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with friends like these
May. 7th, 2008 08:45 pmNorman Lebrecht is a curmudgeonly music critic who often winds up casting more egg on his own face than that of his targets.
I'm not sure if he does that much better when his intent is to praise. Take his recent column on Vaughan Williams. OK, got it, VW was a modest man (inviting the Churchillian retort "with much to be modest about"), that's why his socks didn't match and he put cats on his lap.
But is it true that "his few posthumous champions came from the political right"? I don't recall VW being politically co-opted the way Bruckner was (along with Wagner and even Beethoven) by the political right in Germany, and most of the really snarky remarks about VW - "the cowpat school of English music" - came while he yet lived, and were generated by cultural politics, not electoral.
Lebrecht says that of VW's symphonies, "the fourth is among the bleakest ever written, akin to Sibelius’s sixth." But VW's fourth is violent and aggressive, and Sibelius's sixth merely gnomic. Surely he means Sibelius's fourth and Vaughan Williams's sixth.
I'm not sure whether to trust the accuracy of Lebrecht's claim that the current VW symphony festival by the Philharmonia (good as their Beethoven was, I wish they'd brought some of that to San Francisco this week) is "only the second time the VW nine have ever been done complete." If so that's startling, because it means I caught the first time. That was in 1995, I think, when I saw posters all over London that the Bournemouth Symphony was doing a series. I was lucky enough to get to the concert with the Sea Symphony and the Sinfonia Antartica, two works I never expect to hear live at home. (I have attended the fourth, fifth, and sixth here, so he's not entirely neglected.) It was a memorable encounter with the work of the man I consider one of the 20th century's four or five greatest symphonists.
I'm not sure if he does that much better when his intent is to praise. Take his recent column on Vaughan Williams. OK, got it, VW was a modest man (inviting the Churchillian retort "with much to be modest about"), that's why his socks didn't match and he put cats on his lap.
But is it true that "his few posthumous champions came from the political right"? I don't recall VW being politically co-opted the way Bruckner was (along with Wagner and even Beethoven) by the political right in Germany, and most of the really snarky remarks about VW - "the cowpat school of English music" - came while he yet lived, and were generated by cultural politics, not electoral.
Lebrecht says that of VW's symphonies, "the fourth is among the bleakest ever written, akin to Sibelius’s sixth." But VW's fourth is violent and aggressive, and Sibelius's sixth merely gnomic. Surely he means Sibelius's fourth and Vaughan Williams's sixth.
I'm not sure whether to trust the accuracy of Lebrecht's claim that the current VW symphony festival by the Philharmonia (good as their Beethoven was, I wish they'd brought some of that to San Francisco this week) is "only the second time the VW nine have ever been done complete." If so that's startling, because it means I caught the first time. That was in 1995, I think, when I saw posters all over London that the Bournemouth Symphony was doing a series. I was lucky enough to get to the concert with the Sea Symphony and the Sinfonia Antartica, two works I never expect to hear live at home. (I have attended the fourth, fifth, and sixth here, so he's not entirely neglected.) It was a memorable encounter with the work of the man I consider one of the 20th century's four or five greatest symphonists.
