Barbirolli conducts Vaughan Williams and Arthur Butterworth

Glorious John and a notable premiere

Butterworth, his life and times

Arthur Butterworth was born in New Moston, Manchester in 1923. He studied composition with Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he also took trumpet and conducting lessons. His professional career began as a trumpet player with the Scottish National Orchestra in 1949. Six years later he joined the Hallé Orchestra as a trumpeter under Sir John Barbirolli. He left in 1962 to concentrate on composition and teaching, and became permanent conductor of the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he held for 30 years. He has written six symphonies and concertos for bassoon, organ, violin, viola, cello and guitar. Among his chamber works, the First Piano Trio (1983) deftly adapts an epic mode of expression for small-scale forces. His internationally successful brass band pieces unquestionably benefit from his experienced ear as a trumpet player. Sibelius, the North York Moors, and the English music tradition are all acknowledged influences.

Unusually for Butterworth, his Symphony No.1 had a long gestation period.Ideas formed in the composer’s mind in the autumn of 1939, but it was not until September 1949 that he began any sketches, including the opening theme, inspired by the start of Sibelius’s Symphony No.6. His day-job with the Scottish National Orchestra meant he had little time to devote to the work until Spring 1952.

The greater part of the symphony was written during a walking holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Sutherland, Loch Lomond and Caithness particularly impressed the composer and helped shape the work’s distinctively Nordic character.

The scenery reminded him of the music of Arnold Bax, and some of that composer’s Celtic sensibility is apparent in the scoring of the symphony, such as the atmospheric, painterly use of harp and contrabassoon.

Butterworth joined the Hallé in January 1955 and, in the summer of that year, was able to begin work on the finale, which was inspired by three factors: the relentless northern winter weather, an exhilarating rail journey from London to the far North of Scotland and, in particular, hearing a string quartet by Leonard Salzedo, the finale of which took the form of a whirling moto perpetuo. The symphony was completed on 6 March 1956 and the composer gave the score to Barbirolli.

He heard nothing until early in February 1957, when the conductor greeted him cheerfully: ‘Well now! You’ll be pleased to know we’re going to be doing your symphony at Cheltenham this year! ‘The first performance, given by the Hallé under Barbirolli, took place at the festival’s final concert on 19 July 1957.

The symphony in outline

A soft drum roll launches the work, after which the strings articulate the first movement’s main idea: a three-note figure, consisting of D-C-E. More chromatic material first heard on woodwind emerges, followed by a vigorous, striving and wide-ranging theme on tutti strings, arched over a pulsating accompaniment, not unlike a grittier version of the opening theme of E.J. Moeran’s Symphony in G minor, a favourite work of Butterworth’s. These three main ideas are rigorously developed, before leading into a fourth idea consisting of fragmentary woodwind utterances over a winding, hushed string accompaniment. This gathers considerable substance, uniting with references to the earlier ideas, and builds to a tempestuous climax, marking the halfway point of the movement. The material is then restated upside down as if reflected in a lake’s surface. The ferocious climax is reached again followed by a brisk coda. In the concluding bars, the main ideas are restated in reflective mode and the movement ends inconclusively, the main symphonic argument to be continued.

The following Lento molto (inspired by his walks in and around the Rothiemurchus Forest) is notable for the emotional intensity of its string writing. It complements rather than challenges the mood of the preceding movement, even adopting motifs from its thematic material.  The opening muted tremolando violins recall the start of the slow movement of George Lloyd’s Symphony No.4 (1947), which was inspired by an Arctic seascape (Butterworth has at times recalled the sight of small icebergs on his journey across the North Sea from Cuxhaven to Hull after his release from the Army). After this glacial opening section, the bass clarinet introduces a new theme, developed at length: a climax reveals its kinship with the vigorous third main idea of the first movement. A passage for strings alone based on the opening movement’s second theme leads to a further climax. After this, the solo bassoon utters a version of the bass clarinet theme; the strings present a grandiose version of the oboe tune and passing references are made to earlier thematic ideas as the movement draws to a quiet close.

Formally, the third movement is the most traditional of the four, being virtually a minuet and trio. However, the scoring is far from conventional – the composer has made reference to a late evening spent on a shore with fellow SNO players after a concert in Aberdeen, with the swish of pebbles washed up on the sand and the thud of the surf.The brass is silent and the percussion have a significant, albeit discreet role: timpani and side drums have sweeping arcs described upon them by a dance band wire brush and a suspended cymbal is struck by a soft timpani stick. The initial theme is given to flute, followed by another variant of the first movement’s second woodwind theme. The flute also introduces the artless, innocent-sounding ‘Trio’. The Minuet’s material is then treated fugally, the countersubject provided bythe Trio’s main motif. After a foreshortened version of the Trio, this spectral, disembodied music suddenly extinguishes itself. The sound of this elusive movement is strikingly Mahlerian for a composer who has often declared his antipathy to that composer and the chamber-like scoring, childlike, almost cloying fragmentary themes, faltering rhythmic patterns and sardonic undertone make this movement one of Butterworth’s most uncharacteristic inventions.

