MUSIC
A NEW symphony by Alan Rawsthorne was played by the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Adrian Boult, at the Albert Hall on November 15th. This is the composer's largest work, and its appearance is a major event in English musical life. Unfortunately I can only write my impressions after reading the score and attending a rehearsal, as the Spectator will be irretrievably in the hands of the printers by the time of the concert. Rawsthorne is the composer who combines more happily than any other British contemporary fastidiousness with gusto, formal inventiveness with feeling, brain with muscle. His musical imagina- tion is fertile, and it is this fertility which gives his treatment of his material an air of confidence and finality. Anxiety and agitation, which are clearly marked constituents of his music, are expressed with complete assurance and ease, and no more imply a tentativeness in the composer than Debussy's deliberate suggestions of hazy or imprecise images imply a haziness or lack of precision in Debussy's own mind. The note of melancholy or nostalgia, seldom absent from a whole movement of Rawsthorne's, is in the same sense deliberate and objective—not so much the cry of a sensitive soul as the poet's delighted response to that whole aspect of existence which stirs pity and tenderness. It is probably these qualities of confidence and tenderness, both marks of strength and closely connected with creative fertility, which make Rawsthorne's music -almost uniformly tonic in character. Like that of most tonics, its flavour is often astringent. Rawsthorne thinks elliptically, too (we live, after all, in an age of extracts and concentrated essences), and he does not often " reconstitute " his ideas before offering them to the public ; that would mean the swelling of his thoughts by the addition of much, strictly speaking, unnecessary water, and he prefers to present them neat and undiluted.
The first of the four movements of his new symphony opens quite uncompromisingly, with an imperiousness which loses its power if the movement is taken too fast. The orchestration of the opening group of subjects is heavy, in marked contrast to the second group, where the music loses its tempestuousness (marking is allegro tem- pestoso) and its allegro character, even if the pace is to be main- tained. There is only a severely truncated recapitulation, and the whole movement is remarkable for its melodic copiousness and The delightful ingenuity with which the composer augments, diminishes and varies his themes rather than for more severely architectural qualities.
The second movement opens with two false starts, at a quicker pace than the Lento of the main body of the movement, and is then dominated by a flute solo in which connoisseurs of Rawsthorne's earlier works will recognise familiar melodic traits and. a familiar atmosphere of aloof and impersonal melancholy, interrupted by moments of a more violent mood. The third, or scherzo, move- ment is largely in quintuple rhythm, and its humour is without either malice or bitterness, for Rawsthorne has a remarkably straight- forward musical temperament, capable indeed of mystery and
violence, of tenderness and sardonic playfulness, but quite foreign to the diabolical vein which his musical idiom sometimes suggests.
The last movement I found the most difficult to grasp, though its buoyant quality and unfailing invention will dispose any listener in its favour. Perhaps a fast and tempestuous first movement demands a different kind of finale ; but two broadcast performances will by now have enabled many listeners—and perhaps me—to make up
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