Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
Mon, Mar 21 2011, 11:12AM
Whatever you may think of Holmboe, you can´t call him a slacker. He wrote about four hundred works, of which I´ve heard precisely 29, all symphonies, and string quartets. He started writing symphonies very early, the first sounds more like a dance suite than anything else, and to me seems to show a young composer rather tentatively and academically trying to work out a symphonic argument and absorb influences around him.
The Second and Third are much bolder, if not exactly memorable utterances. I don´t like saying anything bad about the Fourth, dedicated as it was to the memory of his younger brother, who lost his life to the Nazis, but the first movement reminds me of Carmina Burana, and as this is the most hideous piece of music I know, anything that calls it to mind has a hard job endearing itself to my ears. Reading the text that comes with it, written by the composer, doesn´t do anything to change my opinion. Symphonies 5 and 6 are increasingly better written and more rewarding. The Sixth is the most Nielsenesque of the lot, could those bassoons be anyone else?
Holmboe had all these symphonies under his belt, before he attempted a string quartet, and the experience he had gained clearly shows. From the strident opening viola solo to the last C major the First string quartet is an amazingly confident and original work for a first salvo in this form. The opening of the third movement has some of the most glorious harmonies I´ve ever heard. He must have been in a rich vein of inspiration at this time, because very soon after he wrote his Seventh symphony, one of his masterpieces in my book.
The quartets owe there strongest debt to Bartok. People say Shostakovich too, but these were mostly contemporaneous, and I don´t know how well Shostakovich´s quartets were known in the 40´s and 50´s, not very I would guess. Although they are not all equally compelling, I don´t find a dud among them, and none are less than a satisfying listen. I haven´t heard the last 5, or 6 if you include the one finished by Norgard(don´t know how to write the correct letter on this keyboard, sorry).
It seems to be a case of odd numbers with Holmboe. His greatest symphonies for me are his 7th, 9th and 11th, and of the string quartets I find the 1st and 5th wonderful.
I have never heard anything else he wrote, and am curious to know if I am missing out, so over to you gents and ladies.
Tue, Mar 22 2011, 10:36AM
#2
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
Thanks Tagalie, for a very considered response. It´s one of the fascinatingly eternal mysteries of music, how two people can listen to the same piece of music, and form widely differing opinions about it. Does it say more about the differences in the listeners, or the music itself or both. I imagine it´s the first, as the same person can have very different opinions about the same piece, depending on various personal factors, time of life, mood, what you have or haven´t heard before. You´ve clearly listened to a lot more Holmboe than me, and I would imagine over a longer timespan, and thus have digested it more. I say all this because the 5th Symphony kind of passed me by, whereas the 9th blew me away from the start. I find its mix of moods wonderful, and that first Intermezzo, wow, sounds from another world. I think it would be fascinating to have other recordings of the symphonies.
One thing I love about Holmboe, which I think he had from the start, is his transparency in orchestration, how there seems to be space around all the instruments that allows the individual voices to be heard, and allows you to follow clearly the threads in a symphonic argument. This is something very different from Simpson for me for whom the orchestra seems to move in unison.
I agree about the CD notes. I was reading some for the quartets, and the writer started going on about "sound carpets" at which point I stopped reading, and started listening. Right I´m off to give that 5th Symphony another spin.
Tue, Mar 22 2011, 6:45PM
#3
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
Last week I listened to non stop Holmboe, and I think maybe I had too much of a good thing, in that listening to so much consistently good music I didn´t differentiate between works sufficiently. I cleansed my listening palate over the weekend and today listened to the 5th Symphony in isolation, and the most striking thing is the gulf in compositional ability and originality between it and the 4th Symphony, even moreso when you consider there were only three years between them. The fact that the three years in question, 1941-1944, were not your average run of the mill years may have something to do with it.
As much as I like the quartets, I´ve come to the conclusion that the best of the symphonies are better than the best of the quartets, but I find the latter more consistent overall.
So given that you and others, myself included, rate Holmboe so highly, why is he never programmed in concerts, or even on radio?
Tue, Mar 22 2011, 7:14PM
#4
RE:Vagn Holmboe
It´s one of the fascinatingly eternal mysteries of music, how two people can listen to the same piece of music, and form widely differing opinions about it. Does it say more about the differences in the listeners, or the music itself or both. I imagine it´s the first, as the same person can have very different opinions about the same piece, depending on various personal factors, time of life, mood, what you have or haven´t heard before.
I think it would be fascinating to have other recordings of the symphonies.
One thing I love about Holmboe, which I think he had from the start, is his transparency in orchestration
I agree about the CD notes. I was reading some for the quartets, and the writer started going on about "sound carpets" at which point I stopped reading, and started listening.
