Malcolm Arnold - Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8

Malcolm ARNOLD (1921-2006)

Symphony No. 7 (1973)

Symphony No. 8 (1978)

National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland

Andrew Penny

rec 21-22 Feb 2000, National Concert Hall, Dublin, Ireland (in presence of composer)

Approach this "approachable" music with caution - Arnold's Seventh Symphony merits an "18" certificate with additional warnings for the faint-hearted! Rounding off their highly recommendable complete set of the Arnold symphonies, Andrew Penny and the NSO of Ireland may well have saved the best until last. Electrifying music given highly charged performances - buy it, and be damned!

Naxos are the first company to have completed the Arnold symphony cycle. It has been a long and slow process starting with that most forbidding of works - the Ninth Symphony back in the mid 1990s. The wait has been well worthwhile. Naxos are not the first to couple these two symphonies; that honour went to Vernon Handley on Conifer CDCF177 

Apart from the pedestrian issues of numerical sequence the coupling of the two works has other strengths; they contrast well. The Seventh is not an easy conquest; at least not when you compare the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth. The Eighth is just as raw but far more approachable. Amid the angst it still deploys turns of phrase and long unblushing tunes you might easily associate with the English Dances and the Cornish Dances. The years he spent in Ireland (1972-77) are also logged in these two symphonies.

The Seventh is dedicated to his children (Katherine, Robert and Edward). It was completed at the home of his friend William Walton on the island of Ischia. Arnold had helped considerably in realising Walton's ill-omened score for The Battle of Britain a couple of years previously. The symphony was a New Philharmonia commission which Arnold conducted with them at London's Royal Festival Hall on 5 May 1974. The laggardly first broadcast performance came when the BBCSO was conducted by the composer on 16 March 1977. Since then it has been conducted by Handley, Groves, Penny, Hickox and Downes.

It is typical of Arnold that, in the first movement, he uses a macabre fractured ragtime (8.20) as well as making grim sport with the tattered wraiths of his own more popular works like the Concerto for Two Pianos Tree Hands (Phyllis and Cyril). This is Arnold playing the evil clown-master. Bernstein's brilliance is also suggested and it is a wonder that 'Lenny' did not take an interest in the symphonies. Arnold is at core more of a musical soul-mate to Bernstein than Schuman ever was. Bernstein and Arnold also share Mahlerian tastes. At 12.22 (I) a great sliding tune is developed with an eye to lichen-bedecked Hollywood studios. This is a symphony with the character of night and of daylight remembered from vantage point of night: a psychological Guernica progressing towards a grim finality

The late-Mahlerian second movement drifts like someone's 'Dark Night of the Soul' - the aural equivalent of a Francis Bacon picture. A Bachian chorale variant (9.40) familiar from the first movement reappears here (as it also does in the finale at 2.33) amid tom-tom pattering. The music rises to the dull clang of cowbells at 12.01. A gaunt trombone call also rears up which annotator Richard Whitehouse links with the role of the same instrument in Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony.

After two meaty movements (16.23 and 13.58) the Allegro is only 7.43. Happy - well, not directly. This is happiness viewed through smoked glass from the experience of disillusion. The cowbell returns as a harbinger of dissolution in all three movements. Irish bodhran and whistles and the Celtic prettification of the harp make a frank appearance (like a lucid interlude amid a continuum of disturbing visions). Could there, I wonder, have been greater body to the Irish strings. Again those terminal bells (negation not valediction) ring out dully - speaking of decay.

I recall listening to the broadcast premiere of the Seventh on the BBC with a friend and finding it unforthcoming. Expectations were high - elevated by the Fifth Symphony (a master work - probably the masterwork - of the Cornish years) then recently recorded for EMI by the composer. It remains a tough proposition but worthy of persistence.

After the Seventh, the Eighth is almost a relief though no soft touch emotionally speaking. In the first movement (5.30) the business in hand is advanced through a Sankey-style marching hymn which drifts into sharp focus and out into blur amid cordite and tears. In this his film music meets the talismanic English and Cornish dances. In the andantino a tender film-style tune floats freely. Note the lovely oboe phrasing at 0.55 and the bassoon's sad legato at 3.53. The theme is put through many colouristic transformations. A dance-style Vivace forms the core of the finale. This is a very moving symphony which is certain to make a direct and responsive impact.

The Eighth was commissioned by Rustam M Kermani Foundation and was premiered by the Kermani-supported Albany SO conducted by Julius Hegyi on 5 May 1979. Worth noting that Kermani's foresight and acumen also resulted in commissions of the Rubbra Sinfonietta and several George Lloyd symphonies The scorching first UK performance of Arnold 8 was given by the then BBC Northern SO conducted by Charles Groves on 2 October 1981. The First London performance came on 26 November 1982 when the Young Musicians SO were conducted by James Blair (whatever happened to him? He broadcast some exciting repertoire for the BBC in the 1980s - Havergal Brian Violin Concerto, Arnell's Lord Byron and Rawsthorne's Symphonic Studies - and then disappeared from view).

The Naxos recording shows no sign of budget cutting corners. It opts for a slightly closer microphone placement than the Conifer and we can rejoice in the intimate flurries of vibrant instrumental colour.

This CD is a more than worthy peroration to the Naxos series. Who knows … perhaps Naxos will next be issuing all nine as a boxed set. I would place this cycle very high indeed - only one half step down from my all time preference (regrettably unavailable) the Conifer cycle conducted by Vernon Handley.

Rob Barnett