Unknown Scottish Romantic Music

Last week I attended performances of the modern Scottish theatre epic, The James Plays.  This week I'll be going to a performance of Shakespeare's famous (notorious?) "Scottish play", Macbeth.

Somehow, Scotland is in the air, and this seems like a good time to introduce a couple of Scottish composers and their magnificent orchestral works.

It's a curious fact that, although Scottish writers are known and admired widely, few people seem to be aware of other forms of artistic creation in Scotland.  And yet, Scotland has a centuries-long tradition of revering and respecting the arts, and has produced many fine painters, sculptors, authors, and composers.  In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, at the same time as there was a major renaissance in musical composition in England, a parallel musical boom was also under way in Scotland.  John Blackwood McEwen was one of the finest Scottish composers of that time.

The first work I want to bring to your attention is a set of three symphonic poems which McEwen called Border Ballads.  Although the name suggests singing, there is none.  Instead, we have a symphonic form that can be related to the piano Ballades of Chopin or Brahms: structures which make use of multiple themes, and which proceed in a fashion that suggests narrative without any detailed narrative programme being followed.

The three pieces were all composed between 1906 and 1908, although the ideas may have begun to form as early as 1900.  The style is conservative for the day, the music written in a post-Wagnerian Romantic vein.  And yet, it is unmistakably Scottish.  Perhaps a close parallel is found with the tone poems of Dvorak and Smetana which brought the rhythms and harmonies of Czech folk music into the musical mainstream.

The first of the three Ballads to be composed, Coronach, is an elaborate funeral ode, named after the dirges sung over the bodies of Celtic chieftains.  The opening theme is a quiet funeral march on the brasses, accompanied by timpani rolls.  Although there are louder eruptions from time to time, the music is predominantly quieter as befits its inspiration.  The funeral march is gripping and impressive, but the contrasting themes which follow are more meditative than interesting -- until the march quietly re-emerges and seizes attention once again.  A new march theme in major key then appears and lightens the tone of the music, building up until it ends the Ballad in a tone of majestic triumph.  

The second Ballad, and much the longest, The Demon Lover, is inspired by a Celtic legend of a married woman lured away by the demonic spirit of her former sailor lover.  But like the best symphonic poems of other traditions, this one does not take a narrative approach to the music.  McEwen preferred to construct a symphonic structure related to the legend by tone colour and mood rather than in form.  Sadly, the composer never managed to get this work performed.

It begins with swaying themes that suggest the sea.  More so than the other Ballads, the spirit of Tristan und Isolde hovers over this music, especially in the harmonic procedures, yet it isn't derivative.  A slow, mysterious theme based on a repeated four-note motif rising and falling pursues its way like a funeral march.  After it rises to a shattering climax, a new andante melody suggests passion and longing.  The sombre four-note motif recurs.  The music then bursts into the extended allegro section which comprises the second half of the work.  Here the surging waves of multiple climaxes create a melodramatic atmosphere amidst chromatic Tristan-esque harmonies.  The last and greatest climax is followed, not by a full-scale recapitulation, but by a diminuendo passage which winds its way down to silence.

The last and most musically inventive of these three tone poems is called Grey Galloway.  The title refers to the southwestern corner of Scotland, between Glasgow and Carlisle, a beautiful land of rolling hills and sea lochs, and yet a land which has seen much battle and bloodshed through the centuries.  The music opens with a march-like theme punctuated by brass chords, making almost Wagnerian use of the large brass section of the orchestra.  The dotted rhythm includes in its second bar a "Scotch snap", the rhythm of an eighth note followed by a dotted quarter.  There follows an extended tranquil section whose lyrical beauty brings to mind the rolling landscapes of the Galloway hills.

A skillful crescendo passage leads into a turbulent militaristic battle scene incorporating another march theme.  The effect is not unlike the battle music of Smetana's tone poem Sarka.  A contrasting quieter passage contains wailing woodwind effects not unlike the keening of the pipes.  Eventually the uproar of the battle bursts out again, leading into a final brass-heavy recall of the opening theme to round the work off.

In a later post I'll cover another important work by McEwen which doesn't really fit into my theme today because it is decidedly un-Scottish in mood.

From McEwen I want to turn next to Hamish MacCunn.  I've heard a couple of recordings of his music which held my attention briefly.  But the first piece of his which I ever encountered is one of those remarkable works which is so ingrained in my mind that I can quite easily find myself humming it over when I haven't listened to a recording for months on end.  I'm humming it right now.

MacCunn's concert overture, Land of the Mountain and the Flood, declares itself Scottish by virtue of the title.  It's a line from a once-famous poem about Scotland by Sir Walter Scott, a poem I recall memorizing when I was in elementary school.

