…It would have been better had the conductor stayed away, not least because it would have prevented the audience from being subjected to 25 minutes of unremitting noise classed by Button as atonal.

The so-called Symphony No 191 created by Segerstam was so unpleasant that I was rendered physically unwell – so much so I could not get up to walk out. By the end of the piece, I was in tears from the pain of the noise…

Wow. That’s quite something. Perhaps it’s alarming that my eye was immediately drawn to the words “classed by Button as atonal”. Does the letter writer have some better description of her own? How dare John Button make a correct judgement about the harmonic nature of the music? I am 100% certain that the letter writer would have come away free from nausea had she actually made some attempt to listen to the music rather than tried to block it out. Unfortunately, her hatred of Segerstam’s music (I think it might be worth pointing out here that much of the music with which Button compared Symphony No. 191 is eighty years old) also affected her enjoyment of the remainder of the concert

…The Karelia Suite was the NZSO at its best – possibly because they have made it their own and the conductor left them to the performance at one stage, acknowledging this point.

Having been to the pre-concert talk and heard some of the great sopranos sing the Four Last Songs with sympathetic orchestras, Saturday’s soprano didn’t have a chance because the conductor didn’t match the orchestra to her voice, allowing it to override her…

Or alternatively, the Karelia Suite succeeded without much conducting because it is a fairly simple repertoire work and any orchestral player will have performed it dozens of times. A professional orchestra does not need a conductor to keep time with pieces like this – the conductor’s role in shaping the performance to a far greater extent in rehearsal than on the concert stage, but because the letter writer is so determined to steer any credit away from Segerstam she ignores this consideration. If I have understood the comment about the Four Last Songs correctly, recordings of the work were played, which the letter writer feels were more balanced than the actual performance. This is, of course, exactly what one would expect. Recording a work, even live, will naturally create a better balance than the same work live, simply because microphone positioning and mixing will create a false impression of what is actually happening.

Here are a couple of contributing factors. But probably not the actual cause, which is pretty obvious really. That’ll come ‘soon’.

Culprit #1: The Try-hards?

Let’s be perfectly honest, there is no other way classify the symphonic work of Derek Bourgeois, a composer whose music I do rate… sometimes. Bourgeois is fond of comparing himself to the late Havergal Brian, composer of 32 symphonies, most of them written in old age. Bourgeois is a composer whose work is sometimes conceptually very strong, and who rarely has trouble finding material to fill up his music. Unfortunately, this material is not always quite up to scratch, and his concepts are by no means as poetic in practical use as in reality. Bourgeois currently seems to be writing three or four symphonies every year – no mean feat, especially considering the sheer size of these works, using large orchestras and durations of up to two and a half hours. To mark his equalling the mark of his apparent hero Brian, Bourgeois wrote his thirty-second symphony in thirty-two movements, possibly a landmark blow for the idea of symphonic coherence. To be fair, Brian’s best-known work, the Symphony No. 1 ‘, is nearly as sprawling, and ways in at two hours of immense orchestral and choral work, but its immensity is equalled only by the strength of organic growth in the material. Bourgeois seems to be so caught up in ‘beating’ his idol that in the process he has forgotten how to write coherent music.

Of course, Bourgeois is far from the most prolific modern composer of symphonies. That role belongs to the erstwhile Finnish conductor/composer Leif Segerstam (and his beard). Segerstam has composed well over two hundred symphonies; many of these are really known only to the composer himself, although he and his beard will be premiering one with the NZSO later this year.

What was the point of this section? Since the end of the Classical period, symphonies have been monumental efforts in the careers of their composers, with years of preparation and writing going into their creation. The drive to create multitudinous symphonies by composers such as Bourgeois and Segerstam necessarily reduces the amount of compositional energy that can be put into each one. They are wasting their artistic freedom by not imposing any kind of self-discipline, producing music from their egos, rather than their hearts and minds. The problem is that nobody cares whether your penis is two hundred and twenty symphonies long. Sure, it’s an exercise in following one’s own instincts, but it’s a purely self-interested one, not seeking to have any effect on the wider world of music whatsoever.

Culprit #2: Film?

Many of the composers who do choose to write symphonies are those for whom the genre still entails the vast emotional, often programmatic nature that it often became during the Romantic period. This is by no means an irredeemable perspective – after all, many of the great early twentieth century composers suffered from the same affliction. Sadly, the influence that 19th century music had on twentieth century film scoring seems now to be flowing back in the other direction, with some composers bringing film score cliché back into the concert hall (to say nothing of the performance of certain film scores themselves). While this seems largely to be a youthful phenomenon, there are nevertheless a few reasonably well-known composers whose work suffers embarrassingly from this malaise.

One of the most prominent of these composers is the Russian-American Alla Pavlova, whose work includes at least four symphonies. Most of her thematic material, and also most of her orchestral writing, appears to have come straight from the score of a really awful romantic film. To an extent this is redeemed by Pavlova’s skill in symphonic development itself; her music stands up on its own ‘merits’, without requiring an accompanying film, but her reliance on sweeping string chords and rhapsodic violin melodies gives her work a sense of sameness that prevents it from reaching the great emotional depths that Pavlova so plainly desires.

On the other hand, she does have a pretty amazing last name.