With eight symphonies to his credit, several of them of great
authority, Benjamin Frankel is a major British composer by any account.
Still relatively little known, this boxed set will hopefully further the
appreciation of Frankel's work, which in recent years began with this
very series of recordings. The four CDs here were recorded between May
1993 and April 1999, with each containing two symphonies and all but one
also featuring one or two shorter additional pieces. Each disc is packaged
with photographs, the same excellent essay on the composer by Dimitri
Kennaway (the composer's step-son, without whose efforts Frankel's music
would be still less well known than it is) and notes on the music by Frankel's
friend and former pupil, Buxton Orr. The exception is the disc containing
the final two symphonies - as Orr died in 1997 the notes are either by
Kennaway, or are Kennaway's revisions of Orr's or Frankel’s original programme
notes for the premiere performances of the symphonies.
Apart from an outer card slipcase the four discs are
exactly as one might buy them separately. It's a small quibble, and
one that presumably would have cost CPO too much to change, but due
to the order in which the works were originally recorded and released
the symphonies appear slightly out of sequence, even though they could
all easily fit on four discs in the correct order.
Benjamin Frankel was born in London in 1906 and had
a very varied musical life, studying at London's Guildhall School of
Music, working as a jazz pianist and fiddler and having a very successful
career as a film composer before retiring from the cinema in 1965 following
his epic score for Battle of the Bulge (also recorded on CPO)
to concentrate completely on his concert music. The first performance
of his serious music is thought to have been at the composer's own studio
in December 1933 - a series of chamber works - while Frankel did not
turn to the symphony until 1958. During the 1950's Frankel also adopted
12-note serialism, a technique which informs each of his symphonies.
It is however, a modified, personalised and less austere form of the
technique than might be imagined. After a long struggle Frankel has
won me to his point of view; I have long held with his contemporaneous
colleague in film music, Miklós Rózsa, that serial music
is fit only for the devil.
If as I have you find the Symphony No.1 somewhat nebulous,
may I suggest approaching the eight symphonies as a body of work, playing
through each to familiarise yourself with the style; each work is focused
to the same ultimate end, a musical-philosophical quest which ended
with the composer's premature death. May I also suggest turning to the
Symphony No.2, at 35 minutes the longest work by a fair margin, and
a musical odyssey of fearsome emotion and drama. It is, I would suggest
alone with No.8, the key to unlocking the questioning nature of the
symphonies, a piece written as the composer notes in 1962 during a time
of emotional distress and turbulence. It is a deeply personal work,
dedicated to the composer's late wife, Anna; though the emotional contents
we can only guess at. However, this intensity makes it the most immediately
striking of the symphonies.
In a spoken introduction on the CD Frankel talks of
the vague magical/poetical ideas behind the creation of the second symphony,
a work prefaced with quotations from Wordsworth. The first movement
seeks spiritual reconciliation, speaking of a "dark inscrutable workmanship"
yet the second movement journeys through a dark landscape which might
as well be Lovecraft as Wordsworth. The relentless pulse, the uncompromising
brass, the inventively scored percussion, all contribute to a virtuoso
exploration of an unquiet spirit. Parts of this music are truly unnerving,
suggestive of a darkness which is no mere flirtation with the depths,
but a clear eyed stare into the abyss. After this the finale comes as
a relief, a lengthy adagio which seeks a peaceful resolution but is
left fading into the night. The atmospheric writing towards the end
asks more questions than it can answer, pointing to the very different
Symphony No.3.
In a single movement half the length of its immediate
predecessor, Frankel's Symphony No.3, dates from 1964. The mood is less
dark, even at times optimistic, though melodies still turn to fragments,
a work without resolution. The opening themes are diatonic, the formal
plan of the work the transformation of that material into serial form.
If this is in a sense an exercise compared to the monumental work of
1962, there is a tightly argued logic which displays an often alpine
grandeur, a sense of new vistas to be explored, ever new horizons to
be reached. There is a bold majesty on the verge of self-immolation,
an indomitable urgency which is by turns exhilarating and intellectually
haunting. One can only speculate as to what drove Frankel to this unease.
