Havergal Brian.

[Sergeant Rock]

'hnh records'? It looks a bit like a close up shot of a home made quilt.

It does look like a quilt but in fact it's a painting by Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms. It's part of the Guggenheim collection. I agree with you: the Lyrita cover seems more appropriate to Brian's style.

Sarge

[cilgwyn]

Oh dear,not a masterpiece I hope?
Actually,the only Havergal Brian Lp (as opposed to cd) I have left in my collection is the record of Brian's songs. In my opinion one of the best & yet most underrated Havergal Brian recordings ever released. I played it so much I practically knew all the songs by heart'

The scene: Me in the bath. Time: late evening:

Me (warbling while soaping myself): 'When Ic-eecles heng by the w-aaaal...'.(etc,etc)
Neighbour (hammering on wall) Shurrup yer tone deaf tosser!

Also,while washing up. Very,very catchy indeed. Classics which should be as admired as those of VW or Gurney.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Actually,the only Havergal Brian Lp (as opposed to cd) I have left in my collection is the record of Brian's songs. In my opinion one of the best & yet most underrated Havergal Brian recordings ever released. I played it so much I practically knew all the songs by heart'

The scene: Me in the bath. Time: late evening:

Me (warbling while soaping myself): 'When Ic-eecles heng by the w-aaaal...'.(etc,etc)
Neighbour (hammering on wall) Shurrup yer tone deaf tosser!

Also,while washing up. Very,very catchy indeed. Classics which should be as admired as those of VW or Gurney.

I love the songs too. They are often very haunting, with wonderful melodic and harmonic inventions. Brian Rayner Cook and Roger Vignoles do an excellent job. And it's the same with me - I bellowed 'My soul, be strong!' in many difficult situations. Well, I didn't, but 'The Soul of Steel' is terrific, with that typically Brianic bass line. I also like 'Renunciation', which starts:


I glimpse the road that stretches white, austere,
Before you, but I cannot follow there;
Your feet are shod, your heart is full of cheer,
My heart is empty and my feet are bare.


After 'bare' there is a very characteristic hint of a (funeral) march.

[cilgwyn]

I downloaded mine from Amazon,but I am ashamed to say I downloaded the booklet from Toccata,which is a bit crafty I know. If I could get to the other end of my back room I would have a look at the old Lp. I seem to remember there was an odd cartoon or drawing on the front. As to ye olde cassettes,I still use them a bit. Particularly for spoken word cassettes,but cd's are obviously to be preferred,unless you can't live without side breaks. As to the songs. I'm not actually that keen on english song myself and Havergal Brian's are the only one's I've ever really enjoyed. I haven't got the booklet or poems to hand & the download is still on an external drive & I have only just started to transfer music from it onto cd-r's. But I can 'hear' Cooke's voice singing them in my head. I must do that cd-r next. Again with Brian,it's the sheer range of the songs. Some of them are quite jolly,even jaunty & full of really good hummable tunes. They should be popular! And the 'Defiled Sanctuary' makes a truly dramatic ending. You'll be apalled to know I actually used to sing that. Not very well I can assure you,although I did,unfortunately, pass my audition for the school choir (I didn't go!) A record I played over and over and over again.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Yes, the range of the songs is wide. 'Care-charmer Sleep' with its last line 'and never wake to feel the day's disdain' struck a chord with me when I was in my twenties. I took up singing lessons then, too. I am a baritone, like Cook. Not as good, mind you! Singing wasn't and isn't my vocation!

[Mirror Image]

MI, if you are revisiting your recordings, the performances of the Violin Concerto, and symphonies 11 (first movement too fast, though), 12, 15, 17, 20, 25, 32 are good. I know your budget won't be limitless, but two CDs are essential in any Brian collection - the Lyrita with 6 & 16 and the new Dutton with symphonies 10 & 30, the Concerto for Orchestra and English Suite No. 3...

Johan, thanks for the recommendations. I do intend on buying more Brian recordings soon. I just bought the two Naxos re-releases with Leaper, which I didn't own, so it will be great to hear these works.