Difference in taste is what makes musical debate so fascinating, interminable and useless. But fun. Witness the range of responses on the recent Mahler thread. For me, the intermezzos in the 9th interrupt the flow of the work. As for the 5th, it's perhaps a bit elemental compared to some of his works, but from the opening plucked string slaps it has a drive and mounting excitement with those airy, transparent interludes you mentioned, so characteristic of Vagn Holmboe. The end of the first movement is such a powerful coming-together. The finale is maybe a bit of a cop-out.
Good point re. alternative readings. For many less-popular composers it seems we're destined to have only one recording. The initial #8 on Turnabout, with Semkow and the Royal Danish Orch. was very serviceable but hearing the BIS recording is like your first sight of a restored masterpiece. I'd forgotten I also have the 10th on lp. Neither it nor the BIS convince me.
One of my most breathtaking musical experiences was driving out of Canmore, Alberta, on a March morning after a fresh dusting of snow. I'd just put the Sinfonia in Memoriam into the tape deck (remember those?) and as I rounded a corner Cascade Mountain swung into view against a clean blue sky, just as the invocation sounded. I almost put the car off the road. Which I did do once, carried away by 'Entangled' on Genesis' Trick of the Tail. But that's another story.
Re. notes to cds, Holmboe himself tends to talk gobbledygook when describing his music. Perhaps something is lost in translation.
Tue, Mar 22 2011, 7:24PM
#5
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
I cleansed my listening palate over the weekend and today listened to the 5th Symphony in isolation, and the most striking thing is the gulf in compositional ability and originality between it and the 4th Symphony, even moreso when you consider there were only three years between them. As much as I like the quartets, I´ve come to the conclusion that the best of the symphonies are better than the best of the quartets, but I find the latter more consistent overall.
So given that you and others, myself included, rate Holmboe so highly, why is he never programmed in concerts, or even on radio?
Totally agree re. the gulf between 4 and 5.
Your comments re. his orchestration explain, to me at least, why the symphonies are superior to the quartets. There's a whole extra dimension.
As for why he's never played that's perhaps a whole new thread, one that's appeared elsewhere in this forum. I think most of us who live in the relative boonies would be happy to hear anything beyond the couple of dozen warhorses continuously recycled by our local orchestras.
Mon, Mar 28 2011, 2:17PM
#6
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
Hello,
I stumbled across this thread quite by accident thanks to some Googling, and it seemed perfect timing because I was on something of a Holmboe-hunt within a day or so of when this thread started!
I only have the BIS set of symphonies, but going through some of them again prompted me to look again at what else was out there. And then start putting together a list. By the time I started looking at Wilhelm Hansen, BIS, Dacapo and even iTunes, it became quite an epic exercise.
It's actually quite exciting to see just how much of his music is now recorded. BIS and Dacapo have clearly been leading the way, but even with the last year or so it seems quite a few works have been recorded elsewhere.
As for the symphonies, I will have to leap to the defence of the 5th because I think it's one that has a very direct and immediate impact. I actually tend to associate it with Beethoven's 5th, because of the way that the 1st movement creates so much momentum from an opening idea.
I thoroughly enjoy the first 3 symphonies, although I agree that they're not in the mature Holmboe style. The 4th I agree is not that successful, apart from the fairly brief 'Gloria' movement.
Other ones I particularly enjoy include the 6th (especially the opening), the 8th and the 11th. I haven't listened to those last two for a little while. The first thing I always remember about the 8th is how thrilling the end is - one of the few works I can think of that makes me want to stand and up and applaud immediately (and this is just on CD).
Some of the others I'm still getting to know. Just this month I think I've finally come to grips with the 12th, except for one moment where there is some heavy drumming that feels a bit... exaggerated? And I'm still working on the 13th, where the heavy drumming is even more in evidence and feels a bit more like dramatic film music than a symphony. But I may well come to accept it.
The quartets are high on my shopping list now that the complete set is available as a box. But then there's so much else left to explore. Still, that's true of quite a few composers!
PS I see that I've just missed the discussions on Faure and Simpson. Half my luck!
