ARTS
Music
What about Arnold?
David Mellor feels it is time one of our great contemporary composers received his due
milestone marked by concerts in London and elsewhere and an Arnold mini-festival In Manchester. But one is left under- whelmed and with the distinct impression that Arnold is not getting his due: not enough performances, though thankfully a lot of good recordings; a CBE when lesser Men have been knighted. The sad truth is that conversations about contemporary British composers tend to dwell on Tippett and Birtwhistle, Maxwell Davies and young hopefuls like George Benjamin, with Arnold at best shoehorned in as an afterthought. I fear the musical establish- ment responds to Arnold rather like Sir Thomas Beecham who, having reeled off with relish to the young Neville Cardus the names of the many composers who were to feature in his next season's programmes, was questioned by Cardus about an omis- !Ion. 'What about Elgar?', he enquired. What about him?', Beecham testily responded, 'Isn't he well?'
Arnold has never been fashionable. The reasons are not hard to find. He is prolific and multi-faceted. He has written exten- sively for the cinema — over 80 film scores, In fact — and won an Oscar for The Bridge Over the River Kwai. His music, though Modern in many technical aspects, is unashamedly tonal, approachable and, hor- ror of horrors, filled with good tunes. For all these high crimes and misdemeanours, many arbiters of contemporary musical taste will not lightly forgive him. But a formidable body of work is there for the open-minded to explore and, as I have done, hugely to enjoy. And if Michael Kennedy is right that atonality will soon be seen as a blind alley for 20th-century music, what then? Well, then I believe Malcolm Arnold will come to be seen as a significant v„oice to be relished by all, and not just by a Jew consenting adults in private, huddled over their CD machines with the English Dances, the Second Symphony or the Peterloo Overture. Malcolm Arnold's childhood enthusiasm for Louis Armstrong led him to the trum- rct, at which he was so accomplished that became principal trumpet of the Lon- don Philharmonic at the age of 21. The practical musicianship imparted by his time M the orchestra has impacted upon his i.enius for composition as it did upon t.. lgar, by making him a technically formidable orchestrator and a master of instrumental range and colour. For Instance, his many concertos written for !fiends as diverse as Julian Bream and fenny Goodman — nearly two dozen in all ---, display a formidable command of the full resources of each instrument. Rarely
more than 20 minutes long, these chamber concerti divert and entertain, making clear why Arnold's admirers love him and why his detractors sneer at his accessibility and supposed superficiality. Plainly the allegation that facility has led to facileness lies at the heart of the case against Arnold. To adopt a bon mot about Ronald Reagan, if you walk through Mal- colm Arnold's deepest musical thoughts, do you get your feet wet? Yes you do, say I. What the lawyers might call the `Shostakovich Defence' is available. As with Shostakovich, his best music exists on a number of levels and a great deal goes on beneath the surface brilliance. It is certain- ly true that a lot of Arnold is pure enter- tainment. Why on earth not, for heaven's sake! But through his best work run under- currents and nuances, sinister and disturb- ing images, which give the music bite and real emotional substance.
As I write these words, I am listening to the Seventh Symphony. This work, written in 1973, is ostensibly about his three chil- dren, one of whom is severely autistic. The music continually presents disturbing juxta- positions between popular idioms and pas- sages of deep pain and anguish, where the music is dissonant and frequently flirts with atonality. This symphony plumbs the depths of Arnold's own often depressive and tortured private life, whereas on the whole Arnold's music presents an ultimate- ly optimistic face to the world. One can almost hear him saying, laugh, clown, laugh. On with the motley! But, as I say, his own life has been far from straightforward. This is put before us with searing intensity in the Seventh Symphony which will, I believe, be seen as his masterpiece. In its kaleidoscopic recall of life's experiences, good and bad, of joy and sorrow, it reminds me irresistibly of Shostakovich's equally soul-searching and valedictory Fifteenth Symphony, to which it yields little in elo- quence.
The enormously talented young Uruguayan guitarist Eduardo Fernandez has recently recorded with great success another of Arnold's best pieces, the Guitar Concerto written in 1958 for Julian Bream. He thinks it one of the very best works ever written for the instrument, and 'a tri- umphant declaration of the guitar's versa- tility'. He also reveals a wider truth about Arnold's entire oeuvre when he says that the concerto fully explores 'the guitar's chameleon-like characteristics . . its ability to go from lyricism to drama, from light- hearted joke to serious comment, the fluid personality that allows it to assume innu- merable masks'.
Here Fernandez captures the essence of all of Arnold's best music. Intertwined with the good tunes are figurations unique to Arnold, unusual and thought-provoking instrumental combinations, and above all bold and striking harmonic changes, which Arnold says he learnt from his hero, Berlioz. Repeated listening confirms that there is much more to the music than ini- tially meets the ear. There is a great deal to explore and obviously not all of it of equal merit: nine symphonies as well as the two dozen con- certos, several ballets, occasional pieces, concert overtures, even a few mini-operas; in fact over 130 works with opus numbers to set alongside the 80-odd film scores. A remarkable creative achievement has therefore been packed into these three score years and ten.
To those interested in Arnold's music, may I strongly recommend the Fernandez account of the Guitar Concerto (Decca 4 30233-2) and Tod Handley's splendid performance of the Seventh Symphony with the RPO (Conifer CDCF 177). For those new to Arnold, I can think of no bet- ter introduction than the English, Scottish, Irish and Cornish dances, gathered togeth- er on one CD (Lyrita SRCD 201) under the composer's own baton. Here is Arnold the master entertainer, with the full range of his orchestral and melodic virtuosity on display. For these dances are not the usual derivative products of the English 'cowpat' compositional school: this is Arnold writing his own tunes and dressing them up in recognisably regional garb. I defy anyone to listen and not find them irresistible, exhilarating and invigorating — a veritable tonic worthy of prescription on the NHS.
But the best single disc of all must surely be the EMI compilation which combines the Second Symphony under its dedicatees the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Charles Groves, with the Fifth and the Peterloo Overture under Arnold and the Birmingham Orchestra, all 70 minutes in excellent sound. All three are splendid works, especially the Fifth, a tribute to friends who. died young. It has a haunting slow movement which shows Arnold's tech- nique at its finest. At moments of great stress, he has written, people tend to talk in emotional clichés. This is his defence of a movement in which a haunting tune is repeated endlessly in different instrumental combinations. In some hands it could be treacly. But the quality of the tune and the mastery with which it is deployed make it all rather moving, in a manner recalling Mahler (EMI CDM 7 63368-2).
In conclusion, I increasingly think Mal- colm Arnold is to British music what his near contemporary Samuel Barber (1910- 81) is to American. Both are supreme melodists, as anyone familiar with Barber's Violin Concerto will attest. But both are not just splendid tunesmiths and orchestral craftsmen but composers of real substance. When Barber died, his death was marked by cautious appreciations and substantial apathy. Today a reassessment is taking place. The same will, I am sure, be true of Malcolm Arnold. But thankfully in his case there is still the time and the opportunity for this reassessment to take place while he is still alive, and for the musical world to do full justice to this distinguished man in life rather than after death. I hope they will take it.
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