Brian Symphonies 22-24 and English Suite – Walker

Some composers write a symphony as a way of arriving somewhere. Havergal Brian wrote them the way other men write postcards — quick, dense, dispatched almost as afterthoughts, and yet somehow containing whole geographies compressed into a few square inches. By the time he reached his early nineties, working through what would become his final symphonic decade, he was posting them at a rate that would exhaust composers a third his age. The three symphonies here — Nos. 22, 23, and 24 — all come tumbling out of 1964 and ‘65, within months of one another, and they sound like it: related, argumentative siblings who finish each other’s sentences and then contradict them.

I confess a soft spot for the Symphonia Brevis, and not only out of nostalgia for the old CBS LP, which I wore down to a whisper of surface noise decades ago in my student years. Nine minutes and twenty-two seconds. That’s all Brian needs to build something that feels like an epic foreshortened, the way a Bruckner adagio might feel if compressed into a single movement. There’s a rightness to its brevity that the two symphonies following it don’t quite manage, magnificent as they are in their stranger, spikier ways. Set alongside Rubbra’s Symphony No. 11, the Brian holds its own for density of incident per minute.

No. 23 and No. 24 arrive here as world premiere recordings, which makes this disc more than a curiosity for the already converted. We are close now — perhaps only the Fifth, the Wine of Summer, still wants a commercial release — to having the entire cycle of thirty-two symphonies on disc. Brian spent the bulk of his composing life ignored by the musical establishment, working as a journalist, writing symphonies nobody performed and expecting none of them ever would be. That such documentation should exist now, on modest independent labels, decades after his death, is one of the stranger turns in twentieth-century British music.

No. 23 seethes. There’s no better word for it. Belligerent, eerie, restless — Brian piles incident on incident and trusts the listener to supply the connective tissue he refuses to spell out. The transitions arrive not so much prepared as ambushed; you’re in one episode, and then, without much ceremony, you’re in another. Some of this recalls the closing pages of The Gothic, that overgrown cathedral of a symphony against which every later Brian symphony must, fairly or not, be measured. Some of it seems to grow out of the folk-inflected orchestral thinking of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, though Brian takes that material somewhere RVW never intended it to go — toward something more compressed, more nervously argued, less interested in symphonic argument as conventionally understood than in juxtaposition, collage, montage.

No. 24, in a single continuous span rather than the multi-movement layout of its two companions, pushes concision further still. Episodes don’t so much develop as collide, blast through one another, evaporate. There’s a valedictory gesture at the close that nagged at me all afternoon, something familiar, something I could almost place and could not, a phantom quotation hovering just out of reach. That’s very Brian: the sense that everything he wrote late in life exists in conversation with everything he wrote earlier.

Alexander Walker and the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra deserve real credit here. This is repertoire with no performing tradition to lean on, no interpretive lineage handed down — every phrase has to be worked out from cold, and the players do it with evident commitment, brass that doesn’t shy from Brian’s occasional garishness, strings that find the tenderness lurking under the granite. Ensemble is not always immaculate. There are moments in No. 23 where the counterpoint gets muddy, where you’d want more air, more separation between choirs. But the conviction never wavers, and conviction counts for a great deal in music this defiantly uningratiating.

The English Suite No. 1, op. 12, dates from 1905–6, when Brian was still in his twenties and riding an early wave of real success — Henry Wood was conducting him, Elgar was taking notice. It’s a different composer altogether: expansive, tuneful, unabashedly Edwardian, closer kin to German Reed light music and to Elgar’s own suites than to anything that follows. Hearing it after the symphonies is a small shock, like discovering the crabbed, aphoristic old man wrote love letters in his youth. The contrast tells you something about the whole trajectory of this career — a composer who began in confident, tuneful abundance and ended, decades later, still writing, but writing less and less for anyone but himself.

Not an easy disc to love on first hearing. Necessary, all the same — and, on repeated hearings, more than that.