Symphony No 3

'The performance is powerful, the recording superb' (The New York Times)

'A record collection of British orchestral music lacking anything by Havergal Brian would be significantly incomplete and this is the right record to fill that gap' (Music & Musicians)

'A good mid-price introduction to a fascinating composer' (The Independent)

Several myths still adhere to the life, work and reputation of the English composer Havergal Brian, though some of the more unlikely statistics are not mythical at all but plain facts. He really did compose 33 symphonies (the first now being lost and discounted from the 'official' canon of 32); the majority of them were written at an age to which most other composers of note never lived, let alone produced some of their most significant music; and the celebrated 'Gothic' (No. 1) is probably with justice regarded as the largest symphony ever written.

Some of the myths, however, are utter misconceptions, like the notion still held by some that the other 31 symphonies are as gargantuan as the 'Gothic'. In fact the Third recorded here, though the longest of all of these, is but half the length of its vast choral predecessor and shorter than most of Bruckner's and Mahler's. Also, Brian's composing was not, as is often thought, a mere old man's hobby, but a sustained life work extending over more than three-quarters of a century. His concentration (in the end almost exclusive) on symphonic form was a characteristic of the latter half of his extraordinarily long creative career. The lost Fantastic Symphony was just one work from a respectably large body of music produced before World War I, and he did not finally take up the deepest challenges of the genre until he was well past forty.

The 'Gothic' emerged between 1919 and 1927. His next creative task was the orchestration of his opera The Tigers, sketched before that symphony, and after this was completed nearly a year elapsed before a Second Symphony began to take shape. No 2, for orchestra alone, was far more orthodox in scale and structure, though still a very substantial piece by any other standards. The full score was completed on 6 April 1931, and only six days later Brian began to sketch its mighty successor.

It seems that No 3 was not begun as a symphony. On 25 May 1931, two days after the first movement was completed in outline, Brian wrote to Sir Granville Bantock that he had 'resolved the Concerto into a Symphony'. This is the only such reference, but it surely means that the Third was initially conceived as a concerto for piano - or rather, perhaps, the two pianos that loom so large and diversely in the final score. We should also note that this first movement uses these instruments far more extensively than the other three, which were still unwritten at the time of the letter. The pianos only appear in the latter half of the Lento second movement, parts of the Finale, and not at all in the Scherzo (the movements were composed in that order).

On 21 June he began the second movement and completed its short score on 1 July, despite the 'many hindrances' complained about just over a week later in a letter to Bantock which goes on: 'I like the second movement now - it is bigger than such as I played to you from the first movement'. Composition of the work gathered pace: the Finale was completed on 16 July after four days' work, and the Scherzo despatched in a final two-day blaze of exuberant creativity celebrated in a further letter to 'Dear Gran' on the 20th: 'I finished the sketch of my new Symphony last night. As I heard the slow movement in a very slow 3 - I had to evolve a 2/4 Scherzo which sounds as though it had been written in Vienna ... It will take a long time to decipher and write out my sketches ...'

The 'long time' stretched to 28 May 1932 when the full score was finally completed. This was hardly surprising, given the full-time writing and editing commitments at the magazine Musical Opinion which Brian had been fulfilling since his appointment as Assistant Editor in June 1927, not to mention the sheer size of the symphony and its orchestration. The work is scored for the following array: four flutes (all doubling piccolos), four oboes (two doubling cors anglais), E flat clarinet, four clarinets in A (two doubling bass clarinets), four bassoons, contrabassoon; eight horns, four trumpets, four trombones (including contrabass), two tubas; six timpani (two players), bass drum, side drum, tenor drum, cymbals, tambourine, castanets, triangle, gong, xylophone, glockenspiel, celesta, two harps, two pianos, organ ('ad lib', but included in this recording) and strings (often much subdivided). For this recording the total forces numbered 120 players.

While the Third Symphony has its fair share of dissonance, march rhythms, angular string writing, hard-edged percussion-topped scoring and abruptly cut off climaxes - more than enough to proclaim its kinship with later Brian - other features equally hark back to moods in his earlier music; of pastoral innocence, Elgarian nobility and sheer unbuttoned fairground riotousness. Withal it remains his most expansive, objective, heroic and lyrical symphony - all characteristics in keeping with the connotations, both aspiring and celestial, of the enigmatic word 'Altarus', the apparent title which Brian wrote on the score and then partially erased. In more than its number, as well as the disposition and relative dimensions of its movements, this work is Brian's 'Eroica' (without claiming further comparability with the greatest of all Third symphonies).

Havergal Brian never heard his Third Symphony - which at the time of composition he described to Bantock as 'the best of the symphonies I have written'. It was first played in a BBC studio in January 1974 - just over a year after Brian's death - by the New Philharmonia Orchestra under Stanley Pope, with Ronald Stevenson and David Wilde playing the important piano parts. It was first given in public by the Symphony Orchestra of Composers Platform, West Midlands, conducted by Paul Venn, in Birmingham Town Hall on 17 May 1987. The present recording was made at the BBC's Maida Vale Studio 1 on 27/28 October 1988, immediately following a public performance before an invited audience.
DAVID J BROWN
Secretary, The Havergal Brian Society