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The Sea Hawk was in the swashbuckler genre of
film, a 1940 Errol Flynn classic packed full of thrilling naval action,
and Korngold rose to the occasion with his score. This potpourri of three
sections consists of a Walton-like ‘Main title’ and ‘Finale’, brassy fanfares
and driving rhythms, framing a slow, dreamy ‘Reunion’ with its melody
hovering dangerously near ‘We’ll gather lilacs in the spring’ (Track 1:
03’.30"). But it serves as a reminder of how brilliant a composer
of film music Korngold was after his initial success in 1936 with Anthony
Adverse and then another Flynn movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood
in 1938. Lush scoring and with melodies heavily influenced by Rachmaninov,
the magical entry of the saxophone (Track 1: 04’30") is typical of
his style.
For Korngold to produce a symphony in the post-war era
when so many composers were qualifying this form with adjectives such
as ‘chamber’, ‘simple’ or even ‘short’ and only Shostakovich, Vaughan
Williams, and, once again, Walton were sticking to their symphonic guns,
was a brave move. The music is nothing like the film music, and indeed
it transpires he had been working on it for over thirty years. It’s a
huge late-romantic work, effectively out of date before he had completed
it, but he clearly did not want to travel the path of serialism or atonalism.
Its ambiguities lie further in the absence of modality, deliberately avoiding
the words ‘major’ or ‘minor’ in the key title, rather leaving it to the
implications of the moment. Key relationships are deconstructed, there
is none between the first and second subjects of the first movement (F
sharp to C major), the development has a thrilling tension with some allusion
to his film style before concluding mysteriously in woodwind dominated
passages (Track 2: 08’50") before the recapitulation, where we hear
once again the unison theme of the harsh, dramatic material at the start.
The Scherzo is a tarantella (with thrilling horn passages which hark back
to film scores, Track 3: 08.30") followed by a surreal and sparsely
scored trio, while the slow movement is a Mahlerian funeral march, the
emotional epicentre of the work. The main theme is a transformed version
of the Death March for the Earl of Essex composed in 1939 for another
Flynn (and Bette Davis) film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.
The build up from Track 4, 05’.10" to one of three climaxes Track
4, 06’20" exemplifies the outpouring of emotionally rich material
at this composer’s fingertips. The work ends with a rather abrupt mood
swing to a jauntily joyous Rondo, in which the earlier movements are recalled
at various places.
This is an excellent performance by the Oregon Symphony
[Orchestra] under James DePreist in the surround sound of Delos’s Virtual
Reality Recording made in the spatial acoustics of the University auditorium
in Newberg, Oregon. The symphony has had its interpreters over the years,
the late Rudolf Kempe with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in 1972 and
Werner Andreas Albert’s 1988 compilation for cpo with the Nordwestdeutsche
Philharmonie, but this is as good as it gets.
Christopher Fifield
see also review
by Rob Barnett
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The
Sea Hawk
Symphony
moderato
ma energico
Scherzo:
allegro molto
Adagio:
Lento
Finale:
Allegro
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Oregon Symphony Orchestra/James
DePreist 