Sinfonia Concertante

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Rubbra (1901-1986) was a British composer whose symphonies contained great emotion, great propulsive power, and in some cases sound almost demonic. His assertiveness hardly seems British. His Symphony 1 (1937) is one of those assertive works. Rubbra was heavily influenced by Bartók and Debussy, but he uses a kind of polyphonic approach to the main themes much different from those two giants. His Sinfonia Concertante (1936) is a work for piano and orchestra, but not a piano concerto. The piano's role is much muted. But Tribute (1942) holds the real soul of the composer. Melancholy and sad, thankfully it's only four minutes long. --Paul Cook

Tracks:

Symphony No. 1 Op. 44: I. Allegro moderato e tempestoso
Symphony No. 1 Op. 44: II. Perigourdine: Allegro bucolico e giocoso
Symphony No. 1 Op. 44: Lento
A Tribute Op. 56: Andante
Sinfonia concertante Op. 38: I. Fantasia: Lento con molto rubato - Allegro
Sinfonia concertante Op. 38: II. Saltarella: Allegro vivace
Sinfonia concertante Op. 38: III. Prelude And Fugue: Lento

Amazon.com

Rubbra (1901-1986) was a British composer whose symphonies contained great emotion, great propulsive power, and in some cases sound almost demonic. His assertiveness hardly seems British. His Symphony 1 (1937) is one of those assertive works. Rubbra was heavily influenced by Bartók and Debussy, but he uses a kind of polyphonic approach to the main themes much different from those two giants. His Sinfonia Concertante (1936) is a work for piano and orchestra, but not a piano concerto. The piano's role is much muted. But Tribute (1942) holds the real soul of the composer. Melancholy and sad, thankfully it's only four minutes long. --Paul Cook

Customer Reviews:

The Darkness of PreWar Europe.......2003-04-11

Rubbra's symphonies have been overshadowed by the work of his better known colleagues, Walton and Vaughn Williams. But his work is every bit as well crafted and provacative as anything by his compatriots. This Chandos CD is a welcome beginning in a traversal of the entire Rubbra symphonic cycle by Richard Hickox...one that is long over due.

I don't own this exact CD, rather I have the boxed set of the complete symphonies, which is the same performance but missing the Sinfonia concertante and the Tribute. As a result I'll only discuss the Symphony No. 1, as that makes up makes up the lion's share of this CD. The symphony was composed between 1935-37. It is young man's music; vigorous, passionate deeply earnest. The symphony is turbulent, recalling both the Vaughn Williams 4th and symphonies by Walton. It is hard to listen to the work and not think of the disturbing events that were racking Europe at the time of the composition. All three of these composers denied a connection in later years, though at least some of the edge of the times must have seeped in.

Rubbra's symphony is cast in three movements. It begins with a tempestuous Allegro, with highly rhythmic and chromatic themes, spiked with dissonance. The second movement is stunning. It begins as a lighthearted scherzo in a lilting 6/8 rhythm with material drawn from the first movement, transformed from it's tonally unstable origins to a bright A flat major . But as it goes along, the material becomes darker and darker, until the end of the piece is becomes quite terrifying, all darkness and brooding. The finale reaches back to the opening of the symphony, with a brooding slow movement that eventually rises to a blazing C major completion. The work is dark, urgent and brooding, but ultimately hopeful and triumphant. It is a brilliant opening for a career that would span much of the century and give 10 more remarkable and varied symphonies.

Hickox is to be commended for his attention to forgotten British repertoire. His conducting is pristine, the BBC National OPrchestra of Wales is rich and lush, and the sound is typically brilliant for Chandos. In fact, along with Naxos, Chandos is fast becoming my favorite classical label. The smoothness and clarity of the recorded sound, along with the adventurousness of the programming, really appeals to me.

If you like the music of Vaughn Williams, Walton, or Finzi, I would highly recommend this symphony of Rubbra's to you. You may want to start with this disc to see if you enjoy the music. If you do, then you should go ahead and get the complete boxed set of all the symphonies. But starting with this disc will give you the added benefit of two other Rubbra works not included in the boxed set, so you won't really have duplicated anything.

Happy listening.

After Vaughan Williams' 4th and Walton's 1st.............2001-05-14

The first half of the 30s was an interesting time for English symphonic music. First Vaughan Williams abandoned his pastoral torpor with the grinding dissonances of his 4th symphony. Then William Walton produced his 1st (or most of it), though it sounds much gentler today than it did then. Finally, an unknown came along with his 1st - Edmund Rubbra. The first movement is terrifying - dissonant and bleak with a definite nordic atmosphere. Tapiola revisited. This is exciting music despite it being so densely scored. Temporary relief comes occasionally but the effect is like seeing the damage after a storm. Next comes a vigorous dance movement, a form which recurs in later symphonies. The last movement, of heavenly length, is beautiful and noble and it is here than we enter Rubbra's real musical world. That first movement was a one-off, never to be repeated. Some of the grimness is to be found in the 2nd symphony but after that it evaporated. This is a flawed work musically - the orchestration is invariably thick - but for me, at least, it does not matter. The Sinfonia Concertante is an earlier work. It is well worth hearing and ends with a rather wonderful fugue. The Tribute is a short work which was written for Vaughan Williams' 70th birthday. It is a charming little piece and very characteristic of the composer's style at the time of the 4th symphony. The performances are excellent, as is the recording. The notes are good too.

Rubbra's Monistic Vision.......2000-12-11

Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986) studied with Cyril Scott at the Royal College of Music; he studied also and privately with Gustav Holst. Rubbra learned a great deal, although never his pupil, from Ralph Vaughan Williams. From RVW, Rubbra indeed absorbed his characteristic interest in modal polyphony and a mystical bent, which, however, he would pursue far more concertedly than Vaughan Williams, the confessed agnostic, ever did. Primarily a symphonist, Rubbra eventually wrote eleven examples of the genre. Together, they show a remarkably consistent development of the composer's austere style. The First Symphony (1936) - for decades more written about than performed - struck Wilfrid Mellers as exhibiting a "remorselessness" in its "free polyphony" and "an extreme nervous intensity that may properly be called contemporary" despite the work's archaizing atmosphere ("Edmund Rubbra and the Dominant Seventh"[1943]). Robert Layton has referred to the First's requirement for "enormous concentration" by the listener and suggests that the music rises in its level of procedural complexity to that of Bach's "Art of the Fugue" ("A Guide to the Symphony" [1993]). One must remember, in assessing such potentially intimidating remarks, that Rubbra's harmonies rarely step beyond the boundaries of those recognized by Brahms. One can say then his contemporaneity, unlike that of the Second Viennese School, does not stem from any abandonment of tonality. With qualification, the First Movement of the First Symphony begins with what sounds like a cross between Tudor counterpoint and Bachian fugal writing: A chorale of sorts in the brass against a great deal of busy support in the other choirs. The qualification is that Rubbra has written a movement as tempestuous, maybe more stormy, than that of Walton's First Symphony (roughly contemporaneous). Rubbra's music in fact outstrips Walton's in urgency and it makes the crisis of the opening Allegro of Vaughan Williams' Fourth (1934) seem tame by comparison. The Second Movement (of three) bears the title "Périgourdine." A chattering woodwind ensemble introduces the medieval French tune, innocent enough as it appears, but quickly complexifying itself contrapuntally into something uncanny and not a little bit threatening. The Third Movement (Lento) comprises a prelude and fugue (longer than the two preceeding movements combined) and forecasts the concluding movements both of the Third Symphony (1939) and the Seventh (1956), also fugal, or "monistic," as the musicologists say. Like Robert Simpson, his friend and (slightly younger compeer), Rubbra knew his Bach "by heart." The pedal-notes in the opening bars remind one of Sibelius, whom critics occasionally mention as an "influence" on Rubbra. The fugue occurs in slow tempi and emerges from the prelude so subtly (in a "Tallis Fantasia"-like string paragraph) that listeners might well miss its commencement. The stretto works up to a pitch of tempestuousness equivalent to that of the First Movement. The brass writing, especially the passages for solo trumpet, are hair-raising. One can only wonder why this remarkable symphony has remained obscure and unrecorded for six decades. The same puzzlement obtains where it concerns the Sinfonia Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1934), dedicated to Holst, Rubbra's first substantial work after a series of chamber-music essays. It seems in many ways a rehearsal for the First Symphony, but tackles the additional formal complexity of reconciling the solo instrument with the orchestra. A drum-roll introduces the First Movement (Lento con Molto Rubato - Lento), whereupon the soloist describes a many-intervalled arpeggio ascending with calm strength from the lowest register of the keyboard. The string-choir gives support. We witness the same organic "unfoldment" or "evolution" as in the First Symphony (two years in the future): The same immediate polyphonic elaboration of the opening material, the atmosphere of crisis, the conflict of elements. The Second Movement (Allegro Vivace) takes the form of a Saltarello. The dance tune begins innocently enough but quickly assumes the character of something Dionysiac and menacing (anticipating the "Périgourdine" of the First Symphony). Howard Shelley's muscular pianism matches the controlled power of the music. Under Richard Hickox, the BBC Welsh National Orchestra plays with great clarity and precision. Hickox and the orchestra keep the equal lines of Rubbra's counterpoint separate and audible at all times. The noble Prelude and Fugue of the Sinfonia Concertante unfolds slowly, with impressive inevitability, through a precisely calculated graduation of dynamics. As a filler, Chandos gives us the brief (five minute) "Tribute" (1942) to Vaughan Williams, also basically a prelude and fugue. Only the "Tribute" has appeared before in recording, on an old Chandos LP led by Hans-Hubert Schönzeler.

Symphony does merely "thrilling" one better... no, five.........1999-06-28

It's like this. You spend a lot of your time browsing around a university library of scores, learning about music, learning to love music, learning to obsess over music (and ignoring your math homework, but never mind. Always gets done at the last minute.) One score catches your eye, though it isn't alone; but it does catch your eye. Years later, you're reading an encyclopedia (Grove 5...), which describes the piece in what must have seemed to the writer as insulting terms- but it occurs to you: you want to hear a piece just like the one the writer is describing. The features he describes- uncaring of the ears, harsh in its unforgiving attention to linear counterpoint and melodic development- describe your own aesthetic to a T (then and, frankly, now...). But the university you frequent now doesn't have the score, so you have to settle for occasional visits to New York City library just to look at it, and hope someone will think to record the piece, some time.

And finally a recording of the piece does come out, together with the Tribute to Vaughan-Williams you'd heard on a Lyrita CD back in college, and another premiere recording of a sinfonia concertante. So... does it meet my expectations?...

OH, yes. Even as artificially high ones as I had... the first movement of the symphony is a tensely-coiled spring with few (but still some) points of rest, strongly motivic; the second movement is a "perigourdine" (such as Rheinberger used in his piano quartet; an old French dance) that starts out frankly chipper (the only, just about, major-mode music in the symphony...) but gains gravity and weight as its original A-flat major becomes a concluding f minor; and a sonata-form finale, beginning in a minor, concluding in c, with a lengthy fugue in lieu of recapitulation of its second theme (and based on that second theme), all to come down to a resounding, raise-the-roof finish. While I find it's usually the first movement that receives the most praise from those who do rate this symphony, for me the finale takes the awards; it isn't easy to write a 19-minute movement showing the control of increase and decrease of tension this one does, and by the time the fugue comes to its concluding page, you've been through the vise of a master. This one's a keeper. To say the least.

As for the other two works on the disk, the Tribute is a later work, a brief "Introduction and Rondo alla danza", perhaps a bit too brief to my ears but quite enjoyable; and a more-subtle-than-it-at-first-seems three movement "sinfonia concertante" for piano and orchestra, the earliest work on the disk, also highly motivic, not as emotionally charged as the symphony (to my ears) but getting better on each listen, more individual than I first thought. Its central Saltarello movement is a fine inspiration. - Eric Schissel

Track Listings:

Track Listings

track listings

Track Listings

Garcia (Compliments) [Original recording remastered]

Moll

Midnight Believer/Take It Home [Import]

Holst/Stanford/Bax: Piano Trios

Love Songs of Robert Burns

Rebirth: Kickin' It Live [Live]

Marquee Moon [Original recording remastered]

Latin Music: 20 Exitos Nortenos

La Voz Immortal, Vol. 5

1924-1925

Souvenirs