Concerti for Orchestra
* Gregson: Concerto for Orchestra
* Hoddinott: Concerto for Orchestra
* McCabe: Concerto for Orchestra
* Interview with Gregson, Hoddinott, and McCabe by Lewis Foreman
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Douglas Bostock.
Classico CLASSCD 384 TT: 78:08
Three musicians' composers. The Romantic notion of the genius as God
-- especially in a monotheistic culture -- has, I think, robbed us of a
lot of pleasure and thus strikes me as somewhat unhealthy and unnatural.
There's nothing wrong with liking Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and Mahler.
However, if that prevents you from liking Kuhnau, Vorisek, the waltzing
Strausses, or Parry, because they become less worthy of your time, then
I'd say you've missed out on something. In the name of high standards,
you lose what makes any of these composers interesting for his own sake.
On the other hand, almost every composer competes with others (including
composers long dead) for time and resources. Thanks to government
support, although under Blair it wanes, British composers have it slightly
better than Americans in their own country. However, Britain has also
produced an incredible number of -- if not great -- damn good composers,
all of them superbly trained, in my opinion far better than the average
stateside composer. Furthermore, everybody seems to know everybody else.
Composers develop strong relationships with performers, and there seems
a lot of mutual loyalty. The Royal Liverpool players, for example, chose
to commission McCabe. Hoddinott fostered McCabe's academic career.
Competition with the dead runs pretty strong here. When one encounters
a "concerto for orchestra," one first thinks of Bartok, although Bartok's
example doesn't stand alone or even chronologically first. Hindemith's
contribution, at least, comes before, Petrassi wrote eight such concerti,
and one finds some particularly swell examples from Kodaly, Lutoslawski,
Piston, Gerhard, Bernstein, Hovhaness, Sessions, and Tippett. Nevertheless,
for very good reasons, Bartok's concerto became iconographic. It's hard
to imagine a piece better written or as inventive. It remains the measure
of all the others.
I first knew Edward Gregson's brass music in the Sixties, through
recordings by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the Halle. Others
may know him by his incidental music for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Gregson's concerto dances like mad and sounds damned good, besides.
The score glitters, with special attention to brass, tuned percussion,
and harp. Gregson works with rather edgy, angular, but memorable ideas.
Everything holds together extremely tightly. In fact, the opening motive
runs throughout all three movements of the piece. Of the three works
here, I think this the one that will catch up most people, because it
moves so purposefully -- indeed, almost as well as the Bartok. Gregson
originally called the work Contrasts, and that's certainly the rhetorical
strategy. In the first movement, it sounds as if groups of instruments
keep interrupting each other. The B section of the movement contrasts
with its frame in tempo, dynamics and orchestration. The second-movement
"Elegy" plays with sharply contrasting ideas: something that sounds like
a ground bass, rhythmic punctuation, usually from the brass, and a sinuous
melodic line. The finale is a corker, the most propulsive of the three
movements, with rat-a-tat rhythms and "big-shoulder" fanfare ideas in
the brass. It should knock you out of your seat.
Alun Hoddinott stands as one of the four great names of Welsh music,
along with Daniel Jones, Grace Williams, and William Mathias. I had to
learn to appreciate his music. At first, he struck me as rather bland,
especially next to the flashier Mathias. Now, I'm afraid that Mathias
comes to me as way too derivative of Walton and Britten, while Hoddinott
always sings in his own way. If one can separate composers into, roughly,
singers and dancers, then Hoddinott sings. However, an astringency
usually runs through the lyricism and adds, I think, to the persistence
of the music in one's memory. As in works of Vaughan Williams or Martinu,
I can "hear" Hoddinott pieces in my head that I haven't listened to in
years. His concerto shows the same strong qualities. There's a wonderful
opening idea, based on the call of doves (which the composer hears in
his garden). It's sufficiently abstracted that you wouldn't necessarily
think of it if you hadn't been told, but once you know, the composer's
skillful invention will stick with you. Hoddinott abstracts the idea
even further, into a game with the interval of the major second, throughout
the score. Nevertheless, if the Hoddinott concerto sounds a bit more
relaxed than the Gregson, it also seems to acquire a greater emotional
maturity, particularly in the central adagio. If Gregson aims to impress.
Hoddinott wants to convince you of something. It's not a matter of one
piece better than the other, but of the contrast between Gregson the
Public Orator and Hoddinott the Lyric Poet, between an artistic extrovert
and an artistic introvert. You shouldn't, however, get the idea that
Hoddinott is all swans and moonbeams, but it does seem night-haunted,
which includes the things that go bump in the night, just at the edge
of earshot.
The second movement, an adagio, is essentially a long sigh. A composer
has to work to bring something like this off; otherwise it'll just lay
there like a blancmange. Hoddinott pulls it off and in a non-obvious
way. I have no idea from several intense listenings how he does it. It
all seems "natural" and "inspired." The third movement displays both wit
and power.
I've listened to John McCabe's music also since the Sixties. About his
concerto, undoubtedly the most tightly-written of the three (and probably
even tighter than the Bartok), unfortunately, I don't really care at
all. McCabe's music to me never seems to go anywhere, or only grudgingly.
It's not a matter of tempo or lack of ideas. Gregson has plenty of ideas
and varies his tempi. But even at its chattering quickest, McCabe's
music seems to stay put. It's not a matter of motific development, but
the sense of getting from here to there, as in a tale well-told. It's
more like watching a flag-pole sitter balancing a table and eating lunch
-- a lot of activity, but not a lot of mileage. This comes down to my
preferences on what I want music to do, and I really value "narrative"
movement, which McCabe has never given me. Those of you less stubborn
than I may not have this problem.
The performances -- all recording premieres -- are splendid. Hoddinott,
in his liner notes to the piece, remarks that practically all modern
orchestral writing is virtuosic anyway (in that sense, most symphonic
pieces are "concerti for orchestra"), and technical standards for
orchestral musicians have risen so high that regional orchestras,
like the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, put Mengelberg's Concertgebouw
or Koussevitzky's Boston players to shame, at least technically, if not
musically. You also get a recorded interview by Lewis Foreman with all
three composers. I'm a sucker for such things, even when a composer
doesn't say anything he hasn't said before or merely pays compliments.
Groupie mentality, I guess. But the three composers do in fact say very
interesting things.
The recording itself shows the colors of all three scores to their
advantage.
Steve Schwartz
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