On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music SWING TUNED BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH Thanks to radio, keeping up with the musical life of the United States is a simple matter of staying tuned. The lead was set by the now traditional...
...In fact, Brian's conception for the Gothic was so immense he required score paper with 52 staves...
...The Blair players, despite a delightfully pouncing attack in the second and fourth movements of the Schumann Quartet No...
...It is impossible to liken the Gothic to anything else...
...When a piece is written, he said, it is finished...
...Special events, like festival openings or recitals at the White House, also came to be carried live quite routinely...
...Brian's thunder has inexhaustible varieties: exuberant alarums, towering avalanches, plummeting strokes of annihilation...
...The four players maintained a fascinating independence, even mutual indifference, and conveyed an emptiness that became almost palpable...
...Brian was not wholly neglected in his lifetime...
...41, No...
...commentary by violist and teacher Raphael Hillyer, for over 20 years a member of the Juilliard Quartet...
...In 1966, some 44 years after its completion, the symphony was given its first professional performance at the Royal Albert Hall under Sir Adrian Boult, with Brian in attendance...
...Bach, Goethe, or Berlioz undisturbed, was an atheist...
...In the quieter passages-As in the third movement, evoking night on the vast pampas-the lower voices hovered, hardly producing tone at all...
...And let us not forget the NPR for the bold decision to transmit it to us...
...All the evidence suggests that Brian never gave a moment's thought to the performance of his works...
...Only recently, though, have regional institutions found access to the national airwaves...
...Indeed, it was an event of historic importance when on May 25 it broadcast live from London Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony...
...the high voices skittered up and down at the threshold of silence...
...Another word for it might be monstrous, at least in its physical demands...
...The commentary and the playing were of variable quality...
...they gave the popular Ravel quartet a vivid, idiomatic reading, and, until they hit the concluding Theme russe, explicated their final selection-the Beethoven Quartet No...
...1 (Op...
...7 (Op...
...unable to find any with more than 26, he gave up hope of finishing it...
...and recorded conversations with the musicians...
...The lead was set by the now traditional Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, followed by concert series from the nation's major orchestra halls-All with loyal listeners scattered from coast to coast...
...Each of Quartessence's 13 parts consisted of a taped live recital, introduced by host Kaaren Hushagen...
...The Gothic occupied him from 1919-27...
...Twenty-five of his major works were written after he reached the age of 83...
...it is dedicated to Richard Strauss, who wrote Brian that he thought the piece gros-sartig, magnificent...
...Hillyer offered concise and pertinent remarks on the nonstandard repertoire but was an-noyingly gee-whiz in tone on the subject of Mozart, though here too he had some valuable things to say...
...the chordal progressions of the third took little advantage of the strings' singing quality, but the players' skill in coloring the harmonies made this transcription a fascinating study in musical mimicry...
...Ginasiera's Quartet No...
...The instrumentation derives from Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner, Strauss, and the Schoenberg of the Gurrelieder, but the vision is Brian's own...
...It is an impertinence, I suppose, to discuss so titanic a work on the basis of a single hearing-but, after all, that is as many as the composer ever got, and if we wait to talk about the Gothic until we have heard it often, we might as well take the vow of silence today...
...The symphony is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the "largest" composition ever penned, and the broadcast performance drew on the talents of some 850 musicians...
...Of the ensembles, we may take the Alard and the Blair Quartets as representative...
...Individual instruments erupted in Little isolated flurries...
...These unfamiliar compositions elicited the players' most interesting work...
...A great debt of thanks is owed to the London Symphony Orchestra, the 10 choral groups, the solo quartet, and above all to the conductor, Ole Schmidt, for their heroic, impassioned performance...
...Out of these immensities there rises the songlike simplicity of a solo violin, climbing serenely above the wreckage, or the blithe confidence of the clarinet, skipping to the beat of a muffled tabor...
...Then, in the boisterous finale-one pizzicato passage sounds as if it were scored for a loopy jug band-they blended with perfect unity of purpose...
...And no one has been more enterprising in providing this access than National Public Radio...
