Following on from the BSO concert, Symphonies presented themselves as a topic for Top 6 consideration.
For the reasons outlined in the concert review, Beethoven no. 6, the Pastoral, is an automatic first choice. A teenage favourite but still magical and flawless after all those years, lyrical and powerful. Beethoven is difficult to overestimate and this has all the benefits of both his intense moods and his lightness of touch.
Sibelius is another certainty for the list and no.5 gets the first vote for its cold, clear description of Finland’s lakes and woodlands, its surging themes and leitmotifs. It is powerful as well as beautiful and it is already becoming clear that although my very favourite music comes from before 1800, the symphony, which as a teenager I thought was the Premier League of classical music, is a C19th and C20th thing, only developing to its fullest achievement when building on the earlier masterpieces.
The first LP I ever bought was the Waldo de los Rios Symphonies for the Seventies with its eight arrangements of classic repertoire pieces. Making classical music accessible in user friendly versions is usually quite rightly derided but Waldo did a faithful job on his selected victims. However, I wouldn’t have needed the inducement of his Schubert Unfinished, whatever number is assigned to it, to include it here. Spare, lucid and redemptive, I might say if I went and fetched my thesaurus. What would Schubert have gone on to achieve if he had lived to any sort of maturity is one of those mind-boggling questions which also applies to Mozart.
Waldo’s version of Mozart 40 was the first record I ever bought, in 1971, with its chart position of number 5 and the symphony has to be included for its seminal place in my own musical biography. Mozart, of course, sounds playful and inventive but even then, aged 11, I think it was the dark undercurrents of anxiety and doubt that made me realize that there was something else in all of his music. It isn’t cute, chocolate box music whatever a tourist trip round Salzburg might try to sell you.
And so, with only two places left, it’s already too late for some. I won’t include Mendelssohn only because I think he’s a massively under-rated composer and seems to be dismissed as somehow ‘lightweight’ against more grandiose Romantics. I’ll have the Italian Symphony, no. 4, even more for its soothing and lovely second movement Andante than its bright and lively start.
Gorecki no.3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, makes up the half dozen. I turned on the radio one day last year, or maybe longer ago than that. I had no idea that it was on. I began to wonder if we had suffered a royal bereavement, so grieving and enormous was its effect, unintroduced and speaking only its own mournful language. I heard a great quote on the radio this week, I’m sorry I can’t attribute it to its author, about how music is too precise to be expressed in language. And that is right. It is why musicians will always be held in higher regard than mere writers or poets. Poets and painters are fine but you often have to sober them up a bit to get any sense out of them. Musicians have the rarest talent and the best of them inevitably put it to best use.
For the reasons outlined in the concert review, Beethoven no. 6, the Pastoral, is an automatic first choice. A teenage favourite but still magical and flawless after all those years, lyrical and powerful. Beethoven is difficult to overestimate and this has all the benefits of both his intense moods and his lightness of touch.
Sibelius is another certainty for the list and no.5 gets the first vote for its cold, clear description of Finland’s lakes and woodlands, its surging themes and leitmotifs. It is powerful as well as beautiful and it is already becoming clear that although my very favourite music comes from before 1800, the symphony, which as a teenager I thought was the Premier League of classical music, is a C19th and C20th thing, only developing to its fullest achievement when building on the earlier masterpieces.
The first LP I ever bought was the Waldo de los Rios Symphonies for the Seventies with its eight arrangements of classic repertoire pieces. Making classical music accessible in user friendly versions is usually quite rightly derided but Waldo did a faithful job on his selected victims. However, I wouldn’t have needed the inducement of his Schubert Unfinished, whatever number is assigned to it, to include it here. Spare, lucid and redemptive, I might say if I went and fetched my thesaurus. What would Schubert have gone on to achieve if he had lived to any sort of maturity is one of those mind-boggling questions which also applies to Mozart.
Waldo’s version of Mozart 40 was the first record I ever bought, in 1971, with its chart position of number 5 and the symphony has to be included for its seminal place in my own musical biography. Mozart, of course, sounds playful and inventive but even then, aged 11, I think it was the dark undercurrents of anxiety and doubt that made me realize that there was something else in all of his music. It isn’t cute, chocolate box music whatever a tourist trip round Salzburg might try to sell you.
And so, with only two places left, it’s already too late for some. I won’t include Mendelssohn only because I think he’s a massively under-rated composer and seems to be dismissed as somehow ‘lightweight’ against more grandiose Romantics. I’ll have the Italian Symphony, no. 4, even more for its soothing and lovely second movement Andante than its bright and lively start.
Gorecki no.3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, makes up the half dozen. I turned on the radio one day last year, or maybe longer ago than that. I had no idea that it was on. I began to wonder if we had suffered a royal bereavement, so grieving and enormous was its effect, unintroduced and speaking only its own mournful language. I heard a great quote on the radio this week, I’m sorry I can’t attribute it to its author, about how music is too precise to be expressed in language. And that is right. It is why musicians will always be held in higher regard than mere writers or poets. Poets and painters are fine but you often have to sober them up a bit to get any sense out of them. Musicians have the rarest talent and the best of them inevitably put it to best use.
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