Gade: String quartet no 1

Day 97

Gade: String Quartet no 1 in D major op 63

Copenhagen string quartet

This was a lovely piece. Quite short and understated but a real pleasure to listen to. Gade was Danish but I can't say I detected any Nordic influences. This was a very much characteristic of the Leipzig school with Mendelssohn and Schumann the obvious influences. This is hardly surprising as Gade conducted the first performances of both the Mendelssohn violin concerto and the Schumann piano concerto.

The music flows freely and without any obvious effort - the scherzo second movement was particularly enjoyable with fast semi-quaver interchanges between pairs of instruments - it must be fun to play. The coda was very neat and raised a smile. Perhaps only the last movement was a slight let down. It was the most symphonic of the four movement and there was perhaps a feeling that Gade thought that he should 'up his game' and show how serious a musician he was. I don't think that there was any need for that and at times the music did seem a bit strained.  But all in all a work I was very happy to have heard.  I don't think that I have heard any Gade before. His music does turn up in second-hand bookshops occasionally as his oratorio The Earl King's Daughter did have quite a vogue in Victorian England. His overture based on Ossian is supposed to be worth hearing so perhaps I will dig that out.

Sorabji: Opus Clavicembalisticum

Day 96

Sorabji: Opus Clavicembalisticum

John Ogdon

As part of this project I want to explore some of the more outré and bizarre repertoire - listening to music which otherwise I would never have had the inclination or time to discovery. And pieces don’t come much more outré than this.

I first came across Sorabji at university: I remember one of our lecturers being surprised to find that the term’s recital programme would include some of his music. Sorabji had banned public performances of his music decades earlier and had only just lifted it to allow Yonty Solomon to play some of the shorter pieces in concert.

Opus Clavicembalisticum is certainly not a short piece! This performance by John Ogdon lasts 4 hrs and 46 mins. I listened to the whole thing in one day - not all in one sitting I have to say but spread throughout the day. It is not an experience that I am likely to repeat. It was extremely hard work and offered very little reward for the investment of time. The music is vaguely tonal but with no real key centres and no rhythmic structure. The bar lines are just there to show the broad phrasing. The result is that there is no real sense of shape or structure to the music - it just meanders along seemingly aimlessly for minutes on end. In particularly the fugues just go on and on with no sense of direction. In all of the 4+ hours there were only a few moments when I really found something to enjoy - the only one which comes to mind is a few moments of psudo Spanish music about 3 hours in. 

Was Sorabji a hidden genius or a Charlatan?  It is difficult to say. Clearly there was a real music brain behind this music - to have devised all of those extraordinary piano textures shows that - but at the same could he seriously believe that a piece over 4 hours long was viable - and of course some of his other pieces - nearly all unperformed - are much longer. The image that came to mind was a virtuoso pianist lock in a darkened room all on his own getting gradually drunker and improvising to save his life with the hope of ultimately destroying the piano!  Unfair perhaps but that’s what it felt like.

I don’t think that I will be going anywhere near Sorabji for a very long time.

Brahms: String quartet no 3

Day 95

Brahms: String quartet no 3 in B flat major op 67

Artemis Quartet

Brahms has always been a complete mystery to me. I simply do not understand why he is ranked among the great composers. I've never found a way to make any sense of his music. Over the years I have played almost all of the orchestral works and while they are highly enjoyable as pieces to perform - he really knows how to to use the Contrabassoon - I don't find being in the middle of the music brings any greater appreciation. There are some beautiful moment of course, but to me nothing really fits together. Melodies start well but peter out and to me all to often the music drifts without any real sense of purpose. I know that these are heretical views and that for many Brahms is revered for his melodic gifts and sense of form. Perhaps one day all will become clear - though I played the 2nd symphony only a couple of weeks ago and I still felt very much the same.  Still I am not entirely alone in feeling this about Brahms - Tchaikovsky and Britten, to name only two composers, were very scathing indeed in what they said about his music.

