The best symphonies of the past 50 years?

[Alan Howe]

The previous post ignores IMHO a considerable number of masterpieces:
Mozart 29, 35, 38
Beethoven 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
Berlioz Harold in Italy, Romeo et Juliette
Schumann 1, 2, 3
Mendelssohn 3
Liszt Faust
Rufinatscha 5, 6
Bruckner 6
Tchaikovsky 5
Raff 2-5
Draeseke 2, 3
Dvorak 6
Mahler - all?
Nielsen - all?
Shostakovich 1, 4
Elgar 1, 2
Prokofiev 1, 6
and many, many more....

[BFerrell]

And.....Ralph Vaughan Williams? 2 through 6 at least. Walton 1, Moeran 1, Bax 1-7.

[ahinton]

Aren't we now straying from the original thread topic by widening the time-frame?

Anyway - last 50 years? Well, Dutilleux doesn't count (sadly) because his two date from the 1950s. For me, then, Pettersson 9, Simpson 9 (yet again!), Rubbra 9, Shostakovich 13 & 15, Henze 7 & 10, Matthews 6 (surely the best of his 7 to date?)...

[BFerrell]

We certainly have!    It's just our enthusiasm.
May be old news, but Dutton recorded Matthews' 7th Symphony last July. John Carewe conducted. It may be released in February.

[Rainolf]

Was Boris Tchaikovsky yet mentioned here? He surely belongs to the great symphonists of the 2nd half of the 20th century, if you ask me. You maybee can hear, that he was a pupil of Shostakovich, but he had his original own voice. I would say, that Tchaikovsky had a greater inner repose than his teacher, calmer in its silent parts, more monumental in the energetic ones, but not less powerful and not less emotional moving than Shostakovich. A speciality of Tchaikovsky is his free handeling of rhythm and metre.

He wrote four symphonies, from which the 2nd and 3rd ("Sewastopol") I would call the most important. The 2nd is my second nomination for this tread. It is a three movement work of 50 minutes. There's a toccata like first movement with some calm introspective episodes, a silent and expressive slow movement and a march like finale, that culminates in a D major/minor chord at the end.

[Alan Howe]

We have indeed strayed - but only in pursuit of an answer to the question of whether really fine symphonies have been written in the past fifty years. Clearly, there have been some. I'm still not persuaded, though, there there have been that many.

I do agree about Henze 7, having said that. Interestingly, that symphony seems to me to pay obvious homage to 'the tradition'.

[Alan Howe]

Does anyone know Elliott Carter's 45 mins+ Symphonia of 1998?

[vandermolen]

I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD 

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

[vandermolen]

Living composers still writing 'genuine' symphonies which you (may) have a chance to hear would include:

John McCabe and David Matthews(Great Britain)
Kalevi Aho, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Aulis Sallinen(Finland)
John Kinsella(Ireland)
Halvor Haug, Ragnar Soderlind(Norway)
Krzystof Penderecki(Poland)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich(USA)

It's not a very long list, is it    But all of these-at least to my ears-have the ability to write in long, extended paragraphs of genuinely symphonic dimensions and to touch the soul. I might add later Vadim Silvestrov(Ukraine) as well

Nice list Colin. Aho is the one I need to explore more. I enjoyed Symphony No 4 on first hearing.

[ahinton]

Does anyone know Elliott Carter's 45 mins+ Symphonia of 1998?

Yes - and how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements. We'll sadly not likely get any more big, bold orchestral scores out of him these days - but he was a young lad of 87 when he completed it and, as  he'll be 103 on Sunday week, I suppose that he has at lest some excuse...

[Alan Howe]

how I came to omit it from my list I know not! Mea culpa! It's arguably one of Carter's most ambitious works and certainly one of his finest achievements.

I'm glad someone has heard this piece. My problem, though, is that I just don't get it - there's so much going on, but it all passes me by as a series of sonorities, some lovely, some harsh, some striking, etc, etc. So, how do I get a handle on this music? I have no problem with, say, Henze 7, but Carter is another story - almost another world to me...

[saxtromba]

The previous post ignores IMHO a considerable number of masterpieces:
Mozart 29, 35, 38
Beethoven 1, 2, 4, 6, 8
Berlioz Harold in Italy, Romeo et Juliette
Schumann 1, 2, 3
Mendelssohn 3
Liszt Faust
Rufinatscha 5, 6
Bruckner 6
Tchaikovsky 5
Raff 2-5
Draeseke 2, 3
Dvorak 6
Mahler - all?
Nielsen - all?
Shostakovich 1, 4
Elgar 1, 2
Prokofiev 1, 6
and many, many more....

Without wanting to hijack the thread, but in the interests of refining our understanding of what you mean by "masterpieces", could I ask a few follow-up questions?  Do you really consider, for example, Beethoven 1 & 2 to be at the level of, say, Mozart 40 and Haydn 44, or even Beethoven's own 3 & 7 (please note that I did, btw, include 6)?  Is every Mahler symphony as good as every other one?  Is Draeseke really at the level of Bruckner 8?  And so on.

I am sympathetic to many of these symphonies, and even love some of them (Bruckner's and Nielsen's 6, e.g.).  But I took the parameters here quite seriously, and given the implication of the word 'masterpiece', I'd even lop off some of the ones I mentioned, let alone these others.  Schumann is a wonderful composer, but I just can't see any of his symphonies as operating at or even near the level of Beethoven 3.  Likewise Mendelssohn.  The shattering impacts of Bruckner 9 or Shostakovitch 5, for example, combined with their technical strengths, raise these works above even others by the same composers (Bruckner 3 and Shostakovitch 7) which are otherwise powerful or enjoyable on their own.

By these standards, then, I am claiming that the number of truly great symphonies is always small (though the number of very good symphonies is much larger and possibly more subject to fluctuation from era to era).  But in either case, I see Aho, Pettersson, late Shostakovitch, Sallinen, and many other contemporary or recent as being major symphonists, with each having produced at least one work deserving the accolade "great".

[Alan Howe]

There are clearly different levels of mountain peaks here - thus Beethoven 3 is a revolutionary masterpiece (an Everest, as it were), but Beethoven 4 is still a masterpiece (remembering that the Himalayas contain many very high peaks).

Anyway, we really mustn't get sidetracked here. I was, after all, asking what forum members consider to be the best symphonies of the past fifty years, thinking that some sort of consensus might be possible.

[britishcomposer]

I very much agree with your assessment of the Kinsella 3rd and 4th, Jeffrey

Am very much looking forward to the new recording of the composer's 6th and 7th symphonies from RTE

Thanks Colin - I have recently received the new Kinsella CD 

No 6 sounds excellent on first hearing - he is such a worthwhile composer. No 7 is influenced by Sibelius's Symphony No 7 but is in no way derivative. I shall look forward to exploring this too but at the moment I am focusing on No 6.  As soon as I have heard it I want to play it again.

In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago!

[albion]

In case you shouldn't have noticed yet: I uploaded Kinsella's Sinfonietta to the Irish Music Folder some time ago!

Thanks.