...The Gothic is an epic written in a fascinating language we have yet to master...
...The composer's face, according to the BBC producer, musicologist Robert Simpson, remained totally impassive throughout...
...To such long-running programs as The World of Opera andNPR Recital Hall, it has added two important new ones this year, produced in cooperation with member stations: Quartessence, a survey of string quartets that has recently completed a spring run, and The Art of Song, launched last month...
...NPR's introduction to these important if unrecognized citizens of our musical commonwealth greatly deepens our appreciation and knowledge of musical America...
...1)?handsomely indeed...
...Airing the Gothic in cooperation with the BBC, NPR went to great lengths to make the monumental work of this virtually unknown giant accessible to an American audience...
...Listening to this symphony is to take an excursion into a landscape of a thousand suns...
...And not only those...
...Brian lived nearly a century, 1876-1972, composing in that time five operas, 32 symphonies, plus diverse songs and choral works...
...the BBC paid him some attention, and, in the year of his death, two of his more manageable symphonies were recorded for commercial release on the British "Unicorn" label...
...1 is a far more involved investigation of string-sonorities...
...The Alard is on balance the more cultivated and musicianly team...
...In the score's more rousing movements, they cut loose with a fiery temper wholly lacking in their Mozart and Schumann...
...The Alard recital began with three 16th-century Spanish pieces arranged for string quartet by Denis Stevens, and the centerpiece of the Blair program was the First Quartet of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera...
...These series give an indication of the wealth and variety of music-making going on outside the framework of our prestige institutions...
...Hillyer aptly described the second movement as a "veritable encyclopedia of instrumental effects," citing the influence of Bartok's Quartet No...
...Of the six movements, the first three are purely orchestral and generously scored in the mode of the late romantics...
...59, No...
...While not the most adventurous musicians on Quartessence, the Alard and the Blair Quartets offered some unusual selections...
...Producer Andy Trudeau prepared an excellent half-hour introduction on Brian's life and works, featuring excerpted interviews from the archives of the BBC...
...the Blair's was inhibited by the canons of classical discretion and a blanched affair...
...1), were defeated by its duller stretches...
...Many of them, the string players in particular, eke out a living by teaching at music schools and universities as artists in residence...
...In the stately opening number of the set, as the top line sailed upward, the slow bowing in the lower voices imitated the dark, droning sound of ancient instruments...
...Brian, who usually composed in the midnight hours, when he could keep company with the shades of Frederick the Great, J.S...
...Grand as it is, the symphony only over extends itself in a few insistent choral passages, where the needle seems stuck on Brian's cosmic phonograph...
...A friend then cleverly proposed joining two sheets together for each page, and the composer's problem was solved...
...Brass cries in flashing panoply above the massed battalions of the winds, and the flutes fly carefree across the din...
...Asked which he would want to rescue if only a single one of his works could survive, he chose the Gothic????At the same time he confessed he never expected to hear it played at all...
...As it happens, he did...
...4. The Blair players executed the eccentricities of the scherzo marvelous-ly...
...The featured artists do not, in general, figure prominently on the international circuit, nor do they enjoy the benefits of fat recording contracts...
...Something like discovering the Grand Canyon, nothing prepares one for the sheer scale of the Gothic...
...The series was thus an exploration of the quartet literature by the complementary means of illustration and analysis...
...The second piece betrayed its keyboard origins in the nimble dance of the bass line, which was shaped with loving deftness...
...Both groups undertook Mozart's Quartet in C, K. 465 (the "Dissonant...
...The international music scene also captured NPR's attention this spring...
...the Alard's version was stylistically attentive and often beautifully molded...
...The second, longer half of the Gothic is a setting in three parts of the familiar Te Deum...
...The May 25 broadcast marked the work's second professional performance, and the first to be heard in America...
...Yet the work is by no means forbidding...
...Despite the implications of the liturgical text, the composer offers no conventional Christian affirmation and sounds no note of supplication in his vigorous vocal settings...
...The Stevens arrangements of the three Spanish pieces retained their original flavor without resorting overmuch to the expedients of pizzicato or strummed strings...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 13
