The colourful world of Malcolm Arnold
The British composer’s Second and Fourth symphonies reveal a mind of rare ingenuity, says Julian Haylock
On this month’s cover disc, the BBC Concert Orchestra performs live from Malcolm Arnold’s home town of Northampton in blazing accounts of his Second and Fourth symphonies. Listening to these exuberantly inventive scores, whose unique emotional soundworlds synthesise inspiration from both Mahler and Sibelius (composers normally considered polar opposites), it is difficult to believe that Arnold was for many years dismissed by his critics as somehow lacking gravitas.
For a while, following the international success of his Second Symphony in 1953, it looked as though Arnold might become the leading light of the younger generation of composers. Yet by the time his Fourth Symphony appeared just seven years later, there was already a distinct critical chill in the air, caused in part by the glorious silliness of his A Grand, Grand Overture for organ, three vacuum cleaners, floor polisher, four rifles and orchestra (1956), written for Gerard Hoffnung.
Additionally, Arnold had achieved a series of successes in a genre considered by many unworthy of serious attention: film music. He even won an Oscar and Grammy nomination for his score to 1957’s The Bridge Over the River Kwai – composed in just ten days. Yet it was his heightened filmic instincts for orchestral colour, melodic character, emotional structure and expressive candour that made him such a potent force in the concert hall, both as an inspired miniaturist and, as heard here, when working on a symphonic scale.
A personal journey
The Second Symphony caused quite a stir at the time as one of the few British symphonies of the last century to travel abroad successfully, without the slightest hint of parochialism. Yet it is hardly a crowd-pleaser – anyone expecting a classic Beethovenian emotional trajectory of fate being overcome will be sorely tested by its nerve-jangling semantic uncertainties and reversals. This is deeply personal music that refuses to settle comfortably into generic emotional patterning.
The first movement opens innocently enough as a pastoral idyll, yet despite Sibelian rays of musical sunshine illuminating the soundscape, one senses an underlying melancholy. The following scherzo sounds gesturally as though it should be thoroughly jolly, except it isn’t, and then Arnold plays the emotional flipside in a haunting Lento movement that tantalisingly suggests desolation and loneliness, yet throws us reassuring musical lifelines that prevent us from
falling into the abyss. The finale offsets carefree jauntiness against outbursts of freewheeling counterpoint, leading to a final peroration that, in true Shostakovich style, has a decidedly hollow ring to it.
Looking West
If the Second Symphony can be viewed as a psychodrama which at times feels like a musical roadmap signposting facets of Arnold’s turbulent creative imagination, the Fourth (1960) looks to the outer world for inspiration. Although at the time Arnold was keen to emphasise the symphony’s purely musical credentials, he later admitted that the inclusion of exotic percussion instruments and passages of Caribbean-style rhythmic pizazz symbolised racial integration in the wake of the Notting Hill race riots (see right).
It also allowed Arnold to pay musical hommage to Bernstein’s West Side Story, which had arrived in London’s West End the same year. When asked about the riotous march that breaks out halfwaythrough the finale, Arnold insisted that it was purely to provide ‘musical and dramatic contrast, not social.’ There was, though, surely more to it than he was prepared to admit at the time.
Further listening
To explore Arnold’s symphonies further, head for the set of all nine recorded by the LSO and BBC Philharmonic under Richard Hickox and Rumon Gamba (Chandos CHAN10853(4)X).
Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Concert Orchestra have recorded regularly together, not least in 2000’s disc of light orchestral works by Sidney Torch (Marco Polo 8.223443).
And for more of the BBC Concert Orchestra and Keith Lockhart in partnership, go for their 2011 recording of music by the American composer Frederick Converse (Dutton CDLX7278).