Havergal Brian Gothic Symphony from Hyperion

[Dundonnell]

We are all, I think, straying far from Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony in our criticisms of 'The Gramophone' magazine ....

....but, with your indulgence, I picked-at total random-an issue from my shelves. It happens to be the January 1977 edition. The contributors reviewing new LPs that month included-

Felix Aprahamiam, Denis Arnold, Mary Berry, Alan Blyth, William Chislett, Roger Fiske, Edward Greenfield, Max Harrison, Trevor Harvey, Robert Layton, William Mann, Ivan March, Malcolm Macdonald, Richard Osborne, Michael Oliver, Christopher Palmer, Stephen Plaistow, Stanley Sadie, Lionel Salter, John Steane, John Warrack, Stanley Webb.

These names will mean nothing to younger members or, possibly, those who never bought the magazine even then.....but these were names one could trust. These were critics of substance with a reputation which frequently extended beyond music criticism per se.

[Alan Howe]

I agree 100%. These were certainly men one would pay to read - and learn from.

[dafrieze]

Since this seems to have mutated from the "Havergal Brian Gothic Symphony from Hyperion" forum to the "Ooo Those Awful Critics!" forum, I thought I'd throw in my two cents' worth.

Kenneth Tynan once wrote that criticism was not a science; it was, alas, an art.  Is it possible to have great critics without great art?  I'm fifty-six years old.  Into my early adulthood, there lived great composers who were universally acknowledged as great composers during their lifetimes:  Shostakovich, Britten, Copland, Messiaen (whom I was lucky enough to meet).  Even Stravinsky made it through most of my adolescence.  Who has that kind of career anymore?  What composer's new work elicits headlines, apart from the scandalous or provocatively controversial kinds?  Today's music critics don't live in that kind of atmosphere.  All too often, their concept of greatness (if they have one) is our concept of mediocrity, because that's all they really know.  Some reject the very idea of greatness as too "elitist" and concentrate on the invidious comparison of contemporary performances of acknowledged classics with earlier performances of acknowledged classics; some embrace elitism and concentrate on the obscure, the outrageous and the determinedly unpopular.  In both cases, they're marginalizing themselves. 

But why not? The arts are marginalized in the United States, certainly, and to some extent in Britain, from what I read.  Musical education has have been excised from most of our schools.  Many American cities have no classical radio stations.  Most of our newspapers - those that are left - have slashed their arts coverage to the point where potentially first-rate critics have nowhere to go, except perhaps the internet, where everyone with an opinion is considered a critic.  Classical music is - and let's face it, always has been - a minority taste.  Contemporary capitalism can't accommodate minority tastes, so classical music is left to the enthusiasts and the opportunists.  All too many critics today - and all too many composers, and all too many performers - are one or the other (or in rare cases, both).  Why bother to be great?

[Dundonnell]

All I would wish to add is that-as has been said before-there are still some excellent and trustworthy critics around and, in Britain, many of them are writing lengthy, well-informed and perceptive reviews for International Record Review. These include Martin Anderson, Piers Burton-Page, Robert Layton, Callum MacDonald, Robert Matthew-Walker...to name but a few.

It will be most interesting to read the review which will appear in IRR of the Gothic Symphony...presumably next month.

[vandermolen]

I always liked Trevor Harvey's reviews - was sad when he passed away.

[Dundonnell]

With the Brabbins' Gothic blasting my apartment in full, glorious splendour....and Yes, I do think that the performance IS utterly magnificent ....

.....I am reading, for the first time, the cd booklet notes by Calum(Malcolm) MacDonald.

You can imagine my joy at reading the quotation from Deryck Cooke in "The Penguin Book of Choral Music", my copy of which has been lost behind a virtually immovable bookcase for many years.

Cooke described Brian's Te Deum as "a dithyrambic paean of complex neo-medieval counterpoint like nothing else in music" that "reveals the mind of a truly visionary genius".

THAT was the very passage I read aloud to Malcolm 49 years ago as I recall in the quad. of our school in Edinburgh It was that very passage which sparked off his interest in a composer on whose music he is now the leading expert in the world.

So.........really, it is all MY doing

NO, seriously, I am simply delighted to see that passage, the precise wording of which I had long-forgotten, reproduced in the cd booklet.

It is a wonderful piece of music-no comparisons relevant   And the Brabbins performance glows on disc in fantastic sound quality. The BBC/Hyperion engineers have done a marvellous job in allowing us to hear the work in its full splendour.

For those of us lucky enough to have been present the visual spectacle was quite overwhelming. Perhaps, just perhaps, that slightly detracted from one's ability to focus sufficiently on the music itself and on the performance. I am not really qualified to make the sorts of detailed judgments on the performance and interpretation that others have made: the Boult, Schmidt, Lenard, Curro, Brabbins each and every one has much to be said for it in different ways. But, for me, that night Brabbins nailed it. And now I and others can listen again to the music in its full, glorious grandeur.

Mirabile dictu.

