Edmund Rubbra, Symphony No.4 (1/2)

[@transitny]

I read that BBC Radio aired the recording a few years ago but hasn't done anything else with because of 'quality issues.' There is a lot of static and background noise. And so what? They should remaster as best they can and release on CD!

[@Allanfearn]

The BBC has or had a recording of the wartime Proms premiere conducted (in uniform) by Rubbra himself. It would be nice if that were posted. Pity the post edrub43 agrees with is no longer here. This work is far too good to put on the shelf. And, incidentally, so is the one movement Piano Trio.

[@MartinSmithMFM]

*Rubbra - No 4* Needs a crescendo on the first long bar - and parallel passage bars 6-8, at a guess. A Holstian world of magical conjecture. Ravel hasn't happened. War is raging but Rubbra is with Elgar before the time of the trenches. And back there with Brahms. The declaratory motif is *emotionally* implicit in the "Kreutzer" (just where the violin takes off,...) , but also elsewhere in western music: I mean the mordant and the rush up to a minor third. Slight change of mood at about 4 minutes. Major implications. Still Wagner's funeral march pall cast. Has none of Bax's mercuriality. At 5:12, tubas entry very miffed. Or Muffed. Score needs revision here. Trumpet at 5:39 glorious soaring, like an albatross. And the circle of 5th following lovely in the extreme. Then some dark Waltonian sounds. Luckily not too many of them. Holst's "Mars"! Climax at 6:40 immense, but troubled. Bit of counterpoint threatens, smudged away... Quiet at 07:15. Hammering theme. Tor or Odin? This is now a motif. Now descending thirds, at almost eight minutes, complement the turbulent Gormenghast world we are so firmly in.... Brass blasts to heaven and back to hell at 8:30. What a pedal point at 8:35! Now a more martial rhythm, truly frightening at around nine minutes! This is the Blitz, just present....9:50 oceanic stasis as good as Sibelius. If not better. Has his gloom too.. Atmosphere is not the word. Double brass incursion, so splendid. Minute and a half to go. Attic tragedy settling to the moment in Genesis when the Dove was loosed...yet a high trumpet...(Oh my God!) then lost...will it come back! I have enough of these demented third runs, these mordants, this ...*tragedy*...and Rubbra knows it too...! Amazing climax towards 12 minutes, where are we going? - this is The Raft of the Medusa and Turner's "Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth" in one - an attempt to keep order, alas that trumpet note will not now return...! Anguish, deflation, decrease, ending, tympani roll, same F minor tonality to the ends of the earth and the greatest ending since Tristan... (The trumpet - was it high soaring golden E flat? You never returned. How could you, Edmund....? Edmund...!!!? But this *is* true art...I yearn, I yearn, I yearn, I yearn *a year* ; and beseech the Gods: beseech them for that lost moment now plunged under the vault of Heaven to the Styx's depths!...) And in my troubled ecstasy, in catharsis, I am released.

[@MartinSmithMFM]

How do you mean...I think all of us are autistic to some degree...it is a tautological definition. How do you see yourself...?

[@bernamej]

+Martin Smith First of all I think I misunderstood your very first comment about the crescendo. You did not mean that the symphony needed one but the interlretation right? I think that got me confused. You know the actual score?

[@MartinSmithMFM]

You mean my comment about the Tuba entry? I don't know, I would have to listen again...same thing for the crescendo... These were my stream of consciousness jottings at the time...I remember I was thrilled by the whole thing...if there was anything in the inner artistic image which suggested a different treatment, it seems to have been a very minor sense of something wanting - and my briefly wondering about... another emphasis. This is always happening in art. I just listened to Glenn Gould's Brahms First concerto with Bernstein....at an unusually slow speed, for example... I was thoroughly convinced.... As you see I even allude to Brahms.... I think my comments have a certain Platonism to them, in fact....As for the score, would it be at ISMLP...? We would have to check. .It would be a rare, rare thing indeed... * And as I feared, it it totally unavailable both digitized and as a printed volume...Looking online, there is part of a reference to No 4 on page 74 of one online publication...which indeed suggests that No4 was a release for Rubbra in some way... books.google.co.uk/books?id=GjM3BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=rubbra+dark+night+of+the+soul&source=bl&ots=2h_F7oVQwg&sig=fv3hLvLeRqeNn1kIGfA7c0j75Co&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjatfyejqjNAhXCIJoKHTXWDtIQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=rubbra%20dark%20night%20of%20the%20soul&f=false ...I was looking into the cantata Dark Night of the Soul at this point.... seems again a most wonderful work....! I think I might listen to hist first quartet now...

[@bernamej]

+Martin Smith Do other works of Rubbra impact you also?

[@MartinSmithMFM]

Hello, if you want to talk with me as a friend, please tell me your first name...otherwise it is like throwing banknotes over a cliff...