Endnotes, October 2024

Posted on September 27, 2024 by leslie

St Mary Harrington, Lincolnshire, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, October 2024

In this edition: more Bruckner from the archives * Dvorak from the Czech homeland * contemporary music from England and America, reviewed by Stuart Millson

SOMM Records continues to open its vast treasury of vintage Bruckner recordings, in this, the 200th anniversary year of the great Austrian composer’s birth. And our thanks must go to SOMM, not just for championing Bruckner, but for bringing into the limelight almost-forgotten (or, at least, neglected) conductors, such as Hans Schmidt- Isserstedt, a supreme interpreter of Beethoven, as those who know his Decca cycle of the nine symphonies will testify. For Beethoven, Schmidt-Isserstedt had the Vienna Philharmonic under his baton, but here in SOMM’s Bruckner (the Third Symphony in the 1878 Oeser Edition) we are treated to the equally magnificent playing of German Radio’s NDR Symphony Orchestra.

Originally recorded at the Musikhalle Hamburg in the December of 1966, the NDR players give us a version of a Bruckner symphony that many view as the first of the truly mature part of his cycle (which, like Beethoven, consisted of nine symphonies). The misterioso atmosphere of the opening movement — underpinned by a tense, Wagnerian forest-murmur feel in the NDR strings — sets the stage for the great panorama of struggle, action and nostalgia that is to come. And what must already have been a clear, ahead-of-its-time radio archive recording has now transferred to CD (thanks to sound restoration and remastering by recording specialist, Lani Spahr) to give dazzling, full-blooded Brucknerian sound.

The scherzo movement of the Third brings us out of the mainly gentle reflection of the Adagio, gripping the listener with a torrent of agitation, often verging on terror, as an intense, attacking volley of sound from the strings and battering brass cascades onward. Again, the NDR players capture the authentic Teutonic tread of Bruckner, bringing the symphony to a glorious conclusion with a radiant, unstoppable affirmation of earlier themes from the work.

Also on Somm’s CD is a 1958 Bavarian Radio ‘tape’ of the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Volkmar Andreae in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, ‘Romantic’ — possibly the most often played of the cycle, due, no doubt, to its more simple pastoral atmosphere and fairytale hunting-horn scherzo. A fine, bracing performance of the work awaits the listener, especially in the stormy, fiery interpretation of the first movement; and in a dreamy approach to the gentle heartbeats of the second — ending, with pizzicato and delicate timpani, as if a distant country procession has just disappeared out of view.

Still in the glades of Middle Europe, Pentatone has just issued a stunning set of the last three Dvorak symphonies, the partnership of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic proving itself as among the greatest in the world today. The seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies (again — nine — that hallowed number for composers) are performed with a sense of utter conviction: a love for every note, a passion for every great tune, as if the Czech players are carefully setting down on record for posterity their personal family history. This recording is a testament to Bohemian romanticism; and to the patriot, Antonin Dvorak, the architect of that soulful, yet ebullient style, the musical magus of the Czech people.

The folkish, dance-like romp of colour that is the Eighth Symphony works well on this recording — almost like a 40-minute-long Slavonic dance. The more famous Ninth, subtitled ‘From the New World’, is a glorious fusion of the Czech homeland and the wide-open spaces of North America (surely the composer expresses a home-sickness in this work?) a land where Dvorak found himself feted at the end of the 19th century. But what is particularly interesting is the performance of the Symphony No. 7 (arguably the best, and the more enigmatic of the three) — a work that echoes Bruckner in its sense of struggle, of venturing forth into a dark landscape; allusions and feelings that are suggested in the mighty monoliths, ‘clenched-fist’ brass and grand gestures of the first movement, the rushing third-movement scherzo and the noble, brass-dominated, chorale-like ending. A real affirmation in music, but somehow not glorious, but firm, serious, stoical. Whatever your own personal response to Dvorak’s music, you probably won’t find a better-recorded set than by Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic.

Contemporary British composer, Peter Seabourne — a musician who rejected the extreme atonalism of many of his peers and immersed himself in a personal quest for artistic individuality and integrity — has issued an eighth volume of his Steps piano pieces. Subtitled, ‘Nineteen Album Leaves Caught by the Wind’, this latest chapter in Seabourne’s odyssey takes the listener into an almost freeze-framed autumnal sequence — a meditation of memories and impressions, sometimes hazy and valedictory, at other times with an intensity brewing just beneath the surface.

With titles such as: Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud — and After Autumn, Winter — the composer has created a new landscape of English pastoral music; but not an England of Edwardian twilight, instead the slanting light and chilly winds blowing across his own Lincolnshire horizon, interwoven with the deepest personal responses to the seasons of his own life.

Anyone seeking something of our own time, distilled into sound and made immediately relevant to life today, should listen to Peter Seabourne’s surprising and atmospheric music. Another recommendation for the CD is the quality of the piano-playing and recording: Michael Bell gives a masterclass for the instrument, while the Sheva contemporary label captures the piano at a perfect autumnal ‘temperature’ — always just a little less in the foreground, the piano never stark or clanging. The remainder of the album is given over to Seabourne’s settings of Emily Dickinson, with soprano, Karen Radcliffe, joining Michael Bell in a wonderfully woven cycle that, again, brings the listener into that lonely fenland.

Finally, to the work of two United States composers, not well known in Britain, but whose compositions deserve the attention of all who seek concert programmes enlivened by music that has something to say. Randall Svane continues to carve a reputation in the churches of the East Coast with a religious fervour not usually found in our nihilistic times. Although not yet appearing on CD, Quarterly Review has been fortunate to hear his Gloria — a setting that could easily be used as an alternative to similar works by Walton, Britten or Rutter — and which record producers, church music directors or those planning concert programmes should consider.

Likewise, New York composer Stanley Grill, offers music that continues where Britten’s War Requiem and other pacifist works left off. The composer writes of his own youthful anti-war zeal, and how with the onset of the years the radical tends to become the mellower sage, looking with the eye of a seasoned outsider on the vicissitudes of our turbulent times. Nonetheless, Grill remains loyal (as Walt Whitman would have put it) — ‘to thee, old cause…’ and informs us that his work may be found on the following platform:

https://stanleygrill.bandcamp.com/album/against-war

CD details: Bruckner from the Archives, Vol. 3. SOMM ARIADNE 5029-2.
Dvorak, Symphonies 7, 8, 9. PENTATONE, PTC 5187 216.
Peter Seabourne, Steps, vol. 8, Sheeva contemporary SH 326.