I think at some stage years ago I might have heard this string quartet, when I was making an effort to get to know Brahms, but if I did I don't remember any of it.  Listening to it today brought back all of my feelings about the composer. Some attractive parts but nothing seemed to hang together and all too often the sense of line was interrupted. One of my biggest bugbears about Brahms is the constant interaction between 3/4 and 6/8 - he seems unable to stick to one or the other for any extended length of time. That was certainly true here and it continued to irritate me!  The last movement is in variation form - so at least it was possible to follow what he was trying to do. But towards the end there is a sudden intrusion of the opening material of the first movement.  I can see on paper that he was trying to show that there was some commonality in the shape of that material and his variation theme, but as a purely aural experience it just jarred.

So this was not the moment when I had a revelation from on high and the greatness of Brahms revealed itself to me - perhaps it will happen one day. After all, as I have mentioned here, it did with Handel and Rameau. But time is running out..........

Bruch: String quartet no 1

Day 94

Bruch String quartet no 1 in C minor op 9

Mannheim String Quartet

Bruch is almost, but not quite, a ‘one work’ composer. I suppose I have known his first violin concerto all my life as it was a favourite work of my parents and their LP of the concerto was often playing. It is a lovely piece and I was glad to hear it live a few days ago in concert. I have played a couple of other Bruch pieces - Kol Nidrei and the Scottish Fantasy and neither of them have anything like the same attractiveness, indeed the latter is one of the most boring pieces I have played for some time!

This quartet is a relatively early work (1859) - I had heard part of the slow movement before but this was the first time I had heard the whole piece. It is very much in the Schumann Mendelssohn tradition and is extrovert in character, quite symphonic in style and obvious designed for public performance. 

The first movement I found rather ordinary - the material was not particularly memorable and it did seem rather over extended, but the other three movement were more successful. The slow movement is beautifully lyrical and one can sense that this is by the same composer as the violin concerto, though it has to be said that it comes perilously close to plagiarising the slow movement of the Mendelssohn octet at times! The third movement has a Schumannesque rhythm and the finale is a lively 6/8 vivace rondo which builds to an impressive climax. 

There is a lot more Bruch to discover - he lived a long life, dying in 1920. Tovey said that his finest pieces were those for chorus and orchestra so perhaps that is the area to explore.

Fuchs: String quartet no 1

Day 93

Fuchs: String quartet no 1 in E major op 58

Minguet Quartet

Robert Fuchs' name appears in the literature fairly frequently because of his long career as a teacher in Vienna. Among his pupils are Enescu, Korngold, Mahler, Schreker, Sibelius, Wolf and Zemlinsky. The sources differ as to who exactly were his pupils and I suspect that some of these may have attended composition classes as junior students rather than had one-to-one personal study session. That list gives a good indication of Fuchs' time and place. He was born in 1847 and lived on until 1927, by which time he must have seen a relic of another age.

One of my tutors at university, the late Robert Pascall, was an expert on Fuchs and wrote the article on him in Grove. So we were exposed to some of his music during our time at university but I hadn't heard this string quartet.

It is the first of four and dates from 1897. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. It is a late-romantic style as one would imagine but is generally quite gentle and not as overblown as much chamber music of the period: you can easily imagine four talented friends sitting down in a large drawing room in a house in Vienna and playing this music for their own enjoyment - it doesn't make bold statements and never puts too much strain on the medium.

There is certainly a Brahmsian feel to some of the music - Brahms was a great admirer of Fuchs - but the textures are generally less dense that those of Brahms - to me that is a real plus. I also sense the presence of Bruckner from time to time, particularly in the rustic second movement where the trio section could fairly easily have fitted into an early Bruckner symphony. Perhaps the slow third movement was rather unmemorable but the lively finale brought the piece to a spirited conclusion.

By all accounts Fuchs was self-effacing and didn't go out of his way to drawn attention to his own music. But I would certainly be happy to encounter the other string quartets and perhaps the serenades, which seem to have been the most popular of his pieces during his lifetime. 

Raff: String quartet no 3

Day 92

Raff: String quartet no 3 in E minor

Manheim String Quartet

After a series of British symphonies it is time to explore a different repertory so I will spend the next few days of this project looking at the string quartet repertory. Also, given that I have spend a lot of time with French and Russian music recently as well, I’ll look at pieces in the Austro-German tradition.

