Humphrey Searle’s name will be known to music lovers, to the extent he’s familiar at all, as one of the contributors to those legendary Hoffnung Music Festivals back in the late 1950s. A pupil of Anton Webern and one of the first composers in the U.K. to adopt 12-tone technique, he was able to produce hilarious parodies of this style for Hoffnung’s comedy enterprises. Of course, for most people it will be impossible to tell the difference between Searle’s parodies and his “serious” music, which sounds suspiciously similar. This is especially the case with the Fourth Symphony, which has more than its share of “squeak, bloop” sound effects, in which various extremes of high and low skitter among the pops and clicks of the percussion section. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra clearly hates this music: the string section in particular makes no pretense to clean rhythm or even good intonation, but part of the fault really must be laid at the feet of the composer. People who like this sort of thing don’t need me to tell them whether or not to buy this disc, but I suspect that vast majority will want to give it a pass.