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of Quarterly Review

 

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An Arbitrary Colourist

Posted on September 19, 2024 by leslie

An Arbitrary Colourist, Van Gogh, Poets & Lovers

Exhibition at the National Gallery, 14 September 2024 – 19 January 2025, press preview 11 September; Catalogue of the exhibition, Cornelia Homburg, featuring the essay ‘Art of the Future’; reviewed by Leslie Jones

Le Christ sur le lac de Génésareth, Delacroix, credit Wikipedia

The art critic Paul Mantz described how Eugène Delacroix, in Christ Asleep during the Tempest (1853), achieved a “terrifying” symbolic effect by using blue paint to distinguish Christ’s raiment. In ‘Art of the Future’, likewise, Cornelia Homburg, the curator of this exhibition, observes how Van Gogh used “heightened colour” to “express the intensity, imagination and emotion he wanted to convey in his art”*. “The Provençal landscape, with its intense light and beautiful weather”, was ideally suited to this end and in February 1888, he moved from Paris to Arles. Van Gogh’s objective in moving to the south of France was to set up a studio in the Midi. Other sympatico artists, such as Bernard, Signac and Seurat, would hopefully follow. However, his dream of a “Studio of the South”, a colony of like-minded artists, remained just that.

Gauguin, The Wine Harvest. Human Misery, credit Wikipedia

From 23rd October to 23rd December 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and worked together in the ‘Yellow House’, the afore mentioned “Studio of the South”, with a guest room decorated with The Sunflowers (1888). Van Gogh agonised at this time how to incorporate memory and imagination into his art rather than merely observe or copy nature. Something of a philosopher manqué, he wrote to Émile Bernard, “imagination is a capacity that must be developed … that enables us to create a more exalting and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality … allows us to perceive” (letter 596, Vangoghletters.org)). Gauguin, who had contemporaneously created The Wine Harvest. Human Misery (1888) entirely from memory, urged Van Gogh to follow suit. In The Sower, accordingly, although he incorporated sketch work of the walled fields visible from his room in the private Maison de Santé in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (which he entered voluntarily in May 1889), the figure of the sower (indebted to Jean-François Millet, like Delacroix another painter he admired) was drawn from imagination/memory in the studio. And in Memory of the Garden of Etten (Ladies of Arles) (1888), the figures are his mother and sister Willemien, whom he had not seen for years but transposed to a Provençal landscape.

Van Gogh, The Sower, credit Wikipedia

Collaboration with Gauguin evidently helped to free Vincent from the thumb of “vulgar resemblance”. He said of The Sower, “There are many touches of yellow in the soil…but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality” (June 1888, quoted in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, ‘Poets and Lovers review, a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars’). As Jones contends, his transformative art tore up the Impressionist rulebook

This is the “first major exhibition devoted to Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s history”. As such, it bears comparison with the 2010 exhibition at the Royal Academy, entitled The Real Van Gogh; the Artist and his Letters (see Quarterly Review, spring 2010, ‘Van Gogh, by himself’, Leslie Jones). Notwithstanding a “bleak narrative”, involving his notorious act of self-mutilation and the falling out with Gauguin, and repeated mental breakdowns requiring hospitalisation, paradoxically Van Gogh’s “southern sojourn” produced “some of the most astonishing paintings of the modern era” (Rachel Spencer, Financial Times, ‘Poets and Lovers review, burning visions from beyond reality’).

Van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888), credit Wikipedia

Each stage of Van Gogh’s chequered career before becoming an artist in 1880, to wit, junior apprentice at international art dealer Goupil & Cie, trainee teacher, would be evangelist etc was a search for his god given calling or Beruf, as posited by Luther and subsequently analysed by Weber in The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism. Ernest Renan maintained that “Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy…he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on”. Van Gogh concurred. (Quotation from Renan, letter to Theo dated 8 May 1875,  vangoghletters.org, letter 33).

In Wheat Field with Reaper at Sunrise (September 1889), Van Gogh saw “the image of death, in the sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped…But in this death nothing sad” (letter 800, to Theo 5 & 6 September 1889). Although the suffering and transience bound up in human existence are recurrent themes in Van Gogh’s mature work, he also offered “something consoling, like a piece of music” (letter 673).

______________________________________________________________

[* (as in Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) (1888), with its enhanced colours of gold and orange to suggest harvest time). The “painter of the future”, Van Gogh proclaimed, “is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before”, quoted by Emily LaBarge, ‘A New perspective on Van Gogh’s Final Flowering’, New York Times, Sept 13]

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

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Endnotes, September 2024

Posted on August 31, 2024 by leslie

Nude statue of Mars, wall painting, Pompeii, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, September 2024

In this edition: The Man from the Sky; orchestral music by Gerard Schurmann; wood nymphs, country songs and planets at the Proms; two ‘lost’ works by Vaughan Williams, reviewed by Stuart Millson

British composer Gerard Schurmann (1924-2020) was known chiefly for his richly orchestrated and exciting film scores, such as those which accompanied the WW2 commando story, Attack on the Iron Coast, and the historical drama, starring Patrick McGoohan, as the Napoleonic era Kent parson-turned-smuggler, Dr. Syn – Alias The Scarecrow. Schurmann also composed the score for the 1957 film, The Man in the Sky, with the much loved actor Jack Hawkins (often cast in war films) as a peacetime era test-pilot charged with flying a new type of aircraft — the music perfectly complementing the theme of the noble, obsessive aviator soaring to high altitudes; culminating in a decisive orchestral fortissimo, evoking the sheer force of human application and will. Captured on a new Chandos CD, with the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Ben Gernon in technicolor form at their state-of-the-art recording centre at MediaCity, Salford, the full power of film music — presented in its own right — gives us an opportunity to re-appraise the scintillating, sharp-edged scores of Gerard Schurmann.

Another dimension to this overlooked composer is displayed on his disc: the early 1970s’ Piano Concerto, originally written for that other ‘man of the sky’ — the brilliant John Ogdon, an artist who achieved not just a huge reputation for his playing, alone, but for the tribulations of this obsessive, psychologically tortured artist.

