The series of discs being released under the banner of Nimbus Alliance is rapidly building into a fascinating and significant collection. In part I’m reminded of the old Argo label which combined high performance and production values with a questing and questioning approach to repertoire. All of those qualities are on display here with a disc showcasing the very considerable talents of the British composer Philip Sawyers. I enjoyed this disc very much from the very first playing and my appreciation of the stature of the music it contains has grown with each repeat listening.
Sawyers will celebrate his 60
th birthday next year.
He spent twenty-four years from 1973 as a member of the Orchestra
of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. That orchestra was then,
and remains today, one of the very finest and Sawyers joined them
straight from college so clearly he is a seriously good violinist
as well as composer. I mention that here because I think the playing
experience he has impinges directly on the quality of the music
he writes. Sawyers has written the liner-notes for this disc and
they are as informative as they are insightful. Crucially, from
my point of view, they reveal – almost in passing – Sawyers’ pragmatically
practical approach to composition as well as his innate respect
for his fellow players. Both of these facets result in music that
is as rewarding to play and listen to as it is challenging. I
will write about the music chronologically because, as Sawyers
explains, to some degree each work begat the next. The earliest
work here is the 1972
Symphonic Music for Brass and Strings
written while Sawyers was still a student at the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama in London. I would challenge anyone to identify
this as a student or even early work. Perhaps it exudes the confidence
of youth but not at the expense of form or fluency. Again the
liner is illuminating; Sawyers cites the Hindemith
Konzertmusik
Op.50 as an initial inspiration. He mentions Hindemith’s remark
that “tonality is like gravity – you ignore it at your peril”
and that is the key [pun intended] to all three works presented
here. Sawyers avoids keys in the traditional sense but prefers
instead ‘tonal centres’. These act as the gravitational focal
points around which the music can almost literally orbit. I feel
he is being almost too confessional admitting the further influence
of Bartók and Mahler. Not that there aren’t passing moments but
lucky the composer who is able to write in totally splendid isolation
unaffected by the writings of anyone else. What I find most impressive
is his confident handling of form in such an early work. The piece
is a single movement span lasting more than eighteen minutes.
Yet never once does the attention wander or the interest flag.
More than anything else this is
exciting music. From a
calm opening listen to the way the Sawyer builds the music to
the first extended climax around 3:15. For a violinist I think
he’s a frustrated horn-player – as indeed am I! The brass writing
is muscular, athletic and spectacular. In this he is helped hugely
by excellent playing throughout. The continued support of a fine
and dedicated group of musicians is oxygen to any composer. The
recordings here are taken from live performances spread over six
years. This is the third disc I have heard by this orchestra and
in each case they have sounded superb. As an aside I would warmly
recommend the Hailstork Symphonies on
Naxos
as well as the harder to find Ott Symphonies on Koss. All of these
discs show the Grand Rapids Symphony to have agile and sweet strings,
the powerful sonorous brass already alluded to and characterful
alert wind.
I have written elsewhere how I find the use of often pointless ‘extended’ performance techniques irritating. Too often these mask a fundamental paucity in the composer’s musical imagination instead having to fall back on superficial effect. Imagine my delight to read in Sawyers’ note “I didn’t want something devoid of colour, but I wanted to avoid all those gratuitously used special effects….. I was also interested in absolute music, something classic and pure with no programmatic overtones”. Take my word for it Mr Sawyers – you’ve succeeded brilliantly, how refreshing to hear music confident enough in its own essential strength to be true to itself. This is music without artifice or ornament, simply honest and strong – and so much the better for that. Although in one continuous movement the work falls into five sections – again Sawyers modestly acknowledges a structural debt to Bartók in his use of this arch/mirror form. At the centre of this is a very beautiful passage for violins and solo horn – it’s that horn again! – the instruments entwining around each other in an increasingly passionate musical embrace. Again, for a (then) young composer the pacing of this build is hugely impressive. Credit too to the engineering of this disc – yes there are occasional reminders of an audience’s presence but this is something that rarely bothers me and certainly not when the trade-off is a group of performances that palpably radiate the energy and electricity that these do all of which has been caught in wonderfully present sound. Exciting is a word that my listening notes contain repeatedly. Surely only those congenitally opposed to any music written post 1920 can fail to find the final climax hurled out by the trombones at the 17:00 mark thrilling – actually this is a moment that recalled Hindemith’s
Symphony -Mathis der Maler.
