In the mythology of English music, Stanford is the Brahmsian Old Testament that Elgar was sent to sweep away with his new doctrine. Bernard Shaw was scornful of his academicism, usually referring to him ostentatiously as ''Professor Stanford'', but (contradictorily?) also dubbed him a ''gentleman amateur'', both words being meant dismissively, the intended comparison being with Elgar the non-gentleman professional. Despite the advocacy of Vaughan Williams, Stanford's greatest and least Stanford-like pupil, these accusations have stuck, and even if we have never heard a Stanford symphony in our lives we suspect that we know how they would sound: like Brahms, but with much less character and rather more counterpoint. Shaw said another damaging thing, to the effect that Stanford's academicism was rendered tolerable when he used Irish folk-songs as his material (thus implying, I suppose, that his own tunes lacked vigour) and for that reason—but for that reason only—it is perhaps a pity that the latest attempt to restore Stanford to favour should begin (and it is the beginning of a cycle) with two of his 'Irish' works: to find out once and for all whether Shaw was right or wrong we really must hear some of Stanford's non-nationalist music. But from this recording it already seems obvious that Shaw was at the very least exaggerating.
There are two Irish tunes in the finale of this symphony, both industriously worked into an allegro of zestful momentum, but the finest idea in the movement, a lyrical melody of real strength, is Stanford's own, and it turns what might have been no more than an agreeable 'fantasy on Irish airs' into something weightier and more symphonic. The beautiful melody of the slow movement has folk roots (in Russia as well as Ireland, by the sound of it), but it was again a real composer who made it memorable and variable enough for a substantial adagio to be derived from it. Its development is again 'Brahmsian', both in sound and in satisfying resourcefulness, but what in the world is wrong with that? Stanford's Brahminism, his academicism if you insist, gives the light-footed jig-scherzo substance as well as Irish charm, and the dutifully text-book structure of the first movement is fleshed out with long lines that only nod towards Brahms (and hardly at all to folk music) but have an invigorating purposefulness that seems to be Stanford's own. Despite a couple of passages of rather mechanically deployed craft and perhaps one of over-inflation, it is a work that could still earn an occasional place in the concert repertory, and since it counts as relatively early Stanford I look forward to hearing his later symphonies (of which there are four) with great interest.
There is a hint of what late Stanford might be like in the middle section of the Fifth Irish Rhapsody, where fierce martial, folk-derived music gives way to quietly and then passionately nostalgic lyricism. Is there some programmatic significance here (the work dates from 1917, 30 years after the symphony)? Whatever the case, it makes an agreeable makeweight, with its brassily rousing coda, and like the symphony it is splendidly played. The orchestra is audibly enjoying Stanford's clean and expert orchestration (amateurish and gentlemanly my foot!) and enjoying the acoustics of the Ulster Hall no less. There is not a hint of academicism to Vernon Handley's vigorous direction, not a trace of a cobweb on the vividly direct recording.'