Music Chat: Granville Bantock--Bax Without Brains?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 พ.ย. 2020
- The music of Granville Bantock (1868-1946) specializes in sensual themes, colorfully scored, and based on exotic subjects. Neither the most original nor the most distinctive representative of English musical renaissance, there's still a good bit of captivating music to sample and enjoy. In this talk, I give an overview of what he wrote, and explain where to find it on recordings,
Musical Example courtesy of Naxos Records. - เพลง
The CD of the Celtic Symphony and the Hebridean Symphony conducted by Vernon Handley is absolutely brilliant.
Agreed!
Agreed! To call that utterly disgraceful performance on Marco Polo more exciting than Handley's is deeply concerning 😬
@@elliotdavies3555 Indeed.
Yes, it is a fantastic disc. However, as with all the Hyperion discs, I find you have to turn the volume up quite high while listening to it
Ya'll gotta help me out here. It is rare that I have a visceral dislike for classical music. Either I find it boring and leave or rather like it and will return to it. With Bantock's Hebridean Symphony, I had a visceral reaction of distaste. Perhaps it's not fair that I have a great love for Mendelssohn's wonderful overture on the same subject and am probably unwittingly not judging Bantock's work with an objective eye.
If I had to pick only a work of him, it would be A Celtic Symphony for its sheer loveliness and unforgettable tunes. I just love it. His other symphonies pale in memorability, albeit I enjoy The Cyprean Goddess too. There are many of his works that haven't seen the light of day yet. Hopefully they will be recorded some day.
oh i didn't expect a video about dear Granville ! always found some of his music quite fascinating !
Your first eight minutes sure are funny! I got distracted listening to it when I should really have been practicing his music for a concert tomorrow!
Sorry!
@@DavesClassicalGuide I should have added that what I was supposed to be practicing was the viola part of Bantock's String Suite "Scenes from the Scottish Highlands".
I love the monolithic nature of his work. He deserves to be more well-known.
I like some of his pieces a lot. I got to know him through his friendship with Havergal Brian, whose music I like, too.
Some Trumpet player/players must have really pissed him off🤣
Bantock is amazing, Hebridean Symphony is my favorite, very picturesque and entertaining. Vernon Handley version is a must have (much superior to the other one) and I know why you have chosen that sample :). Those who don't like it may knock themselves out. Also I wonder if Howard Shore listened to Celtic Symphony for his LOTR hobbit theme inspiration. More recycling, yay! Those interested to sample Bantock, do not get the full box, get the Celtic /Hebridean CD with Handley and decide for yourself
That "hobbit" theme is a pretty direct quote, eh?
Personally speaking, I think Bantock is a rather good composer. There are descrepensies here and there, which I think you’ll, get, with any prolific composer.
I remember the first time I stumbled upon Bantock. It was an advert in a music magazine. I was struck by the album cover and the title of one of the works: "Thalaba the Destroyer" - I was immediately reminded of... Conan the Barbarian! Wow - I thought - that must be a really exciting piece! The name has stayed with me for years but actually I've never listened to that one nor to any of his orchestral pieces; just to his Sonata for viola and piano.
Well, if it's any help Thalaba sounds like Tchaikovsky without the tunes.
Enjoying your Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Obscure British Composer Galaxy, Dave. Given my Baxian Citizenship, I surprisingly don’t know Bantock at all. Then again, we also left the EU. I’ll give it a listen after I park my UFO.
Man, Mr. Hurwitz, you did amuse me with this one! Been considering to look closer into the Bantock trunk for some time, but now I have more to go by than those (sensual) sirens on the cover of Handley box. :) I guess if post-Romantic fare is anyone's name of the game, this would be a real discovery. And it is not that far removed from the slightly, or indulgently, exotic music (Holst, or "the Poe man" Josef Holbrooke come to mind) that was hot in Britain to start the XXth century. I, for one, seem doomed to like it. Because can we ever have too much of... interesting... orchestral music?
I like it too, and no, we never can have too much.
🤣😅😂😂"Francesco De Remini in Outer Space", literally spewed coffee all over my monitor.
Touche! And thanks for correcting me on Amirov. It was late at night and my brain was half asleep. I too like Amirov's Mugams but this thing was bombastic in the worst sort of way, and void of arresting ideas. It was placed on my dump pile. I will admit that it beats Carter and Wourinen tho. BTW, I do enjoy your candid reviews. I usually check out my collection (13,000) to see if I have any of the recommended or panned recordings. If I do, I listen again in the context of your review. I'm especially interested to see if I missed any that I might like.
Thank YOU for being a good sport! I knew you couldn't have been that grouchy on purpose.
What a story 😆 lol . He is so funny 😁.