The Symphony No.4 surprises after what has come before
with its very positive and sunny opening. Two further years have passed,
it is 1966 and the three movement, 25 minute symphony seems to paint
an indomitable picture. However, after the stirring introduction, we
find the work becomes a tribute to its dedicatee, the violinist Olive
Zorian, her death being directly referred to in the gentle Lento finale.
Between life and death comes a terse five minute Quasi Allegretto, the
elliptical almost-melody looking both backward and forward, suggesting
brief nostalgic reflection subsumed by a bold, near fugal march theme
with typically rich and glittering orchestration. After this the finale
is paradoxically uplifting in its quietude, introspection and resolutely
powerful crescendos.
At just 18 minutes the Symphony No.5 (1967) is as short
as it is enigmatic. The opening two movements both suggest gently disturbed
landscapes, impressions but which soon shift out of focus. Then the
brief Allegro brillante finale comes along, in under five minutes upsetting
any expectations with an ironic smile and bright shards of gleaming
colour. Brass and woodwind race to the finishing line dispelling all
doubts yet leaving the listener with the knowledge that this cheerfulness
is quite uncharacteristic of the previous symphonies. One almost senses
the composer teasing the audience; setting a riddle and saying, "solve
me" if you can.
There are five movements lasting just shy of half-an-hour
to the Symphony No.6 (1969), the lyrical opening bars of the Andante
giving way to a sense of a perfectly hermetic musical world looking
to a future outside of its time. There is a feeling of disengagement
with the 20th century, a personal retreat into a domain of
perpetually circling questions. The woodwind writing is eloquently otherworldly,
the strings presenting a controlled turbulence which explodes in the
following Allegro. There is a reigned fury to this writing suggestive
of a world about to cycle out of control, the conflict finding its inevitable
consequences in the longest movement, a central Adagio. This however
is no lyrical lament, but a desolate, barren earth, the haunted textures
indicative of some final and irreversible catastrophe. Given the date
of composition one may well be drawn to imagine the Cold War come to
horrible fruition. In the woodwind writing which opens the Intermezzo
await ghosts of Stravinsky, a Rite of Spring turned to stark
winter with little human warmth. Leavened with cold ironic wit, the
finale "Allegro alternating with Adagio", is exactly what it says, a
dark joke torn between dancing and despair. A grimly uncompromisingly
symphony, according to taste one may find it among the least accessible
or most profound; perhaps both.
The Symphony No.7 (1970) followed immediately from
No.6. Frankel notes it stands between two lines of Marlow: "That time
may cease and midnight never come" and "The stars move still, time runs,
the clock will strike." The music was written between periods of dangerous
illness opens in reflectively mystical mood with an Andante tranquillo
which seems in the composer's more modern language to pay passing homage
to The Planets. A dark cosmic grandeur infuses every passage,
while of the second movement Frankel suggested that the listener "may
imagine oneself contemplating a vast temporal clock-mechanism, with
strange chiming devices and a rather hypnotic action." This description
could not be bettered, this visual thinking perhaps the legacy of the
composer's long association with cinema; the result a vivid tone poem
which one cannot but see as informed by a science fictional-visionary
imagination in the tradition of the works of Olaf Stapledon. One even
wonders what 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) might have been like
had Mr Frankel met Mr Kubrick. The third movement again evidences Frankel's
defiant spirit, an almost military redoubt replete with combative snare
informing the music. The finale balances between "imminent threat" and
nostalgia, and again in the composer's words "There are processional
moments of a certain splendour and strange echoings of such processions
in ghostly imitation." It is stark and grave writing without a safety
net, the clock has reached two minutes to midnight.
