Thread by @deeplyclassical

#SymphonistOfTheWeek 🧵

1/ Today's #RobertSimpson100 #SimpsonSunday listening: Symphony No. 9 (1985-7)

First things first: If you care about symphonies AT ALL and don't know Simpson 9 then stop what you're doing and buy this record RIGHT NOW. It will repay you many times over.

2/ "BUY?" I hear you cry, "But Symphs, can't you just post a Youtube link or something?"

No. The single 10-minute extract available online is in poor sound and doesn't begin to convey the cumulative experience this symphony's unbroken 50-minute span can deliver. Don't go there.

3/ You just googled it didn't you? Disappointing wasn't it?

I did try to warn you.

4/ There are no shortcuts with Simpson. Extracts miss the point of his musical ethos entirely. With Simpson you can't skip to the end, you have to go on the whole journey. I want to persuade you to buy your ticket and embark on one of the most epic voyages in symphonic music.

5/ First some history. @BSOrchestra commissioned the symphony. They premiered it under Vernon Handley on 8 April 1987 at Poole Arts Centre (now @LighthousePoole) and recorded it there for @hyperionrecords the following year. Both performance and recording won immediate acclaim.

6/ “A most powerful experience: concentrated, awesome, and as mysterious as some astronomical phenomenon.” (Penguin Guide)

“As hypnotic as the star-filled night sky” (@GramophoneMag)

The record won Gramophone's Contemporary Award in 1989.

You want to hear it now, don't you?

7/ "Simpson did not, perhaps, set out to produce some kind of definitive statement in his Symphony No. 9 ... but the result was a work which, for many listeners, sums up the absolute essence of what Simpson's music is all about." (Calum MacDonald)

Its success was assured right?

8/ The last live performance I know of was given in 1992 by @LPOrchestra and Simon Rattle no less. 34 years after its premiere and despite its early acclaim, in 2021 that first recording remains the only way to hear Simpson 9, and I am still at a loss to understand why.

9/ "History's all very well" I hear you cry, "but what's the symphony actually like? (Btw what's with all the crying? You OK hun?)

Of course I can't tell you what the music is like, only listening can do that, but I'll try to help you decide whether it's music *you* might like.

10/ You need to hear Simpson 9 if you love any of classical music's three Bs. Remember the three Bs? Of course you do: Bach, Beethoven and Br...uckner!

These titans of symphonic thinking loom behind the symphony like musical spirit animals guiding it on its own individual path.

11/ Speaking of the 9th Simpson himself said "In the deliberation of its movement the symphony may sometimes suggest Bruckner"

Simpson literally wrote the book on Bruckner, evangelizing him on @BBC radio and in print when Bruckner's symphonies were seldom heard in Britain.

12/ Simpson's use of the orchestra is often reminiscent of Bruckner. Similarities in their approach to symphonic form and motion are such that Brucknerians should make a B-line for Simpson 9. He even alludes directly to a passage in Bruckner's 3rd (6:19).

13/ Simpson 9 is an unbroken 50-minute span in three parts. The first 20-minute section is in Simpson's words "very deliberate and grand". It smashes straight into the central scherzo which merges into the final "intense but eventually peaceful slow movement", also 20 minutes.

14/ Hmmm. Two grand outer movements each 20 minutes long, together framing a central scherzo. A final intense slow movement that eventually finds peace. If the three sections were not continuous that description could apply to another monumental 9th.

15/ @BehemothMusic's superb study of the symphony, available on the Robert Simpson Society website, has more on the relationship between Simpson and Bruckner. If you want to dive deep into Simpson 9 then this is an essential read, Highly recommended.
robertsimpson.org.uk/wp/wp-content/…

16/ Simpson also holds a dialogue with Beethoven, who'd have thought "some lunatic had got hold of one of his scherzos" had he heard the 2nd movement. Simpson 9's opening channels the same spirit that animates the start of the most monumental 9th of all.

17/ Simpson's main theme fans out from a central note. After variations on it this wedge theme becomes "a gigantic chorale prelude" and the subject of much astonishing counterpoint. Simpson, like Bruckner and Beethoven, worshipped at the altar of Bach.

18/ If you love these three Bs you'll encounter elements of them in Simpson 9 but its effect on the listener is as different as Bruckner is to Beethoven or Beethoven is to Haydn. More so: Simpson has absorbed their means; the expressive end is his alone.

19/ Speaking of Haydn, Papa Joe wrote several musical palindromes: themes that are the same forward and backwards. Simpson loved Haydn and palindromes. He uses one in the finale of his symphony. It sounds about as much like Haydn as I look like Brad Pitt.

20/ Carl Nielsen was one of Simpson's heroes. His last major work, Commotio, was for organ. Inspired by the polyphony of Bach, Buxtehude and even late Beethoven, it in turn inspired Simpson's own organ work laying musical foundations for this symphony.

21/ Simpson's harmony sets him apart from his predecessors. His earlier music expanded Nielsen's idea of progressive tonality. By the 9th, which starts with a sense of mystery reminiscent of Nielsen's 5th, Simpson had gone way beyond this idea.

22/ Now the gravitational force binding the elements of the symphony together comes not from keys, but particular intervals and pitches around which the music revolves. The 9th is dominated by the interval of a 4th. It fans out from the opening D# to which it returns at the end.

23/ To me the symphony's concentrated power and mystery bring Simpson closer than ever to late Sibelius. The finale's fugue almost enters the twilit realm of Tapio where "dwells the Forest’s mighty God, And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets."

24/ On the surface there seems little similarity between Simpson and the British symphonists who preceded him but the Ninth's cosmic closing pages bring a final unlikely kinship to my mind with a symphony premiered as he was beginning his musical career.

25/ "As rising scales pass through the coda's pedal-points into the final glacial sonority you'll know that you've heard one of the finest symphonies of the post-war era." (@GramophoneMag)

Love Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen, Sibelius or RVW? You might ❤️ Simpson too.

26/ He doesn't sound quite like any of them because he has the quality that I find in all great composers: they always sound like themselves.

"People who write symphonies do it because they feel able to: a lot of those who don't tell everyone else the symphony is dead ... "

27/ "The trouble is that the symphony as an abstraction does not exist: there may be exhausted symphonies and exhausted composers, but the response to a challenge to one's capacity for large-scale organisation and development – that can be exhausted only in individuals."

END