As a nutty musical Anglophile, I have to say I’ve never been able to get my head around the music of York Bowen. Lord knows, I’ve tried. Every year as a radio host, I’d pull something from the station library on his birthday anniversary and give it a whirl. But he was not someone whose music I sprang for whenever looking for a piece to fill out a program.
Bowen lived from 1884 to 1961. His contemporaries included Frank Bridge, John Ireland, Cyril Scott, John Foulds, Arnold Bax, George Dyson, Lord Berners, George Butterworth, Rebecca Clarke, and Eric Coates.
Allegedly, he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime as a pianist and composer, and his career unquestionably contained some notable achievements. Bowen was the soloist in the first recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4. He played the premiere of William Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante for Orchestra and Piano. He published his own editions of the piano works of Mozart and Chopin. His own music was championed by such artists as Fritz Kreisler, Efrem Zimbalist, Lionel Tertis, and Adrian Boult (naturally).
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, who got to the point that he didn’t want his works performed by anyone (to the point that he enacted a 36-year ban), dedicated his to Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 102, to him. Camille Saint-Saëns went so far as to praise him as “the finest of English composers.”
Who am I to disagree? But alas, I do.
Bowen’s music, while Romantic in influence and disposition, is not to my ear especially “English,” in the sense that, say, Vaughan Williams or Walton are English. Also, I just don’t find him all that interesting.
Or at least I didn’t. But maybe I just wasn’t listening closely enough.
I have the great good fortune to live near Princeton Record Exchange, with its vast store of secondhand merchandise always deeply discounted. It is not unusual for me to walk out of there with a shopping bag full of classical music treasures priced at a dollar or two or maybe three. The trouble is, I buy so much that, with a collection of over 10,000 recordings, it’s not unusual for me to duplicate. I used to take them back and swap them out, but for a dollar, it got to the point where I figured why bother? Instead, every December I just divvy up the dupes and send them out in bulk as gifts to receptive friends.
This year, one of these was a Chandos recording from 2011 of York Bowen’s Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Philharmonic, which, when I went to unpack my treasures following one of these PREX expeditions, I discovered I already own, but obviously never listened to it. In driving around last week I decided to take it with me as companion on my travels. The Symphony No. 1 did nothing to change my opinion of Bowen. It’s innocuous music, though hardly indelible, a student work, written when the composer was 18 years-old. At times, it seems to be on the verge of blossoming into a light music wallow, along the lines of somebody like Roger Quilter, but sadly it never quite gets there.
The Symphony No. 2 (1909-11), however, is another matter entirely, and may at last have made me a convert. The work is compelling, with a degree of drama and forward momentum, it has some good tunes, and it’s strikingly orchestrated. It’s also interesting to note how Tchaikovsky might have been filtered through an English sensibility. It doesn’t sound exactly like its prototype – at times it’s like a hybrid of Tchaikovsky and Bowen’s classmate Arnold Bax – but you can pretty much lay a transparency of a Tchaikovsky symphony over it and the influence is unmistakable. The scherzo reminds me of Mendelssohn (an enormous influence in the U.K. in the 19th century) and even a little bit of Korngold. It’s sparked my interest to go back and listen to all those other Bowen works I’ve dismissed, to see if maybe I’d just been having a bad day, or at the very least, if there’s an ember in there somewhere that in my growing disinterest I might have overlooked.
This is an often-unacknowledged aspect, I think, of one’s mania for classical music. It’s a genre that, in some respects, is a celebration of the past, as the repertoire, accumulated over centuries, is enormous. Yet because it’s so vast, one discovers new things all the time. So even if the music itself has been around for quite a while, there is the stimulation of novelty. Of course, one can also listen to the greatest works again and again, and in different performances that reveal further wonders within the familiar.
Even if we’re to ignore the fact that there are new “classical” works being written all the time, in this kind of aural museum, there is always growth. Of course, the experience is not unique to this particular art form. We see or hear things differently, depending on where we are in our individual lives – our maturity, our life circumstances, our moods, our stresses, the time of day, the weather, what we’ve eaten for lunch. Sometimes, for whatever reason that has nothing at all to do with the music itself, it just doesn’t hit us right.
Who knows, maybe this has been the case for me with York Bowen.
I typed up these thoughts last week, but it was so late in the day, I figured it would get lost on Facebook, so I set it aside, planning to post it in the morning. Then I forgot all about it, until Rocky Lamanna played a York Bowen piano concerto yesterday afternoon on KWAX. (Thanks, Rocky!) How many half-baked posts linger forgotten among my Word documents, I wonder?
In the meantime, you know what? I got to enjoying Bowen’s Symphony No. 1 too. It’s nowhere on the same scale or level of flamboyance as its successor, but the work does have its charms. Its geniality is infectious, and revisiting it by way of the Second Symphony, it’s obvious that Bowen’s affection for Tchaikovsky was there all along. I particularly like the last movement, which also picks up a trick or two from Schumann. On the Chandos album, the work receives its world premiere recording.
Is it life-altering, world-shattering music? No, but it is pleasurable to listen to. I’m glad I made the effort to really let it in. Sometimes you have to live with music for a while, through all moods and extraneous conditions, to truly get to know it.
See what you make of Bowen’s Symphony No. 2.
