Alexander Goehr, "Two Choruses"

-- Liner Notes from Angel S36387 --

side one, bands 1 & 2 [4' 25" 81 3' 38"]
Alexander Goehr
Two Choruses, op.14
I had hope when violence was ceas'd
from Milton's 'Paradise Lost'
Take but degree away
from Shakespeare's 'Troilus and Cressida', 1.3

During the late 1950s. the first generation of British composers to have accepted the innovations of the Viennese serialists was beginning to gain a hearing. The time-lag characteristic of British music, together with a certain innate conservatism, has produced a group of composers whose methods are especially interesting. They have avoided the paths of some of the extreme continental experimenters, and have taken what best suits them from various sources.

All four composers represented here conform to this pattern. Typically. none of them has found it necessary, in accepting the Schoenbergian experience, to restrict himself to twelve note [or even serial] methods. Each writes against the background of serialism, but has also to a greater or lesser extent integrated it with other methods.

Both Alexander Goehr [b. 1932] and Richard Rodney Bennett [b. 1936] are more obviously in the line of succession to the second Viennese school, though Bennett has proved himself an astonishing master of every style. His light music, his third stream jazz, his film scores and his serial music are all composed with impeccable technique, and show real personality-above all in the warmly romantic atonalism which recently he has made his own.

Goehr, too, has tended to follow paths that stem from Schoenbergian expressionism. Despite the high norm of dissonance, his idiom can be accepted on comparatively few hearings as harmonically euphonious in the traditional sense. Witness the Two Choruses. The complex rhythmic developments and variations particularly need the listener's concentration. They stem mostly from Messiaen, whose classes Goehr attended when studying in Paris in 1955. Goehr's vision is rich and powerful. Like many post-war artists he has occupied himself, in works such as The Deluge, Sutter's Gold and Hecuba's Lament, with the subject of tragic desolation. -- Anthony Payne, 1965

Alexander Goehr, "String Quartet, No. 3, Op. 37"

-- Liner Notes from Wergo 60093 --

String Quartet, No. 3, Op. 37
1. Non troppo allegro, con sensibilita
2. Allegretto e vivace
3. Introduzione: Lento molto sostenuto; Allegretto moderato, un poco leggero ma cantando

Lindsay String Quartet
Peter Cropper & Ronald Birks, violins - Roger Bigley, viola - Bernard Gregor-Smith, cello

Despite the difference of medium, the works recorded here bear out this observation of Alexander Goehr about his own music since 1976, when the Third String Quartet was first performed by the Lindsay Quartet in London. The Quartet is, to date, his last work to be ordered serially; following a period of preoccupation with modality, the Kafka cycle approaches a tonal conception of musical order. But the listener will more readily (and rightly) hear the continuity of an individual way of presenting musical ideas and even, since we are not here concerned with a Stravinskian wearing of historic masks, with continuity in the ideas themselves.

In the Quartet, Goehr's adherence to formal designs from the classic-romantic tradition contains not the slightest hint of archaism or nostalgia. Forms such as sonata, scherzo, rondo, arise from the nature of the material. Instead of breaking down the quartet into a group of soloists (like many modem quartets including to some extent Goehr's own No. 2 of 1967), Goehr rejoices in the homogeneity of the ensemble and the fascinating results of interweaving its parts. Much of the intimate yet vibrant colour of the work derives from Goehr's exploitation of overlapping registers to create an intense but never strident colloquy, at once intellectually absorbing and texturally sensuous.

The ear is struck at once by the preponderance of triads in the classically-moulded opening theme. The Quartet is not tonal, and the material is still transformed serially; but the clarity of chording guides the listener towards recognition, not only of the fact that an idea is recurring transformed (which can be done through rhythm) but of the nature of the pitch transformation itself. Hence the recurring rondo theme is easily picked up, as is the reprise of the sonata-form first movement. Between these two movements, both in the kind of tempo Brahms might have marked arnabile, the brittle scherzo provides an excellent contrast.

