RVW 6
I'm also happy to see that the BSO is putting on Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony this January, with Sir Colin Davis. I pulled a CD of this out of the NY Performing Arts library at some point last year (having listened to it once before a few years back) from which point forward it's been safely ensconced in my own personal "This Should Be Performed More Often" list.
He composed it in 1948, and it's still informed strongly by a wartime atmosphere. Most of the first movement is written in long, winding phrases lashed to a snare-drum-driven 6/8 forward momentum, if you can imagine a kind of abstracted military-music vibe but with the triumphalism replaced with subtle desperation. The two middle movements (slow, fast) are bitter and bleak; the final movement is eerily quiet and inscrutably creepy to the extent that basically everyone (with the notable exception of Ralph Vaughan Williams) decided from the start that it was written about Hiroshima. So for an apparently traditional four-movement symphony, the RVW Sixth is fairly far out there.
But the crown jewel of the piece is near the end of the first movement, when the tersely dramatic opening theme blossoms without warning into a lushly sad lullaby of a song, like something Rachmaninoff would have written. It breaks your heart for a minute and a half, and then goes away, and nothing in the rest of this desolate piece sounds remotely like it. But it centers the piece emotionally and sentimentally, and ups the stakes for the half-hour of bleakness that follows it.
This is also a great reminder of how sentimentality is a real, legitimate emotion (and one really well served by orchestra music too!) that can really make sparks fly in a work of art when combined with your sterner, more serious emotions. I think a lot of contemporary classical composers miss the boat by avoiding anything whatsoever that could be construed as sentimental.
He composed it in 1948, and it's still informed strongly by a wartime atmosphere. Most of the first movement is written in long, winding phrases lashed to a snare-drum-driven 6/8 forward momentum, if you can imagine a kind of abstracted military-music vibe but with the triumphalism replaced with subtle desperation. The two middle movements (slow, fast) are bitter and bleak; the final movement is eerily quiet and inscrutably creepy to the extent that basically everyone (with the notable exception of Ralph Vaughan Williams) decided from the start that it was written about Hiroshima. So for an apparently traditional four-movement symphony, the RVW Sixth is fairly far out there.
But the crown jewel of the piece is near the end of the first movement, when the tersely dramatic opening theme blossoms without warning into a lushly sad lullaby of a song, like something Rachmaninoff would have written. It breaks your heart for a minute and a half, and then goes away, and nothing in the rest of this desolate piece sounds remotely like it. But it centers the piece emotionally and sentimentally, and ups the stakes for the half-hour of bleakness that follows it.
This is also a great reminder of how sentimentality is a real, legitimate emotion (and one really well served by orchestra music too!) that can really make sparks fly in a work of art when combined with your sterner, more serious emotions. I think a lot of contemporary classical composers miss the boat by avoiding anything whatsoever that could be construed as sentimental.
3 Comments:
"Like something Rachmaninoff would have written." doesn't strike me as being a good thing...
What I mean is that it's a Big Tune, and (again) a really sentimental one.
It sounds more British, naturally, and since it only stays a minute it doesn't get cloying. Maybe it wouldn't touch off your Rachmaninoff allergies.
I listened to this again tonight (in the music library, where I still am) and I need to correct one thing: that Big Tune isn't a variation on the opening theme, but rather a major-key version of a secondary theme. They do spring somewhat from the dramatic, rising motive that opens the symphony; this is what I was thinking of.
Also, I'd call the first movement less "snare-drum-driven" than "snare-drum-accented." It's funny how details can stick in your musical memory out of proportion to their actual presence.
More importantly, I listened to Benjamin Britten's Third String Quartet too, and this is a masterpiece. It's the last piece he finished, from 1976, a few months before his death): cryptic and terse like late Shostakovich, but with softer harmonies (including some stunning major-key cloud-clearings) and illuminated with that lyricism that Britten did so well. The last movement turns over and over a two-phrase passacaglia melody, in a moody sense of mind-wandering like late Mahler.
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