Havergal Brian

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

Insert included.

Few stories in twentieth-century music are stranger or more instructive than that of Havergal Brian (1876-1972). Almost entirely self-taught, working for decades in complete obscurity, Brian composed thirty-two symphonies across a career that spanned more than seventy years of active composition, the most celebrated of which - the massive Gothic Symphony of 1927, requiring forces of extraordinary scale - received its first performance only in 1961, when Brian was 84 years old. The story of his rediscovery in old age - by Robert Simpson and the BBC, by a generation of conductors who heard in this music something that defied easy categorization - is among the great acts of cultural reclamation in the history of twentieth-century British music.

The two symphonies presented on this Unicorn LP - the Tenth and Twenty-First - belong to the extraordinary late flowering that Brian sustained into his final decade: concentrated, formally assured works in which a lifetime of compositional thinking was distilled into something simultaneously archaic and entirely original. The Tenth Symphony (1953-54) is among his most searching, its expressive world touching the chromatic intensities of late German Romanticism while belonging to no school but Brian's own. Unicorn, UNS 265.