Sir Malcolm Arnold’s Ninth Symphony, written ten years ago, has become something of a mystery work, and it is good to have this superb first recording to confirm that here is a culmination to his symphonic series both characteristic and distinctive. All credit to Naxos in their projected Arnold cycle for achieving this important first. As Arnold explains in his interview with the conductor, included as a supplement to the 47-minute symphony, Sir Charles Groves took it up just before he died, giving a trial performance, and then one with the BBC Philharmonic. Since then conductors have fought shy. Registering the baldness of the arguments, with two-part writing the general rule and with structure built on repetition and juxtaposition rather than thematic development, one can perhaps understand the reservations of traditionalists. What that fails above all to take into account is Arnold’s continuing mastery of the orchestra, the actual sounds. As the late Hugo Cole puts it in his survey of Arnold’s music (Faber: 1989), “Arnold composes with his ear. His music speaks to us first of all through its sounds.”
If at the start and elsewhere one is reminded of Shostakovich, the instrumentation is quite distinctive. The ear is regularly tweaked by the terracing of sounds, at extremes of register as well as of dynamic, culminating in the long slow finale, almost as long as the other three movements together. With two poignant themes, one scalic, one built on a rising arpeggio, both obsessively repeated, the mood of tragedy and disillusion is clear. The parallel with the final Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony comes obviously to mind and Arnold in his interview explains that the whole piece reflects “the five years of hell” he had just suffered before writing this work. Yet unlike Mahler the music conveys no hint of neurosis or self-pity. Arnold relents so far as to end on a major triad, a firm D major chord, but that is the merest sop towards granting release.
The other three movements are just as direct, bald in their arguments but ever pointful, not facile, built on instantly memorable material. So the first movement, Vivace, quickly establishes Arnold’s mode of duetting, with occasionally jazzy slurrings that only he could have written. The second movement, Allegretto, brings hypnotic chaconne-like repetitions on a theme with modal overtones. I was reminded of the repetitions in polyphonic Masses using tunes like The Western Wind or L’homme arme. The third movement starts like a typical Arnold scherzo, weightier than the rest of the work, but then grows ever angrier. There is no fun here. One remembers the “five years of hell”.
I was impressed enough by the first of Andrew Penny’s Arnold discs for Naxos, coupling Nos. 1 and 2 (see above), but this is far finer, for he draws not just a concentrated, consistently committed performance from the Irish players, but a warmly resonant one, with the strings sounding glorious and the woodwind and brass consistently brilliant. The recording is rich and full, more closely focused with clearer presence than the earlier one. I look forward to more in the series.'