[cilgwyn]

I really WOULD recommend the cd of his songs. Just because it's not one of the more high profile releases,hardly anyone ever mentions it (except here)and it doesn't have the glamour of a symphony orchestra doesn't mean it isn't much good or it's not as interesting or exciting. Personally,I would quite CATEGORICALLY place it up there with the Dutton cd of sym 10 (etc),the Lyrita cd & the emi recordings as one of the best and most exciting Brian recordings ever released (commercially). As a teenager I was bored stiff by song but this one made regular returns to my Van der Molen Stereo record player. It is marvellous,a real ear opener!
As to my singing. I'm better at lighter stuff,like Gilbert & Sullivan,although 'whole lotta Rosie's' quite good fun in the bath. Brian Rayner Cooke is the 'real deal' though. (I wish I'd stuck at my choir sessions now).
I notice you emphasise the more serious songs JZH. I suppose they're the main meat. Nevertheless,I do feel the lighter side of Brian is not to be sniffed at & might appeal to some who are turned off by his more weighty stuff. I always find it astonishing that Brian was working on something like 'The Tigers' at around the same time as the 'Gothic'. Two huge,astonishingly ambitious works that are as different as the sun and moon (although there are connections eg 'Gargoyles' for example) and all from the same mind. Most of us have enough trouble working on one thing at a time,let alone on that vast scale.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Oh, but I DO like the lighter songs, too! 'Lady Ellayne', for example, or 'Love is a merry game' (if that's the title). That the weightier and darker songs should strike me more is only natural (for me), but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the lighter Brian. I do. Especially as Brian, even when he is in his 'light' mood, still manages to create something substantial.

[cilgwyn]

Can't have the Havergal Brian thread slipping this far down the Forum! At least not for too long.
I have now located my original Auracle Records LP of Brian's songs. Not exactly mint, (the sleeve)but intact,it includes the original song sheet. Also,the cartoon on the front cover,which I remembered from the original LP,is 'Adrian Potter' & the cartoon is by Frank Furnivall. Yet so far I am unable to find anything in the accompanying notes to explain who Adrian Potter is?! Can anyone enlighten me?
I note some other old favourites:

Take,O take those lips away
The Message
Love is a Merry Game
Piping down the Valleys Wild
The Chimney Sweeper

But then,aren't they all? A classic! According to the notes,Brian wrote around 65 songs,in all,many of which are lost. A number of them were sung by leading singers of the day,including John Coates and the still popular & indeed legendary John McCormack (If only he'd recorded some,even just one!) I wonder exactly how many extant songs remain unrecorded. I only wish I had a record label,I'd be gagging to record them!
I seem to remember reading that Brian's landlord,at the time,'CM Masterman' the author of one of the Songs ('The Soul of Steel')represented here let him live in his accomodation rent free because of his musical abilities. I only wish most of the landlord's I have come across had such good taste.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Can't have the Havergal Brian thread slipping this far down the Forum! At least not for too long.
I have now located my original Auracle Records LP of Brian's songs. Not exactly mint, (the sleeve)but intact,it includes the original song sheet. Also,the cartoon on the front cover,which I remembered from the original LP,is 'Adrian Potter' & the cartoon is by Frank Furnivall. Yet so far I am unable to find anything in the accompanying notes to explain who Adrian Potter is?! Can anyone enlighten me?
I note some other old favourites:

Take,O take those lips away
The Message
Love is a Merry Game
Piping down the Valleys Wild
The Chimney Sweeper

But then,aren't they all? A classic! According to the notes,Brian wrote around 65 songs,in all,many of which are lost. A number of them were sung by leading singers of the day,including John Coates and the still popular & indeed legendary John McCormack (If only he'd recorded some,even just one!) I wonder exactly how many extant songs remain unrecorded. I only wish I had a record label,I'd be gagging to record them!
I seem to remember reading that Brian's landlord,at the time,'CM Masterman' the author of one of the Songs ('The Soul of Steel')represented here let him live in his accomodation rent free because of his musical abilities. I only wish most of the landlord's I have come across had such good taste.

This thread is already bigger than Beethoven's (which is too much honour for HB, however much I love and admire him!), so - don't be disheartened by a momentary interruption of proceedings here... I don't know who 'Adrian Potter' is, either. Frank Furnivall, on the other hand (as you will know), was Brian's son-in-law, married to his daughter Jean.


I think I'm going to download the songs (possible at Toccata Classics). I simply like them too much, to go without them!

