Sibelius - Symphonies 5 & 7

There's this idea that composers reflect the environments that surround them. Zemlinsky reflects the queasy, whipped cream-rich sickness of fin de siècle Vienna, Falla reflects the bright colours of the Mediterranean, and Sibelius reflects the cool purity of the snowy north.

Perhaps there's something in this, and perhaps it's just reductive, but it's been snowing here lately, and when I go out what I notice more than anything is the quiet. This must be partly because heavy snow is uncommon here and so when it does come things simply stop - roads, trains, industry, all fall silent (peculiarly, this break from life's monotony is usually portrayed as a bad thing). But the nights, too, are quieter than they were. Where before speech bounced off the pavement and scattered, now it hangs in front of your face, you hear it clear and close. Thoughts, too, stay with you, are undispersed. Missed chances, regrets, hope. Awful, it is, and beautiful.

And this has drawn me even closer to Sibelius' seventh symphony, a piece I was already virtually obsessed with. It begins with the simplest of gestures: a tap on the timpani and a scale, the notes of C major, one leading necessarily to the next, forward motion, overlapping figures as woodwinds slide over strings sliding over brass (everything overlaps here, including the tempi, four movements merging into one). It's all about the creation and release of tension - perhaps this is true of all fancy music to some extent, but here you really feel it moment-to-moment. That opening scale is interrupted by an unexpected chord which slowly, slowly resolves back towards C major, before taking another turn away from it... and so the piece goes on. One constant is a slow fanfare-like call (first heard on the trombone at 5:25 into the first track of the symphony on this recording) which recurs several times, always in C major.

Ultimately, it ends loudly, with slowly overlapping appoggiaturas - tension and release reduced to its simplest, and a satisfying reminder of that scale at the symphony's very beginning. But the most striking moment comes a few minutes earlier (at the beginning of the final track in this recording), when the strings are abandoned and left to swerve around each other and reconfigure space to make room for that horn call one last time. To me, this moment of coalescence is the climax of the piece, and the dynamic marking is mezzo forte. I don't know of another symphony where this is true. Pieces which fool you with false climaxes are common enough - the tension is increased again and again until the final outburst. But when the real high-point comes, it is almost always the loudest of all; here the real climax is not bigger, but stiller. All the tensions, the worry, the work, resolved for one moment of transcendent moderation.

As well as the seventh, this disc contains what is perhaps my favourite recording of the fifth symphony. Enough talk. Listen.

Beethoven - Symphony No. 9

I am not in love with Beethoven's ninth symphony. I find it very difficult to hold it all in my head at once and the last movement baffles me. The first three movements are of such scale and scope that Beethoven's decision to bring a choir into the finale is understandable - it adds weight and grandeur, helps to balance the piece. But once you've got that choir, it's hard to write a conventional rondo finale, so Beethoven repeats the solution of his third symphony and pens a loose set of variations. And of course this is Beethoven, so they are worked into a miniature four-movement symphony in their own right, with an expository allegro, a scherzo with jangling Janissary band, a slow movement, and a frantic finale. The ambition is great, but the strain seems to show, it can seem a little messy (the Grosse Fuge is messy, too, but there it's easier to accept the messiness as part of a deliberate scheme, especially when heard after the rest of the Op. 130 quartet; in the more formal shape of a symphony it looks odd). It's a popular piece, the fault is probably my own, but I end up experiencing it moment-by-moment, or at best movement-by-movement. Okay, this is how music goes, but it's nice to be able to stand back and see things in their entirety.

Perhaps all that just means that for me to like this symphony, it takes a special kind of performance. Here are two, each completely different in approach and effect. Furtwängler's recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is searing. It doesn't help me to see the big picture, but I'm not bothered about that when I'm busy dodging the lumps of molten iron its hurling at me in every bar - when you're running away from a lion you don't stop to admire the beauty of the savannah. Commentators turn to elemental or geological terms to describe it: it is seismic, it has the force of a tidal wave, it is volcanic. It was recorded live in Berlin in 1942 - this is troubling even if you take a charitable view of Furtwängler's much-discussed involvement with the Nazi Party. Some try to argue that the performance is somehow inherently anti-Nazi; the piece is a cry for freedom and universal brotherhood, and the performance has such a desperate urgency that such a reading may not be as fanciful as it seems. Anyway, the music is great.

Klemperer's live 1957 performance is at the opposite end of most scales. If the critical cliché for Furtwängler's performance is "volcanic", then for this it is "granitic". Here we're in more peaceful times, the lava has cooled. It isn't so furiously exciting, but it will last. The danger that Furtwängler feels in every bar is not so present here, but there is that wider view, standing back and looking at the hills, the trees, the smoke.