This season at the Proms, that other John Ogdon speciality, the half-romantic, half-20th-century Busoni Piano Concerto, was given a rare Royal Albert Hall outing. How fitting to hear the Ogdon dedicated Schurmann concerto; a work only about half the length of the Busoni, but which stands in the category of quirky concerto pieces. From its curiously, shadow-filled, slow and understated opening solo (beautifully played by Xiayin Wang — who champions this score) the work seems to function, in part and at times, as a spiky piano sonata with orchestral interventions. Judging by a remarkable photograph in the CD booklet, capturing Schurmann and Ogdon poring over the manuscript, both composer and soloist took particular pleasure in bringing the piece to life. And now that we have this fine new recording on CD, let us hope that orchestras in this country and abroad bring the Schurmann concerto into their programmes.

Meanwhile, at the Proms, unfamiliar music (‘novelties’ as the season’s founder conductor, Sir Henry Wood, described them) continue to make an appearance. Alongside the Nordic supernaturalism of Sibelius’s infrequently heard The Wood Nymph (1894-95) – a composition evoking not just the shimmering play of water that you find in The Oceanides and the forest murmurs of En Saga, but also the most delicate, dreamy orchestral cello solo – the Royal Albert Hall audience on the 25th August enjoyed Songs from the Countryside (Laulat maaseudulta) by the young Finnish-American composer, Lara Poe. Her new piece continues the Sibelian-Mahlerian tradition of rural evocation in music (in this case, the spirits and characters of farm animals as remembered by the composer’s grandmother and transcribed by Lara Poe into a completely original ‘libretto’). But it is a work conjuring a peculiar atmosphere, tinged with a surrealism every bit as beguiling and elusive as the Northern Lights, and made all the more poignant by a sharp-lined, Schoenberg like 21st-century, but completely accessible style. There is a countryside storm (an echo of Sibelius’s The Tempest) and a deeply-affecting portrait of a horse, afraid to cross bridges – a reaction caused by the animal’s reaction to seeing a bridge being destroyed in war. Sung with elemental force by Anu Komsi, soprano, it was played with total commitment and sensitivity by the combined forces of the Royal College of Music and Sibelius Academy Symphony orchestras conducted by Sakari Oramo. [Editorial note: re ‘Songs from the Countryside’, your po-faced editor begs to differ].

This super-ensemble returned in part two for Holst’s great astrological pageant, The Planets, a piece composed on the eve of the Great War. The snarl and menace of Mars, The Bringer of War brought us to the very frontline wire on the Western Front, but the orchestra then returned to the dreamy purity associated with serene Sibelian country landscapes, in Venus, The Bringer of Peace. Echoing through the great spaces of the Royal Albert Hall, the monumental, infectious rhythms of Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity gave the orchestra a chance to show off its youth and elan, before slowly bowing out into the mysteries of distant realms and constellations in the offstage-voice-accompanied dreamscape that is Neptune, The Mystic. A ghostly, almost icy contribution here from high up in the Hall’s Gallery, sending us on our way into outer space, from the superb RCM Choir. A memorable night at the Proms – and how magnificent it was to hear the Royal Albert Hall organ – sheer granite power and weight deployed in Uranus, The Magician – played by Ben Collyer.

In concert programme notes and Vaughan Williams record sleeves of old, there were often tantalising mentions of a lost, or discarded fifth movement intended for A Sea Symphony — RVW’s first symphony. Now, thanks to the Dutton Epoch record label and the painstaking musicological restoration work of conductor, Martin Yates, that movement has emerged from the shadows and now stands as a newly-revealed section of the great English composer’s seascape. Except that the music isn’t quite a depiction of the ocean, but rather a symbol of the great quest which mankind finds himself on.

In The Steersman, Vaughan Williams again sets the North American romantic poet, Walt Whitman, whose themes of transcendence give the listener a sense of the soul breaking free above the tides and attaining glory in some unconjectured region:

‘But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.’

However, it is unlikely that this movement (sung on the CD by Jacques Imbrailo, baritone) will ever be played as part of A Sea Symphony. As Dutton Epoch’s fascinating CD booklet notes suggest, The Steersman is, in part, stylistically different from the rest of the symphony, the composer sensing, perhaps, that it was not a true part of the whole. It represents a meditation, much akin to the symphony’s second movement, On the Beach at Night Alone.

Just as we disappear into eternity at the end of Holst’s The Planets, so we find a similar escape in this ‘new’ music by Vaughan Williams, which is given that deep, dark orchestral and choral sound so necessary to its life by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Martin Yates — among the foremost interpreters of our time of English music. With a particularly apocalyptic cover picture, and which also features a Matthew Arnold setting from 1908, The Future (with soprano, Lucy Crowe) and Andrew von Oeyen playing the solo part in the Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, this is a CD for anyone questing for the soul of English music.

CD details:
Gerard Schurmann, orchestral works, CHAN 20341.
Vaughan Williams, The Steersman, The Future etc. Dutton Epoch. CDLX 7411

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

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Flying Blind

Posted on August 16, 2024 by leslie

Flying Blind

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster, Adam Higginbotham, Simon and Shuster, pp 576, reviewed by Bill Hartley

Governments can’t resist projects on a gargantuan scale and when they go wrong the disaster is of a magnitude to match the distorted ambition. Author Adam Higginbotham has already covered this ground to great effect with his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl. In Challenger, Higginbotham turns his attention to the Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. The image of the booster rockets separating from the craft is one of the indelible pictures of the last century. Told at a rapid pace, the reader is taken inexorably to the awful conclusion. Despite the story being well known, there is no sense of anti climax.

People of a certain age will recall the US – Soviet battle for supremacy in space. With the USSR being first to get a man into orbit, President Kennedy laid down the challenge (and the budget) to reach the moon before the end of the decade. NASA had been used to gobbling up huge sums of American taxpayer’s money but following the moon landing the public grew tired of space travel and TV networks were no longer routinely covering launches. NASA needed something (and someone) to recapture the imagination of the public.

