Havergal Brian.

Started by Harry, June 09, 2007, 04:36:53 AM

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J.Z. Herrenberg

#500
@ Albion I think you culled that dream from the pages of the HBS Newsletter. I remember they ran a series, a long time ago, about the Bantock-Brian correspondence. I had forgotten this particular jewel. That Brian had a fecund imagination, bordering on the weird, is very clear!

@ Klaatu 'The Tigers' and the 'Gothic' complement each other. They are the twin products of Brian's earliest maturity as a composer and they both inhabit a very special sphere of feeling, which I don't encounter in any of his later works. Which is not to say the later works are lesser, just different, more circumscribed, perhaps. 'The Tigers' and the 'Gothic' give me a  sense of timeless and boundless exploration. Anything can happen, the music could go on forever.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Albion

Quote from: Jezetha on December 23, 2010, 02:33:47 PM
@ Albion I think you you culled that dream from the pages of the HBS Newsletter. I remember they ran a series, a long time ago, about the Bantock-Brian correspondence. I had forgotten this particular jewel. That Brian had a fecund imagination, bordering on the weird, is very clear!

It actually came from Reginald Nettel's Ordeal by Music: The Strange Experience of Havergal Brian (OUP, 1945, the first version of the biography expanded in 1976) which I've just been re-reading. Whenever I reach the final chapter of Ordeal, entitled The Last Phase it gives me something of a thrill to imagine the unprecedented and unexpected torrent of music that Brian was shortly to begin unleashing. It also brings home the tragedy of the loss of so many important full scores, especially By the Waters of Babylon (1903), The Vision of Cleopatra (1907) and Prometheus Unbound (1944).
A piece is worth your attention, and is itself for you praiseworthy, if it makes you feel you have not wasted your time over it. (SG, 1922)

J.Z. Herrenberg

#502
Nettel? OK. I read his book a very very long time ago! I remember having the same feeling when I came to the end of the original version. A book that was meant to be a study of an old and forgotten composer, turned out to be only about part of his career!

Here, by the way, are our friends in Brisbane at a 'Gothic' rehearsal - the climax of the Vivace (I don't know how to embed this):


http://www.youtube.com/v/Cl8KwnOmJJA

EDIT: Philip Legge says, on Facebook, he "is sorry to have to make the rehearsal samples private, but I acknowledge the need to have these embargoed".

Blast!
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Albion

Quote from: Jezetha on December 24, 2010, 12:24:50 AM
Here, by the way, are our friends in Brisbane at a 'Gothic' rehearsal - the climax of the Vivace

Many thanks for this link - what a thrill it must be to be part of such a performance - they clearly do have a Xylophone player who is up to the task!

It makes me all the more frenetically excited at the (hopeful) prospect of a Proms outing in July (the first I'll have attended in years)!
A piece is worth your attention, and is itself for you praiseworthy, if it makes you feel you have not wasted your time over it. (SG, 1922)

J.Z. Herrenberg

#504
Then you'll be frenetically excited the coming months... [it's a cert, don't tell anyone]

Here the opening of the Allegro assai:

http://www.youtube.com/user/phi1ip2#p/a/u/0/lZc5lTCHqek

EDIT: Philip Legge says, on Facebook, he "is sorry to have to make the rehearsal samples private, but I acknowledge the need to have these embargoed".
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Albion

Quote from: Jezetha on December 24, 2010, 12:39:34 AM
Then you'll be frenetically excited the coming months... [it's a cert, don't tell anyone]

I'll try to contain my frenzy - wouldn't want to keel over with a coronary before the big day!
A piece is worth your attention, and is itself for you praiseworthy, if it makes you feel you have not wasted your time over it. (SG, 1922)

Lethevich

Peanut butter, flour and sugar do not make cookies. They make FIRE.

J.Z. Herrenberg



"Just as the audience started to file in, I snuck over to the highest row of the choral stands up the back of the hall." (taken from a Justin Harrison on Facebook)
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Luke

Spellbound by all this, guys...those youtube clips send shivers down me!

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: Luke on December 24, 2010, 03:25:51 AM
Spellbound by all this, guys...those youtube clips send shivers down me!

Malcolm MacDonald (who was guest of honour) wrote on Facebook something along the lines of 'this orchestra is up for anything'. And it is. Bass soloist Philip Legge told me (also on FB) that the dress rehearsal went even better (he was off stage at the performance).
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Luke

I could watch that ginger-afroed xylophonist dude hitting all the right notes all day long!

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: Luke on December 24, 2010, 03:31:53 AM
I could watch that ginger-afroed xylophonist dude hitting all the right notes all day long!

