some don’t like or aren’t convinced by the downbeat ending but I think it’s tremendous.

Me too! I don't believe VW ever naively saw the world through rose-tinted glasses.

It’s interesting that Simon Heffer , the interval interviewee last and believe me no socialist , pretty much condemns the Edwardians for their complacent, self indulgent neglect of both Empire and Home Nation in his very lengthy one vol history . That’s pretty much what I get from the novel and , to a lesser extent, from the sense of decay in the symphony.

It's not unknown for the distancing of elapsed time to allow Conservative adherents to admit to past sins they would have probably gone along with at the time. No doubt with the current rightward trends continuing we will eventually be finding apologists for slavery.

[edashtav]

A programme note for the LA PHIL quotes an extended passage from the 1909 H G novel:

Toggle menu A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)


About this Piece


Composed: 1920
Length: c. 45 minutes
Orchestration: 3 flutes (3rd = piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, sleigh bells, side drum, tam tam, triangle), harp, and strings

First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: July 16, 1925, Sir Henry Wood conducting

In an essay written during the 1930s, Vaughan Williams declared: “Every composer cannot expect to have a world-wide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a message for his own people, and many young composers make the mistake of imagining that they can be universal without first having been local. Is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which a foreign composer... is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer... But is he prepared with his secret?... What a composer has to do is find out the real message he has to convey to the community and say it directly and without equivocation... If the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil and that soil has anything individual to give you, you may still gain the whole world and not lose your own souls.”

Thus, VW initially “cobbled” his style, as he modestly put it, “out of English folk song, the 16th-century Tudor composers [he prominently cites William Byrd] and... Henry Purcell.”

The London Symphony was begun as early as 1908. Then, in 1912, the 40-year-old composer, to amuse his friends on a visit to Cambridge, played on “a battered upright piano” the sketch for the first two movements.

In his 1912 essay “Who wants the English Composer?” he observed that the artist “should take the forms of musical expression all around him and purify and raise them to the level of great art.” A London Symphony, then, is about what was around him – the sights, sounds, and moods of the great metropolis. It was completed in 1914 and premiered in that year in the Queen’s Hall London under Geoffrey Toye, best known for his association with the D’Oyly Carte Opera and its Gilbert and Sullivan presentations. The orchestral manuscript was subsequently sent by Vaughan Williams to conductor Fritz Busch in Germany for his consideration and became, literally, an early casualty of the First World War, in which it was destroyed. The orchestral score was then reconstructed from the instrumental parts and published in 1920.

The opening suggests a misty daybreak over the city, “all that mighty heart lying still,” leading, again in the composer’s words, to a “memory of Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon.” The ensuing Allegro risoluto section is “alive with the noise and scurry of street traffic – hansom cabs and most likely the occasional motor – and the distant chiming [harp and clarinet] of Big Ben.” And doesn’t the movement end with a burst of sunlight? Perhaps over the houses of Parliament; something very imposing, at any rate.

The slow movement of the original, lost version was, in the words of Vaughan Williams’ friend and fellow composer George Butterworth, who was to die in the trenches of France in 1916, “an idyll of grey skies and secluded byways — an aspect of London quite as familiar as any other: the feeling of the music is remote, mystical.” Such feelings are equally palpable in the 1920 score.

Vaughan Williams himself wrote of the scherzo-nocturne third movement: “If the hearer will imagine standing on the Westminster Embankment at night, the distant sounds of the Strand with its hotels on one side and the ‘New Cut’ [then, a street chiefly inhabited by plumbing-fixtures dealers and furniture brokers] on the other, it may serve as a mood in which to listen.” The sound of the buskers’ harmonica and accordion (imitated by muted horn and strings) in the E-major middle section is noteworthy.

The magnificently rich finale opens with an impassioned cry from the full orchestra that winds down, dramatically, to a cello solo which introduces an Elgar-like march tune (all the cellos). A London Symphony is crowned by the elegiac closing pages (Big Ben again an audible presence), whose “explanation,” the composer suggested to his biographer, Michael Kennedy, was to be found in a passage from the H.G. Wells 1909 novel Tono-Bungay, in which the narrator, sailing down the Thames, “seems to be passing all England in review.” The splendidly evocative Wells passage further reads:

“To run down the Thames is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England …There come first the stretches of mean homes... the dingy industrialism of the South Side and on the North Bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic, literary, administrative people’s residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster... We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open sea we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon... The river passes – London passes – England passes.”

[edashtav]

Last night's outstanding performance of the 1920 version of the Londom Symphony surely shows that whilst it should never wholly replace the final RVW 1936 revision, it is necessary to hear it from time to time to fully appreciate thus mysterious and sometimes dark work.

I quoted The composer's biographer on an earlier post,#22. Here it is again

There can be no question of the original version supplanting the revision. The 1936 score represents the symphony as Vaughan Williams wanted it to exist for posterity. The cuts and re-scorings were his own decisions, not forced on him, like Bruckner's, by well-meaning friends. Vaughan Williams would, and did, ask for advice, but never took it against his own inclinations."

Surely,.MK is too prescriptive/ black and white?

[Ein Heldenleben]

Me too! I don't believe VW ever naively saw the world through rose-tinted glasses.



It's not unknown for the distancing of elapsed time to allow Conservative adherents to admit to past sins they would have probably gone along with at the time. No doubt with the current rightward trends continuing we will eventually be finding apologists for slavery.

I think with Heffer it’s more to do with Edwardians becoming grouse shooting pseudo aristocratic rentiers while their businesses rotted, in contrast to vibrant Victorian techno entrepreneurs etc etc…
The whole point about Tono-Bungay is that it’s a total con like so many of the products of 21st capitalism !

[LMcD]

Yes, that worked so well apart from the interruption you mention. However there was a long, long pause at the very end of the last movement.

I now need to buy the Hickox original version to compare and contrast, as well as the version I heard last night. Could get expensive.

The Hickox/BBC NOW performance of the original version is available on youtube - a surprising number of empty seats. It's also available from wob (formerly World of Books) for £3.59, and from £1.79 + £1.76 delivery on Amazon.

[jonfan]

An outstanding reading of the symphony, surpassing Brabbins’ own recording. A live audience somehow gives that extra frisson.

[Maclintick]

An outstanding reading of the symphony, surpassing Brabbins’ own recording. A live audience somehow gives that extra frisson.

An outstanding concert all-round. The bitonal tumult of Hammersmith put me in mind of GH's exact contemporary Charles Ives -- they were born within a month of each other in 1874 -- though I don't imagine any of Ives's works had crossed the pond by the time of the composition of Hammersmith.

[LMcD]

I thought it was an odd choice of songs and the first half seemed to peter out a bit towards the end. It was a pity because I thought Maltman was very impressive but only got poliite applause.

They were probably saving themselves for the opportunities thoughtfully provided by Vaughan Williams between movements of his symphony.

[smittims]

Applause between movements is so common now that I've wondered if they think they're expected to do it. I noticed this at the Wigglesworth Elgar 2 (after every movement) and a few years ago when a British orchestra and conductor (maybe from the BBC) did Beethoven's Ninth at the Dubai (or was if Bahrein?) Proms . The audience applauded in the middle of the finale (after 'vor Gott!') , a classic 'they think it's all over' moment.