We are Twenty-seven
MUSIC
By CHARLES REID
LAST Sunday night at the Royal Albert Hall was one of the most moving nights the place has seen. After the first performance of his 'Gothic' Symphony—which, for all its length (one hundred minutes) and size (500 singers; 180 instrumentalists) somehow doesn't smell of megalomania—Havergal Brian, a small man in brown tweed with a prelatical fringe of white hair, came on to the platform and got as whole- hearted a standing ovation as any musical visitor since Toscanini. Not knowing quite what to make of it, he stared out at the auditorium for a moment and scratched his forehead. Then, turn- ing his back on us, he smiled and said things we couldn't hear to the people who mattered most: his singers and players and Sir Adrian Boult, his conductor, who, clapping hard, was trying to efface himself in a back row.
A mere five years younger than the hall itself, Mr Brian was one and a half years old when Wagner gave his famous concerts there in 1877 to get money for his new Bayreuth theatre. At ninety, mentally composed and spry, he gives no outer sign of a career conditioned by the capric- ious lunacy, as it then was, of English musical patronage or unpatronage. No sign, that is to say, of squalid London lodgings, commercial travelling and copyist drudgery (the rate was six- pence a sheet) to make ends meet and raise a family, stray thoughts of suicide, the mortifica- tion of having his music taken up, in a limited way, by Beecham, Wood and Landon Ronald, then dropped.
Mr Brian is now sketching his twenty-seventh symphony. Fourteen out of the preceding twenty- six, as well as a cello concerto and a concerto for orchestra, were written after he was eighty. All have been composed as intellectual exercises, without thought of performance. You don't think of 'performing' yesterday's game of chess. Yet occasionally a Brian symphony finds its way into a broadcast or a concert room.
Before going to the Albert Hall I ran tapes of his 'Tragic' Symphony (1948) and his Tenth (1954). These one-movement pieces aren't on the 'Gothic' scale or anything like it. The first is eighteen minutes, the second twenty minutes long. Both have what I take to be essential Brian notes,' including sober but strongly shaped melody, modulations that surprise without being freakish, touches of remote, mysterious fanfare, trombones that bravely stride and plunge. If labels and categories count, this is obviously Nordic music. But, as to harmonies and general facture, it owes nothing to anybody. They are sYmphonies without pedigree. The Tenth I re- member particularly for a slow coda of emo- tional weight and singular beauty. Sketched in 1919 and completed eight years later, the 'Gothic' was first heard in 1961, when that tireless pioneer Bryan Fairfax put on a per- formance which, although semi-amateur, en- tailed arduous fund-raising. Sunday's promoters were the BBC. Who else could have readily paid for that giant professional orchestra, those loggia- fuls of extra brass and drums, that chain of rehearsals?
The 'Gothic' is divided into four movements. The first three, relatively short, are for orchestra only. The fourth is a full-scale setting of the Te Deum, which accounts for three-quarters of the symphony's length. Hence the pile-up of choirs from all over the place, Orpington to Hampstead, with BBC groups as spearhead and groups of schoolboys and schoolgirls thrown in. Along the platform edge a solo quartet. Owing to complex textures and at times, perhaps, questionable balance, it wasn't always clear what Honor Sheppard, Shirley Minty, Ronald Dowd and Roger Stalman were up to, but when the solo lines did get through they sounded expressive, unhackneyed and utterly vocal in character.
It seems that Mr Brian is agnostic. Unbelief has never kept any composer off the great liturgi- cal texts. The more doctrinal, downright and dogmatic these are the more they seem to attract the doubter. Cf. Berlioz and Verdi. Mr Brian has explained that what spurred him to compose the `Gothic' was the architectural splendour of great cathedrals. Inevitably, if illogically, he found himself caught up and involved by some- thing quite different: the words that are said or sung inside the splendours.
There are fine monumental things in the three instrumental movements, whose scoring, often turgid at the afternoon rehearsal, turned out at night, when a capacity house corrected the acoustics, to be clear as well as massive. Some of the fine things are blazingly original. At rehearsal they gave me the impression of isolated, spur-of- the-moment inspirations that didn't bear much relation to one another. At the performance I began to feel (without being sure) that they co- hered. It is, however, by its Te Deum that the 'Gothic,' if only on grounds of proportion, should be judged.
Mr Brian approaches the Latin text and works on most of it as nobody else has done or could have done. Before the choir open their mouths we are summoned to hail and praise by trumpet and horn fanfares that are peremptory and regal. After his fashion Mr Brian is as 'operatic' as Verdi was so fatuously reproached for being in his Requiem. Since Mr Brian is a Berlioz man of long date, I wondered apprehensively as we neared the ludex crederis' whether he might have
committed some reminiscence or echo. Nothing of the kind. His setting is so far removed from Berlioz's rolling, minatory main tune, with its implacable side-drum rhythm, as to give the liturgical message an altogether different gloss. -I he syllables are carried by harmonics for un- accompanied voices which overlap and swell like chimes. We are not threatened with judgment. We are promised it.
Another gay. vast canvas is 'Et laudamus nomen mum.' A row of clarinets, 1m.s clarinets and basset horns in imperturbable unison opened and closed this section with an audacious march tune, sotto-voce and jaunty, that might easily have sounded cheap and isn't so at all. Boween the two march statements there are rejoicings and elating melodies and dan-dara-dan outbursts for combined choirs, bandsmen, full orchestra and full organ which all but lifted the hall's tin ceiling.
Is Mr Brian a bit short on eschatology? His touches of hell-let-loose, topped off by a bird- scaring machine (a sort of hand-cranked, jumbo- size rattle), aren't as convincing, as his Ilea% enly jollities. And there are times when intik idual 'vision' suddenly gives out and we find ourselves up to the hocks in church' part-writing or brassy bluster. I have a disquieting memory of the supplementary bands used for an accompaniment in detached chords that might just as well have been given to the orchestra if it had to be given to anybody at all, which is doubtful. Originality is a splendid thing—but hard to keep up for a hundred minutes on end. However, we put up gladly with inferior patches in the tone-poems of Mr Brian's near-coeval, the late Richard Strauss. The 'Gothic' should be discriminated about, not against.
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