Thank you for all this appreciation. No. 17 should now download correctly.
I wonder why a composer is inevitably held to stand and fall by his symphonies. It perhaps goes without saying that I find more in Stanford's than Evan does and I think no. 5, more than the Irish, is the masterpiece is any of them is.
Maybe a future article should try to understand why Stanford, faced with the string quartet, became tauter in his form and pithier in his subject matter, with the chamber music including piano somewhere in between. The trouble is, I don't know the answer, though I suppose by writing about it I may at least come up with some theories.
It's not just that smaller forces concentrated him, as did also smaller forms (songs and partsongs), because in the five big Latin choral/orchestral works, and particularly the Requiem and Stabat Mater, he succeeds in filling the canvas that is to be filled in a way that he doesn't always in the symphonies and concertos, yet these are larger canvases still.
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