[cilgwyn]

I wasn't being all that serious,actually. I'm sure things will 'pick up' quite a bit when the 'Gothic' gets performed at the Proms! (Also,Toccata Vol 2). Ludwig's admirer's needn't feel too downhearted. He's just as interesting,it's just that there have been so many umpteen recording cycles & books people eventually run out of things to say. (For example,what can you say about Beethoven's Fifth that hasn't been said a million times before?) Although you could say the same about Brian's Gothic,in some respects! I mean 'Mind boggling','bigger than Mahler's eighth',or if you don't like him,'over rated','overlong'. Who hasn't come out with any of those observations before? And there is so much by Brian that hasn't been recorded or even performed. And his career and belated discovery? It's the stuff of movies!
I must say the 'Legend for Violin & Piano' rounds off the Toccata cd very nicely indeed!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

 Many years ago I wrote down some thoughts about Brian for personal use. They are fragmentary, and I don't even subscribe to everything in them anymore. But they might be of interest to some of my fellow GMG Brianites:

"Quality control is not my business. I do not, in the following, answer the question of Brian's "masterpieces". What I will try to do instead is to set out what sort of an artist I think Brian is. In what kind of country does his genius hold sway, and what are its borders? If we know what he is and can, and what he doesn't want to be and do, we won't criticize him for not being Dmitri Vaughan Sibelius.

Brian is divided. He reacts and he constructs. He is a rational builder and an emotional player. His art is torn between structure, understood as controlled inevitability, and process, unpredictable freedom. His stated aim of "Balance of Form" shows great self-knowledge. In this dichotomy resides Brian's power and weakness. The tension between structuring form and fracturing process, circle and line, stone and plant, Symphony and Drama, cathedral and theatre, music and language, eternity and time, whole and part, there is the heart of the Brian phenomenon. Its throb is in everything he wrote. Brian can give you a breathless report, lasting an hour, idea piled upon idea, or a concentrated epic, taking a mere minute. Because these two principles can swap their temporal character. The succes of a work depends on their fruitful cooperation. Unity in Brian is dialogical. Brian is as much a monumental Bruckner as he is a mercurial Mahler, within a piece. The ratio of one to the other decides the character.

We can speculate about its origin.

We might even see a socio-political analogue to this pair: birth and merit. The story of Brian's life is that of a violently energetic man, trying to escape a background that crippled his chances in advance. There is something barbaric in this indefatigable journey upwards and onwards. Brian sacks the West. He devours it. No one is safe, nothing is safe, not Goethe, not Latin, not Luther. Here is Brian's link to James Joyce and Igor Stravinsky, hubristic, voracious outsiders.

In his obsessive funeral marches he, the victim, becomes the executioner, embodying the power that threatens to crush him and his ambition. (I, for one, am not certain Das Siegeslied is the great anti-totalitarian statement. Doesn't Wine of Summer, perhaps, point to contrition in its rarefied Englishness?).

The Gothic is the greatest testament to Brian's hopes for himself. That is why it takes on the whole Western tradition and ends in openness and expectancy.

Part One's Allegro and Lento are rather static, circular. The first movement  jumps from heroic striving to lyrical self-absorption, while the second movement is an unforgettable study in incremental grandeur. There is no gain, no breakthrough. Brian is staking out a giant terrain.

But the Vivace is the Gothic's axis mundi, marrying structure and process in unforgettable perfection, it is the giant gate, on whose hinges the whole symphony (and the rest of Brian's oeuvre) flies open, disclosing the vista of the Te Deum in all its achieved informality, where a progression similar to that of Part One is repeated on a higher level, but now as an ongoing quest, with the text almost functioning as the connecting pretext for some of the freest music Brian ever composed. (And might this, by the way, at last explain the vexed question of why the Gothic travels from D minor to E major? Does this shift not signify Brian's ultimate favouring of process over structure, growth over order, as a symbol of liberation?)"

[cilgwyn]

I'm going to have to mentally 'digest' you're post before even attempting a reply. You're vocabularly is as granitic as Brian's. And I mean that in a really good way. I particularly like you're analysis of the 'Vivace' as a kind of 'giant gate'. The colossal storm that follows is like passing through the heart of some huge star/ black hole. Somehow,you pass through on you're journey intact,but nothing is ever quite the same again. There's no going back! (But I'm not as good at analogies as you).