[albion]

The Hyperion Gothic receives an excellent review by Richard Whitehouse in the January edition of IRR (pp 38-39). Without reproducing the whole assessment, here are some extracts -

July's performance at the Proms saw the work come through its customary brickbats with relative ease. Mocking is easy as a substitute for constructive criticism, so credit to Martyn Brabbins for overseeing a performance which emphatically did not play it safe: enabling the piece to be appreciated for a formal evolution as oblique and purposeful as is its emotional progression.

Various commentators have only partially succeeded in explaining the physiognomy of the Te Deum setting that constitutes the second half. Outwardly the most conventional of these later three movements, the fourth is equally the most difficult to make cohere. Brabbins succeeds like neither of the comparative versions in forging its overtly schematic alternation of praise and supplication into a cumulative sequence [...]

[...] this release looks set to be the primary recommendation well into the future: conveying the fullest extent yet of a flawed masterpiece that risks so much in staking out the listener's awareness of its greatness.

Richard Whitehouse was, like several members of this forum, present at the performance and accords Brian the respect of giving his mighty symphony one of the most detailed reviews (with myriad timing marks) that I've encountered even in IRR.

[Dundonnell]

I had just posted a similar enthusiastic recommendation of the Richard Whitehouse review on another website and was about to copy it on here but Albion has beaten me to it

I can only echo what he says above and urge members to get hold of a copy of IRR-if they are not already subscribers to this quite excellent magazine

This is the sort of detailed critique so sadly and unforgiveably lacking in other publications where lazy critics write a paragraph(or maybe, just, two) of worthless prose which masquerades as serious criticism

Albion has highlighted the two passages I particularly noticed: "Mocking is easy as as substitute for constructive criticism" and "a flawed masterpiece that risks so much in staking the listener's awareness of its greatness". That-I think-is fair, balanced writing which does Whitehouse great credit and in its detailed analysis of the piece reflects the value of an exceptionally fine musical publication.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The quotations show that the review must be very good indeed. I agree with the praise for the Te deum laudamamus - I think Brabbins has given it the best performance so far. And the same goes for the first two movements, in my opinion.

[Dundonnell]

I have read somewhere that the IRR reviewers tend to 'gush' in their praise for particular recordings of works they clearly know well and love.

I see nothing wrong in the Editor of a serious music journal sending cds to reviewers they know are intimately familiar with or are likely to be empathetic to particular composers or their works. If I want to read a review of a relatively obscure composer or composition I want to know that the reviewer is somebody I can trust to give a balanced opinion regarding the merits of the work in question rather than someone who has a track record of hostility to the composer.

I don't tend to read reviews of works in which I have little interest. The persistence of another music magazine in sending cds of a particular composer to a certain critic(who, apparently, requests that he reviews those cds) and then persistently rubbishes the music strikes me as, to put it mildly, perverse in the extreme.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I agree with your point, Colin - it is perverse to let someone review a work he evidently dislikes, though antipathy can be educational, too. I hope there comes a day when Brian doesn't need any advocacy and we can 'simply' compare performances and discover ever more aspects of works we think we know. For instance - listening again to Myer Fredman's performance of Symphony No. 22 was a real 'ear-opener': he brings out the tenderness in an otherwise rather harsh and uncompromising piece.

[Jimfin]

It's a good point. On the other hand, when a British music (for example) enthusiast reviews a rarely-performed work, the temptation is surely great simply to rave about the work, rather than reviewing the performance objectively, as one would with a well-established piece. I get so tired too, of CD inserts which spend the first two pages giving a potted biography of the composer and the next in refuting all the nasty things said about them. I think every single CD I own of music by Brian or Stanford starts with "HB/CVS was born in Dublin/Dresden in 1852/1876 into a protestant Irish/working class family...." Who do they think buys these discs anyway? Goths trying out the Gothic?

[Dundonnell]

Regarding your first point-the temptation "to rave about the work, rather than reviewing the performance objectively....": there may indeed be that temptation but that is what differentiates the good reviewer/critic from the 'fanatic'(if I may use that word ).

Richard Whitehouse in his review of The Gothic calls it "a flawed masterpiece". Now one may or may not agree with his use of the word "flawed" but as a qualification of the word "masterpiece" I would deem that to be an acceptable point of view and by no stretch of the imagination "raving" about the work.

I would regard myself as a "British music enthusiast"-albeit one totally unqualified to write a decent review of a work or a cd for any sort of publication -but I am not, I hope, uncritical. If a substantial piece of British orchestral music is not to my taste, either because I find it too thorny or overly complex(as I do, for example, late Tippett or early Maxwell Davies, Richard Rodney Bennett) or, on the other hand, overly-romantic/dreamy(as I must admit I find Delius, York Bowen or Cyril Scott) I shall gladly admit to it

[Jimfin]

Absolutely agreed! I understand that CD inserts are  a little different, as they are trying to sell the work. For example, Jeremy Dibble is a lot more complimentary about Parry's 'Job' in the CD insert than he is in his biography of Parry. And that's a work I can't listen to too often.

[eschiss1]

What makes a _really_ good review/good criticism, and not just a neutral or not actively bad one, is I think worthy of its own thought (though the thought I have given it myself is not at all original) and perhaps its own thread.