... to all my friends in England, and most especially Nige: Forget Bob Dylan. England, in the 20th century, produced a genuinely great composer: Sir Malcolm Arnold. Please listen to his nine symphonies. I can't find any of them on YouTube, but YouTube does have his frivolous. wonderfully accomplished, and delightful A Grand, Grand Overture, which I link to below. So he had a sense of humor, could write for the movies. Those symphonies tell us what it was like to be a live in the second half of the 20th century.
Undoubtedly a very fine composer, Frank; I particularly like the 5th Symphony, and some of the film scores are truly memorable. But a great composer ? That's a heck of a claim. In my humble opinion, a truly great English composer of the 20th century (although his life straddled the 19th and 20th)was Ralph Vaughan Williams. I haven't checked the coverage of RVW on YouTube but a very fine account of his life and music can be found on the DVD 'O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams'
ReplyDeleteI quite agree that Vaughan Williams is a great composer. I was in high school when his ninth symphony was premiered. I could not understand how some people didn't immediately recognize how great it was. But VW is the first half of the century, Arnold is the second half. I like the fifth symphony, too, and the fourth. And the more I listen to all nine, the more they strike me as being, taken together, a genuinely great orchestral testament. I know there's Shostakovich, but I have never, for some reason, warmed to Shostakovich. My fault, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteAh I'm glad we're at one on RVW (and I'm with Frank on Shostakovich - and indeed most Russian music). On Arnold, I can recommend a superb documentary by Tony Palmer, Toward the Unknown Region, which I believe is available on DVD. A real eye-opener, esp in view of the near-oblivion into which Arnold has slipped in Britain - too popular I fancy, too playable. Over here the classical music establishment favours the like of Harrison Birtwistle - enough to put anyone off the whole idea...
ReplyDeleteI have seen the Palmer documentary, Nige, and it is indeed impressive. AS for Birtwistle, he used to teach at Swarthmore, just outside of Philly. Talentless. Musical establishments want people to listen to music they think people should hear, for all manner of unmusical reasons. And I am by no means reflexively opposed to "difficult" music. I happen to like, for instance, Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata.
ReplyDeleteI struggled with Shostakovich until I attended a performance of the 5th Symphony at the Free Trade Hall in the seventies; it almost blistered the paint in the old building. But I really came round to him after hearing a radio broadcast of the 11th Symphony ('The Year 1905') played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Avery Fisher Hall in New York. It may be viewed by many experts as the least symphonic of the canon, but it had me utterley gripped from first note to last. The passage involving the cor anglais solo in the final movement was very moving. The BBC player must have felt so exposed in front of a live audience (I remember feeling very nervous for her; she may have been the calmest person in the hall) but the result was flawless and magical.
ReplyDeleteHaving rambled about a great Russian, I have to say that I turn most often to that wonderful Englishman, RVW.