Vaughan Williams's Veranda

[knight66]

Tomorrow I shall be listening to Wagner while walking a tightrope across a vast canyon.

I do wish you had provided more notice; I would have sold tickets.

On RVW, having read the recent posts I am now going to put on the 4th Symphony. I can't hear it in my head, so want to explore what is surprisingly dark about it.

The sun is shining, that will counteract any impulse to throw myself out of the window.

Mike

EDIT: I have now listened, I had forgotten what a punch it delivers, passionate and for the most part dark. Agitated and exciting.

M

[Sergeant Rock]

EDIT: I have now listened, I had forgotten what a punch it delivers, passionate and for the most part dark. Agitated and exciting.

Bernstein's "young people's" lecture on intervals ends with "[The last movement] finally works itself up to a frenzy of major and minor seconds, but at the very height of this exciting build-up, when everything is going like gang busters, on the very last page, the composer suddenly hurls us back into the dissonant rage of the opening movement, and with six final hammer-blows the symphony comes to a savage end. Now why this sudden, brief, angry, dissonant ending after a whole joyful movement that made us feel we'd solved everything at last? Well, it's as if Vaughan Williams were telling us: Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, that's life."

Bernstein didn't sugarcoat things 

Sarge

[Elgarian]

I do wish you had provided more notice; I would have sold tickets.

Not interested in the spaceship-to-Mars Holst performance, then?

[The new erato]

Not interested in the spaceship-to-Mars Holst performance, then?

If you go to Pluto, that could be interesting.....

[vandermolen]

Just (another) plug for this lovely, poetic, compassionate work -'Epithalamion' (1957) for baritone, chorus, solo flute and string orchestra (with prominent piano). I think that it is his most underrated and little known score. It was written not long before Vaughan Williams died and a critical reaction set in against his music. It is a late craggy (though gentle) score, perhaps difficult to stage because of the forces involved, but there are at leat three CDs now which is pleasing. David Willcocks on EMI is the best but now quite expensive on amazon etc - the other versions are good too. Ideal gramophone listening.

[karlhenning]

Revisited Dona nobis pacem last night; it had been a long time since hearing it last.  Even more tenderly affecting than I remembered it!

[vandermolen]

Revisited Dona nobis pacem last night; it had been a long time since hearing it last.  Even more tenderly affecting than I remembered it!

Oh yes Karl, a great work.

[Guido]

Tomorrow, Steven Isserlis at the Proms plays the surviving fragment of the Vaughan Williams Cello Concerto that we mentioned a few pages back - it's the first performance of a completion and elaboration by Matthews. Should be special.

It's on Radio 3 of course.

[Lethevich]

Many thanks - I don't really keep up with the proms, but this is a must-hear.

[Guido]

Yes, I'm so glad that they've done something with this - in a recent interview, Isserlis seemed very taken with it's beauty. Hopefully it will be better than that rather tawdry work he wrote for Casals (The Fantasia on Sussex Folk Songs).

[Mirror Image]

Tomorrow, Steven Isserlis at the Proms plays the surviving fragment of the Vaughan Williams Cello Concerto that we mentioned a few pages back - it's the first performance of a completion and elaboration by Matthews. Should be special.

It's on Radio 3 of course.

I'm not much for another person completing a composer's work, which why I always laughed when somebody completes another Mahler 10 or somebody fools around with a last movement idea for Bruckner's 9th or Elgar's unfinished 3rd, etc. It just doesn't seem like these people have the best intentions with the given composer's music.

[Elgarian]

... Elgar's unfinished 3rd, etc. It just doesn't seem like these people have the best intentions with the given composer's music.

Anthony Payne wrote a book about his 'realisation' of Elgar's third symphony. It was a labour of love for years - I suppose he grew to understand more about what Elgar was attempting to do than anyone else is ever likely to do, based on all the scraps of material Elgar had left, together with Billy Reed's recollections of what he'd heard Elgar play. As far as one can tell, his intentions were as good as one could hope for.

Bearing in mind that Elgar had left very little that was actually performable, but only sketches, the result is astoundingly like Elgar, and is a work of such power and delicacy, that for it not to have been given form would have been tragic, in my view. And the process had one very useful biographical byproduct - it demonstrated conclusively that the common picture of Elgar as a washed up composer after the death of his wife isn't correct. What prevented him completing the symphony wasn't lack of inspiration, but his declining health.

But of course it's still a matter of great controversy among Elgarians, and there's a broad split between those who think Payne's 'realisation' was a betrayal of Elgar's wishes, and those (like me) who think the result is so magnificent as to justify the attempt.

[Luke]

I'm not much for another person completing a composer's work, which why I always laughed when somebody completes another Mahler 10 or somebody fools around with a last movement idea for Bruckner's 9th or Elgar's unfinished 3rd, etc. It just doesn't seem like these people have the best intentions with the given composer's music.

I also think this is a very hard thing to believe of, for instance Cooke's performing version of Mahler 10 which is and will remain the most high-profile 'completion', I suspect. What proof is there that Cooke wasn't working with the best of intentions here, as Payne was with Elgar? None that I know of, and plenty of evidence to the contrary - it's a scrupulously careful, reverentially-done job, and explicitly not actually a completion either, merely the production of a piece that represents Mahler's sketches in a performable form. For which thanks ought to be given, not doubts over intentions cast, I think.