Thanks David for the excerpt. It will save me some money. Goodness me, what a hopeless composer.
Once, on Baxia, young Bartock, later Bantock, got infuriated by a trumpeter, who tried on his trumpet to compete a cat in love. "One day", young Bartock (later Bantock) said, "I'll drive you mad, you and all of your kind." So began his desire to be a composer. And later, he took revenge on all trumpeters: 192 repetitions they have to play.
That I call an ostinato!
But what is more interesting than the question, why this fragment is repeated so often, is the question, why the repetions stop at this point. Theres no cause for going on and none to stop.
I never heard such a piece like this. And I am glad, I didn't, I mus confess.
I could have sworn there were more than 192 repetitions just in that excerpt David played. It sounded more like a Marx Brothers parody of orchestral music than something an actual composer would write. I'll keep on listening, but not to Bantock.
"I never heard such a piece like this. And I am glad, I didn't, I mus confess."
That reminds me of Mozart's line after Salieri invited him to a performance of one of his operas and asked him afterwards what he thought of it, to which Mozart responded "I never knew music like that was possible!"
@@Don-md6wn I didn't count exactely, I must confess... :-)
Bantock uses his three trumpeters in rotation, so I count 196 of the ostinato figure without any break inbetween: after figure (56) in the score, you hear 1 followed by 2 (in a lower octave), repeated; then 1, 1, 2, 2 (with 2 still in the lower octave), repeated; then 1 and 2 alternating on the same pitch for 8 bars in a row; and lastly 1, 2, and 3 each in turn for 56 bars in a row. So in 70 bars you hear 196 of these trumpet calls; after that the trumpets get a short break as the ostinato jumps around into the winds and celesta at different pitches before returning to the trumpets again…
@@Xanthe_Cat Very interesting, but did you crack the code? People seem to find the repetions humorous but, being a mathematician, I don't. Thanks to your detailed analysis I saw it immediately. I'll give you a clue: Leibniz.
I MUST tell you this!! I just walked back from the supermarket and heard this strange sound. It turned out to be a guy pumping up the wheel on his car with a foot pump. But the sound, an insistent and repetitive whine, with a pause between each, was the exact reproduction of that trumpet theme from the Hebridean Symphony, even the rhythm!! I laughed and thought you should know! I get what you mean about some of the Bantock pieces, although some of the music is enjoyable in its lush, late Romantic idiom.
Thanks for sharing this! Of course it's not all bad--a lot of it is fun, or I wouldn't be talking about it, so I agree with you. Pump away!
It really cracked me up!! 😅
@@michaelirons1609 Uh oh, I was not getting the reference until I listened to David's excerpt! It made so much sense! xD The noteworthy thing is, that bit of the Hebridean (I hadn't been exposed to it before) still did not sound terrible. Over the top, yes, but perfectly listenable. But of course there will be no way ever hence to get over that trumpet! Any warning whether the harps go similarly crazy in the Celtic? ;))
Omar Khayyám is great! Either one of the recordings Dave has mentioned is great.
Time must be very fluid on the planets Baxia and Bantockia, since Bax was born 15 years after Bantock.
I agree that Bantock was at his best when he had an exotic and sensual text to set. I would recommend that anyone wanting to sample his music should take a listen to the prelude to Sappho and the third song, "I loved thee once Athis, long ago" (also included in the Del Mar "Omar Kayyam" set, as well as in the Handley box).
I that doesn't hook you in, than Bantock is probably not for you.
Bax was named after the planet, not the other way around, and believe me, the planet was there first
"Fifine at the Fair" is originally a Robert Browning poem.
And now that I know that, I can die happy.
For what it's worth, Thalaba the Destroyer as epic poetry: 1801; Thalaba the Destroyer as tone poem: 1900; Conan the Barbarian/Cimmerian as pulp literature: 1932. I actually don't think it unreasonable to speculate that the story of Thalaba could have inspired the creation of Conan. It's all sword and sorcery hokum.
Handley and his brass section handle that trumpet passage much better, but it still qualifies as detraction after such a moodily evocative opening. Bantock was really inconsistent, but I do like some moments, most were on that first Handley release (later boxed).
Well, it's all about the sea, pirates, naval battles etc, so I believe this trumpet passage works great in context of the piece. There's also a short mourning passage after the battle is over. The effects imitating ships' guns discharge are very well orchestrated. Handley's version is vastly superior.
Agreed. I own both, but I certainly didn't buy the Marco Polo release for the Hebridean Symphony. In fact, when I ripped the Marco Polo disc to my digital library, I deliberately *didn't* rip that work. It simply has nothing useful to offer after hearing Handley's interpretation.