Raff is one of those composers who gets a mention now and then for his programmatic symphonies and also because of his assistance with the orchestration of some of Liszt’s symphonic poems, though the extent of that ‘assistance’ is open to debate. He was quite highly regarded in his day (1822-1882) but the only piece of his that retains any place in the repertory is his Cavatina, which occasionally gets played as an encore piece in violin recitals.  I have a vague memory that I did listen to one of the symphonies years ago but nothing has stuck in my memory.

This quartet, the third of eight dates from 1866. I found it a curiously uneven work. The first movement was a well mannered piece typical of a Leipzig schooled disciple of Mendelssohn or Schumann - the melodic material was attractive but I got the sense that Raff didn’t really have much of a sense of how to develop that material and the piece rather meandered along. The second, scherzo-like, movement was much more interesting - it started out as pure Mendelssohn but developed into quite unexpected harmonic areas and had some interesting textures which pointed to much later music. The third was a complete mystery. It is a theme and variations on a very simple theme. The variations themselves were rather like the simple variations which you find in the early Mozart piano music - each variation has a single idea which persists throughout. It all seemed very stiff and must have seen old-fashioned even at the time it was written - though the coda was rather lovely. The last movement had some attractive ideas but again I didn’t get a sense that Raff quite knew where he was going with the music and the incessant dotted rhythms rather began to pall. It ended quite perfunctorily.

Raff has his supporters and there were certainly glimpses here of a strong musical personality - particularly in the second movement - but I rarely felt totally engaged by this music or got a sense that Raff is an unjustly neglected master. Perhaps the evidence of one piece is not enough to make that sort of judgement but in this case I don’t think musical history has got Raff wrong.

Brian: Gothic Symphony

Day 91

Brian: Gothic Symphony 

Soloists

Various choirs

BBC National Orchestra of Wales

BBC Concert Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins

This short series of British Symphonies ends with perhaps one of the most famous - perhaps notorious - of all of them. The Gothic symphony has the reputation of being both the longest and biggest of all symphonies. Whether that is true depends on how you define a symphony and whether or not you count unperformed pieces, but under any definition this is a monster of a piece. The score is almost unreadable simply because there are so many staves so how anybody conducts from it is a complete mystery. There is a famous picture of Sir Adrian Boult, who conducted the professional premiere, addressing the distant choir at a rehearsal though a megaphone.

I’d heard a couple of the shorter Brian symphonies before but this was my first exposure to the Gothic. It is certainly an extraordinary piece and hearing it live in the Albert Hall must have been a thrilling experience But in the cold light of day how does it rate as a piece of music?  Pretty well in my opinion. There was some very impressive music here as well as some music which seemed, at least on first hearing, completely bizarre and impenetrable. There is a multiplicity of music styles here: the Russian influence is strong but it is still demonstrably English in character - Holst and Vaughan Williams were clearly part of the same tradition though they never ventured into the extremes of the idiom in the way that Brian does. But there are all sorts of other resonances in the music as well as foretastes of things to come. There were hints of Ives, Stravinsky and Britten among others.

The choral writing is extraordinary and places almost impossible demands on the singers - I noticed that some discrete organ support was added in for some of the most difficult passages which was not  in the score. It is a reminder of the virtuosity that composers could expect from English choirs in the early 20th century - the choral symphonies of Granville Bantock are another example.  

I must confess that I didn’t listen to the symphony in one continuous sitting but spaced it out over the day - so perhaps I didn’t get the full cumulative effect of the piece but still it made a big impact. There is an endless fascination in what Brian does with the massive forces at his disposal. Not everything works and in many ways he doesn’t exploit some of the more unusual instruments in the way that I had expected. But his writing for the percussion is phenomenal - and the xylophone solo in the third section is one of the maddest things I have ever heard in a major symphonic work - I hope the player got a special bow at the end of the performance.

This ends this phase of my exploration of British symphonies. There are still many more of them to listen to and perhaps I will return to the subject later in the project.