We have all been missing, or are about to miss our concerts, and this week it is the turn of the Royal Choral Society.  Sadly, for only the third time in 144 years, we are unable to perform our annual Royal Albert Hall Good Friday ‘Messiah, the previous two missed occasions being due to wartime bombing.  Please go to our RCS website and join in with our virtual performance of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ on Friday afternoon.

Thought for the Week
I would also like to give a special mention and word of admiration and appreciation to our RCS Patron, Her Majesty the Queen (UK!), following her heartfelt television broadcast on Sunday.  She ended with the words ‘We’ll meet again’, the title of the wartime song sung by Vera Lynn.  The Queen really spoke well (for all of us in the UK and around the world) and it’s worth listening to.
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Most of what I write each week is spontaneous, and based on personal reflections rather than academic analysis.  I’m sure how I write will vary according to the music chosen.  I have had a bee in my bonnet about musical perception for much of my life since student days, and what constitutes ‘great’ music.  I will come back to that thought possibly in a future week.

My understanding based on what I saw around me as a student was of being, if not surrounded, then certainly partially immersed in the company of anarchists and fundamentalists.  Looking back, I suppose it was rather exciting.  The ‘anarchists’ ran King’s College, Cambridge, and came within one vote in the 1968 year of ‘revolution’, of abolishing King’s College Choir, closing down King’s Chapel and turning it into a library.  The ‘fundamentalists’ were the avant-garde composers – without doubt highly intellectual and accomplished musicians who generally wrote music which people ‘didn’t like’.   (We once put together an item in a student concert which took the mickey with some pre-recorded sounds integrated into some creative squeaks and other live noises – prepared piano etc.  Pre-recorded sounds included a flushing toilet – not everyone was laughing….).  King’s was probably the most left-wing and anarchistic college in Cambridge at the time.  Someone foolishly invited members of the right-wing junta/dictatorship of Greek colonels to a gathering in Cambridge around this time.  Members of King’s and others went to jail for burning down the hotel where they gathered (not while they were in there!).  I rarely saw the student living in the room next to me – he lived in a permanent cloud of marijuana. 

I recall a general feeling in some of my contemporaries that composers such as Prokofiev and Britten were somehow 2nd class because they weren’t as avant-garde as Stockhausen, Varèse, Schönberg etc., - because some of their music sounded more traditional than that of the modernists.  Prokofiev was also seen (wrongly and naively) as an apologist for Stalin, a compromiser and therefore not quite genuine.   They died on the same day in 1953.  Much that we suspected we shouldn’t like, even if secretly we did, was referred to cheaply as ‘Pseud’, and one had to be wary about giving an opinion on any subject.  Somehow Rachmaninoff, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss were not part of the argument because they were unashamedly Romantic, pursuing their writing in a largely 19th century language.  I repeat, all these composers, including the modernists, were of a very high intellectual calibre, but Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and many of their contemporaries had their own language which they single-mindedly pursued.  One of their main weapons was that they could compose to include contemporary discordant harmonies, and they succeeded, like all great composers, in being more than just clever; they could ‘move’ people. 

Music has always evolved as composers sought new ways by which to communicate, and 20th century saw much experimental writing. The relative simplicity of Minimalism was in part a reaction.  Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, John Adams and others are exponents of this, and history will show in the future whether this Minimalism has been a trend like Impressionism, or something more progressive.  I’m sure it will still be performed in 100 years, unlike a lot of other music of our time.  Benjamin Britten and Prokofiev will also be there.  One must be careful though, because a huge amount of music from earlier centuries has also been discarded.  I conducted a ‘world premiere’ of a violin concerto a year or two ago.  It was by Stanford (1852-1924)….!  You could go online and look up the catalogue of Stanford’s music – it’s mind-boggling.

With that wayward introduction I move on to my choice for this week, and it is unashamedly ‘easy listening’ which I think many of you will know, but just in case you don’t…

Rachmaninoff Symphony No.2
This music is not at all sparse.  It’s simply ravishing all the way through - a long warm bath in sheer beauty.  Even Donald Trump would say ‘it’s a beautiful thing, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing….of course Rachmaninoffe was a good friend of mine, a very good friend of mine and we got on very well - a wonderful American.  I could do what he did’.  

Many of us know, and have sung, Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (Vespers), and his orchestral music seems as if it comes from another composer.  Like most great composers, yes most, he was a phenomenal pianist and I wonder if some people are nervous of his orchestral music (I know one quite famous conductor) because it is too embarrassingly sumptuous.   The same with Puccini, but take a step back because their compositional technique is up there with the greats.  If you prefer chamber music or 16th century Renaissance choral music – all very good, but that takes nothing away from Rachmaninoff.  All his orchestral music is Romantic and far removed from the likes of Stravinsky. Somehow it retains a sense of Russianness, as with Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin etc.  The suffering of Russia over the centuries seems to call out in this music. 

The second half of the 19th century witnessed a surge in “nationalism” in music of many, mainly European, countries.  No ugly political connotations here (not quite….), but rather a wish to rediscover ‘roots’ through the folk music of the various regions, and some desire not just to do the same as the mainstream Austro-German composers.  Some Russian composers were part-time and their composition techniques were relatively limited (Balakirev, Cui etc.).  It was probably inevitable that this nationalism would become integrated with the organically-growing German style – the gradual evolution of classical harmony towards ‘atonal’ music without an identifiable key.  Tchaikovsky was regarded as too ‘western’ for some who wanted a rather more purist ‘Russian’ style, and Rachmaninoff would also have been in that category.  But somewhere in both of them there lurks a Russianness going back to the 19th century of the likes of ‘The Five’ - Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Balakirev and Cui, a feel for something loosely related to Russian folk-music.  This ‘feel’ continued with Rachmaninoff in the 20th century and in the more modern style of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.  Rachmaninoff’s 2nd symphony, at least to my ears, is nostalgic, melancholy (he fled the revolutions of both 1905 and 1917 in Russia) and, in the case of his 2nd symphony, a seemingly unending and longing (for his homeland) rhapsody.

I am not going to break the work down into separate movements here; they all possess the same luxuriant quality whether fast or slow, and the melody flows out in abundance, touchingly harmonised in a flowing and intricate accompaniment by the strings and full orchestra.  Many of you have sung Rachmaninoff ‘The Bells’, and suffered on the way (sorry, but not really), but I hope you never forget the final two minutes of that great work played by the orchestra.  The 2nd symphony is like that all the way through!

I can’t recommend a particular recording because I don’t really know them.  I happen to have a CD of Kurt Sanderling conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1989 which is outstanding to my ears.

This YouTube video looked rather good and the conductor definitely knows what he is doing!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvuitFzDxDg

Enjoy it!  Something less indulgent next week.  I hope you are somehow keeping your spirits up. 

All my best wishes,
Richard