Havergal Brian.

[listener]

Oh, & yes, i myself called Tom Service "asinine", but as i said in the article, that was simply because he was practically getting an erection at the simple massiveness of the 'Gothic', which i continue to find stupid beyond belief

But remember the context: he's speaking to that mass of unknowns listening to the BBC, not the GMG.  Some evangelistic salesmanship is often required to prevent pre-mature turn-offs.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

At the Queen's Arms. Vandermolen (Jeffrey) had already left, but the bespectacled Colin can be seen. The bald head belongs to music critic Richard Whitehouse.


My sister took these. The photos she took in the hall don't add much to what already has been released. I also have film footage of the final part of The Gothic, but that needs conversion to another format...

[Mirror Image]

Johan, thanks for sharing these pictures. The GMGers look like a lively bunch.

[bhodges]

Johan, thanks so much for posting the photos! Makes me wish I'd been there, and you can see the evening's energy in your faces.

I've been drifting in and out of this thread with interest - mostly because of the performance's "event" status, which it surely was. (I've not yet heard the Gothic but am planning to hear the BBC recording sometime during the next four days.) So I won't enter the "advocacy" arena since I don't know the piece. But I will say that for Royal Albert Hall to sell out in basically 24 hours' time says something...

And another welcome to 5against4, and hope you'll stick around and check out some of the other threads here.

--Bruce

[cilgwyn]

More please!
To 5against4. If it was that bad here I'd be off!!! For a really catty,if not 'bitchy' thread,it would be hard to beat the old & thankfully,in my opinion,defunct 'Radio 3 message board. Just mentioning the name 'Robert Simpson' was enough to get you a verbal kicking. And quite nasty too!

Erm! Robert Simpson? (gulp!)

[Brian]

If 5against4 returns: how did you get such extraordinary quality sound in the Gothic FLAC/MP3? I just recorded the BBC Radio 3 'On Demand' playing of Prom 1 - Janacek Glagolitic Mass - and the sound is rather thin and ratty and compressed.

[cilgwyn]

Hate to say this Brian,and I know some people might laugh,but my dolby D90 cassette copy sounds full bodied and lovely.
I very much doubt if it will compete with 5against4's FLAC/MP3's though. Which I HAVE downloaded,incidentally.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

More please!
To 5against4. If it was that bad here I'd be off!!! For a really catty,if not 'bitchy' thread,it would be hard to beat the old & thankfully,in my opinion,defunct 'Radio 3 message board. Just mentioning the name 'Robert Simpson' was enough to get you a verbal kicking. And quite nasty too!

Erm! Robert Simpson? (gulp!)

You forgot - it's just 'Bob'. ;-)

[vandermolen]

That quote sounds okay, Jeffrey!

I liked the bit about feeling as if the top of your head being blown apart!

And also the green lamp bit.

[5against4]

To 5against4. If it was that bad here I'd be off!!! For a really catty,if not 'bitchy' thread,it would be hard to beat the old & thankfully,in my opinion,defunct 'Radio 3 message board. Just mentioning the name 'Robert Simpson' was enough to get you a verbal kicking. And quite nasty too!

Okay, we'll put my reaction down to n00b oversensitivity, shall we? It just seemed (to me at least, n00b that i am) a surprisingly cheap bit of reductio ad absurdum. i know that brand of offhand rudeness is pretty endemic on the web, but i don't go out of my way to cross its path!

[cilgwyn]

Bob?! D***,I knew it was MY fault!!!
Regarding Brian's late hours. Didn't Brian mention hallucinating or imagining seeing Goethe or Berlioz,or someone,while he was at work? I seem to remember reading that somewhere. (And I mean HB,not OUR Brian,of course!)

[vandermolen]

I asked a kindly member of the chorus to take a photo of the GMGers in the pub but I don't have a digital camera and will post when the film is processed.

My objection to the review of David Nice is not because he dislikes Brian's music but because the Gothic is so rarely performed [posted too early by mistake  ]I meant to say that I do not object to his disliking Brian's music but because of his arrogant ' I am right and you are wrong' tone and his suggestion (see comments section) that HB fans must have 'self-esteem issues'. He did much the same in a review of a concert featuring Miaskovsky's 6th Symphony which I was fortunate to attend last year. It is the intolerance I object to - not the fact that he dislikes Brian's music (although that is his loss I believe  )

[cilgwyn]

Indeed! It felt almost like a personal attack. David Hurwitz,on the other,hand while he can be extremely annoying,does at least (usually) have some intelligent observations and an interestingly different slant on things. I remember his rather eccentric review of the Naxos recording of the Gothic. His OTT comments about Havergal Brian admirers (?) physical attributes were rather amusing,even if they were untrue (?!!!).
On the other hand his snide remarks about Jaqueline du pre were more than a little offensive. Although,I COULD see what he was getting at,even if he was just doing his usual grand standing & being a bit of a t***!

[Philip Legge]

But say a word against the all-holy Havergal Brian!!!!! and you prove yourself silly (cilgwyn), unserious (Guido), uninformed and unprofessional (Sgt. Rock), facile, rude, and intellectually lazy (Klaatu), truculent and ignorant (Legge), asinine (5against4), self-important (Hatoff), sad but amusing, predictable, pontificating, hopelessly out-of-touch (Luke), and similar ad hominem attacks.

If you will kindly point out exactly where I accused Mr Nice of being ignorant then I will own your piece of criticism. However, I think a reading of my post will confirm that I described Mr Nice's assertion on behalf of jaded critics having the right to make uninformed comments as being the position of ignorance. I will own up to use of the word truculent, which in my parlance normally means rude defiance. Arguably the closest to an ad hominem I used was referring to him as "Mr David (Not-Very-)Nice", but I also think that is a fair reading of his review in light of his confession in the comments.

Andrew Clements in the Guardian has heard the Gothic multiple times in addition to other Brian works, and I haven't written him off as ignorant, though his rather steadfast, mostly anti-Brian position over the years is evidence that he and I hear different things in different composers. That's not a surprise, but neither is it a sin of heresy requiring condemnation from me as some Brian fanatic insisting on excommunicating the infidels; I simply disagree with his opinion. He at least knows what he's writing about.

I appreciate it cannot be easy for reviewers to come to a work dead cold and be obliged to write intelligent commentary for the consideration of a large readership, and this becomes especially fraught when two separate factors come into play: (1) the work is a world première, so by definition no one has heard the work performed before, and (2) the critic has never heard another representative work by the same composer, and so has no other experience to bring to the table that would give insight into the work at hand (the default critical procedure is then to compare the composer to other more familiar composers, regardless of whether such comparison is sensible or not). The first excuse is simply not available to Mr Nice, and has not been for half a century; and as for the second, with the ample number of recordings of Brian's symphonies which are readily available (e.g. Mackerras' 7th on EMI probably the finest, and the new Brabbins disc of 10 and 30 which would additionally have given insight into the Proms conductor's methods) and which Mr Nice could have consulted to remedy his unfamiliarity, the fact that he then rhetorically throws the remaining 31 symphonies under the bus with even less reflection makes his position look more like sheer laziness.

Several years ago I arrived at a concert of Mendelssohn's Elijah having lost my wallet en route, and unable to purchase a ticket at the door as originally intended, threw myself on the mercy of the concert promoter (who happened to be a friend from many years previous). He said, fine, but would you write me a review for the Arts pages of his magazine? I shuddered at the thought of the vested interests involved, but swiftly agreed in order to hear the concert (once I had phoned the bank and cancelled my cards). It is also very much to the point that while I had some knowledge of the oratorio and had heard or performed in excerpts of some popular movements from it, in three decades I had somehow escaped being exposed to a full performance of the complete work.