Yes, he's incredible! There is hope for the human race after all.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Luke

Just back from a long drive across the snowy nighttime wastes of East Anglia. A Gothic-length drive, in fact....the Lenard one, this time. Reeling, still, some thoughts (nothing new here):

1) what an ungrateful bunch we can turn into sometimes, carping at this recording's flaws and forgetting its glories! As I listened to the symphony I was struck with renewed admiration for the work of Lenard and co here, despite fluffs such as the xylophonist makes (see below).... the orchestral commitment and lack of fear is extraordinary in Part I, and as the chorus take centre stage in Part II with those gutsy, oceanic convulsions of praise, throwing themselves into every melismatic paean with such gusto, I can forgive anything. We tend to take this recording for granted now, I think, having lived with it so long, and the Boult , easily available now in a way it wasn't when the Lenard appeared, is often preferred - for its historical importance as well as its musical qualities and the unmistakable, unrepeatable atmosphere of that recording. But note-wise, tuning-wise and so on, the Boult is less accurate than the Lenard, it has to be said...

2) It has to be realised, I think, that this piece will always be well-nigh impossible to record in a wholly acceptable way, just for logistical reasons - with the volume up full blast, I was aware of constant page-turning, for example, because with that many musicians in one space, someone, somewhere, will always be flicking over to the next side! And there's the problem of the large space itself, the echo, the time-lag. Though I think that these factors actually can be heard as part of the piece themselves, and to me part of the sound of The Gothic is that resonant noise of an expanded violin section, multiply divided, playing high and strong in a large space - there's nothing else like it.

3) re that poor xylophonist, let's remember a) that this must be by some distance the hardest and most exposed xylophone solo in classical music, tonal classical at any rate; b) the mistakes are obvious because the solo is composed of arpeggios and scales which reveal mistakes cruelly; c) actually there aren't that many mistakes, really, they are just exposed and d) cut the guy some slack, he's giving everything to the cause, and that is much more in tune with the spirit of the piece than mere accurate note bashing - "Whoever strives with all his might, That man we can redeem" and all that!  ;D

4) Listening again, I find myself once more able to agree with Malcolm Macdonald's assessment of the 1st movement as the weakest, structurally speaking....in theory. I can see the logic. But in practice, I have never felt this movement less than utterly compelling from first to last, structurally very clear, the drastic divisions between sections, which MM thinks go too far, seem to me to be just right, to be pillars - an architectural image he and others use all the time about this piece - that open the movement up like a gateway, saying, 'here are the extremes between which we will explore'. The two haunting, suspended violin soli statements of the second subject, in the exposition and the recap, those moments of ultra-sweet beauty that MM and others fear are too beautiful, are to me islands of such sweetness that they lodge in the memory and provide little glowing moments of structural pointing. I love this movement wholeheartedly, I love its tone - from the first note, the moods might shift dramatically, but the tone is unified, shades of granitic gray, but with an interior sweetness and glow, like a candlight procession through a darkened cathedral (hackneyed image, but still...)

5) the architecture of this piece is just so splendid, the long term shaping that takes the listener on a journey not from Dark to Light, or some such, but a complicated, doubting quest from darkness through mystery, fantasy, conventional jubilation, fear, anguish, hope....it's so marvellously achieved in every way, tonally, motivically,  orchestrally....

6) I know every single note of this piece by heart, every tiniest gesture and resonance - I'm not alone in this, there are many of us even just on GMG who can say the same, it's not a quality of mine, it's a quality of the music. Given its nature as a piece of extraordinary size and length, I think this fact is significant (it's not something I can say of many other comparable pieces which I have listened to at least as much - as Mahler 8, say). It tells me that piece was composed as a unity, despite the scale and the time-frame of composition. Which leads me to...

7) MM thinks the world of The Gothic, clearly, and also thinks that it is something of a special case, set aside from the rest of Brian's work. He's right, of course. He also thinks that it is HB's most important work, his crucial work, his greatest piece.....but not, necessarily, his best piece. Well, I understand this totally, and confronted with symphonies of an even greater maturity and in which the Brian style is more completely there, with no intrusions from elsewhere - things like number 6, 7, 8, which I think is one of the finest symphonies of the century, 16, 27.... - it's hard to say that they are of lesser quality than The Gothic. But, in the final analysis, forgetting musical details, I think The Gothic is HB's finest piece, for the reasons MM says, and also because it is so terrifically inspired, from first note to last. That kind of thing cannot be faked and survives even 'flaws' in the notes themselves - the work burns with intensity for its entire duration, never slacking, and I know of no other piece on this scale or of this rare genre-busting type that does that. Schoenberg tried with Jakobsleiter - and he couldn't sustain it, the piece remained unfinished.

karlhenning

Thank you, and merry Christmas, Luke!

