I picked up some super-bargain CDs in the local gay charity shop yesterday - £3 each – in the form of three Malcolm Arnolds and a Richard Rodney Bennett.
The latter, which I played first, struck me as undistinguished. There was also a piano concerto, and something called "Concerto for Stan Getz", and other bits and pieces with only that wonderful Waltz from Murder on the Orient Express making any great impression. But I'll give it another go soon, and see if anything grips. At least he's trying to be tuneful and popular and entertaining.
The Malcolm Arnolds are much more promising. There's Arnold himself conducting his Third Symphony, and a film music disc, neither of which I've yet listened to, and there's one of his two string quartets, which I have just have listened to.
Arnold is our Shostakovitch. I'm not just saying that. The parallels are really quite striking, most notably in that Arnold also churned out a mass of music for the movies, and that his more serious compositional style is not so much a rejection of all that tunefulness and professional middle-of-the-roadness as an ironic distancing from it, while at the same time not very secretly quite liking all that and doing lots of complicated things with it and weaving into it lots of folk and folk-like melodies, real and made up.
Arnold had no Stalin to torment and stimulate him by issuing life-threatening critiques of pieces that he, Stalin, disapproved of. Arnold's problem with his serious stuff wasn't being officially disapproved of, so much as the Western horror of being insufficiently attended to, first for being too modern, and then later for not being modern enough, although compared to most serious Western composers he did pretty well and was always busy with commissions.
Athough politically he had it easy, Arnold suffered even more severely than Shostakovich did from what are politely called "inner demons", who seem to have more than made up for the lack of external demons but are perhaps not as glamorous for outsiders to reflect upon. He wasn't ever completely unhinged, the way Schumann ended up being, but he suffered from bouts of extreme unhappiness, often provoked by personal misfortunes (notably the loss of a daughter) but then severely reinforced by his own inner temperament. There's a lot of this torment to be heard in his more serious music, together with the effort to keep it at bay. Arnold didn't write as many symphonies as Shostakovich (the score there being 15-9 to Shostakovich) and not nearly as many string quartets (15-2), but the similarities between the two are nevertheless rather striking. To my ear, they both developed a similar musical language, and they both used it to express similar things.
I have worshipped Shostakovich ever since I heard a talented schoolboy at Marlborough thrashing out the first movement of the first cello concerto during a competition, and then immediately acquired the CBS Rostropovich LP and played it to death, and then the fifth symphony. Much later, when I was starting to suffer from the problem of knowing everything and having everything, or thinking that maybe I did, I started listening seriously to Arnold's symphonies. I now like these a lot (and recommend the bargain set of these on Naxos), and I think I'm going to like these two quartets a lot also, especially number two. There's another whole paragraph and more that could be written about how Arnold is also our Bartok, the second of the string quartets being particular provocative of that thought.
Some of those reading this may over the years have whistled that very catchy tune that introduces the BBC TV show called "What The Papers Say". Arnold wrote that. It's a snippet from the first of his English Dances, Set 2, op. 33.