ALEXANDER GOEHR is one of the leading figures in British musical life today. The son of the conductor Walter Goehr, he was born in Berlin, but was brought to England when only a few months old. Nearly thirty years on, he is still regularly tagged with the label of 'member of the Manchester School', the group of fellow students at the Royal Manchester College of Music which also included Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth. After Manchester and a year in Messiaen's master-class in Paris, Goehr worked as a copyist and translator, then during the 1960s as a producer of orchestral programmes for the BBC. He was musical director of the Music Theatre Ensemble between 1967 and 1972, and is a fluent and stimulating broadcaster. In parallel with all his other activities, he has also - perhaps to his own surprise - entered the academic world, becoming Professor of Music first at Leeds University and then in 1976 at Cambridge, where he has brought about a radical transformation of the syllabus of the music faculty.

Goehr's catalogue of some forty-five opus numbers includes an opera, Arden Must Die, a triptych of music theatre pieces, Naboth's Vineyard, Shadowplay and Sonata about Jerusalem, and two large-scale choral and orchestral works, Sutter's Gold and Babylon the great is fallen. Among his orchestral works are a Little Symphony, a Symphony in One Movement and a Sinfonia, concertos or concertante pieces for violin, cello and piano, and most recently two substantial Etudes for orchestra. His music is widely performed and broadcast, and in 1982 Unicorn Records released their recording of two of his orchestral works Metamorphsis/Dance and the Romanza for cello and orchestra. A book of articles and interviews, edited by Bryan Northcott, entitled The Music of Alexander Goehr, is also available, published by Schott.

Goehr's works all show a strong sense of musical logic: 'I write music', he has said, 'in order that people can follow from bar to bar and know that certain notes follow and that others don't.' His personal voice has evolved in a series of syntheses: between Schoenberg's contrapuntal outlook and Messiaen's harmonic thinking; between twelve-note serialism and various types of modal writing; between the musical language of the present and forms of the past like chaconne, variation and fugue. Techniques of elaboration play an important part, but this in itself implies a simple starting-point, and the 'still centres' of his works provide many of his most striking passages. His career as a whole seems also to have reached a kind of 'still centre', a nodal point, some six years ago with the composition of a very simple 'white-note' setting of Psalm IV for female voices. This was followed by two string pieces, a Fugue and Romanza, elaborating the same material, and then by an increasing flow of other works which now seems to be leading the way towards his second opera. -- Anthony Burton (1983)

Wergo Records, London, gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust.

This recording was made at the Concert Hall, Cambridge, on 19 and 20 June 1982

James Burnett, Producer
John Bower, Sound Engineer
Cover designed by Lynette Williamson
Sleeve printed in England by Robert Stace and Co. LM.
Record pressed in Germany by TELDEC
Music published by Schott & Co. Ltd., London

Alexander Goehr, "Sonata In One Movement Op. 2" (1953)

-- Liner Notes From Auracle AUC 1005 --

From a purely historical point of view the association of John Ogdon (left) with at least three of the composers in his recital recaptures and crystallises an important phase in the development of post-war British music. For it wasjust over ten years ago, (1 53), that Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and John Ogdon, all of whom were then students in Manchester, founded together the New Music Manchester Group. At that time the music of the younger continental composers, and even that of Schoenberg and Webern, was hardly known in this country. But since then a minor revolution has occurred, of which the very existence of this record alone is sufficient proof. Just how influential a role the New Music Manchester Group played in this revolution only the future can decide, but certainly their concerts of their own music, of Schoenberg, Webern and others, gave considerable impetus to the changing climate of opinion.

Richard Hall, too, was then professor of composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, and both Goehr and Birtwistle were members of his composition class. Clearly nothing more than a simple accident of time had brought all these remarkably gifted musicians together in the same place at the same moment. Inevitably, however, they quickly became identified as the "Manchester School". But this is a label that all of them have strenuously denied, and one only needs to compare the sonata of Alexander Goehr and the Five Pieces of Peter Maxwell Davies, both of which were written during their student years, to realise how little their musical personalities had in common even then.

Rhythmic variation is also an important feature of the piano sonata op.2 of Alexander Goehr (b.1932). But here its function is quite different, recalling similar procedures in the music of Olivier Messiaen, with whom Goehr studied in the academic year 1955-56. The sonata, in fact, was written some years earlier in 1953, and performed for the first time at Morley College. A virile, energetic work, it is both bold in structure and forceful in expression. Even at a first hearing it gives an impression of real authority, of a lively and imaginative intellectual discipline. The melodic and harmonic ideas which form the basic substance of the music are themselves so full of character that they never lose their recognisable identity through the many subtle rhythmic transformations. As the music becomes more familiar it discloses an increasing number of ingenious cross-references which bind together the various overlapping sections into a closely knit, highly articulate formal unity. Towards the close of the sonata, which is dedicated to Margaret Kitchin, the opening phrase of Prokofiev's seventh piano sonata is woven into the texture as a tribute to the Russian composer who died in 1953.