Luke

The same to you, Mr H!  :)  :)

J.Z. Herrenberg

#515
Hi, Luke! Wonderful piece! I was just writing an extended post, when I did something stupid and lost the whole thing... But rest assured - I'll write a reaction to your ideas, assessments and insights. First I'm making coffee... One other thing - I'd like to send your thoughts to MM (with your consent, of course). He should know them. It would be interesting to see whether he has changed his views about the opening movement at all since 1974, when vol. 1 came out... It's a pity you're not a member of the HBS. You could reinvigorate the pages of the Newsletter!
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Klaatu

Quote from: Luke on December 24, 2010, 09:33:06 AM

the tone is unified, shades of granitic gray, but with an interior sweetness and glow, like a candlight procession through a darkened cathedral

One of the joys of perusing this forum is to come across a simile of such aptness that it really enhances the music. Hats off to you, Luke; that's a wonderful gothic-cathedral image - scraps of melody resembling little flickers of golden light across a great immensity of granitic grey. Perhaps a metaphor for the mediaeval age of cathedral-building, with its artistic glories burning like a guttering flame against the darkness - perhaps a metaphor for Brian's time (and our own).

Gosh, it's Christmas Eve, I've had a drop too much port and I'm waxing lyrical..............

Merry Christmas to one and all!

J.Z. Herrenberg

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Luke

Thirded, and thanks both!

J, I don't mind you sending Malcolm Macdonald anything you like - only, that isn't much of a thought of mine, and there's no detailed rationale for it at all, as there is behind every word that he writes about Brian. It's merely my own response to the piece, and moreover, one which is probably conditioned by a hefty dose of imprinting, as I listened to this piece so often as a teenager - this movement more than any other, no doubt, due do the sort of 'Luke, stop listening to that racket and come down to dinner' interruption that is common to teenage boys  ;D It's simply that I love this movement, and never felt the total stasis of the second subject, its suddenness, or its extreme beauty, to be a problem, even though I can see perfectly well that, as MM says, to stop dead like that after only a few bars of such a momentum-fuelled opening to such a mammoth work causes troubling formal issues. To me there is one - the muscular D minor opening, kinesis - and the other - the lyrical, vocal D flat music, stasis (reminds me of Tippett's division of musical types, that....). Placed in opposition straightaway although, somehow, as I suggested, sharing the same tone...perhaps that's something acoustic, even, the echoes of the first fading into the second, so that the two do not jar, for me, at all.... At any rate, it's never troubled me, it's just seemed to me like the composer setting out his terms straightaway. The D flat major of the second subject is as drastic a step down, flatwards, as one can get, all wrong at this juncture, in classical terms, but it also = C# and is thus related to E major. When the melody is recapitulated it is in exactly those tonal regions, and we all know where E ends up in this symphony.... And so right at the start we find the seeds of something which will end the symphony.

J.Z. Herrenberg

I never had any problems with the opening movement, either. MM's first volume preceded my experience of Brian's symphonies. I read his book in 1977, and was already a convert before I got to know the 8th and 9th a year later... The Boult 'Gothic' I only heard in 1982 (iirc) and MM's strictures certainly coloured my listening. The first movement seems 'smaller' than its two successors, and it is also 'simpler' in its binary character of a stark opposition of themes. It also lacks the goal of a real climax. But in its unresolved tension you can sense - half almost beyond the notes, because the music seems to draw its sustenance and materials from some sort of 'atmosphere' Brian inhabited for 8 years, which gives the whole giant work its deep unity -, but you can sense that this movement puts the pieces of the edifice into place. Put differently, this Allegro assai works like a mighty curtain-raiser for the big drama that will begin.

On the issue of the 'Gothic' being Brian's greatest work - perhaps. A lot of his oeuvre is still uncharted territory. What I heard of his opera 'Faust', for instance, belongs to his best music. (Toccata has recorded a CD of orchestral music from Brian's operas 'Turandot' and 'Faust', release date yet to be announced.) But as long as we don't have a complete view, I'll gladly consider the 'Gothic' his biggest masterpiece. It is, as you say, supremely inspired. You enter into the furnace of creativity itself.

I'll see what I'll do then, with your post... But your critique of MM's criticism is good (combined with the added remarks). I suddenly remember there is an analysis by Lionel Pike of the tonal structure of the 'Gothic'. He also sees that connection between the C# and the E with which the symphony ends...

Nuff said. It's late!
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato