Havergal Brian Symphonies 22-24 – Alexander Walker

Somewhere in a drafty flat in Shoreham-by-Sea an old man was still writing symphonies nobody had asked for, in a language nobody else was speaking anymore, and the wonder of it is that the results are not the ramblings of a superannuated eccentric but something closer to visionary shorthand — messages typed in a hurry by someone who suspects he is running out of time to send them.

Havergal Brian was running out of time, of course. Ninety-two when he died, he had been composing symphonies since Edward VII sat on the throne. By the mid-1960s, when he set down Nos. 22 through 24 within months of one another, he wrote the way old men prune roses: ruthlessly, with no patience left for dead wood. Nothing is explained. Nothing is repeated for the benefit of a listener who nodded off during the transition. You either keep up or you don’t.

The Symphonia Brevis is the one to play for skeptics who think Brian is merely a curiosity assembled from the wreckage of late Romanticism. Nine minutes and twenty-two seconds, and inside that span there is more incident, more sudden weather, than most composers manage in forty. Themes arrive already in medias res, as if we’ve walked into the middle of an argument; brass chorales rear up out of near-silence and vanish before you can get your bearings. I’ve gone back to this piece for decades, first on that old CBS/Ostrava LP that a generation of us wore thin, groove by groove, before it resurfaced digitally. It has never stopped feeling like an epic compressed into a matchbox. Only the Sixth, in this listener’s accounting, casts a longer shadow among Brian’s non-Gothic symphonies. Edmund Rubbra’s Eleventh, another exercise in extreme brevity married to symphonic weight, is the nearest useful comparison, though Rubbra’s spiritual temperature runs cooler, more contrapuntally serene, where Brian is all nerve endings.

Symphony No. 23 is stranger company altogether: belligerent, yes, and eerie in a way that has less to do with harmonic language (Brian never really abandoned tonality, however far he pushes its outer walls) than with pacing. He compresses argument the way a poet cuts an adjective. What’s gone is gone, and you’re left to intuit the connective tissue. There are passages in the first movement that seem to glance back, almost guiltily, at the hushed, awestruck closing pages of The Gothic, that vast cathedral of a symphony now decades behind him. Whether that’s deliberate self-quotation or simply the same musical mind revisiting its own obsessions, I couldn’t tell you. Brian isn’t the confiding sort.

No. 24, cast in a single unbroken movement, dispenses with even the pretense of conventional layout. Episodes don’t develop so much as collide, one dissolving into the next at a clip that can leave you slightly seasick, in the best sense, and there’s a valedictory gesture in its closing bars that nagged at me for days: some half-buried echo I couldn’t place and eventually gave up trying to. Maybe that’s the point. Brian’s late music trades in exactly that kind of unresolved familiarity, voices from deep in the twentieth century’s memory bank surfacing and submerging again.

Alexander Walker draws playing of real conviction from the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble that has quietly made something of a specialty of British repertoire far from home. The strings occasionally betray their non-English pedigree in matters of portamento and attack, but the brass, so crucial to Brian’s sound-world, all those craggy fortissimo perorations, has weight and bite, and Walker never lets the structural seams show more than Brian intends them to. Given that Nos. 23 and 24 arrive here in world-premiere recordings, that alone would justify the disc. That the performances also convince on their own terms is the happier surprise.

The album is filled out, generously, with the English Suite No. 1, op. 12, dating from 1905–06: Brian in his twenties, still under the spell of Elgar and the pastoral-cum-processional English tradition, decades before the compression and strangeness set in. It is lovely, expansive, occasionally a touch four-square, and it offers a useful corrective to anyone tempted to think Brian sprang into the world already writing in code. He had to earn his eccentricity.

This is not music that will convert the unconverted overnight. But for those of us who’ve spent years in Brian’s peculiar orbit, this disc belongs on the shelf without argument, an indispensable filling-in of the discography, played with more sympathy than the composer’s reputation as a hopeless case usually attracts.