Season

Malcolm Arnold's Symphony No. 8, Op. 124 was given its first performance in Albany, New York, on 5 May 1979 by the Albany Symphony Orchestra. It was partly conceived as an envoi to the composer's formerly prolific career as a writer of film scores.


In this symphony Arnold partly reused the main theme from his 1969 film score to The Reckoning based on a story set in Ireland. The work was written after Arnold had lived in Ireland for a few years and, not unsurprisingly, features an Irish March. Arnold felt the work, as a whole, was imbued with a distinctively Irish flavour and his personal musical tribute to his adoptive homeland.

The symphony is in three movements:

Movement I – Allegro

Movement II – Andantino

Movement III – Vivace

George Lloyd's Symphony No. 6, is the shortest of his eleven symphonies, its outer movements being deft takes on sonata and rondo designs; their immediacy of ideas thrown into relief by their formal sophistication, while the central Adagio focuses on a Cor Anglais melody of winsome poise.

The symphony is in three movements:

Movement I – Allegro

Movement II – Adagio

Movement III – Vivace

Lloyd completed his Sixth Symphony in 1956. His Fourth and Fifth symphonies (1946 and 1948) had been completed in Switzerland whilst his wife nursed him back to health from the shellshock he suffered in the Second World War.

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 is a mirror held up to Stalin’s Russia. In the early 1940s, as news of the increasing European genocide and persecution of Jewish people reached Shostakovich, he was compelled to speak for the Jewish people whose voice was repressed by the ever-growing tyranny of Stalinist Russia.

Many of the published analyses of this symphony view the piece simply as a musical bras d’honneur to Stalin and his cronies. This symphony contains  a kaleidescope of musical allusions: military themes becoming increasingly aggressive, Jewish musical inflections serving as a catalyst for violent reactions, ghostly references to Tchaikovsky, and even a reference to Mussorgsky’s 'Catacombs' movement from his Pictures at an Exhibition can be detected as an introduction to a lengthy and dark Jewish lament for those who have died under the tyranny of others.

Ben Bates'Symphony No.1 was first conceived in 1992, originally for Classical Guitar, Xylorimba, Pipe Organ and Contrabass.  In 1993 Ben started transcribing the piece for full orchestra, including a choir and an ensemble of guitars. This realisation was ultimately unsatisfactory resulting in the choir and guitar parts being removed. 

The first two movements are founded in diminished and octatonic tonality in tandem with the use of compound and uneven time signatures.

The third movement returns to common practice harmony as a release from intensity of the first two movements.   It introduces solo lines for the Piccolo and Flute which continue into the final movement as a main theme stated by different sections of the orchestra.

The final movement returns to the harmonic basis of the opening but this time with new themes interchanging with entry bursts of first movement themes.  The string parts are characterised by arpeggio patterns; one ascending, the other descending which are then interchanged.