So did I write uninformed nonsense about matters I did not have knowledge of? I could have written a long ranting diatribe on Mendelssohn's conservative attachment to an art form that has in our time expired and gone to meet its maker — and could then go on to wittily describe the regular exhumation of Handel's Messiah by every orchestra and its dog each Christmas as an undead, zombie oratorio that won't lie down when it should have been long dead and buried. However, it was hugely more fructifying to write about the elements and quality of the performers and their performance, rather than be bogged down with some dialectic about a subject which I assumed the interested readership would actually have a better acquaintance with, if not with the particular concert happenings that I was able to witness.

I will gladly respect the opinion of someone who has gone at least some decent way to making acquaintance with the music before judging it, as you obviously have, even if I choose to disagree with the conclusions you reach. I do not see why I should pay respect to some critics who have not even made a fair attempt to remain objective. As others here have pointed out, some non-critics have displayed a higher degree of thoughtfulness in approaching a review of the work than the professionals.

[cilgwyn]

Andrew Clements isn't one of my favourite critics,because like so many newspaper critics,he tends to 'toe the establishment line'. That aside,he usually explains why he doesn't like something or what's wrong with it in a reasonably intelligent way. Although,I personally find his reviews a tad superficial. Hurwitz,irritating as he can be,has more insight,and when he's not too busy showing off,really is a quite interesting reviewer & I often refer to his reviews when I'm thinking of buying a particular cd or looking for a recording of a particular work.
(I am singling out 'the Hurwitz'.as he has been called, because I know that he annoys some people!)
Sforzando,on the other hand, was 100% pure vitriol.

[Philip Legge]

I remember his rather eccentric review of the Naxos recording of the Gothic. His OTT comments about Havergal Brian admirers (?) physical attributes were rather amusing,even if they were untrue (?!!!).

In fact it's been quoted at least twice in this thread (which is now well over 1600 posts, the majority having been written post-December last year), most recently by me just a couple of pages back, also providing a link to the rest of the review which I think is much more to the point. Hurwitz was purportedly describing the characteristics of the New York chapter of the Havergal Brian Society, and its interesting how the HBS itself occasionally has its critics: advocacy for a particular composer (when there are such societies for any composer under the sun) must be regarded as "special pleading"; its members are "fanatics" or "out of touch", etc. etc.

Incidentally, seeing as my photo has been underneath my name for some time now, I think that would class me as an outlier in HBS terms:

• Age: 30 years less than the supposed average according to Hurwitz
• Male: guilty as charged (but Allan Dean Foster has a theory on that)
• Bald on top with lanky shoulder-length white hair: not yet white, obviously (and baldness isn't in the family). Occasionally I do let it grow a little, but rarely to shoulder length!
• Thick glasses: the prescription of my glasses is –2, which is fairly mild
• Goiters, harelip, poxes, skin diseases: ok, very minor bouts of eczema (it's a common accompaniment to asthma in this part of the world)
• Credit card: yes (cf. the story immediately above of having to put it "on hold" having lost my wallet prior to a concert)
• In possession of majority of teeth: yes

And I'm not going to even rise to the bait of "personal hygiene issues".

[Mirror Image]

Incidentally, seeing as my photo has been underneath my name for some time now, I think that would class me as an outlier in HBS terms:

• Age: 30 years less than the supposed average according to Hurwitz
• Male: guilty as charged (but Allan Dean Foster has a theory on that)
• Bald on top with lanky shoulder-length white hair: not yet white, obviously (and baldness isn't in the family). Occasionally I do let it grow a little, but rarely to shoulder length!
• Thick glasses: the prescription of my glasses is –2, which is fairly mild
• Goiters, harelip, poxes, skin diseases: ok, very minor bouts of eczema (it's a common accompaniment to asthma in this part of the world)
• Credit card: yes (cf. the story immediately above of having to put it "on hold" having lost my wallet prior to a concert)
• In possession of majority of teeth: yes

And I'm not going to even rise to the bait of "personal hygiene issues".

I would hate to read what Hurwitz thinks of Allan Pettersson fans.

[karlhenning]

I would hate to read what Hurwitz thinks of Allan Pettersson fans.

That's rather a fun thought!

[Mirror Image]

That's rather a fun thought!

[karlhenning]

Mind you, I'm in the habit of not taking Hurwitz at all seriously . . . .