While our fascination with The Beatles is in part nostalgia for a generation’s shared past, it can scarcely be denied that the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney has had an unrivalled, if largely unsought, influence on the development of popular culture in the post-war period. The Beatles disbanded in 1970, but they retain a central place in the iconography of our time. Recognizing the significance and durability of their kind of artistic endeavour (q.v. Allan Moore’s forthcoming Cambridge Music Handbook on “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”) does not, however, imply that ‘crossing over’ will achieve comparable results. The finest classical music can be ageless but never precisely young, whereas the songs of Lennon and McCartney both encapsulate a specific era – the 1960s – and embody the essence of youth itself, something Brahms would have recognized in the waltzes of Johann Strauss.
I did not find such resonances in Standing Stone, but it should not be dismissed on that account. McCartney’s pop albums still sell and he has won great acclaim as a live act. Unlike several of his peers, it cannot be said that he has ‘gone classical’ to bolster a flagging career. His work to date continues to encompass straightforward rock ‘n’ roll, sentimental muzak balladry and those strangely affecting, oddly distanced vignettes of decent, ordinary life which resurface in the Liverpool Oratorio co-written with Carl Davis (EMI, 11/91). Significantly, he has never learnt to read music and his new ‘symphonic poem’ has a frank, artless, experimental character that will not be to all tastes. Themes are varied and tried out in different combinations without much sense of ‘development’ or uniformity of style. Whatever McCartney’s aspirations, he still sounds most comfortable when operating within the sort of closed structural units that show off his melodic gift. His long-range thinking rarely embraces the harmonic, which can make for some painfully static pages. On the other hand, there is plenty of textural variety, nicely realized by McCartney’s collaborators at the workbench and in the studio.
Even more than the Liverpool Oratorio, Standing Stone aspires to the cachet of through-composed entity (there are four movements) so it was sensible of EMI to provide 19 tracks which allow the uncommitted listener selective access. There is a ‘vamp until ready’ quality about the threatening Celtic backdrop of “Fire/rain”, but the first woodwind entries announce that, for good or ill, Standing Stone will be more exploratory in idiom than anything in McCartney’s previous output. The second section, “Cell growth”, is notable for its iridescent scoring and for the fact that the music, despite oscillating in quasi-Sibelian fashion, isn’t ever likely to develop beyond the amoeba stage. The sopranos of the London Symphony Chorus hit their top B flat without strain. The third, the “‘Human’ theme” is more successful: a striking, grandly aspirational melody in the Bernstein/Lloyd Webber/Vangelis manner, sung by the chorus over a droning accompaniment that thickens into Hollywood schmaltz. How odd that despite his admiration for Carousel and West Side Story in particular, McCartney has always resisted the idea of writing a musical! He considers it a ‘dead’ form and yet is already half way to mastering it.
There are more attractive melodic ideas in “Sea Voyage” (track 6) even if the treatment is overstated, a problem throughout; there’s also what seems to be an allusion to An American in Paris (courtesy of Richard Rodney Bennett?). “Lost at sea” (track 7) is harmonically at sea too – designedly reminiscent of The Beatles’ Revolution 9 rather than anything likely to receive airplay on Classic fM. It is the modest sections that are most likely to impress. The “Fugal celebration” of track 16, while not exactly fugal, is more carefully wrought than is sometimes the case elsewhere. Led off by solo violin, the wind writing conjures a vaguely Tippettian Arcadia (courtesy of David Matthews?). The “Chinese Dance” from The Nutcracker is momentarily recalled in the scoring of the “Rustic Dance” (track 17). A real highlight is the touching “Love duet” (track 18), not at all inflated and beautifully articulated by the principal horn. Indeed, the LSO are on fine form throughout, the chorus not quite so well blended in the exposed heart of the concluding “Celebration”. Here, McCartney’s Victorian hymn pulls the threads together with a certain nobility before turning (temporarily) saccharine and loud.
How to sum up? It may be difficult to regard Standing Stone as anything other than a footnote to McCartney’s ‘popular’ work, and one would have to stretch the definition of ‘classical’ music to include it, no bad thing some might say. It is, perhaps unavoidably, derivative. And yet it would be as foolish to look for ‘originality’ here as in a (McCartney-derived) Oasis song – that is scarcely the point of either. If John Adams can get respectable notices for ‘slumming it’ with his synthesized doodlings complete with poem (Hoodoo Zephyr, Nonesuch, 4/94), why jump to condemn McCartney when he is trying the same thing from the other side of the tracks? Sound and packaging are suitably opulent and the CD is nothing if not well-filled.'