Havergal Brian (1876-1972)

This morning I was a full twenty-eight minutes late to work, due to the closing of a portion of I-465 that I normally take to work. Apparently there was a major overnight accident involving several semis. Now the highway is covered in fritos, mayonnaise and Gatorade. Yikes!

I eventually found myself crawling at a snail’s pace along Girls School Road. This afforded me the opportunity to listen to 88.7’s weekday morning program “Symphonic Sunrise”. Sometime after 8:00 there was a little blurb about a composer who had apparently written the “largest symphony ever” (according to the Guinness Book of Records).

What?

It is called…Gothic Symphony.

Impressive.

What is more striking to me is the fact that the composer is a little-known man from Britain who passed away in the early 70’s, never garnering the fame or attention that was his due. He wrote some thirty-two symphonies in his lifetime.

Ever heard of Havergal Brian? Me neither.

They played little snippets of his Gothic Symphony and it sounded amazing. It is scored for winds (including the seldom-used oboe d’amore and bassett horn), brass, a large percussion ensemble, celesta, organ, Solo quartet (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass), four mixed choirs, Children’s Choir, four offstage brass bands, and strings.

Oh my…that’s a lot of musicians.

I have not been able to find a recording at the library yet. That’s probably because there has never really been a successful performance due to the massive size of the production. I hope some orchestra pulls it off some day.

Here are more excerpts from wiki:

Along with choral symphonies such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, it is one of a few works attempting to use the musically gigantic to address the spiritual concerns of humanity.

The scale of the choral finale, which took many years to write, appears to be an attempt to evoke the enormity and detail of this architecture in sound; Brian had to paste blank pages of score together to be able to write the work on gigantic sheets with 54 staves to the page.

Wow.