27 JANUARY 1967, Page 15

The Butterworth Lobby

MUSIC

By CHARLES REID

A SYWHONIC repertory that once looked like running aground on the `standards'— Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mozart (especially Mozart, about whom I began to mutter and scowl and think sacrilegious thoughts) —is revictualled and afloat again on tides of Bruckner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Shostakovich.

Where do the English symphonists come in? Or, more germanely, how do they fit in? Chauvinism is sillier in music—of all arts the one that has least need of visas—than in any other walk of life. Yet there were streaks of opinion in the old British Music Society which came close to jingoism. I remember a pro- gramme which bracketed George Butterworth's modestly meritorious Banks of Green Willow with Richard Strauss's opulent Don Juan. A zealot who was there said, with that touch of aggressiveness that often denotes harrowing doubt, that Strauss, while ripping in his way, had nothing at all on Butterworth.

Sometimes flagwagging degenerates into a per- sonality crush. If for some seasons we have heard less of Vaughan Williams's fourth, fifth and sixth symphonies than they deserve, that follows logically, perhaps, from the fantastic RVW crush of twenty years ago and less. At the same time, a rival crush, the one on Mr Britten, bred something grotesquer still: a suspicion that English composers simply aren't born with sym- phonic souls. After all, look at his output. Under the heading of symphonies, there's nothing to speak of except the Sinfonia da Requiem (I'd rather hear the War Requiem or Grimes any day, old man') and the Cello Symphony (`You don't turn a concerto into a symphony by just calling it one, old boy). But who said sauce for Ben was gravy for the gander?

The recent Mahler-Shostakovich run at the Royal Festival Hall has been punctuated by two English symphonies: Elgar's No 2 in E flat, which is getting on for sixty years old, and Robert Simpson's No 3, which dates from 1962. If, dropping sonata-form criteria, we define sym- phony as sequences of big-scale conflicts and reconciliations between contrasted or affined themes, harmonies and rhythms, then both these scores, although they have little else in common, prove that symphonies may spring as naturally from English soil as John Constable's hay wains and beech groves.

Elgar's E flat was conducted nobly by Sir Adrian Boult at a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert and played with a warmth and substance which showed that everybody on the platform, from principals to rear desks, had his heart in it.

When I use the word 'noble' of Boult's con- ducting, the last thing I wish to convey is that he inflated or in any'other way made too much of those nobilmente and maestoso elements which rank so importantly in the Elgar ethos. What I mean is just the opposite. The performance was noble in the sense that all tempo changes, whether metronome markings or discretionary `rals,"rits' and 'accels,' were taken justly and not made an excuse for emotional overspills or for pulling the piece about to get at the 'plums.' As a result, the symphony's weights and values —and how diverse these are: the first movement all tumult and elegance; the second an elegy which invites (and triumphantly survives) cer- tain comparisons with Brahms and Wagner; the third a tearaway scherzo that must have made the hearers of 1911 reknot their motoring veils; the finale all ease, sunglow and sagacity!—were contained within a curve or master-line which made each component the more eloquent for being subordinated to the whole. In short, a classical performance. I hope it made new friends for a work which has only recently begun to shoulder its way to a front place.

Mr Simpson's No 3, played by the Royal Phil- harmonic Orchestra at the Royal Philharmonic Society's concert, was listened to from the back of the platform by the society's ritual bust of their old client Beethoven. I cannot say he looked pleased. But then, he never does. He had worn the same slightly sour expression while Tor- telier was spinning dreams of silk and immacu- lately phrasing the Dvorak Cello Concerto. The symphony was conducted by Charles Groves. A few days later I heard it a second time on tape, with the score in front of me, and concluded that the performance was not only a sound but a convinced one.

There are two movements. The long Adagio which opens the second movement broods upon a sober, finely articulated theme and breeds from it sub-themes that gradually broaden the poly- phonic web. Much of the exposition is for the string choir only. The first wind chord and the first brass chord, both very soft, enter with a beauty that is both subtle and startling, partly because of the harmonic shifts they bring and partly because of their 'colour' contrast with what has gone before.

Do I seem here to be making precisely the mistake which I praised Boult for avoiding in the Elgar? Am I, that is to say, picking out plums at the expense of the cake as a whole? Perhaps so. Judged section by section (ad- mittedly not the definitive way of judging it), Simpson's No 3 is variable in both quality and kind. It starts with clashes between violins and upper woodwind which are highly sophisticated harmonically. They come off to admiration. Without being in the least repulsive, they give the impression of a piddle of icewater. Nor is he afraid to drop 'sophistication' and pound away at some brief, square-cut phrase. There are points in the first movement, indeed, where simplisme touches grandeur, with flashes of lightning thrown in. But then, suddenly, he will commit himself to some relatively humdrum idea and pound away with equal verve at that. I cannot say I have much faith that these ups and downs of quality will smooth themselves out when I have come to greater knowledge of the symphony's total structure. Even while noting and respecting its architecture (if any), we in- veterately 'live' music page by page, moment by moment even, and always require that the page in hand shall in its own right live up to the pages that have already been turned.

Even so, Simpson clearly has the true sym- phonist's vision and imaginative span. These emerged as long ago as 1953 from his No 1 (which has been recorded by HMV), a one- movement piece with quiet, heavenly part-writing (middle section) and, at the end, a great, striding fugato, which between them show that tradi- tional means may be applied to valid, vital ends.

I do not apologise for the truism. It's so true that some people (including many athematists and fragmenters) can't swallow it.