Benjamin Frankel - Symphony 7 & 8 & Overtures

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Benjamin Frankel - Symphony 7 & 8 & Overtures

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Frankel's music, if you have not encountered it before, is atonally lyrical - Berg rather than Schoenberg. His violin concerto (also on CPO) is among the finest works of the century and can easily stand compare with the Berg and the Schuman. The film music, of which there are many scores (most of which will have to be reconstructed by the hopefully indefatigable Dmitri Kennaway), are fibrous British film music of the 1950s and 1960s in which Frankel marginally softens his pallet for cinema audiences. Interesting that Elizabeth Lutyens made money from using her avant-garde style for horror films. Frankel's concert and chamber works (CPO have the complete string quartets) are ominous, lyrical, threatening, gloomy, charged with the uncertain catastrophic spirit of the times. These various works achieved as much neglect as William Alwyn's (another British film music composer whose true metier lay in the symphony); the difference being that Alwyn used his film music money to fund recordings. The picture might have been different if Frankel had invested his royalty income in a sequence of Lyrita LPs.
The Overture to a Ceremony, might from its title, be expected to latch onto the 'pomp and circumstance' of works like the concert overtures of Chagrin, Leigh, Reizenstein and Howard Ferguson. In fact Frankel does little to soften the serial blow. The music is portentous, projects the usual long Bergian lyricism, and in its fractured dramatics, recalls Nielsen 4 and 5. From 15 years earlier comes the Shakespeare Overture which is marginally more relaxed still - resounding with some filial relationship with Walton's Olivier films. With this I noticed, at 5.29, a long march pointing back towards Frank Bridge's masterwork Enter Spring. All ends care-freed at 9.30.
The Symphonies are the final pair in the cycle. Frankel was to have written a Ninth for the BBC Proms but this never came to anything. The Eighth, might almost be a 'concerto for orchestra'. There is some well calculated and very beautiful music for the tuba pp against strings in the first movement (track 7 8.15). Havergal Brian's stuttering termagant marches are also suggested and, in the final movement, (6.20) William Alwyn's funereal spirit, most evident in the Hydrotaphia symphony, is there for all to hear. Still this is not easily assimilable music. Be warned - you will need to persist. This warning is far less relevant in the case of the Seventh. Frankel seems, for this work, to weave a poem for silvery violins, for romantic horn solos (Dennis Brain would have made great play with the solo in the first movement), with seemingly endless lyrical lines, of a Bergian caste, with the singing of malcontented souls and with the fife and drum satire of Arnold's Eighth Symphony.

Rob Barnett @ musicweb-international.com