Donald Francis Tovey’s only symphony was written in the first decades of the last century, roughly contemporaneously with Elgar’s Second. It is, as you might expect, sturdily built, like a tank, and sensitively if conservatively scored. What it isn’t, alas, is memorable. This is one of those symphonies that may impress as you hear it, but vanishes from the mind like the popping of a soap bubble as soon as it’s over. For a work that lasts nearly an hour, that’s not a good sign, and I very much wish that it weren’t so.
Take the first movement: lengthy, at eighteen minutes, and certainly not devoid of attractive themes or clever passages. Tovey was, in particular, a fine contrapuntist, as the development section clearly shows. In his writings, Tovey took pains to deemphasize the importance of “originality,” claiming that what matters in art isn’t necessarily doing something first, but rather doing it best. But if originality isn’t a prerequisite, a certain freshness and vitality must be, and one can’t help thinking that the emphasis on the symphonic process has outstripped spontaneity and inspiration. It does nothing “best.”
The scherzo follows Beethoven’s model of coming round twice, but the trio, in much slower tempo, really doesn’t sustain repetition–and once again, for all its hustle and bustle, the scherzo proper isn’t terribly ear-catching. On the plus side, no one was more aware of the “finale problem” than was Tovey, and this one largely gets around it, making it the most successful single section of the entire symphony (I found the slow movement simply dull). On the other hand, it might be that a more dynamic and lively performance would reveal the work in a better light.
While certainly technically proficient, all three quick movements strike me as under tempo. The scherzo, in particular, finds Georg Vass conducting with a heavy hand, making too much of Tovey’s “non troppo” qualification of the basic “vivace” tempo. For whatever reason, whether a function of speed, articulation, or a combination of both, much of the work sounds more labored than it should. As to the brief, solemn prelude to Tovey’s only opera, The Bride of Dionysus, the music is completely devoid of character of any kind. The engineering is fine, and it’s nice to have the symphony in modern sound as an alternative to Tovey’s own recording of the work (a dim 1930s broadcast most recently available on Symposium), but this is still not ideal. And to the extent the problem resides in the work itself, perhaps it never will be.
