Customer Reviews

Alwyn: Symphony No. 5 "Hydriotaphia"; Sinfonietta for Strings; Piano Concerto No. 2

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Alwyn's Fifth Symphony (1973) was the last of the composer's works in this genre. According to his wife, Mary Alwyn, during the fourteen years between its composition and the Fourth Symphony, Alwyn's "attitude to symphonic writing had radically changed." Indeed there's a considerable difference between the Fifth and its predecessors. The Fifth is a sixteen minute excursion in one movement that's made up of four sections, each of which is prefaced by a quotation from "Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk," by Sir Thomas Browne. It is, quite frankly, a gray and somber work, followed by the Sinfonietta for Strings (1970), an astringent twenty-five minute work in three movements which continues in the same depressing vein.

Mary Alwyn writes that the Symphony was inspired by "Browne's wonderful prose [which] sets the mood of each section and is an expression of the composer's personal indebtedness to a great man whose writings were always at his bedside and were a life-long source of solace and inspiration to him." The mood Alwyn established is best summarized by Ralph Waldo Emerson who said Browne's book "smells in every word of the [tomb]." In that respect, the Fifth Symphony accomplished what Alwyn set out to do; however, I can't say that I enjoy it, or even appreciate it.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 (1960), which had never been recorded until this disc was made in 1993, is much more palatable. Interestingly, it opens with a flourish very similar to that which opens the Fifth Symphony and proceeds along a fairly somber track for the first three minutes until breaking out in a burst of color. Rachmaninoff's romanticism comes to mind in a few places, circa 1960 though.

For Alwyn completists only.