With politicians beginning to wonder if space travel involving humans was worth the money, NASA came up with its new idea, the reusable spacecraft or shuttle. Unfortunately, the concept was born amidst something the organisation had never dealt with before, a limited budget. Higginbotham humanises the story. Space travel is inherently dangerous and the job was originally entrusted to dashing former test pilots like Colonel John Glenn. These men were put through all the rigours of pre-flight training, such as sensory deprivation tanks which involved hours underwater and the ghastly centrifuge which treated them like ingredients in a blender.

Amidst the wealth of technical detail presented in a readable way, what stands out is the development of the booster rockets, essential for getting the shuttle off the launch pad and into orbit. Budget cuts meant they were to be powered by solid fuel. Wehrner Von Braun, no less, had considered them too dangerous to be used for putting humans into space but they were cheaper than liquid fuelled rockets. The downside was that they couldn’t be turned off. This is the thread which runs through the story: cost cutting whilst working at the frontiers of technology. For example, the rockets were never tested vertically, again to save money. Crammed with volatile fuel they weighed 590 tons and presented incredible engineering challenges.

The author juxtaposes the engineering problems with the public relations aspect. Inevitably what captured the interest of the media was the crew. Previous NASA astronauts were from much the same background. Now word went out that the Shuttle’s crew would be more diverse. Higginbotham effectively sketches in the back stories of the people chosen. These are individuals the reader gets to know; the minutiae of their lives and relationships add a special poignancy to the story. They weren’t earning much either. An estate agent told one house hunting astronaut ‘a welder makes more than that’.

The Shuttle was the most complex machine ever built and perhaps chief among the many problems faced by its designers was the question of the heat shield tiles, there to protect the ship from the high temperatures to be encountered on re-entry. Each was unique, since flat tiles wouldn’t stick to the curved surfaces of the Shuttle. Failure of only one could have led to the immolation of the ship.

With talk of space travel now being within reach of ordinary people, the task of recruiting a new breed of astronaut sought to reflect this. The author describes the selection process and how, in a PR coup, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was chosen. The NASA test pilot old guard had their doubts about a woman among the crew with no special qualifications. She had been chosen to live out the daydreams of the many people who’d written to NASA. Kids love space travel, so what could be better than having a teacher present lessons from up there?

As NASA moved towards launch, delays and cancellations prompted media scepticism. With an eye on the political paymasters, management pressure from the top began to override the concerns of engineers. A Germanic hierarchical management structure bequeathed by Von Braun made it difficult for them to be heard. Arrogance, bullying and mismanagement weren’t the exclusive province of a Soviet totalitarian regime, revealed after Chernobyl. Ultimately the decision to launch was a dangerous compromise. As a NASA boss said, ‘otherwise we’re going to lose the programme’.

The author’s description of the final days before launch unfolds like a tragedy. Engineers from the company which built the booster rockets bravely opposed the decision to launch, often against the wishes of their own senior management, anxious to keep the contract. NASA officials applied further pressure to secure an agreement that it was possible to go ahead in icy temperatures (a supposedly once in a 100 year meteorological phenomenon which had nearly destroyed a mission the previous year). Higginbotham succeeds in creating an emotional experience, despite the reader being aware of what is to come.

Ultimately technical failures caused the loss of the Shuttle but Christa McAuliffe and her crew mates were sacrificed by flawed management and bad decision making. The final part of the book covers the aftermath and there is much to tell. Higginbotham maintains the interest post disaster, as the reader discovers what happened to the families of the crew and the engineers who had to live with the guilt. As someone noted after the inquiry, ‘reality must take precedence over public relations’.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

 

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The Knot of Human Death and Fate

Posted on August 7, 2024 by leslie

Marc Chagall, Calvary (Golgotha), 1912, credit Wikipedia

The Knot of Human Death and Fate

Dan Stone, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival, Palgrave Macmillan, electronic version, 2024, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist’s Path to a New Therapy (1946), (subsequently re-published as Man’s Search for Meaning), Viktor Frankl considered the factors supposedly conducive to survival in the Nazi concentration camps. Paradoxically, certain prisoners “of a less hardy make-up” survived better, in his estimation, than those of “a robust nature’, if the former were blessed with a life of “inner riches and spiritual freedom”. Bruno Bettelheim, in similar vein, conceded that although accident was the primary reason for survival, those endowed with “a rich inner life”, were ipso factor better fitted to survive. As Lawrence L Langer pithily remarked, Frankl and Bettelheim made “physical survival a matter of mental health”. Stone contends that “wishful thinking about the human spirit” vitiated the writings of Frankl and Bettelheim.

Dan Stone is Professor of History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway College. He discerns in the “canonical writings” of Frankl and Bettelheim a classical Freudian perspective in which psychological problems in later life stem primarily from traumatic events in childhood, i.e. from unresolved Oedipal conflicts. In his opinion, the field of psychoanalysis was thereby restricted to what Werner Bohleber calls “the inner world of the human being – [to] the unconscious and unconscious phantasies”. The psychoanalytic notion of “identification with the aggressor”, which Bettelheim borrowed from Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, likewise, entailed regression to an infantile state. In the 1950’s, West German assessors of survivor’s restitution claims doubtless welcomed the conclusion that their psychological suffering was not ultimately attributable to Nazi persecution.

Eindstation Auschwitz, written in 1945, was republished in 2020 and entitled Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp. The author, Eddy de Wind, was an assistant to the admissions doctor in Block 9 of Auschwitz. After its liberation, he worked as a physician. In contrast to Bettelheim and Frankl, de Wind elaborated a theory of survival based on the concept of “stupor”, which anticipated the concept of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In ‘Confrontation with Death’ (1949), de Wind contended that to survive in the camp, the inmate must neither surrender nor resist. An “inner acceptance  of death” was essential. There are uncanny echoes here of the “death drive”, posited by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

For Stone, the “more nuanced” theory of survival elaborated by de Wind (and by Elie Cohen, whose notions of “resignation” and “depersonalisation” complement de Wind’s analysis) unhappily gained “little purchase or resonance until recently”. Contra Bettelheim and Frankl, in his later articles, de Wind attributed survivors’ ongoing psychological problems to the massive psychic trauma engendered by Nazi oppression.