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The text is very compact and not afraid of 'hard' words, I know... I remember wanting to express my feelings/ideas about Brian as succinctly as possible. If I ever write an essay about him, I'll travel a less 'granitic' road!

[cilgwyn]

Nothing wrong with a good bit of granite! It's writing like this that helped me get into Brian at the beginning. I am of course referring to the books of Malcolm Macdonald,which really helped to open up the vast 'hinterland' (as it has been described) of Brian's ouevre.

[cilgwyn]

Just to report my Toccata cd of Brian's songs arrived today via a seller on Amazon .I have the download on an external drive somewhere,but 'hidden away' & decided I couldn't resist the 'shiny thing'. Anyway,it is as wonderful as I remembered it,confirming my belief that this is one of the greatest of all Havergal Brian recordings. Up there with the best! The Legend for Violin & Piano rounds of it's cd incarnation very nicely indeed. If only he'd written more music for chamber & instrumental combinations. Still Brian knew what suited him best!
  With respect to the burgeoning thread (see elsewhere) about Brian's rival in the neglected maverick category,Charles Koechlin I have now dug out my 2cd set of Zinman's 'Jungle Book Cycle. But it's Brian at the moment! (Millie Jackson rounded off last night. I'm an eclectic too!!!).
Here's to Toccata's Orchestral Works Vol 2!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Just to report my Toccata cd of Brian's songs arrived today via a seller on Amazon .I have the download on an external drive somewhere,but 'hidden away' & decided I couldn't resist the 'shiny thing'. Anyway,it is as wonderful as I remembered it,confirming my belief that this is one of the greatest of all Havergal Brian recordings. Up there with the best! The Legend for Violin & Piano rounds of it's cd incarnation very nicely indeed. If only he'd written more music for chamber & instrumental combinations. Still Brian knew what suited him best!
  With respect to the burgeoning thread (see elsewhere) about Brian's rival in the neglected maverick category,Charles Koechlin I have now dug out my 2cd set of Zinman's 'Jungle Book Cycle. But it's Brian at the moment! (Millie Jackson rounded off last night. I'm an eclectic too!!!).
Here's to Toccata's Orchestral Works Vol 2!

I'm certain to listen to Koechlin. But HB will not be easily unseated. I think a favourite composer isn't your favourite for nothing - he appeals to something essential in you.

[karlhenning]

I'm certain to listen to Koechlin [....]

At the risk of aggrandizing a tangent ; ) . . . the recent uptick in Koechlin interest has flagged for me a need to actually listen to a disc or three which I've got somewhere here.

[cilgwyn]

He's certainly intriguing,but I don't see you swapping Koechlin for Brian any time yet! He has some relevance here,possibly,because he was an outsider & a bit of a maverick,like Langgaard. I will certainly dig out some of the cd's of Koechlin,I own......when I've finished with Brian's songs!
You often hear a critic rounding off a review of a cd of neglected music say 'only in this country'. Which of course,as Koechlin,Schmitt or Tournemire might have pointed out themselves,isn't really true. As far as I can make out Britain isn't exactly the only country with a long list of neglected composers. In fact,judging by the sterling work done by some of our small record labels & societies Britain is a bit better than some. Although,I could be wrong! France in particular seems to promote a couple of composers at the expense of so many fine ones. Ropartz,Magnard,Schmitt,Koechlin & Tournemire (his organ music aside) have all suffered. I notice that French composers who favour symphonies seem to have had a particularly hard time!
Tournemire's eight make regular visits to my cd player. With his vast list of ambitious, unperformed & colossal works he strikes me as another contender for a sort of French 'Havergal Brian' (Although,they are of course two very different composers). His Sixth and Seventh symphonies are on a mammoth scale & Tournemire's music often has a similarly dark,'gothic' quality about it. His symphonies,at least in my opinion,are in desperate need of really first class performances and recordings.
The Ropartz and Magnard cycles are magnificent. When I first received the Timpani cd's of the Ropartz symphonies I could hardly believe that (bar the 3rd) they hadn't been recorded before. Astonishing!
America and Italy are even worse.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

A very good friend of mine played some Tournemire to me 20 years ago, an organ piece. I never forgot it. I have a few symphonies of his, but haven't come round yet to listening to them. I find I have to make mental space for new composers and must really feel an urge to listen to them. Otherwise I won't be receptive enough to be able to hear them at all.