Alexander Goehr, "Nonomiya, op. 27"

-- Continued Liner Notes from Auracle AUC 1005 --

Side 2/Band 4

The more flexible and expansive Nonomiya (1969) takes its title from a Noh play, and though the work doesn't create an explicitly Eastern sound-world, its finely wrought 'calligraphic' detail expresses a subtle affinity with Japanese culture.

Without implying programmatic intent, the composer's use of the title does denote the influence of a particular type of Noh play on his own work: the division into two parts, in the first of which the principal actor declaims a kind of aria; his reappearance in the second part as a ghost who threatens those responsible for his (her) death; the actor's singing supplanted by dancing at the climax; finally, his formal exit.

notes by Stephen Pruslin

Alexander Goehr, "Capriccio, op. 6"

-- Liner Notes from Auracle AUC 1005 --

Side 2/Band 3

The Capriccio dates from 1957 and is written frankly in the post-Webern idiom that was then such a dominant mode of expression. At this distance in time, the work transcends mere historicity by virtue of the powerful aural and intellectual control with which the idiom is spoken. Webern may be the music's nearest ancestor, but unlike so many post-war composers, who concerned themselves principally with the surface of Webern's music. Goehr hears his predecessor as a descendant of the classical Austro-German sonata tradition, albeit as the most exotic flower on its remotest branch.

The perceptive listener will hear in the Capriccio more than a vestige of sonata structuring: a series of introductory statements, separated by fermatas; an exposition proper, even incorporating the sense of two ideas (here also expressed as two tempi); a 'developmental' central section; a recapitulation by inversion and a coda, which circles back via a 'first ending' to. a complete da capo, allowing us to corroborate all these impressions. A 'second ending' leads to a brief conclusion, but the final fade on the trill that opened and re-opened the work carries a strong suggestion that the music could continue to re-cycle senza fine.

Stephen Pruslin (piano) was born in New York. He was a pupil of Luise Vosgerchian and of Schoenberg's pianist, the late Eduard Steuermann, and at the age of twenty-two was appointed Lecturer in Music at Princeton University. He has lived in London since 1964.

As soloist and as a member of such leading ensembles as The Fires of London and the London Sinfonietta, he has played all over the world, including every major international festival. He has been called one of the world's leading interpreters of contemporary music' and 'the uniquely committed Pruslin', and this commitment embraces a complete gamut of musical periods and styles from Bull to Boulez in performances often described as lucid and incandescent.

Pruslin has been soloist with the Royal Philharmonic and BBC Symphony orchestras and recitalist at the Bath and Edinburgh festivals. He won a tremendous ovation for his live telecast of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto at the Belgrade Festival and was invited to play the work again at the Reykjavik Festival. His solo and chamber recording awards include Sunday Times Record of the Month, the Dutch Edison Prize and the Grand Prix du Disque.

Stephen Pruslin is also a distinguished author, translator and speaker on many Radio 3 and Radio 4 programmes. Hislibretto for Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy was described by W. H. Auden as one of the most outstanding and original opera texts of the century. He provided music for Derek Jarman's award-winning film of The Tempest and devised and recorded the musical sequences for the London West End production of Peter Ustinov's Beethoven's Tenth.

Alexander Goehr, "Piano Trio, Op. 20"

SlDE TWO
Piano Trio Op. 20
1st Mov. Con anima
2nd Mov. Lento possibile e sostenuto

Alexander Goehr, "String Quartet, No. 2, Op. 32"

-- Liner Notes from Argo ZRG 748 --

Alexander Goehr (b. 1932)