Many years ago I discovered Bantock through the Beecham recording of Fifine at the Fair. I loved it and sought to hear more on the Paxton label. None of it equalled Fifine but it is hardly deserving of your contempt and misplaced humor. Omar Khayam has some lovely things, and so do several of the other pieces. He is certainly superior to Holbrooke, but falls way short of Bax and his craggy originality. Worst listen recently? Amram's Thousand and One Nights on Naxos. Give that one a listen if you dare.
Lighten up pal. Heaven forbid we should have a little fun, when here you are hypocritically passing judgment on the man with (as Shaw might have said) the sanctimonious sententiousness of a country curate. Oh, and it's not "Amram." The composer's name is Fikret Amirov, whose music I happen to enjoy. Stokowski, in particular, recorded a notable performance of his Azerbaijan Mugam.
That snippet of the Hebridean Symphony really got on my nerves! 🤯
In comparission to the snippets from Bruckner's Nullte, that was so severely thrashed yesterday, this latter work seemed almost a masterwork of coherent eloquence! 🙄
Hmmm, I thought to myself, as you only played one example, you might have found just the worst of them all? So I dutifully scurried back to the only piece of Bantock in my record collection: Beecham's recording of 'Fifine at the Fair'.
I doubt it, if Bantock could find a better advocate than Sir Thomas - granted the sonics could be bettered, which might be of quite some importance, as the sumptous, sensous patches of the piece are its most redeeming features. Structurally it left behind an impression of plodding meandering, of going from nowhere to nowhere - and that is certainly something of an achievement in a programmatic piece!
Think Rimsky-Korsakov, think Scheherazade - as a polar opposite regarding form, but in no way inferior, when it comes to sensuality and sumptous orchestration!
That Ernest Newman allegedly should have made the throwaway comment, that Bantock was "better than Elgar", is to this listener incomprehensible. And in listening to the not so fun fair, I several times took myself in thinking: Take me back to 'Tintagel', or wished for strolling the dark, foreboding, but more appropriately sized 'November Woods'!
Oh, that poor trumpeter.
Legend has it, he's still playing "pam-pa-dam" to this day.
Bantock has three of them, so they literally take it in turns to play the tum-ti-tums.
I generally like Adrian Leaper, but I don't think anybody was having a good day on that particular day.
Look at what they had to work with! Still, it's livelier than Handley, even if the playing is a bit creaky.
I wonder if Peter Warlock will get his own planet or just an asteroid with a sleazy pub on it?
A comet.
'Impersonating a composer' is actually quite a good description of GB. I have a couple of the Handley recordings on Hyperion. The Celtic Symphony (with a stupid number of harps) is great fun, the other works are patchy. I once listened to a broadcast of one of his operas, The Seal Woman. It seemed to go on for several days and struck me as very grey.
What did you expect from a seal woman?
Mother of god.. for first half of this video i right what the hell is going on..where u hitting the sauce ? Then you played the music and all was revealed
When will you visit Havergalia?
In time for the next solar eclipse.
When are the rubbrarians going to get their recognition. They left Brucknaria due to counting differences and colonized a small but lovely green planet, that no one ever visits.
Paul G
I haven't listened to all of Handley's survey of Bantock's works but I've listened to some, and enjoyed a few. The Celtic Symphony is quite good thematically, sure it suffers in parts with a lack of creativity but the return of the "tune" at the end is a triumph. I also don't mind the Hebridean Symphony aside from the very annoying bits like the extract you played. I'll listen to some of the other stuff that I've previously ignored now that you have piqued my interest again somewhat...
That's why trumpet players get the big bucks. Miles had it figured out. As much as Bantock filched off Tchaikovsky, Glass was inspired by this to produce a whole catalogue of works that are direct cribs refracted by some techy guy fiddling with volume and pitch.
Fifine, by the way, has as many possible pronunciations as calliope.
First your slagging of Ilya Muromets, and now this. Us lovers of musical wallowing are feeling picked-on. I'm off to dig out my old National Geographics.
Well, the first one of your videos for which I already had copies of all the recordings cited, including the Naxos version of the Marco Polo. All souvenirs of several voyages to Bantockia I made between 2007-2012 in hopes of filling in gaps in my National Geographic collection. I spent most of my time on these trips on nearby and more captivating Baxia, however.
I don't blame you...
I'm a fan of David Hurwitz, but I do think that Professor Bantock was rather ill-served by this review
I thought I was being pretty generous.
That's not an octave, it's a fourth!
Good grief! I must have gotten hypnotized! Thanks,
Amusing review, but for my money Bantock's Hebridean is a greater piece than anything Bax ever wrote.
lol...don't shoot us...we're only the Trumpet players!....Hunt down Bantock!