Tue, Nov 22 2011, 8:53PM
#7
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
As a composer with a profound interest in music of the past century, Holmboe is a particularly important colleague who contributed an enormous amount of work to the literature. His 13 symphonies are of particular interest because they show us a composer whose "inspiration" rarely flagged, and the quality of whose work remained on consistently high level. I may one of the few people in the US who actually owns the scores to all of these works - and I've gone through them in all in great detail. The early symphonies (1-4) are not so much uneven (which they decidedly are not) as they represent a composer in the process of defining what will become his mature idiom. For their occasional longeurs they are recognizably Holmboesque. Beginning with #5, the mature composer comes forward, and each of the succeeding works are marvels of invention. They are not like Shostakovich. They are not like Milhaud. They are not like Nielsen or Sibelius. Indeed, they are only like Holmboe! :) The first Holmboe symphony I encountered back in the early 1960s was #8 (Sinfonia Boreale) - what a knock-out piece! As a symphonist,I would place Holmboe's work in Denmark as a roughly in the same position of such US composers as William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin and Walter Piston, Hilding Rosenberg in Sweden, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Marcel Dupré and Henri Dutilleux in France, Joonas Kokkonen in Finland, etc.
Tue, Nov 22 2011, 9:20PM
#8
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
I had never heard of Holmboe until I read a Tagalie thread some time ago on this website. I have since enjoyed his 8th Symphony and look forward to exploring much more of his output.
Even though this composer was rubbished on a recent Tubin thread of mine, I'd much rather trust Tagalie's judgement than certain God fearing sonataformists to be found herein.
Wed, Nov 23 2011, 11:24PM
#9
RE: Composer of the Fortnight : Vagn Holmboe
So, Atonal, Holmboe was an atheist and anti-sonataformist (anti-comformist). Was he? To your surprise, he used the sonata form in some movements of his Symphonies, String Quartets, etc. and I don't have any evidence he was any kind of God-defiant.
Personally, I didn't rubbish him in your thread. I just still believe, despite all his virtues, he was a second rate composer vis a vis to the great ones. Nonetheless, he is a good addition to the expansion of your knowledge for that period of music in the Nordic countries.
The fact that his works are totally ignored by any public performance, in any field (Orchestral, Chamber or Choral), indicates that he cannot be trusted as...a "sure thing".
Parla
For my money Vagn Holmboe is one of the great composers of the last century, certainly one of the greatest symphonists. Despite a large output, the overall standard is very high. Besides the symphonies and quartets – the backbone of his music - he wrote a large number of concertos including a series of chamber concertos for various instrument combinations, a string of Sinfonietta Preludes, four Sinfonias (alias Chairos), four superb Symphonic Metamorphoses and some major choral pieces. Paul Rapoport has long been a champion of Vagn Holmboe’s music and has written frequently about him, but the much-needed definitive study has yet to appear.
I totally agree with dubrob re. the first four symphonies. They have the feeling of apprentice works, pleasant enough in spells but without a distinctive voice. That voice emerges, startlingly fully-formed in symphony 5, an intense, driving work. From there to the Sinfonia in Memoriam (really symphony 9 in disguise) he wrote 5 absolutely first-class symphonies worthy to stand beside the best of Nielsen, Sibelius and Shostakovich.
After the Sinfonia in Memoriam there is a hiatus of 13 years, hinting at either a drying-up of inspiration or search for a new musical language. Symphonies 9 and 10 do sound different, rather more allusive and cerebral. For me, they represent a slight loss of form and were followed by another 9-year gap before 11, 12 and 13 appeared over a 14-year spell. These last 3 are worthy to stand with his best. The tersest of them, Symphony 13, is an amazingly vital statement for a man of 85.
I yield to dubrob on the string quartets. Widely acclaimed, they just don’t grip me the way the best of his orchestral music does. The loss is mine, and I return to them often to try to rectify it.
Chamber concertos and preludes are lighter fare but thoroughly enjoyable, beautifully crafted. To my ears the Cello Concerto stands alone, far weightier than his other essays in this format. The first three Symphonic Metamorphoses bridge the gap, chronologically, between symphonies 8 and 9, suggesting he was experimenting with his symphonic language before attempting to continue the cycle. Only #2 is of sketch length and all four (#4 followed ten years later) are well-worth investigating. The Chairos Sinfonias are substantial works and should appeal to those who enjoy the quartets.
Perhaps the only Vagn Holmboe work that doesn’t get me off first base is the Requiem for Nietzsche. People far better qualified than me have praised it to the skies, but I find it overly-clever and lacking that vital life spirit that informs the best of this composer.
He is well served on record. For years, all we had was an old Turnabout lp of Symphony 8 and one of the quartets, 4 I think. Owain Arwel Hughes recorded all the symphonies and some of the other orchestral music for BIS in excellent performances. Dacapo have issued all the quartets, Preludes, Chamber Concertos and much else. Those who like to study what they listen to will get little help from the notes accompanying the cds. With highly-literate fans like Robert Layton, Simpson and Rapoport behind him, it’s surprising a full-length study is still wanting.