In How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defence in Nazi Concentration Camps (1948), psychoanalyst Hilde O. Bluhm reviewed twelve books pertaining to this subject for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Have Bluhm’s ideas stood the test of time? Dr Stone regrets the fact that “the concepts of her profession at that time”, notably the questionable notion that “psychological illnesses relate solely to suppressed problems of childhood” and that “victims of the Holocaust reverted to childhood or identified with their aggressors”, informed her analysis. Nonetheless, Stone rates Bluhm’s concept of “estrangement”, a special mechanism of defence developed by the ego, whereby experiences were depersonalised and “turned into an object of …intellectual interests”, as it prefigures de Wind’s idea of “stupor”. Indicatively, Ernst Wiechert, in The Forest of the Dead (1947), one of the twelve books reviewed by Bluhm, referred to “an ever-growing coldness… that filled his entire being” during his imprisonment in Buchenwald. Dr Stone notes that by virtue of when they were written, none of the twelve books in question addressed the concentration camp qua factory of death.

In our review of Frederick Crew’s Freud, the Making of an illusion (2017), we concluded that “For all his failings, Freud surely deserved a more appreciative and generous biographer” (see ‘White Lines’, Leslie Jones, QR, June 7th 2017). Like Dominick LaCapra, Dan Stone is “one of the few historians who values psychoanalytic vocabulary and insights for understanding history” (quotation, Stone, Psychoanalysis etc p. 94). We unreservedly commend his eloquent and thought-provoking exegesis.

The Charnel House, Picasso, credit Wikipedia

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review

“The Knot of Human Death and Fate” is a phrase taken from Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

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Endnotes, August 2024

Posted on July 31, 2024 by leslie

Brightest London is best reached by Underground, subway poster 1924, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, August 2024

In this edition: Bruckner’s String Quintet; From Meadow to Mayfair, with Eric Coates, reviewed by Stuart Millson

200 years ago this year, Anton Bruckner was born — a boy who would be shaped by his rural environment in Upper Austria; a young man preoccupied with church music and his work as an organist; a middle-aged figure, destined to be celebrated as one of the greatest symphonists in the European canon, and yet each step of this ascent, fraught with self-doubt and the criticism of those around him. All the great orchestras of the continent, Britain and the United States now play and record his symphonies — the radiant Seventh and magnificent Eighth guaranteed to fill the Philharmonie, Berlin, the Royal Albert Hall, or Orchestra Hall, Chicago. But we know less about the tiny number of Bruckner’s equally masterful chamber pieces, especially the String Quintet, written when the composer was 54 years of age. Chamber music tends to be something of a passion for a smaller number of concertgoers, but even so, the programmes of our leading chamber venues rarely seem to include Bruckner; and this is a pity, because it would enable listeners who might not yet have warmed to the huge symphonic scores to find a point of entry. And Bruckner’s chamber music can even be a revelation to the devotees of his symphonies: indeed, it is surprising that so many individuals who think that they know the composer are unaware of such works as the Quintet.

Cast in four movements, this work for quartet and additional viola, begins with what can only be described as a deep sigh; a world-weary moment, so soon, but shaping a movement of utter beauty; and one as ‘symphonic’ in scale to please any Brucknerian. In fact, listening to the opening movement, marked by the composer as Gemassigt, brings to mind the hush, the expectation at the beginning of the Second Symphony, or the slow movement of the Third. The massive climb then begins, Bruckner testing his players with long spans of taut time as they follow his paths from foothills to higher altitudes.

We catch our breath in a second movement which has the typical touch of this most Austrian of composers: a trio, marked Scherzo, but with a gentle, jolly, unhurried (‘Langsamer’) feel — as if we have just found a small country inn where someone has struck up a simple country serenade on an old fiddle. Yet we seem to be watching and hearing it from just beyond the village garden: this section, for all its lighter spirit, has a peculiar, dreamy quality. Deeper thoughts, though, overcome the structure and spirit of the Adagio movement: this is the Bruckner of those mighty slow-motion symphonic meditations, often tragic and Wagnerian in character. However, Bruckner in his chamber mode offers us a gentle route out from the intensity, the movement ending in a quiet repetition of the main musical idea; the composer almost saying reassuringly, ‘All will be well, all will be well…’

All these great ideas come together in the Finale: Lebhaft bewegt — nearly nine minutes of purposeful flow for the players, and a peroration for musician and listener, alike, that — if scored for full orchestra — would make for a great ovation in a large concert hall. Our CD recommendation for Bruckner’s Quintet is a classic 1993 rendition, recorded at St. George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol, and captured on the Helios (Hyperion) label by producers Tony Faulkner and Andrew Keener. Performed by the Raphael Ensemble, the work is three quarters of an hour in length.

Finally, and in complete contrast, Chandos records — with John Wilson at the helm of the BBC Philharmonic — take us to the glittering London ballrooms (and rustic copses of 1930s’ ‘olde England’) in Eric Coates’s Suite, From Meadow to Mayfair. Hearing such dazzling, modern full symphonic sound on this recording immediately takes such pieces for light orchestra out of the crackly world of old radio archives; investing the music, instead, with a grace and style that will put a swing in your step. Coates was the master of great, singable tunes (and deliciously romantic wallows).

The curtain-raiser on the album is the 1948 Rediffusion March — Music Everywhere, a piece that brings to mind that semi-mythical golden age of impeccable pronunciation from radio announcers, and summer days in St. James’s Park. Well done to the art department at Chandos for matching the musical mood in their choice for the album’s cover: a 1927 illustration of Buckingham Palace from a poster issued by the Southern Railway. A perfect production for Eric Coates, ‘the uncrowned king of light music’.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

CD details:
Bruckner, String Quintet (with Intermezzo) — Helios, CDH55372.
Eric Coates, Orchestral Works (Vol. 4) — BBC Philharmonic, John Wilson, Chandos, CHAN 20292.

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Mea Culpa

Posted on July 19, 2024 by leslie

York Minster, credit Wikipedia

Mea Culpa, by Bill Hartley

The City of York and County of North Yorkshire now has an elected mayor. The fact that this was going to happen may have come as a surprise to many in the local electorate. Judging by the modest response at the poll, held in May of this year, voters have been underwhelmed by the idea. The total turnout was 29.89 % and around 450,000 people didn’t bother to vote.