The music opens with a simple melodic idea which, in its short two-bar span, has already incorporated the characteristic "Scotch snap" rhythm.  This little melodic idea pervades much of the overture.  After a few introductory pages, a long singing tune is heard which forms the first main theme of the overture.  After some development, the opening two-bar motif returns, but in a more emphatic form which soon takes on a martial character.  With flourishes from the brasses and winds it rises to the overture's one and only really loud climax.  After that dies away, the singing melody returns and gradually leads to a joyful conclusion with brass fanfares.  It's not great, heaven-storming music, but it's full of life and jovial energy, and the themes -- as I already mentioned -- are nothing if not memorable.

None of this music incorporates such "Scottish" elements as bagpipes, folk tunes, or dance music, yet the Scottish feeling is somehow unmistakable in each of these works.  Taken purely as music, they are all definitely deserving of much more attention than they have received up until now.  

The Sweet Sounds of Strings

I have spoken once or twice before about the special affinity which so many British composers have found with the string instruments of the orchestra.  Indeed, there's not just an affinity but an uncommon level of skill in handling the strings, and a really uncommon attention to writing works for the string orchestra alone -- something that few other post-Baroque composers have done more than once or twice.

The three examples in today's post were all written in a short period of time spanning the dawn of the twentieth century, but two of them hark back to an earlier time -- a time when suites of dances were a favoured means of musical expression in all the major countries of Europe.  

I've certainly discussed before this the music of Sir Hubert Parry, an English composer who has for too long been undervalued.  If nothing else, consider the level of skill and polish in Lady Radnor's Suite, a collection of six movements for string orchestra written in 1895 and published in 1902.  The model is the Baroque dance suite.  The music throughout is melodious, harmonious -- and deceptively simple in sound.

Don't be fooled by the apparently lightweight nature of this work!  Parry was unconventional by nature, and his musical style was an amalgam of many influences.  Loudest of all, though, was his own unmistakable voice.  In the first movement of Lady Radnor's Suite, the melody begins with a falling major fourth, and then continues on into a series of running passages, a most typical Baroque procedure.  But Parry's melody never turns the way you think it's going to, and the apparent repeats of the opening melody -- and of the gentler second theme -- are definitely not literal repetitions but new streams of melody originating with the same figures.  There are also some quirky modulations.  And yet the entire movement arrives at its end with what seems to be astronomical punctuality.

It's obvious to me that this is neither burlesque nor clumsiness but a definitely original conception clothed in 18th-century period dress.  I have the same feeling all the way through the six movements of the Suite -- the gentler second movement, the slow minuet in third place, the solemn processional of the fourth movement, the lively bourree fifth movement, and the fast jig of the finale.

Around fifteen years after Parry composed Lady Radnor's Suite, Frank Bridge produced a Suite for String Orchestra.  This is an excellent example to highlight my thesis about English composers and string music.  Bridge's set of four movements have no outward theme, no connection to musical history.  They are music, pure and simple.  Well, pure -- in the sense of being music with no outward connections.  Simple, not so.  This is melodious music, conservative by the standards of the day, but it's not simplistic.  The second movement in particular has some intriguing rhythmic play and some unconventional modulations, and unexpectedly vanishes into thin air just at the point where Bridge seems to be introducing a second theme.  The third movement, a sombre nocturne, is also more harmonically adventurous than its fellows.  The fourth movement has an upbeat rhythmic character which caps the work with a lively, but not extravagant finale.

From Parry and Bridge, we turn to the music of Philip Heseltine, better known by the compositional pseudonym Peter Warlock (he adopted this name because of his fascination with the occult).  He spent a number of years editing early music for performance, and in the process of that work discovered a manual of Renaissance dancing, Orchesographie, by Thoinot Arbeau (the name is an anagram of the real name of the author).  This manual includes dialogues about dance styles, techniques, and steps between Arbeau and another speaker named Capriol.

From this volume Warlock extracted six dance tunes and worked them into a full-scale harmonized setting, which he entitled Capriol Suite.  He placed the dances in a sequence which nicely contrasts the style of music from one piece to the next.  Unlike the typical Baroque practice of writing contrasting pairs of tunes, each dance here consists of one melody only.  Since the complete suite only takes 10-12 minutes to perform, the six dances are undoubted miniatures.  The work exists in three different versions, for piano 4-hands, for strings, and for full orchestra, all arranged by Warlock.

Since the Arbeau volume provides only a melody for each dance, Warlock's approach to arranging them was all his own, and is particularly intriguing.  Although he harmonized the dances primarily in Renaissance terms, he had no hesitation in peppering the score with a fair number of discordant added notes and chords.  These undoubtedly add considerable spice to the harmony.  In the 4-hands version the discords are so abrasive that they sound as if the pianists are making mistakes!  But in the string version, the smoother sound of the instruments reduces awareness of the discordant intrusions, and they simply add extra dimension and depth to the music without necessarily shocking the hearer.

It's not surprising, then, that the charm of the melodies and the skill of the string writing have made this version of the Capriol Suite the most often heard and recorded of these three works.  That still doesn't make it a frequent entry in concert programmes anywhere outside of England.  However, with the more recent revival of older music, the original Arbeau tunes have cropped up in a wide variety of recordings of one sort or another -- and fans of early music will undoubtedly recognize at least some of Warlock's source material when they turn to this early 20th-century piece of pseudo-antiquarian music in a more modern harmonic idiom.