The majority of composers, it seems, have yet to get over the impact of the Modern Movement of sixty years ago. Reactionaries continue to regard the innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as tending to undermine the good old tradition while the avant-garde views the same advances as an obligation to perpetual revolution. However, a third group of composers, as yet regrettably small, sees the most hopeful way forward out of the resulting confusion as that of the modest progressive. Alexander Goehr, for instance, holds that, properly understood, the new resources of twentieth century composition offer means not of supplanting but of enriching the grammar and syntax of musical understanding as it has evolved beneath the surface of the varying musical styles of the last few centuries. Thus the harmonic distinction of all his works since the Two Choruses op. 14 arises from a synthesis of Schoenberg's serial principle with the modality of Messiaen to create a 'transformational grammar' for pitch relationships in some ways analogous with tonality in the days of its potency. That Goehr has absorbed many of the most radical developments of this century will be clear from this disc. Yet at the same time, and without a hint of neo-classicism, these works attain an intimacy and depth reminiscent of some of the great chamber works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Second String Quartet was commissioned by Lord Dynevor and first performed complete by the Allegri String Quartet in October 1967. The first movement is an extended set of double variations. Goehr's initial idea was a three-phrase invocation-like viola melody upon which he immediately composed three slow variations incorporating a limited freedom of synchronization between players and the device of deriving tempo from the longest and shortest possible speeds of bowing. At this point, however, he discovered he could recast the theme as a rising melody completed by its descending inversion, in which form it now opens the whole movement upon the second violin, generating nine variations. The first is a serene harmonic amplification, featuring the wailing slurred sounds so characteristic of Goehr's individual and expert string writing. In the more agitated second variation, first the cello and then the viola play in different metres against the other instruments-a procedure adapted from the music of Charles Ives. Variation four is a miniature concertante for the first violin, five contains a curious texture of sighing harmonics and six and seven comprise the violently disjunct climax to the whole section before the lento cello recitative of nine unwinds the tension to a moment of stillness. The original viola solo and its three variations now follow and the movement is rounded off with two fleeting faster variations based once again upon the opening violin melody.

This somewhat lightweight conclusion convinced Goehr that the variations could not stand on their own as he had originally intended and he found himself rapidly composing two more shorter movements to complete the work. The first of these, a capricious Scherzo, is isorhythmic in construction; the viola rhythm in the opening strain recurs augmented-though with different pitches-in all the other parts at one point or another, most audibly on the cello in the second strain and the brief central trio. Goehr has described the freely evolving form of the concluding lento movement as ‘continuous melody', but its chorale-like texture constitutes equally an extended study in the particular harmonic progressions underlying the whole work. After a central climax of skirling intensity, the music gradually mounts in a hushed coda of great beauty.


Commissioned by the Bath Festival Society for Yehudi and Hephizibah Menuhin and Maurice Gendron, the Piano Trio was first performed by these artists in June 1966. The first of its two movements represents a strikingly successful 're-thinking' of a medium fraught with problems of balance and for which, in comparison with that of the string quartet, there are few major twentieth century examples to guide the contemporary composer. At the outset, the strings present a tight little tune in pungent double stopping somewhat suggestive of Eastern European folk influence and constructed round a pedal A flat on violin-to which note its G string is tuned up throughout the first movement. To this the piano responds with a reverberantly rhetorical chord sequence. The two groups of material are then superimposed in varied restatement and followed by a tail-piece of vociferously chattering repeated notes. After a complete reprise, this four-part sequence becomes the basis for four extended variations, in the second and third of which the timbral independence of the instruments is reinforced by elaborate polymetrical schemes. These contrast with moments of closest blending, as in the dolce cantando conclusion to the second variation, while the fourth thins out the texture to the harmonic bare bones of the movement.

Goehr has described the rapt, translucent and immensely slow second movement as a study in concentration for the players. Its material consists of a long cello melody comprising three arch-shaped phrases of increasing range and elaboration accompanied by intermittent piano chords in a different metre. The cello is then joined by the violin for a decorated repeat at the conclusion of which the piano fades out altogether. By means of double stopping the string texture now expands to three and then four parts during a middle section in which quarter-tone progressions and upbeat phrasing followed by silences of increasing length create an intense expectation. This is at least fulfilled by three florid re-entries of the piano in a lyrical recapitulation of the opening material garnished with a filigree of delicate string decoration. The coda opens briefly with new material, a ghostly pre-echo-so to speak-of what might have been the Trio's finale if the remaining bars of slowly dissolving piano shakes, crystalline chords and string glissandi with which this profound and exquisitely wrought movement retreats into the remote distance, were not so final in themselves.-- BRYAN NORTHCOTT

Recorded in association with The British Council
Piano by Bosendorfer
Cover design: GEORGE DAULBY
Produced by James Burnett with sound engineer Tryggvi Tryggvason.