Disconcerto
MUSIC A MIDDLING-TO-SPLENDID week of Proms didn't /Aso much end as terminally explode, in the
controversial sense, with Roberto Gerhard's Concerto for Orchestra, which reached the Albert Hall via America, where the BBC Symphony Orchestra played it on tour last year, and Chel- tenham Festival, which commissioned it.
Before taking a closer look at the performance (BBC Orchestra again, Norman Del Mar con- ducting), let us reflect for a moment on Mr Gerhard's programme note. Observing that little of the traditional concerto form survives in his work, he suggests that this isn't, perhaps, sur- prising if we agree that 'the revulsion against imposed [I would even say accepted] patterns is a mark of our time.' Since the two words which I have italicised seem to stand for the same thing in Mr Gerhard's mind (they don't in mine), it follows that in his view people who are truly of today (and everybody professes to be that) feel rather sick at those hoary old cadenza-carriers and back away with hands out- stretched, begging mercy, when anything of the kind strikes up.
Mr Gerhard may be right. If so, Mr Glock as Proms-planner is laughably out of touch. Concertos of schools and styles disapproved by the Time Spirit uselessly clutter his list—all those oldies for piano or fiddle or organ and orchestra by Bach (four), Beethoven (five), Mozart (six), Brahms (two) and so on. Besides offering the Grieg, the Schumann and Mendelssohn's 'violin,' Mr Glock has had the effrontery to whistle up both Tchaikovsky 'pianos.' Peter Katin did Tchaikovsky's second, in G, at one of the Sar- gent concerts. How I revelled in the valiance of the opening movement; the thunderous, rum- maging cadenza; the gentle colloquy for violin and cello in the slow movement!
The Tchaikovsky first movement begins and ends with one of the most stirring march tunes imaginable, a march worthy of Bernard Shaw's crack on first hearing Berlioz's Rakoczy—'It
made me want to rush out and take Trafalgar Square single-handed.' The last movement of Britten's D major Piano Concerto (done two nights later by soloist Malcolm Binns with Alexander Gibson and the BBC Scottish Or- chestra) begins and ends with a march tune so wet that I surrender everything and grope for my umbrella. When Tchaikovsky wrote marches, he meant them. They are music to stir the blood and make a man put on his boots. The only ex- planation I can think of for Britten's misfire is that he didn't mean his tune in that sense at all. This movement, like the opening Toccata, dates from 1938, a year when young Britten was fre- quenting aggressively left-wing folds. In the 1930s there was a rigid leftist convention that artists must biff the bourgeoisie from whose loins they sprang. My theory is that, complying with this, Britten decided to guy the Elgar of the Pomp and Circumstance marches which, for bourgeois splendour, almost knock Die Meistersinger. Guying in music is the diciest thing on earth to bring off. I have no faith whatever in 'social criticism' as a begetter of good tunes. So the finale of the Britten concerto derails itself.
It must be added, though—and here we come back to Mr Gerhard—that the work as a whole is as traditional and formal as a top-hat: ternary plan, sonata plan, bravura gestures in plenty for the soloist, and an interpolated passacaglia (1945) which repeats a dullish tune seven times with Cesar Franckian harmonies that make it duller still. Himself one of the marks of our time, Mr Britten is certainly wide of the mark here. In his hands the old structural for- mulas are as unfruitful as Mr Gerhard seems to be saying. What, then, has Mr Gerhard to offer in their stead?
Since he came to this country from his native Catalonia and settled here in 1939, Mr Gerhard has won wide admiration as a stylistically ver- satile composer who has integrity into the 'bar- gain. His Concerto reveals in plenitude at last a peculiarly personal gift which we have always known to be there: that of devising new sounds and new sorts of sound that must stagger every fellow composer alive except those who are notoriously dead on their feet.
The sounds Mr Gerhard invents do not, in general, strike me as beautiful in the way that, say, Webern's sounds or Klee's lines and tex- tures are. His immediate aim seems, rather, to be newness and validity of character. To this end he uses his orchestra with a `vision' and ingenuity that bring marvelling exclamations from all who leaf through OUP's study score. One page that instantly hooked my eye—it looks disturbingly like an attack of migraine—is filled almost from top to bottom with trills for the entire body of strings, who are divided into pairs, desk by desk, and, as to the majority, play what in effect are solo parts. Three percussion 'batteries' harboured extraordinary goings-on.
Some of the cymbals some of the time were played with screw rods or, after the rims had been rosined, with cello bows. And so on.
But it isn't enough to accept sounds bar by bar or page by page, however rich, original and fantastic they may be and whatever the Time Spirit says. The sounds must hang together in such a way as to form a body and get them- selves a soul. In Mr Gerhard's Concerto there is some element of recurrence; there is family relationship between certain thematic shapes and sequences. When we've had a chance to assimilate these factors, the Concerto will possibly turn out to be as much body and soul as Rach- maninov's C minor, though it will never be on speaking terms with it. Meantime, my impression is of immensely assorted sound 'gestures' which clash or mingle or inter-echo not to serve some aesthetic ultimate but to accompany a drama of machines and human wills. I have a feeling that somewhere along the line somebody has lost a terrific, earth-shaking film-script. Here's the- music for it. When the scenario turns up we shall know what the music's about.
For Mr Gerhard, on the other hand, his 'patterns' explain themselves. So-does, or should, the form they produce. A prefatory note to the score tells us that the Concerto's form largely depends on 'three contrasting types of continuity.' First we have 'tonal configuration.' Next come 'constellation-like patterns' and 'configuration based on time-lattices.' Lastly we enter a sort of slow motion. 'Comparatively little happens here, and everything casts long shadows, conjuring up, ideally, the magic sense of uneventfulness.'
One advantage of traditional concerto form is that it can, up to a point. be analysed objec- tively. The same terms convey much the same sense to everybody. Mr Gerhard, however, leans on metaphor, which leads from music to litera- ture, the wrong direction: and on a metaphysic that mayn't ring the bell with five-bob Prommers, who incline to the view that sinerenzfu/ness in music, with or without italics, isn't much cop. Perhaps Mr Gerhard could have explained him- self better.
CHARLES REID
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