A Sonata For The Ages

In all the broad range of the piano repertoire, there are few compositions more fiendish and technically daunting than the works of Charles-Valentin Alkan -- unless they are other works by Alkan.  Really, it's unnecessary to look any further than the technical demands of his work to realize why Alkan's music has been studiously avoided by almost all pianists.

Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) moved in the same circles as his close personal friend, Chopin, and Liszt -- among others -- and their respect and admiration for him as a composer and as a pianist is well documented.  The friendship with Chopin is easy to understand.  Despite their totally different approaches to composition, both men were pianists exclusively and composers for the piano almost exclusively.

In recent years, it has become possible to appreciate the scope of Alkan's art through the efforts of such artists as Ronald Smith, Raymond Lewenthal, and Marc-Andre Hamelin.

One of the first great works of Alkan's maturity was his Grande Sonate for the piano, subtitled Les Quatres Ages, Op. 33, which he completed in the 1840s.

I first made the acquaintance of this remarkable piece in Ronald Smith's pioneering EMI recording, now about half a century old.  The recording I pulled out the other day, which triggered this post, was Hamelin's 1994 Hyperion recording.

Although I have listened to some of Alkan's other music, it often strikes me as being virtuosity devoid of purpose.  But that is not true of this sonata.  Indeed, I think Alkan here succeeded even more triumphantly than either Chopin or Liszt in reorganizing the piano sonata along lines that were entirely unique and entirely his own.

The key word is "reorganizing".  Liszt's B minor sonata, admirable as it is, doesn't entirely succeed in convincing me that there is a structure under all the thematic transformations.  No such charge can be levelled at this extraordinary piece.  Its unique character begins with its unusual key relationships and by no means stops at the fact that the four movements are arranged in an order such that each one is slower than its predecessor, a process which I can't recall ever encountering in any other work.

The title gives the clue to the composer's intentions.  This sonata is a succession of musical impressions, firmly controlled by a classical sense of structure, of a man's life in four decades: his twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

The first movement, the young man in his twenties, was aptly described by Smith as "a whirlwind of a scherzo".  The high-energy first theme is beset by numerous silent beats and cross-rhythms.  It goes swiftly through a main melody and a succeeding counter-melody.  There then follows a trio section of a completely contrasting, march-like tone, before the two main themes of the scherzo return in a free recapitulation.  Although the movement begins in D major it ends in B major.

The second movement, the thirties, is the longest and also the most technically challenging.  It begins in the unusual and disturbing key of D sharp minor.   Subtitled "Quasi-Faust", it portrays the hero in a series of themes which -- like those in the first movement of Liszt's Faust-Symphonie, depict the searching, inquisitive, intellectual aspects of the character.  The first theme up is again of a march-like cut, and launches a lengthy work in classical sonata form.  This ferocious movement eventually arises to a cadence which might be expected to launch a free cadenza in the manner of a concerto.  Instead, after a silent pause, we hear the quiet beginnings of a fugue which soon grows and grows to dominate the entire keyboard -- expanding as it goes until there are no less than eleven separate lines or "voices" all sounding together.  The movement ends in F sharp major.

The third movement, the forties, is an idyll of happy home life in G major.  Here Alkan foreshadows the later depictions of Richard Strauss in his Ein Heldenleben and Symphonia domestica.  The music opens with a long singing melody, and later we hear a swifter lyrical idea representing the children which sounds positively Chopinesque.  Near the end, there is a moment of prayer illustrated by a hymn-like chordal theme which then proceeds in beautiful counterpoint with the "Chopin" melody.

The final movement in G sharp major is slow, dark, and full of despair.  Entitled "Prometheus enchained", it represents the fear of aging and death with long, slow dragging bass scales and emphatic chords which as quickly lose steam and fade away again.  The end is the longest scale of all, rising with slow but dogged determination to a concluding cadence of staccato chords with pauses between them, then a final sustained chord, quiet and low down on the keyboard.  Here, it is the finale of Tchaikovsky's last symphony which is definitely foreshadowed.

Right from the first time I heard this piece, I was captivated by the energy and sense of forward motion that infuses all the music.  The speeds may get slower and slower as the sonata progresses, yet there is never a feeling that the composer has run out of ideas, or is just doodling along to the next spectacular effect.  Although the ordering of the movements, and the key sequence, are wildly unconventional, the structural backbone underlying the work keeps both pianist and listener firmly on course right from first to last.  And, again in contrast to Liszt's sonata, it's unnecessary to listen to Les quatres ages more than once or twice before its structure becomes readily apparent.

Although there are now several recordings of Alkan's sonata available (and quite a few recordings of his other works), I would definitely recommend Hamelin's magisterial account, still available as a download from the Hyperion records website.