In the case of my own touchstone composer, Janacek, I'm certainly very grateful for the completion of his violin concerto. Because of its status as a 'completed' work it's not hugely well known - but it is, IMO, very late Janacek at his most passionately personal, and there isn't much better than that in music. Something else to add to the other major last pieces of Janacek, anyway - the 2nd quartet, the Glagolitic Mass, the Sinfonietta and the House of the Dead, with which it is so closely connected.

[71 dB]

But of course it's still a matter of great controversy among Elgarians, and there's a broad split between those who think Payne's 'realisation' was a betrayal of Elgar's wishes, and those (like me) who think the result is so magnificent as to justify the attempt.

If the completed 3rd symphony is a betrayal of Elgar's wishes, it is totally unintentional from Payne's part. I agree with you, the resulting gorgeous work justifies the attempt with ease and I wouldn't want to live without it now that Payne has given it to us.

[vandermolen]

Yes, I'm so glad that they've done something with this - in a recent interview, Isserlis seemed very taken with it's beauty. Hopefully it will be better than that rather tawdry work he wrote for Casals (The Fantasia on Sussex Folk Songs).

Actually I rather like the Fantasia on Sussex Folk Songs - but maybe that's because I live in Sussex  . Coincidentally I bought an old cassette of it as a village fete last weekend (my car only has a cassette player) and was playing in this morning. I would not describe it as tawdry. There are very few works by VW that I dislike - one is the Serenade for Music (also at the Proms this year), which I have always found overrated and uncharacteristically self-congratulatory. I could do without ever hearing The Wasps Overture again, especially as I have a million copies on CD, as it is often coupled with works I like.  The Suite for Viola is another work I don't really like.

[Sergeant Rock]

I also think this is a very hard thing to believe of, for instance Cooke's performing version of Mahler 10 which is and will remain the most high-profile 'completion', I suspect. What proof is there that Cooke wasn't working with the best of intentions here, as Payne was with Elgar? None that I know of, and plenty of evidence to the contrary - it's a scrupulously careful, reverentially-done job, and explicitly not actually a completion either, merely the production of a piece that represents Mahler's sketches in a performable form. For which thanks ought to be given, not doubts over intentions cast, I think.

Exactly. And Cooke wrote: "Mahler's actual music, even in its unperfected and unelaborated state, has such significance, strength, and beauty, that it dwarfs into insignificance the momentary uncertainites about notation and the occasional susidiary pastiche composing... After all, the thematic line thoughout, and something like 90% of the counterpoint and harmony, are pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that."

What a tragedy it would have been if Mahler's final musical thoughts had remained in some drawer, or tucked away in a museum basement, lost to the world. If all we had was the Ninth as a final statement, we'd be hearing Mahler incomplete, and false, with the final part of his life missing...and that is far more disturbing to me than the "momentary uncertainties" about the performing version. Cooke is one of my heroes.

Sarge

[DavidRoss]

Interrupting this discussion about completions of Elgar and Mahler symphonies to insert a brief plug for RVW's A London Symphony and for Hilary Hahn's achingly lovely A Lark Ascending.  As you were.

[Mirror Image]

I also think this is a very hard thing to believe of, for instance Cooke's performing version of Mahler 10 which is and will remain the most high-profile 'completion', I suspect. What proof is there that Cooke wasn't working with the best of intentions here, as Payne was with Elgar? None that I know of, and plenty of evidence to the contrary - it's a scrupulously careful, reverentially-done job, and explicitly not actually a completion either, merely the production of a piece that represents Mahler's sketches in a performable form. For which thanks ought to be given, not doubts over intentions cast, I think.

In the case of my own touchstone composer, Janacek, I'm certainly very grateful for the completion of his violin concerto. Because of its status as a 'completed' work it's not hugely well known - but it is, IMO, very late Janacek at his most passionately personal, and there isn't much better than that in music. Something else to add to the other major last pieces of Janacek, anyway - the 2nd quartet, the Glagolitic Mass, the Sinfonietta and the House of the Dead, with which it is so closely connected.

I suppose if you look at as we would never hear the work if it hadn't been completed, then it makes sense logically, but the emotional content is what makes a completion sound different, because the composer's own feelings weren't there. Janacek's Violin Concerto was brought together only by fragments. You have to wonder what parts are the composer's own and which are the person who finished it? I just think sometimes that there's a lot of music that should be left alone and honestly I think in many cases the person who completes these works are doing a disservice to it regardless of what their intentions were.

In terms of Mahler's 10th, all of the finished versions I've heard don't even sound like Mahler. I've heard Cooke, Wheeler, and Barshai and none of them come close to Mahler's sound-world.

[Sergeant Rock]

Interrupting this discussion about completions of Elgar and Mahler symphonies to insert a brief plug for RVW's A London Symphony and for Hilary Hahn's achingly lovely A Lark Ascending.  As you were.

Well, the Elgar and Mahler discussions were a little off topic, so your post is not an interruption but a corrective, enabling us to get back on the righteous Ralphian path.

Sarge

[Sergeant Rock]

In terms of Mahler's 10th, all of the finished versions I've heard don't even sound like Mahler. I've heard Cooke, Wheeler, and Barshai and none of them come close to Mahler's sound-world.

What, not even the first and third movments?    We don't know what the Tenth completed by Mahler would have sounded like obviously. He was heading into new territory. No one who's done a completion claims his way would have been Mahler's way. Nonetheless, to my ears Cooke gives us a good idea; it sounds Mahlerian to me. If you don't hear that, well, consider this: We do get pure Mahlerian thematic content and "90%" of his counterpoint and harmony. I'll take that rather than nothing.

Sarge