The idea isn’t new having first been considered in 2004. Although Tony Blair’s government was big on devolution, North Yorkshire, for sound geographical reasons, didn’t get the treatment; the conclusion being that it was too large an area to be governed by a single authority. This is hardly surprising since England’s biggest county stretches 116 miles from the Lancashire border to the North Sea. Then, in 2022, unnoticed by many, a devolution deal was done between York City Council and North Yorkshire County Council. It seems there is nothing that politicians like better than more political posts. Judging by the recent turnout this is not a view shared by the electorate.

Six candidates put themselves forward for the post. Their manifesto statements might have been written by the same person. They spoke of ‘sustainable economic growth’, ‘building communities’ and ‘people first’. Clichés of remarkable similarity and of course the word ‘strategic’ was also used.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with an elected official having strategic oversight but in the case of York and North Yorkshire geography plays an important part in defeating the idea. Conveniently forgotten at the dawn of the brave new era is the reason why the idea was abandoned a couple of decades ago. Some mayoral fiefdoms, usually city regions, are reasonably cohesive: Greater Manchester for example. In Teesside, too, an elected mayor is thought by many to be doing a decent job.

To create a mayoral post covering such a vast area defies logic as does gluing the county to the city of York. One of the favourite subjects found on the candidates’ election material is a good point to begin considering why. Candidates usually talk about public transport. No-one is likely to challenge the idea that it can be improved. A good way to avoid going into detail about this is to stress the need to make it ‘interconnected’. Presumably none of them bothered to look at a map of the county. A geographer would point out that human interaction is shaped by a hierarchy of services. For example, a village in deepest North Yorkshire may posses such basic amenities as a shop, pub and perhaps a filling station. Should a resident wish for access to more services, for example a supermarket, then they are likely to visit a town. More services equal the need for a larger town and herein lies the problem. Whatever the mayor’s strategy it is unlikely to fit conveniently within the borders of his fiefdom. There is, for example, a long coastal strip in the county with Whitby in the north and Scarborough at the south end. Anyone from these towns wishing to access a greater range of services is likely to head for Middlesbrough. Transport links by road and rail reflect this. Middlesbrough of course has its own mayor. Further west the same applies. The nearest large town is Darlington, which has a main line railway station. It happens to be the largest town in County Durham.

The significance of York to most citizens of North Yorkshire is negligible beyond its immediate hinterland. Even within its own postcode area this is doubtful, since to the west is the more accessible town of Harrogate. The main road linking Leeds, York and Scarborough is the A64, one of the reasons why the city is so awkward to reach. It is an accident black spot and at weekends in the summer can be overloaded with traffic heading for the coast. The new mayor, incidentally, has no powers to upgrade the stretch which badly needs to be turned into a dual carriageway.

Further south the map of the county forms a panhandle. This is the district of Selby, the most southerly part of North Yorkshire. A glance at the map will reveal that though York is closer, most of the main lines of communication run east to west between the two cities of Leeds and Hull. The draw of the largest city in West Yorkshire is likely to overwhelm anything York has to offer.

In the run up to the mayoral election the Conservative candidate set himself the task of visiting all the York and North Yorkshire communities, said to number around a thousand. In contrast, the Labour candidate (who won) didn’t trouble to campaign outside the city. If so, then he showed a greater understanding of political realities than his opponent. York has always been a Labour city, whereas the county leans towards Conservative. This was reflected in the vote. Without the York vote going mainly to Labour, the Conservative candidate would have won.

There are now two administrative centres as announced on the new authorities’ website. One is the county town of Northallerton, the other is York. The former, incidentally, has good transport links by road and rail to …Middlesbrough.

An article in the Yorkshire Post, reflecting on the low turnout at the election, expressed concern about the effect on democracy. Equally it might have been a measure of the distain shown by voters who had no say in the creation of the mayoral post. The new mayor’s role is also combined with that of police and fire commissioner. Just in case anyone was worried that this would prove burdensome, he is empowered to create the post of deputy. Doubtless each will have an office with administrative support. That is not all; eight senior managers at North Yorkshire Council are set to receive salaries of over £100,000 a year to reflect their increased responsibilities. Predictably the council defends this with the usual talk about the need to retain talent. Local government lifers presumably are in short supply and therefore much sought after. The chief executive, for instance, is now paid more than the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

One thing that villages are good at is creating a sense of community. It’s one of the reasons why people like living in them. Most have a village hall which hosts various activities and there are sports teams. The new authority still sees the need for a helping hand to show villagers how to do it. There is to be a post of Director of Community Development on a salary of £139,215. Presumably this figure has been set to reduce the risk of candidates being lured away to direct community development elsewhere.

The people behind this new tier of administration evidently see no reason to let logic get in the way as it goes to work to meet the needs of a largely uninterested citizenry. York (the only city in the county) is to be the flag ship even though its draw is more to do with tourism than as a service provider. People will continue to go elsewhere for their needs; not that this is likely trouble the authority. No matter how effective the new mayor tries to be, he will ultimately be defeated by the realities of geography.

William Hartley is a Social Historian

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A Curate’s Egg; review of Edgar

Posted on July 10, 2024 by leslie

The Woodman’s Daughter, John Everett Millais, credit Wikimedia Commons

A Curate’s Egg; review of Edgar

Edgar, drama lirico by Giacomo Puccini in three acts (1905 version), libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, director Ruth Knight, City of London Sinfonia and the Opera Holland Park Chorus conducted by Naomi Woo, Opera Holland Park 6 July 2024, reviewed by Leslie Jones

Director Ruth Knight’s new production of Edgar has polarised opinion. Whereas Culture Whisper was excited to see another Puccini rarity being aired (following Opera Holland Park’s 2022 staging of Le Villi), Jessica Duchen was scathing and dismissive. Notwithstanding what Knight in the programme calls Puccini’s “profound impact on western culture…”, Edgar is rarely staged. “Back in the box with it”, Duchen adjures  (Inews, ‘Edgar, Opera Holland Park review; so bad the audience were chortling’).

For the premiere at La Scala in Milan, in 1889, the much-maligned librettist Ferdinando Fontana moved the location of the drama from the mountains of the Tyrol to lowland Flanders. Ms Knight, in turn, has transferred it from medieval Flanders (specifically Bruges, The Dead City evoked in Erich Korngold’s opera) to 19th century England, presumably because it embodies bourgeois religious and sexual hypocrisy, as documented in WT Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. In Knight’s reworking of Edgar, Tigrana (played by Gweneth Ann Rand), was abandoned by her parents and forced to become a sex worker. We see her briefly in the Prelude as a child, in the company of a youthful Edgar. Although this is a semi-staged production, there was evidently room for a theatrical prop which presumably represents passport control and the “othering” of illegal immigrants. “It’s become all about racism and misogyny”, complains Duchen. And she is correct if not politically correct – “relevance” cannot redeem it.

