Another minor claim to fame of Harty's is that in the mid-thirties he gave the first performance of William Walton's Symphony No 1. Actually Harty gave, paradoxically, two first performances, one with the LSO of the first three movements, when Walton had struggled for the inspiration needed to complete the work, and the second with the Halle when he had finished the job. At Halifax we were unaware of the Harty connection when programming both the Handel and Walton for last night's concert.
There was another poignant connection for me - HSO's first trombonist, Frank Mathison, played bass trombone on the record of Walton 1 I had as a teenager, played by the LSO under Previn. I liked the piece then, for its grim Sibelian severity, swept aside by the exuberant finale, but hadn't heard it for years - it isn't often played - and was curious to rediscover it; and to rediscover whether I liked it.
On the whole, no.
The musical world of the 1930s was a divided one. From Europe, and from Vienna in particular, came new sounds and structures which alienated as many as they attracted. For the Anglo-Saxon wing (remember that America is now an important part of this equation) there was one composer who stood as an antidote to the new cacophony - Sibelius. By any standards the Finn was a great composer, and, vitally, he showed it was still possible to write great music in C major. In Britain critics and composers looked to Sibelius for inspiration. The final chapter of Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, published in 1934, is entitled Sibelius and the music of the future; as late as 1944 Vaughan Williams dedicated the 5th Symphony to Sibelius. Until Benjamin Britten's star burst onto the London musical scene in the late 30s, British music-making set its face against developments in Central Europe, and looked north.
If it's not surprising that the young Walton, embarking on his first symphony, should look to Sibelius for his model, it is surprising that he should borrow so wholeheartedly. It's not just the long pedal points, the harmonic tics (for example the major chord IV in minor key passages) or the brass chords emerging from the orchestral texture to end up dominating it; Walton steals whole melodic ideas, from the Lemminkainen Legends amongst others, but most egregiously from the Fourth Symphony (a tune in tritones in the scherzo, but also the unison string notes which close the Fourth's slow movement, and which Walton uses to open and close his own slow movement: so slavish is the copying that Walton even uses the same pitch, C sharp).
Does any of this matter? Perhaps not - there's a lot of Haydn in Mozart, for example, and a lot of Beethoven in Brahms. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, can anyone say they really enjoy hearing one person flatter another? The imitation is so sincere, particularly in the first movement, that Walton's own musical personality is very largely effaced, emerging strongly again only in the finale. Moreover, it is only Sibelius's outward manner that Walton is aping. He shows no taste for or understanding of the truly distinctive features of the Finnish master's style, nothing of his economy, or capacity for transforming and connecting musical ideas. Instead we get big brassy fanfares and interminable ostinati, taken from Sibelius and fed steroids, but without any understanding that in Sibelius these are merely external manifestations of a process, not the process itself.
I have conducted some Bruckner, a composer notorious for rambling and semi-coherent structures, and felt that by the time the concert arrived I had got to grips with the direction of the music. With Walton 1 I was no wiser after weeks of rehearsal - particularly in the first and second movements.
There are four problems. The first is that Walton does not know how to write a climax; or rather he does not know how to use a climax. By definition, a climax is a point set apart from surrounding events; by definition these surrounding events must be of a different character. In music you show these differences by technical means - contrasts of volume and orchestration, for example - and by the character of the music itself. But Walton bangs on, particularly at the end of the first movement, with almost permanent orchestral tutti, the high points emerging rather like Dartmoor tors, pimples on a drab landscape, rather than mighty alps, amidst a musical affect of near-continuous angst. The effect is wearing.
Secondly, at nigh-on forty five minutes the symphony is simply too long. Again, the first and second movements are the chief culprits. At the start of the piece Walton says nothing after the first ten minutes that he hasn't said already in the first ten minutes. So why carry on? The scherzo, a dancing gremlin of a movement, does its stop-start, bang-crash, pp / ff business (very much derived from the scherzo of Sibelius 1) for five minutes or so; and then just carries on doing the same thing for a few minutes more. There is no emotional or psychological conclusion or development towards the end - for all its jittery jumpiness, after a while it is just boring.
Thirdly - and this is perhaps another aspect of the same fault - Walton has no idea how to do pacing, that most elusive of the musical arts; in other words how quickly to make the music move on from one passage or area of feeling to another, the instinctive dramatic grasp of when the listener will have heard enough of a particular section and want to continue to the next, when to make the music stop, when to make the flow continuous so the listener is caught up in its momentum. In part this is because the first three movements of the symphony always inhabit pretty much the same area of feeling; so how can he move on when the music is largely always saying the same thing? But within this continuous mood there are differing areas of tempo, and the first movement spends too much of the middle five minutes marooned in a tasteful angst-ridden torpor; the pace quickens for a couple of pages, then - and my heart sank every time we played it - back comes the second subject, slower, a wide-intervalled tune, usually in the horns - and at a stroke the momentum is gone again.
Lastly, orchestration. There is a moment, towards the end of the scherzo, where Walton has made up his mind that, having said all he has to say in this movement, he is going to say a bit more of it anyway; here a simple rhythmic idea is bounced between the woodwind and the strings. The ear greets this easy juxtaposition with a sigh of relief. For once Walton has written a simple open texture, devoid of doubled melodic lines, without complex divisi strings, without rampaging brass. But this is a rare moment, for I have never conducted a piece so over-orchestrated, so determined to be complex when being too simple would have been better (and to be sometimes simple and sometimes complex would have been better still). There are reams and reams of notes in this symphony which could simply have been erased. No one seems to have told Walton that sometimes it is better to withhold - because by witholding something its reintroduction is itself an effective musical ploy. If you want a climax, work out where that climax is going to be, then distribute your musical forces so that they have maximum impact at the moments when you need them; then start taking them away again.
All of which brings us back to Hamilton Harty. His Water Music arrangement is wildly anachronistic in this day and age; it bears little relation to Handel's original, and even given the early 20th century full-orchestra premise, there are some bizarre moments capable of making the modern musician gape with appalled wonder. And yet here was a man who knew how the orchestra works, and understood the psychology of the listener. The textures are spare and clear; the different orchestral groups are used for contrast rather than relentlessly mixed. The trumpets are cunningly held back to the last movement so their introduction comes as a thrilling fillip. You might even call the orchestration Sibelian. No wonder people still want to play it.
As for Walton, for all its pacing problems, in the last movement the composer does at last cast off his Sibelian shackles, with some glorious brass writing, a few poignant pages of tenderness amid the mayhem, and an over-the-top conclusion complete with ringing tam tam and cymbals.
Perhaps after the first first performance Hamilton Harty had a word with him.