The final symphony, No.8 (1971) begins with restrained
resolve, again a powerful snare seems to indicate a refusal to surrender,
the Moderato grave apparently being inspired by the composer's solitary
city walks. The brief second movement is relentlessly propulsive, ever
questioning, seeking an answer in the third movement, subtitled "Reflections
on Christmas Eve". According to Buxton Orr "Each year there is the ever
renewed offer of Christian rebirth - Man's gaze flickers and is caught
for a moment, only to turn back once again, fixed on the old paths."
But is this what Frankel meant? And does the music accept the offer,
or merely contemplate it? We can never be sure, but certainly the eight
symphonies offer a quest which is at core spiritual; a determined seeking
for "the answer". Had Frankel finally become, like C.S. Lewis, the most
reluctant convert in all Christendom? Who can say, other than that there
is an unusual sense of optimism to the concluding Allegro moderato,
a sense of tension dissipated in brighter colours and joyful progression.
It is the converse of the despairing No.6, the unflinchingly horrific
No.2. A choral ninth was to have followed and was almost complete in
the composer's mind at the time of his death. Perhaps had he lived to
write it, his choice of text would finally have revealed if he had found
his answer.
And so to end at the beginning. The problem of coming
fresh to the Symphony No.1 is that even Frankel's questions are in the
process of being formulated. The work remains elusive, spectral, and
if fascinating, hard to hold in focus. A composer experimenting with
his new voice, the restless and unresolved nature of the writing points
only forward, and in and of itself fails to satisfy completely. It is,
as I have said, better to approach these symphonies as a body of work;
to return to the beginning at the end and wonder again at the distance
travelled, the sheer commitment, and the compelling gravity of the writing.
Nevertheless this is a long, challenging and often dark journey. Initially
the eight symphonies seem impenetrable, uncompromisingly beyond the
simply human in scale. But then one finds a way in and the works begin
to reveal their secrets; music with a cryptic heart wrought on an epic
scale.
The entire cycle offers a vision greater than its individual
instalments, a vision at once intensely hermetic and monumentally cosmological,
a gesture against the inevitable and a portrait of a vast unknown world
beyond our time and place. In a tradition from Holst, Langgaard and
Scriabin to the visionary literature of the 20th century,
Frankel holds a place which has yet to be acknowledged. There is great
music here, still waiting to be explored and fully understood.
Throughout CPO's recorded sound is a model of detail
and clarity. The precise orchestrations gleam with under the insightful
baton of Werner Andreas Albert, and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra
deliver these complex scores with great finesse and dramatic richness.
A more challenging yet rewarding odyssey through the work of a still
under valued mid-20th century composer is hard to imagine.
Coda:
The set also contains four shorter works. Mephistopheles’
Serenade and Dance is subtitled "A Caricature for Orchestra"
and is a playful six minute piece which ranges through mock orchestral
jazz to jaunty rhythms not inappropriate to an Ealing comedy, while
at other moments hinting at the optimistic sobriety of Hovhaness. A
curious blend which takes its subject not entirely seriously enough
for some tastes. In very marked contrast the Overture: May Day
comes from 1948 and offers a straight forward, expertly crafted patriotic
celebration with a smattering of folk-inspired melody. Filled with light
and colour, the piece is a delight. Commissioned for the St. Cecilia's
Day Royal Concert in 1970, Overture to a Ceremony starts forebodingly
but soon develops into a more exuberant piece laced with witty references
to "God Save the Queen". While the nature of the ceremony remains a
mystery one senses the composer approached it with a good nature. A
Shakespearean Overture is dedicated to Frankel's close friend, Gerald
Finzi and was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1956 (the
year of Finzi’s death, Ed.). The notion was to convey, as much as possible
in ten minutes, the essence of Shakespeare's drama. The music is full
of colour, tension, suspense and imagination, and was the composer's
last work before his adoption of serial methods. The direction of his
future work can be clearly heard, and the tension between more traditionally
tonal writing and this brave new world provides an isle full of most
enjoyable noises.
Gary S. Dalkin
Also see Review
by Rob Barnett
Queensland SO/Werner Andreas
Albert