One of the mysteries not addressed by the liner-note – or on Sawyers’
own website – is the compositional silence of the years he was
at Covent Garden. Certainly the demands made on the time and energy
of a pit player are greater than that of a standard orchestral
player; more performances of often longer works requiring more
rehearsals. For whatever reason the next orchestral work mentioned
on the website is the next work on this disc too – the
Symphony
No.1 of 2004 commissioned by the performers here. Indeed,
from the recording dates I assume that this is a record of that
premiere. Fortunate indeed the composer whose music receives such
dedicated and well prepared first performances. This is a substantial
work; cast in traditional four movement symphonic form it runs
to over thirty four minutes. Again the instrumental writing is
as effective as it is impressive – glowering brass climaxes superbly
rendered. Sawyers notes that he has used a 12-note row to forge
the thematic material of the opening movement but this should
not be taken to mean that this music is atonal. Rather this is
a structural device, for some reason this music has the feel of
a dark inexorably tragic march magnificent and inevitable with
tubular bells in the background the ‘passing bells for those who
die as cattle’. Not that Sawyers suggests anything of the sort
– pure fancy on my behalf. From this the balm of the D major –
initially at least –
Adagio – is very moving indeed. A
fragile flute laments over meditative strings. Again the quality
of the players is apparent – the previously mentioned flute is
quite ravishingly beautiful as is the oboe that soon joins. The
calm is shattered by a central section of impassioned protest.
A common feature from the earlier work is Sawyers avoidance of
any superficial effect – this is ‘proper’ writing rigorously argued.
There is a vocal quality to much of the writing – lyrical in the
literal sense that left me wondering if that is a consequence
of so many years ‘Gardening’. This movement is by some way the
most extended of the symphony and reaches another epic climax
at 11:00 which Sawyers refers to almost guiltily as ‘filmic’.
Not to my mind; rewarding, cathartic, impressive yes; anything
pejorative absolutely not. Context is all – this passage arrives
as a natural result of what has come before and the sinking back
to the string-led calm of the movement’s opening works all the
better for the resplendent nature of that final peak. Not because
there are musical similarities but because the music evoked a
similar emotional response in me I found myself thinking of the
heraldic writing of Bliss in
A Colour Symphony and the
Panufnik
Sinfonia Sacra - two of my very favourite works
so not faint praise in my book. There follows the shortest section
of the work – a fleet and agile
Scherzo all scurrying
energy and nervous vigour. The skirling wind and fraught brass
fanfares did evoke some of Malcolm Arnold’s writing and that word
exciting appeared again. Sawyers’ ability to maintain the momentum
cannot fail to impress as does the playing here; this is a virtuosic
movement played with enormous panache. Sawyers likens the opening
of the
Finale to having a chorale-like quality. This is
soon displaced by some angrily contrapuntal writing the various
sections of the orchestra warring against each other. Again this
is 12-tone based but the effect is more passacaglia-like with
a recurring sequence of chords/melodic shapes providing the basis
from which the movement develops. This leads to a final craggily
impressive statement of the chorale theme [track 6 7:00] before
a resolution into one last D major chord. I see that Sawyers has
written a second symphony – a work I would love to hear on the
strength of this one.
The disc opens with the most recent work; the rather splendidly titled
The Gale of Life from 2006. This is a good old-fashioned concert overture taking its name from a line in A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”; ‘…through him the gale of life blew high’. The commission came from the Albany Symphony Orchestra in New York State as a result of hearing the scherzo of the symphony. Certainly they occupy the same helter-skelter world and it makes as cracking an opener for this CD as it would for any concert. Am I alone in lamenting the demise of a short orchestral work to open a concert? All the virtues both compositionally and in execution apparent in the earlier works are evident here too. My only thought is the basic motif that drives the work is not quite as interesting or strong as the themes Sawyers develops in the two larger works. His handling of the material is every bit as confident though. An interesting thought is how consistent Sawyers has been with his music across the 34 years that span the music presented here and hopefully there will be many more opportunities to hear his work both on disc and in concert.
A disc which reflects great credit on all involved – music of instant appeal and enduring quality performed with zealous passion recorded in excellent sound. Well-worth investigating.
Nick Barnard
Grand Rapids Symphony/David Lockington 
