When, as a young boy, I first discovered Malcolm
Arnold, it was through the composer’s own recording of the Fifth
Symphony - with the Peterloo Overture and Cornish Dances
- on EMI. At that time there was precious little Arnold in the catalogue. Even the symphonies were not full represented,
although the last two were yet to be written at this time and
the Seventh was still wet on the page. I managed to get the
composer’s own version of the First Symphony with the Bournemouth
Symphony Orchestra as well as Sir Charles Groves’s beautiful
recording of the Second but never managed to get my hands on
Malcolm Arnold’s 1959 recording of the Third on the hard-to-find
Everest label. During the last 20 years or so people’s attitude
to Arnold has changed enormously.
There was for a very long time an unhealthy snobbery working
against Malcolm Arnold and his music. He was unfortunate enough
to be a composer writing melodic works in traditional forms
at a time - the 1950s and 1960s - when it was considered that
being ‘modern’ for its own sake was the way forward. We hear
very little of those ‘modern’ works nowadays but now we have
three complete sets of Arnold’s symphonies to enjoy.
Vernon Handley forged the way with his pioneering
set for Conifer in the 1990s – his recordings of the Seventh,
Eighth and Ninth Symphonies all being world premičres. I was
fortunate to hear the Ninth come to life during my time working
at the now-defunct National Centre for Orchestral Studies in
London. I still have my old diaries
from that time and, on 14 March 1988, Sir Charles Groves came to Greenwich Borough
Hall – the Orchestra’s home – to conduct what was the first
(private) performance of this strange new symphony. The BBC
had originally commissioned the Ninth Symphony from Arnold for a 1985 premičre in
Manchester. However, mental breakdown
and other ill-health delayed the writing of the piece and it
was not completed until September 1986, by which time a change
of management at the BBC prevented the chance any performance
being realised at that time. Even the intended conductor of
the premičre of the Ninth was more than a little daunted by
the unexpected new path the musical language took and declined
to conduct it. Charles Groves took up the challenge and finally
gave the public premičre of the Ninth Symphony on 20
January 1992
with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. It is a shame that Groves’s death later that year thwarted any hopes there
might have been of his recording the symphony he had so loyally
championed.
I was not convinced by the Ninth in 1988 and, although
my scepticism has diminished somewhat, I believe that too many
people have read too much into its stark, spare textures and
the predominantly two-part writing. Arnold’s muse had more or less
deserted him and his ill-health had left him a shadow of his
former self. The Ninth is fortunate in having three excellent
recordings that play to its strengths and minimally reveal its
weaknesses. One of the principal problems with the Ninth is
its imbalance. The long, elegiac and sparse finale lasts as
long as the first three movements put together but I have never
been convinced that its material justifies this. The bulk of
the long duration of this movement is due to repetitions of
its purely scalic passages. The final D major resolution has
always sounded weak and somewhat forced to me. The other three
movements again rely too much on repetition and two-part textures.
This is taken to the extreme in the second movement where a
single theme is repeated no fewer than sixteen times, a far
cry from Percy Grainger’s ingenious Green Bushes – now,
that’s how to get away with multiple repetitions! The nearest
thing we get to the old Malcolm Arnold is the Giubiloso
third movement. As Andrew Penny says in the interview after
the performance of the Ninth Symphony, trying to squeeze a few
words out of the almost uninterviewable Arnold, it’s just like a good,
old-fashioned Malcolm Arnold scherzo.
So, what of the other symphonies? The Ninth apart,
I think it one of the most impressive series of symphonies written
by a British composer. People that got to know Arnold primarily through his film music will be surprised
– even shocked – by the drama and violence in some of these
works. From the outset of the series, the First Symphony turns
up the dramatic heat straightaway. Here is music of passion,
a fair amount of pain and full of the big gesture. These trademarks
will be found, to a greater or lesser extent, through the next
seven symphonies. The First follows a three-movement pattern
shared with the Third, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.
The Second Symphony is much more relaxed in mood, although the
second movement is one of those slightly menacing, shadowy movements
where one feels there could be something unpleasant lurking
around the corner. I have always found the slow movement of
the Second Symphony the most Mahlerian of Arnold’s symphonic
utterances. The performance here lacks something of the nobility
of Sir Charles Groves’s EMI recording or Hickox’s quite funereal
version on Chandos. The beginning of the finale could have been
lifted from one of the sets of dances or one of Arnold’s film scores. But, as
so often, there is menace in the background which continues
to cast a shadow over the proceedings.
The performances I know of the Third Symphony do
not vary a great deal and Andrew Penny and the National Symphony
Orchestra of Ireland give a magnificent performance here. One
of the highlights of this Naxos series is, however, the
outstanding performance of Arnold’s most superficially ‘populist’ symphony, the Fourth. In the
days before the BBC made Arnold an outcast, they commissioned this work from him in 1960.