Mixing his metaphors, Gary Naylor thinks that Ferdinando Fontana “sold Puccini something of a hospital pass, and [that] no amount of repairs or revisions could get him off that hook”. Edgar was “the difficult child of the canon” (BroadwayWorld.com). Dominic Lowe agrees that there is little evidence here of Puccini’s eventual “… theatrical flair and innate faculty for character development” (Backtrack). But holes in the plot, such as the reconciliation of Frank and Edgar (performed by Julien Van Mellaerts and Peter Auty, respectively), are hardly unusual in opera. The denouement of Rigoletto springs immediately to mind. The audience are invariably forgiving, providing there are what Naylor nicely calls arias “so pleasing on the air…[which] even when expressing the darkest of thoughts, lift one’s soul”. And there is general agreement that although “Puccini’s greatest music was yet to come”, the score is replete with “soaring moments” which “glisten” (Culture Whisper). Opera Holland Park chorus and the City of London Sinfonia, conducted by Naomi Woo, evidently found “the passion and the beauty in the score” (Naylor).

Some reviews of Edgar beg the question “what exactly is the role of the critic?” Is it to help “excavate” obscure lost works that arguably throw light on Puccini’s development? “Without hearing this,” his second opera, Colin Clarke demands, “how can we “know” Puccini?” But Clarke also acknowledges that this is hardly “top-rank” material (Seen and Heard International, ‘Edgar, Opera Holland park’s recent excavation, is a revelation’). Puccini himself eventually concluded that it was “warmed-up soup”, and that its subject was “rubbish” (see Flora Willson, the Guardian, ‘Edgar review-Puccini was right, his biggest flop is a dud’). Let the composer have the last word.

Editorial endnote; indicatively, there were only three performances of Edgar, on the 3rd, 4th and 6th of July

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review

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Physics Envy

Posted on July 5, 2024 by leslie

Jean-Martin Charcot, chronophotography, credit wikipedia

Physics Envy

On the Couch; Writers Analyse Sigmund Freud, edited by Andrew Blauner, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 346pp, h.b., reviewed by Leslie Jones

The twenty-five contributors to On the Couch consider the founder of Psychoanalysis from a range of different perspectives. Yet key themes recur. Apropos the vertiginous decline in the scientific status of Freud’s system, a consensus emerges from these pages that many of his leading ideas, notably those concerning homosexuality, child development, the Oedipus complex, “no longer convince us” (Adam Gopnik, p255). Siri Hustvedt,  lecturer in psychiatry, likewise, endorses the earlier feminist critiques of Freud by Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir and Karen Horney. And Peter D Kramer evidently speaks for several other contributors when he remarks, “How extraordinary that such implausible theories should predominate in the scientific community, in medical practice, and in popular culture, for decades”. He characterises Freud’s core ideas, such as a link between obsessive compulsive behaviour and overzealous toilet training, as “fantasy”.

So what now remains of Freud’s legacy? For one thing, his undoubted reputation as an essayist. Professor Phillip Lopate, editor of Art of the Personal Essay, reads him “as one does a poet, for his allusive lyricism” and for his “aphoristic sublimity”. Referring to Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Lopate states “I know of no book that more directly encounters the crucial question: Why is human happiness impossible, except for brief moments?”. Gopnik, in similar vein, contends that both Marx and Freud continue to reach us “as literature reaches us”. He recalls that Harold Bloom considered Freud “the Montaigne of the twentieth century” and praises him for “replacing the pious fictions of received dogma with the human truths of actual behaviour”. Gopnik, another admirer of Civilisation and its Discontents, compares Freud to Dr Johnson and says that no one could be “more succinctly Latinate or depressingly accurate”. Freud’s engaging writing style is also highlighted by Sheila Kohler, who mischievously praises his skill “as a writer of fiction”. She suggests that in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), Freud deliberately hid the identity of patient Dora to create a sense of mystery. And Rick Moody thinks that Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) (joint author Josef Breuer) is indebted to the nineteenth century novel in that “he had to have a big ending. A Cure”.

Freud’s first scientific publication, as Mark Solms reminds us, was his ‘Observations on the Configuration and Finer Structure of the Lobulated Organs of the Eel described as Testicles’ (1877). Entering the University of Vienna Medical School in 1873, he studied neuroanatomy for the next eight years. Microscopic staining was invented by Joseph von Gerlach in 1858. Freud excelled in this field, devising new methods. So far, so orthodox. From October 1885 to February 1886, however, Freud attended Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hysteria at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Like Charcot, the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses’, Freud believed that lesions in the brain caused the symptoms of hysteria. In Viennese medical circles, “Mental events were perceived as “brain events”.  But the inability of neuroanatomy to identify any such lesions led Charcot to devise novel methods, notably hypnosis, to remove these symptoms. Freud, in due course, developed his ‘talking cure’ to elicit the traumatic memories supposedly causing hysteria. “A radical break with the positivist perspective was the sine qua non of the development of psychoanalysis, as the premise of the latter is a mental mechanism of symptom causation, an idea that Freud carried over from Charcot” (see ‘White Lines’, QR, Leslie Jones, June 7 2018, a review of Freud, the Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews, 2017).

However, Freud never deviated from the view that the ultimate origin of the neuroses was a physical process in the brain. He made statements to this effect in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and in An Outline of Psychanalysis (1940). In 1895, fearing that his case studies on hysteria “were no more than “short stories”’, Freud began his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. The goal was to uncover the neural underpinnings of psychic states. He discussed this ultimately abortive project with his close friend, the otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, in 1895. “The phenomena of mind”, he averred, “do not belong to psychology alone; they have an organic and biological side as well”. “Freud had physics envy too” (Siri Hustvedt, On the Couch, p 304).

