At long last, a Lyrita recording on CD. Welcome and thrice welcome. William Wordsworth is one of the almost forgotten men and his representation on disc has been scant hitherto. These two works are prime examples of what in the 1950s and 1960s were pejoratively called ''Cheltenham Symphonies'' (their composers included Rubbra, Arnell, Alwyn and Wordsworth), although ironically the Second was rejected by Barbirolli, conductor of the Cheltenham Festival, on grounds of personal taste. The progressivists of 35 years ago wanted none of these traditionally-based symphonies which in their view were occupying programme-time that should have been given to the rising generation. How the pendulum swings. Today Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is writing the 1990s equivalent of Cheltenham Symphonies—and being criticized for doing so by the new generation of progressives. You can't win.
Wordsworth was a pupil of Tovey, to whose memory and inspiration the Second Symphony of 1947-8 is dedicated. Rejected by the BBC, this work won the 1950 Edinburgh competition for a symphony for the 1951 Festival (the year of the Festival of Britain). The BBC pettily refused to broadcast the first performance, which Boult conducted. Forty years later, it is difficult to understand how this music aroused such petulant hostility. On a large scale, its structure is firmly controlled. It is by no means the 'academic' kind of symphony one might expect from the Tovey stable. True its harmonic language might date it many years earlier, but so what.
There is a brooding intensity which I find impressive and moving. I can't think why Sir John didn't want to conduct it—too many Sibelian echoes?—but he made amends by conducting the first performance of the Third in 1953 at Cheltenham, followed by performances in London, Manchester, Sheffield and elsewhere. I heard several of those performances—incidentally, Wordsworth was a charming, diffident, sensitive, unembittered man—and I was pleased to find, on playing this fine recording, that much of the work had lodged itself securely in some recess of my memory. In three movements, it is a lighter piece that its predecessor, more colourfully scored and perhaps more easily grasped at a first hearing.
Nicholas Braithwaite and the London Philharmonic are excellent advocates for this splendid music. Orchestral managements being the timid bodies they are, I don't suppose these symphonies, or the six others Wordsworth wrote, will find their way into concert programmes, but at least recordings make them available to those members of the public who are not frightened away by the unfamiliar. There are rewards here for the unprejudiced, not least the superb recording quality.
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