I just listened to that Stanford Sixth Symphony on YouTube, Michael, in the recording by the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley on Chandos and have even bought a cheap copy of that on eBay. It is indeed full of beauties and strikes me as sub-Elgarian - but of course was in fact written shortly before Elgar's symphonies; ironic, given that there was no love lost between the two composers. Thanks for the tip; I would not otherwise have thought to listen to it - which is part of the problem...
I had hoped that Christopher Howell might post another Stanfordian Thought to mark the centenary of the great man’s death yesterday, 29 March, but sadly it was not so. It’s hard to keep in touch with live music-making from 5000 miles away but I suspect that there has been little to mark the anniversary and my hopes for the Proms are not very high. For those of us who think he was, as his Westminster Abbey gravestone puts it, a ‘great musician’, the CD catalogue fortunately allows us to enjoy his music, so much of which deserves regular performance. I wonder when one of his Irish Rhapsodies or symphonies was last heard live? The Fourth Irish Rhapsody seems to me an absolute masterpiece and the Sixth Symphony, the one in memory of G.F.Watts, despite its century long neglect, is a fine work with an opening movement of wonderful energy (presumably a response to Watts’ great statue) whilst the slow movement is surely one of the loveliest in British music. If the rest is not quite up to this, the quiet and serene closing pages make ample amends as they fade away, ‘all passion spent’.
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