The Scottish conductor James Loughran has died. Although perhaps not so well known in the United States, Loughran made some fine recordings, including a fondly-remembered cycle of Brahms symphonies. But for fans of the cult composer Havergal Brian, he will forever have their gratitude for having conducted the first commercial recording of any of Brian’s music.
Loughran’s recording of Brian’s Symphony No. 10, with the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, was released in 1973, paired with the composer’s Symphony No. 21, conducted by Eric Pinkett, on a Unicorn-Kanchana LP.
Learn more about Havergal Brian in this televised documentary segment, broadcast when the composer was 96 years-old, including footage of Loughran conducting during the recording session. Also, Brian himself speaks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ZFu-MKTRQ
Brian was a composer of almost superhuman tenacity. Despite encouragement from Sir Edward Elgar and early performances by Sir Granville Bantock and Sir Thomas Beecham, hardly any of his music was ever played. Yet he went right on composing for decades.
By coincidence, today marks the anniversary of the first performance of Brian’s most notorious work, his Symphony No. 1, the “Gothic” Symphony, a work of elephantine scale, so long and so large that it was enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records. The work received its belated premiere – four decades after it was written – on this date in 1961.
The interest generated by the work spurred a belated reassessment of Brian’s output, with the BBC committed to performing all of Brian’s symphonies. There are 32 of them in all, 20 of them composed after the age of 80. Talk about faith in one’s own ability!
Although in the last year of Brian’s life he was named Composer of the Year by the Composers Guild of Great Britain, recognition came too late for him to see any of his symphonies issued commercially prior to his death in 1972, two months shy of his 97th birthday.
Brian, a contemporary of Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, emerged from a Midlands working-class background. He left school at the age of 12 and supported himself as a coal miner, a worker for timber firms, and a carpenter’s apprentice – all the while mastering his craft as a composer – until the modest patronage of a wealthy Staffordshire businessman lessened his burden. However, with the outbreak of war in Europe and turbulence in his personal life, the arrangement was not to last, and Brian struggled to keep his head above water. He took menial jobs as he continued to compose, through decades of obscurity and borderline poverty.
It was BBC producer and symphonist Robert Simpson who arranged for a performance of Brian’s Symphony No. 8 in 1954, at which point Brian was already 78 years-old. It was the first time the composer had ever heard one of his symphonies. Simpson continued to use his influence to secure performances of Brian’s music, mostly as radio broadcasts.
This commenced the final chapter of the composer’s most remarkable life as, in his early 80s, he doubled-down and tapped into a well of creative energy that blossomed into an astonishing Indian summer that yielded twenty more symphonies.
The insane demands of the “Gothic,” with its orchestra of 200 players, even before factoring in 500 singers and four brass bands, makes Mahler’s so-called “Symphony of a Thousand” seem like chamber music.
The work falls into two parts. Part I is inspired by Goethe’s “Faust,” and Part II is a gargantuan setting of the “Te Deum.” If ever there was a cathedral in sound, this work would be it. Eat your heart out, Anton Bruckner.
Loughran began his career in the early 1960s, when he worked alongside chief conductor Constantin Silvestri with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He took up his own music directorships, or the equivalent, when he moved on to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (1965-71) and then Hallé Orchestra (1971-83).
It was after an acclaimed performance of “Aida” at Covent Garden that Benjamin Britten invited him to assume the music directorship of the English Opera Group.
Loughran became the first British conductor to be appointed chief of a German orchestra, when he was appointed principal conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra (1979-83).
Between 1977 and 1985, he conducted the Last Night at the Proms five times. He was also principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales from 1987 to 1990.
He made his American debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1972.
Loughran died on Wednesday, eleven days shy of his 93rd birthday. R.I.P.
Brian, “Gothic Symphony”
Loughran conducts Brian’s Symphony No. 10
Loughran conducts Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, with Garrick Ohlsson the soloist, at Royal Albert Hall in 1978
Loughran conducts Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir William Walton, and Benjamin Britten
