Music
Misplaced sniffiness
Robin Holloway
This year's Proms are plentiful in new or recent specimens of the classic genres; as well as three full-scale symphonies, there are no fewer than six concertos — for horn, oboe, piano, trombone and two for viola — also a 'concerto in pieces' for the Last Night (perhaps a riposte to last year's Panic for saxophone and drumldt).
Dominic Muldowney's trombone concer- to (world premiere 22 July) had raised eye- brows because of its much-publicised use of the motif familiar to millions as heralding Hancock's Half-Hour. Sniffiness was mis- placed. The famous signal was upstaged throughout by illUSiC'S best-known signa- ture B.A.C.H. in a sharp-edged piece cap- turing the eternal pathos, and the black side, inherent within the comic. Instead of farts and raspberries, Muldowney's trom- bone elicited construction and counter- point so neat as to court academicism alongside laughter; a fusion of elegance and precision delightful in itself. The cen- tral movement, juxtaposing a tongue-la- cheek blow-out of Mantovani in Blue with a complete instrumentation of an early experimental miniature for piano by Schoenberg, achieved something like the ambiguous hilarity plus discomfort of the master of East Cheam himself. The violin concerto by John Adams (4 August) was not a premiere but is still quite recent. This ambitious piece is a mad- dening mixture of truly musicianly with fast-food throwaway, notably in the applause-inviting finale, a perpetuwa. mobile whose musical content consists chiefly of famous Stravinsky numbers, especially the final dance in The Rite of Spring rendered trivial. Even here exper- tise is undoubted; in the preceding t.wa, movements it is applied to actual musical substance. I've never heard anything quite like the first — a steady stream of chromat- ic motion in the orchestra, creeping, walk'
ing, curling, uncoiling, growing ever busier, against a slashing then florid solo violin; the orchestra tintinnabulates, then rasps and flails with strange scything percussion; the superimposition of different metrical patterns produces ever crazier Morse code and zigzags — from turgid fumbling to mechanised scherzo and back, in one unbroken span. But it's on the end of this movement, a cadenza for the soloist, and the slow passacaglia it introduces, that I'll place my money. This is masterly compos- ing, beautiful both as intellectual process and as sheer sound. Its end, sweet frugality in an aura of bells and harmonies, remains fragrant in the memory long after the wretched finale has come, and gone.
Elegance, exactness, memorability are not the words that occur most readily in considering Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's lat- est symphonic offering, heard for the first time in London at the Prom two days after the Adams. The relative terseness of its predecessor is followed, in this new no.6, by a return to the inordinate length of nos.1-3. There's not much change from an hour in any of them. Unfacetiously, there is simply not enough variety of mood, charac- ter, texture and above all of speeds to fill such spaces without monotony.
In fact no.6 harked back further still, to such Davies of the Seventies as Stone Litany and A Mirror of Whitening Light Where his 'Orkney-sound' came into being. On present rating this is likely to remain his high point; in as much as the new sym- phony recalled that time it sounded both familiar, yet routine. The same baleful repertory of menace — threatening drums, scrunching brass, string clusters, piercing woodwind chords, tuned percussion, alter- nating with soft desultory non-melodic lines on alto flute or bass clarinet — pre- vails throughout the first movement.
The second was darker yet, with the groping brass and angry drums imploding into heavy danceless dance accompani- ments, as if retracing a still-earlier Davies of expressionist foxtrots. On repeated hear- logs this is the new symphony's most con- vincing section, lurching and heaving with more power and less predictability. The closing movement, however, poses the Problem at its most basic because, slowest of all, it can be heard so plain. A would-be Bruckner/Mahler/Berg adagio, whose aching strings gradually incorporate the rest of the orchestra and build up to a big Climax; then dark elegiac growlings; then an even more massive climax; then a crum- pling collapse on to hollow tattooing tim- pani. Every gesture is rhetorically unmistakable, every model recognisable; the music has every appearance of tradi- tional harmony and counterpoint, logic, structure, pitch-leading, and so on, as re- interpreted in personal modernist terms; but its actual stuff bar by bar, note by note, makes no aural sense! One simply cannot focus one's ears upon it because it itself is so out of focus.
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