American audiences tend to be unfamiliar with English concert music. Surely this constitutes one of life’s little ironies, considering that this nation was founded as a British colony and still retains a significant percentage of citizens who are of English descent—myself among them, despite my Germanic last name. You would think we Americans would be thoroughly on the up-and-up with all things British, but in fact we’re not. Oh, we’re not absolute pikers about it all; Vaughan Williams, Walton, Britten, et al., certainly pop up on our concert programs. But for every Elgar piece we embrace there stands a panoply of works by Germans, French, Italians, and Russians.
Consider the names of our orchestral conductors for most of the 20th century: Toscanini, Reiner, Ormandy, Szell, Koussevitzky, Munch, Dorati, Paray, Monteux, Mitropoulos, Ozawa. Lots of countries represented—Hungarians surprisingly abundant—but no British folks. No Americans for a good long time, either, but Bernstein got the ball rolling on that. The English conductors made visits, but they didn’t hang around much. Even nowadays we’re fairly short on British conductors before American orchestras.
Certainly part of the problem has to do with the fact that English concert music only came into its own around the turn of the 20th century. After what almost amounted to a false start with Arthur Sullivan (who made his mark on posterity with Gilbert and those glorious operettas instead of becoming the great symphonic nationalist hoped for by the intelligentsia), Elgar was the first British composer for a good long while to reach past England’s borders as a concert-hall contender. (Do you know much music by William Sterndale Bennett, Hubert Parry, or Charles Stanford? They were all 19th century biggies in England.)
But from the 1890s onwards, English composers began arriving in force: Delius, Vaughan Williams, and Holst; Walton a generation later, then Britten, then up came today’s bumper crop, such as Benjamin, Knussen, and Adès. At the same time the United States finally began producing its own composers of stature: Ives, Copland, Gershwin, and all the rest. It’s quite possible that the English composers got swept under the rug in the process; here in the US we had quite enough on our plate dealing with the major Continental moderns such as Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, and the like, together with our own home-grown music. The English composers, no matter how excellent their work, didn’t get all that much attention. British music was woefully under-represented on American concert programs and recordings, although a bit managed to wiggle through here or there. Think about it: during the two decades while the American record labels were cranking out all of those Reiner/Chicago, Bernstein/NY Phil, Ormandy/Philadelphia, and Szell/Cleveland recordings, English works were glaringly absent save Holst’s The Planets, a must-have stereo showpiece for audiophiles and record collectors. Oh, maybe a bit of Delius slipped through here and there. Bernstein recorded Britten’s Four Interludes from Peter Grimes with the NY Phil, but his Enigma Variations (Elgar) was with the BBC.
Even giants like Vaughan Williams are mostly represented on record by British orchestras. I took a look at ArkivMusic and found 23 recordings of Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 2 “London.” Here are the orchestras with recordings out:
BBC Symphony
Bournemouth Symphony
Hallé Orchestra
London Philharmonic
London Symphony
National Youth Orchestra of Wales
Philharmonia Orchestra
Queen’s Hall Orchestra
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
Royal Philharmonic
All of the conductors are British save one—the Dutch Kees Bakels leading the Bournemouth Symphony.
A major 20th century symphony, really one of the outstanding symphonic works of its time (right before WWI), and not one Continental or American orchestra has recorded it. However, Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony are beginning to record some of the VW symphonies, so at least some American recognition is forthcoming. Abravanel recorded the Sixth with the Utah Symphony back in 1966. And although one might be titillated by the idea of Leopold Stokowski conducting several of the VW symphonies, a moment’s reflection reminds one that Stokowski was, after all, an Englishman….and the recordings are with the BBC Symphony.
We had some Vaughan Williams at the SFS last year—and that was unusual enough to merit the “lead” article for that month in Playbill, a fine essay on the Vaughan Williams symphonies by my friend and editor Larry Rothe.
British music has not tended to export across the Atlantic all that well—despite the immense popularity of so much British culture here. Consider the English pastoral style, so much a part of late Romantic and early 20th century British music; I’ve heard it described as “drab” by any number of American listeners, instead of coming across as reassuring or nostalgically pleasing, as it might be to English audiences.
On the whole I prefer British composers to American (I suppose that’s my English heritage talking), just as I am a hardcore fan of British (and Canadian, by extension) hi-fi in preference to American or Asian gear. (Well, OK, I have German headphones.) So I’m delighted that the SF Symphony has been offering a much-welcome banquet of English music this winter, beginning with George Benjamin’s two weeks just past, and this week’s forthcoming British program with The Planets and Walton’s Violin Concerto, conducted by the always-welcome Charles Dutoit. I’ll be giving the pre-concert lectures for that week, and in recognition of the relative skimpy knowledge American audiences have of British music, I’m presenting a teeny-tiny-mini-history starting with William Byrd and ending with Walton.