Freud & Fliess, 1890, credit Wikipedia

In ‘Reflections on War and Death’ (1918), Freud opines that “War strips off the later deposits of civilisation and allows the primitive man in us to reappear” (see ‘Freud and the Writers’, by novelist Colm Tóibin, On the Couch). Freud himself temporarily succumbed to the bellicose impulses unleashed by the Great War, celebrating in 1915 the “beautiful victories of the Central Powers”.

In war, “people really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day” – death can no longer be denied (Freud, quoted Tóibin, p 92). In ‘Playing the Game’, Michael S Roth elucidates the “sad biographical dimension” that informed Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which Freud radically revised his theory of the drives, positing a death instinct or ‘Nirvana principle’. Before its publication, his favourite child Sophie had died in the influenza epidemic. Her second son Heinerle subsequently died in the pandemic, leaving Freud “inconsolable”. He told Oskar Pfister that “Everything has lost its meaning for me”. Indicatively, “In the wake of Sophie’s death”, Freud was reading Schopenhauer (Michael S Roth, On the Couch, p 270).

In the aforementioned review of Freud, the Making of an Illusion, we concluded that “For all his failings, Freud surely deserved a more appreciative and generous biographer”. After all the relentless Freud bashing, herewith a positive assessment of his work.

Arthur Schopenhauer, portrait by Jules Luftschutz, credit Wikipedia

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

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Endnotes, July 2024

Posted on June 28, 2024 by leslie

Fragment of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, July 2024

In this edition: rare English String Quartets from Tremula Records * Homage, by Randall Svane, reviewed by Stuart Millson

The more one travels to music venues beyond the metropolitan centres ~ Mid-Wales Opera in Brecon (now de-funded by Arts Council Wales); the English Music Festival at Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (not even a recipient of any state funding) ~ the more one encounters unsung heroes who are instrumental in rescuing parts of our national heritage. One such person is the tall and bespectacled Kenrick Dance, an affable, front-of-house figure at the English Music Festival, busily assisting concertgoers, not least through the Festival’s minibus service which he serves in the capacity of driver. A great advocate of the music of English composer, Walter Leigh, Ken has recently emerged as a record producer in his own right, ushering onto the music and CD scene the label, Tremula Records, dedicated to overlooked masterpieces from these islands.

A recent addition to the Tremula list is a recording of string quartets by Edmund Rubbra, Phyllis Tate and Peter Wishart. All three composers belong to the same generation, and their quartets all date from the early-1950s, an era often thought of as a conservative time for music, but actually a period in which British audiences began to hear a more abstract sound-world: Vaughan Williams’s Eighth Symphony, the works of Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh and the music of Michael Tippett.

Rubbra’s String Quartet in E flat major of 1951 is a strongly tonal work, with a sense of elegy, both in the first movement and in the Adagio tranquillo third section; there is some welcome emotional decompression in a soft-stepping scherzo, but which in its near-25 minutes of life, conveys a clear feeling of twentieth-century and post-war introversion. Rubbra, who made his home in the Chilterns, finds unsettled skies and deeply felt darker chords, beautifully and passionately played on this recording, first committed to disc in 1992 by the English String Quartet (Diana Cummings and Keith Lewis, violins; Luciano Iorio, viola; and Geoffrey Thomas, cello). In fact, the acoustic of the recording venue, Rosslyn Chapel, Hampstead, imbues the slow movements of the Rubbra and Phyllis Tate works with a poignant atmosphere of darkness, shadow ~ even of music that brings forth a palpable physical sense of coldness, remoteness. Certainly, the ethereal, slowly-circling Cantilena section (marked Andantino sostenuto) of Tate’s F major Quartet is a masterclass in taking music and the listener to the edge of unsettled dreams ~ a little like the feelings which gradually overcome you in the Neptune movement of Holst’s The Planets.

For Peter Wishart, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and absorbed much from Stravinsky, a spikier more obviously continental framework and style can be discerned ~ in the way that Britten’s very English Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge sounds more at home in a salon devoted to Bartok. Wishart’s String Quartet No. 3 in A dates from 1954 and is the shortest piece in the collection, but the composer doesn’t waste any time on portentous build-ups or grand statements; or indeed any discernible imitation of his overseas teachers and mentors. But his work does sound the more ‘contemporary’ of the three quartets ~ the uncertain, stop-and-start introduction is certainly intriguing. Yet from this, a far-from-unpleasant sequence of less-obviously tonal music begins to dance on and develop into variations, new thoughts, recastings of earlier ideas. The first movement has a definite air of mystery, of tension. The Allegretto and Presto movements have wonderful precision and are most understated (given their ‘presto’ designations), but what is evident from the recording is a sense of each note, each line of this sublime music inspiring its interpreters to a performance of minute clarity, detail and gentle colour.

The QR congratulates Producer, Ken Dance, on reconstituting this attractive, collection. The Wishart is a real gem. We look forward to more great things from Tremula Records: a CD label in the ‘margins’, but actually with something to say ~ and a rival (in terms of imagination and outlook) to the larger commercial labels who seem to be only able to give us yet more symphonic cycles by Brahms or Mahler.

Finally, a preview, private audio file has reached The Quarterly Review of a new orchestral work by American composer, Randall Svane. Entitled Homage, this strongly flavoured Sibelian type tone poem brings a potent, late romanticism once again to our own age of anxiety and cynicism. The composer is already making great headway in the United States (notably in the world of church music) and ~ as he tells us ~ anticipates performances and a commercial recording of Homage; a piece that is meant as a tribute to his teachers, mentors, and musical collaborators through the years. The afore mentioned term ‘Sibelian’ comes to mind because the music grows and gathers in an expansive, well-orchestrated, highly textured tapestry, yet with taut, powerful, to the point arguments and scenes, very much like the Finnish master’s En Saga or The Oceanides. But there is also a tense section, reminiscent of the nervous energy at the outset of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements; and touches in the composition which take the listener to Mahlerian forests, or to the wide, open spaces of Randall’s fellow US symphonist of the 20th century, Roy Harris.

Randall Svane is clearly an heir to the romantic American tradition –  to Harris, Howard Hanson, and the Copland of An Outdoor Overture and the Third Symphony. We look forward to his name becoming a prominent feature of British orchestral programmes.

Head VI, Francis Bacon, credit Wikipedia

CD details: String Quartets ~ Rubbra, Tate, Wishart, played by the English String Quartet. Catalogue reference: TREM 102.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

 

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