Self-indulgence alert!
This Monday afternoon, we’ll hear two symphonies: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 8, with its striking use of percussion (no pun intended), and Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 6.
The Vaughan Williams has been playing in my car pretty much incessantly since the composer’s birthday last Thursday. Beyond the “Sinfonia Antarctica” – the Symphony No. 7, with its programmatic associations with the film “Scott of the Antarctic” – we don’t really hear much of Vaughan Williams’ later symphonies. This one is a gem, with its tuned gongs and movement-long showcases for the wind and string sections. It also happens to be the shortest of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies, and, though marked by ambiguity, it seems not to slip into intimations of the unknown (i.e. death) in quite the same way as the Symphonies Nos. 6, 7 & 9 appear to do. That said, the third movement contains a theme that brings to mind the chorale “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” used in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” Vaughan Williams wrote the work when he was in his early 80s, between 1953 and 1955.
Sibelius’ 6th, completed in 1923, always puts me in an autumnal frame of mind, probably in part because of the composer’s suggested motto: “When shadows lengthen.” Sibelius described the work as “cold spring water;” no doubt an antidote to the contemporary “cocktails,” as he called them, being served up by Igor Stravinsky. It certainly opens with some of the composer’s most hypnotic and gorgeous music. Sibelius said of the work, “The sixth symphony always reminds me of the scent of first snow.” We all know winter comes early to Finland.
We’ll also hear from Hungarian flutist and composer Franz Doppler, an associate of Franz Liszt; Bohemian Baroque master Jan Dismas Zelenka; contemporary Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür; and Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, on their birthdays. I hope you’ll join me for autumnal symphonies and more, from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Sardanapalus wants all his pleasures at once