His use of West Indian percussion and rhythms came in the light
of the Notting Hill race riots in London he had witnessed in 1958.
Arnold wanted to do his bit in
representing racial and cultural integration. I never warmed
to Arnold’s own recording of the
Fourth on Lyrita. It always sounded to me as if everyone had
fallen into a vat of treacle, so slow and ponderous was the
performance. Although on the surface the first movement appears
very lyrical and light-hearted, the menace under the surface
has never been more persuasively conveyed than in this Naxos recording. The scherzo
is as gossamer and eerie as you could wish and the slow movement
beautifully and sensitively done. The troubled and troubling
finale hurtles along, with the explosion into the grotesque
fairground music at 4:55 hair-raisingly done. A winner!
The Fifth is frequently hailed as Arnold’s symphonic masterwork.
I’m not sure I would argue with that judgement. It is perhaps
the most well-balanced musically and most cogent of the nine.
Growing up as I did with Arnold’s 1972 recording with
the CBSO, I tend, whether consciously or not, to compare other
versions to that. When I got to know Vernon Handley’s 1995 Conifer
recording I heard new things in this symphony. Andrew Penny’s
approach to the fifth is a lot more relaxed than Handley’s.
This is most tellingly felt in the first movement – perhaps
a little too slow and laid back in the Naxos version. The last two movements also seem to lack
that last edge of urgency and I suspect that, in the end, Andrew
Penny’s view of this symphony is simply different from mine.
In the six years between the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Arnold assimilated influences from jazz and pop music.
The jazzy rhythms in the first movement afford Arnold a freer rein in the melodic writing, while
looking back the Fifth symphony at the same time … to my ears,
at least. The Sixth also provides a glimpse into the tormented
musical world that would dominate his next two symphonies.
Dedicated to Arnold’s three children, the movements of the Seventh
Symphony are entitled ‘Katherine’, ‘Robert’ and ‘Edward’. The
Symphony contains some of the most relentlessly troubled and
violent music Arnold ever wrote and this is
no intimate portrait of cosy family life. For me this performance
yields in sheer raw power to Handley’s scarily relentless account.
I have not heard Rumon Gamba’s version, alas. It sounds to me
that Andrew Penny is underplaying the first movement, perhaps
not quite believing the degree of ferocity Arnold injected into the score.
This having been said, the climactic cow bell, directed to be
played as hard as is possible, is wonderfully and effectively
clangourous. The second two movements fare much better, as does
the slightly less traumatic Eighth Symphony. The sudden changes
of mood in the Eighth are very persuasively done by Andrew Penny
and his excellent Dublin orchestra.
These performances were all ‘recorded in the presence
of the composer’ and so any details of the performances about
which I have expressed doubts were, presumably, the results
of collaboration between composer and conductor and so we go
back to that old chestnut of taste. The Naxos recordings are all more
closely balanced than Handley or Hickox. While this can sometimes
reveal a little more of the detail of Arnold’s meticulous orchestration, I also found the recordings slightly
‘muddy’ in sound and this, I am sure, contributed to my impression
of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony. This is not to
say that the recordings are in most ways less than excellent,
just that I would have appreciated a little more ambience in
the sound. Again, a matter of taste.
There is some delectable playing throughout this
series by the National Orchestra of Ireland – with some especially
sensitive woodwind playing. As has been suggested in previous
reviews, the strings do not always have the sheer weight of
some other orchestras but one is hardly ever conscious of this.
This latest repackaging is a little puzzling to
me. The five CDs comprising this set were, of course, all issued
individually (the Ninth being the first) and then, in 2002,
in a white slipcase. This set is exactly the same, except with
a newly designed slipcase which acknowledges Arnold’s death in 2006 – something
that the CDs ignore, there having been no revision of the issues
since their first release. The CDs even still bear their original
catalogue numbers. That having been said, this is an excellent
survey of the Malcolm Arnold symphonies from a conductor obviously
very much in tune with the music and its messages. However,
I think a trick was missed here to add perhaps another CD to
include the early Symphony for Strings and the late Symphony
for Brass, therefore presenting a truly complete survey of the
symphonies, as the repackaged Vernon Handley Conifer series,
now on Decca, has done. The repackaged Handley set is around
the same price as these Naxos CDs and so this issue has some
fierce direct competition. This is, however, the only set with
the continuity of one orchestra and one conductor throughout
the series. If you are like me, you will have been unable to
choose and will, at these bargain prices, decide to have both.
Derek Warby
see also Review
by Brian Wilson
National Symphony
Orchestra of Ireland/Andrew Penny 