So here is Furtwängler (in pretty rough sound) and here is Klemperer (in very good sound). Never mind the piece, I love the recordings.

antonin dvorak | symphonies nos. 8 & 9

so speaks our friend in fanciness, docperkins:

Find hereby majestic renditions, in line with the grandiloquence of two representative pieces of the romantic repertoire. Grandiloquent implying positive and negative features that grandiloquence impinges upon art-forms, to which music is no exception. The orchestra is superb and Kubelik up to the crew skills. Along the same fruition highway (or you dared to imagine Dvorak would drop the highway concept on behalf of a ‘hand-made lane’?), our attention to conceptual detail is kindly invited out, on behalf of the quick-relief enjoyment provided by aptly crafted panache. The latter pays a heavy ransom to simplicity, but the latter is most of the times concealed, and when it turns up is always wearing a tux. (Nothing against musical simplicity and quick-relief trends in themselves, by the way.)

Antonín Dvorák, who went to USA in 1892 to teach at the National Conservatory, became a huge fan of so-called African-American spirituals, and nurtured the strongly appealing -- and impossible not to sympathise with -- agenda of sonic miscegenation. Professor Dvorak firmly believed that American music would only acquire a physiognomy of its own, and due relevance, if and when succeeded to methodically (as opposed to spontaneously, which is something to cheer for, given that ‘spontaneity’ in classical music leads to kitsch of the uninteresting type) infuse African-American material into European musical epistemes. Besides of the fact that at the end of the day the opposite occurred, as African-American composers assimilated European epistemes into blues and jazz, Professor Dvorák lack in form what he exceeded in potentially creative ideological content.

Furthermore, his “From The New World” largely shows that the non-western segments Dvorák, with utmost good intentions, correct intuition, and unintended patronising attitude, managed to insert into the symphony did not become organically articulated as components of the piece. At the most they were aural quotations, maybe ornaments transvestited of cultural sonic signposts. In this sense, one could excise these quotations and ornaments while the symphony would still exist and be on its feet after a couple of minor, minute cosmetic surgeries. This would never be conceivable in pieces where the real melting down of Western and non-Western sonic epistemes occur at the very structural level as an issue of form, and to unbelievable effect, as displayed in some of the works by, e.g., Feldman, Scelsi, Xenakis and Bartók.

Meanwhile, it appears that Dvorák’s Ninth, “From The New World”, will continue competing with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” as most played ‘classical tune’ (whatever this means) in supermarkets, department stores, waiting rooms, and also in my study, where this fantastic floppish cultural agenda turned into ‘fancy music’ amuses me and makes me wonder how nice it would be if all failed pompous modern cultural projects were all destined to become unmissable, classy blockbusters. hear

wolfgang amadeus mozart | symphonies 35-41

ah yes, that prancing king of the fancies — it was only a matter of time before he showed up here — mozart! on this dg double disc, his somewhat mysterious final symphonies are handled with apt primness by karl "mr. prim" bohm aprow the supremely capable BPO. you can just picture everyone in the orchestra pursing their lips and buttholes, taking every pain not to harm even one silky strand of hair on mozart's sweet cherubish head. does it need to be this way? that is, does this bizarre kind of conservatism (which adjusts the composition to emphasize its sense of solidity) truly behoove the material potential of the composition? i think in mozart's instance, perhaps so. you may say i'm wrong in the head (or just wrong), but my feeling is that bohm is taking mozart on his own terms. discussants of mozart's style regularly make use of the same cliches regarding his personality (i.e. his playfulness, his sensuality, his penchant for ribaldries) but for god's sake, if this isn't asexually chaste music, what the fuck is? am i not making it sound good? well allow me to try and turn this around here. like i said, i think this is a heightened mozart; a mozart of improved mozartianness. sure, i mean, what the fuck? mozart was an enlightenment man; his late symphonies are aesthetic machines of that philosophical movement. their passion is for the whirring of reason, not the pumping of blood — consider that they were most likely written for the enjoyment of free masons. enjoying them, for me, means (initially) disabling a lot of my regular listening apparatus — basically, the desires to internalize, to find the places in myself where each phrase registers best, and to savor — and respecting the music as more of an external process. then, in that regard, i can start to appreciate the poetics of mozart's tonal politics and thereby engage the above-mentioned apparatus on a secondary level. a not entirely uncondescending way of appreciating the man's music, perhaps, but question not whether such an appreciation voids solidarity with his sounds. and here i'd make a special note: if i refuse to give mozart too much credit for broadening the emotional range of classical music, i have no problem crediting him for giving it a greater capacity for individualism. of course, i'm sure bohm had wildly different intentions, but to me it sounds like he got all of that. hear (and hear).

note: for corrupted symphony 41, III files, hear