Following virtually without a break, the finale is remarkable for the vehemence of its utterance as a hurricane of a moto perpetuo is unleashed. The visceral excitement of the incessant rushing chromatic scales, whooping horns and snarling trumpets and trombones is a prelude to an unremittingly savage movement. The ingenuity of modulating through all the keys in the chromatic scale, each raising the tonal centre by a semitone, creates a long term heightening of tonal tension. This is a structuraltour de force, though the listener is more likely to be gripped by the music’s frenzied, elemental ferocity. Tremendous momentum is generated as the score burns through key after key, feeding off its own self-sufficient energy. The thirteenth rise in pitch heralds the extended, whirlwind-like coda, which brutally fragments the thematic material’s attempts at coherence. The symphonyculminates in a terrifying climax in which Tennyson’s Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ seems to consume itself in an act of mesmerising self-destruction. It ends in B flat (the key in which the finale began and the tonal centre of the whole symphony) with the reappearance on brass of the initial Sibelian motto theme, but this brief and hasty allusion seems almost like a nod to symphonic convention after so much hellishly alien terrain has been traversed in the interim. The finale is especially striking for the austerity of its material. Brass and woodwind are entrusted with such motifs as there are, while the strings provide a shifting chromatic underlay – in the concluding pages, their writhing, slithering upheavals suggest some slimy primeval creature heaving itself obscenely into view. It is not until just before the coda that a recognisable theme is defined, and then promptly torn to pieces. Is this movement really just an expression of the composer’s predilection for the Northern climate, as suggested in a review by the Yorkshire Post critic, or is there something more personal lurking behind its exultation of the physical? Like all great music, it stands perfectly well on its own, beyond psychological probing.

The symphony’s reception: a career launched

The first performance of the symphony was critically acclaimed, The Times Special Correspondent observing that ‘Butterworth clearly possesses a creative talent of which more will be heard in the future’. Barbirolli’s championship of the piece contributed in no small measure to its success. A speech, made on the day after the premiere, conveys his enthusiasm: ‘We of the Hallé feel very proud that from our own ranks we have produced a very fine major work. I would like you to know that when the reading panel chose this work they had no idea that the composer was a member of this orchestra. His work was chosen on its merits’.

A second performance by the Hallé under Barbirolli took place at St George’s Hall, Bradford on 2 November 1957. Some reservations voiced in the press about the first movement after the premiere led to revisions, made in consultation with Barbirolli, to make it ‘more balanced and convincing’ as the composer reported to the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. Consequently, the performance presented here is the original, uncut version of the score, including bars 175–193 of the first movement’s development section and bars 370–388 of its ‘reflected’ restatement and, near the end of the slow movement, bars 146–161, consisting mainly of anextended flute solo.

Butterworth and RVW

Some years earlier, Butterworth visited Ralph Vaughan Williams, who he admired greatly, for advice on his compositions. The great composer warned Butterworth against copying his style, as Vaughan Williams’ influence is evident in such early works as the Legend Op.11 and Romanza Op.12. Arguably, it was not until the First Symphony that Butterworth found his own voice. During his years in the Hallé under Barbirolli, Butterworth played several works by Vaughan Williams, including symphonies, though not the Fourth. According to Barbirolli’s biographer Michael Kennedy, the conductor took up this work on a friend’s insistence in 1950; he never made a commercial recording, but programmed the work in Hallé concerts in the early 1950s, including one at the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in May 1951. As can be heard in this performance, his is a typically individual approach, which, while not underplaying the violent elements, also gives due prominence to the poetic, visionary episodes in the first two movements, lending substance to the notion of the symphony as self-portrait. In the two last movements, Barbirolli’s scrupulous attention to detail means that, despite a measured pulse, there is no loss of propulsive excitement.

‘I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant’

Dedicated to Sir Arnold Bax, Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.4 was composed between 1931 and 1934 and premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult at Queen’s Hall, London on 10 April 1935. Its high level of dissonance surprised the critics, yet a similarly strident tone had appeared in earlier works, such as Sancta Civitas (1926), the masque Job (1930) and the Piano Concerto (1931). Some commentators have perceived a portent of the rise of fascism in Europe, but the composer always denied this; his comment at the rehearsals, ‘I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant’ suggests it was a work he simply had to write. It is one of his most compelling and uncompromising pieces, tightly knit and brutally concise.

The opening Allegro begins vehemently with two four-note motto-phrases that dominate the rest of the work, contributing greatly to its obsessive, tormented nature. By contrast, the second subject is an ardent string melody, appassionato sostenuto, a marking Barbirolli observes implicitly. A march-like D major theme for horns and strings cuts in; this idea, transformed into D flat on high strings, closes the movement dolefully.  The Andante moderato slow movement is rooted in the symphony’s two opening motifs. A threnody for muted violins over plucked bass precedes a desolate flute solo which later closes the movement.  Waggishly jovial, the Scherzo has a self-mockingly rustic trio. A linking passage, consisting of a long crescendo over a pedal note, leads directly into the volcanic Finale’s principal march theme over what the composer called an ‘oom-pah bass’. After reminiscences of the first movement, a ‘fugal epilogue’ advances, machine-like, towards a final restatement of this powerful symphony’s initial clashing semitonal outburst.

C Paul Conway, 2009

Arthur Butterworth (1923 – 2014)

Symphony No.1

Track 1:

I. Allegro molto moderato

Track 2:

II. Lento molto

Track 3:

III. Allegretto con moto

Track 4:

IV. Vivacissimo e furioso

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Symphony No.4 in F minor

Track 5:

I. Allegro

Track 6:

II. Andante moderato

Track 7:

III. Scherzo: allegro molto

Track 8:

IV. Finale con epilogo fugato. Allegro molto

The Butterworth was recorded at a concert given on 19 July, 1957 in Cheltenham Town Hall

From the Arthur Butterworth Collection

The Vaughan Williams was recorded in 1950 in the  BBC Studios

From the Music Preserved Collection

Remastering engineer: Roger Beardsley