The music of the Viennese composers, mainly intended for elite entertainment, reflects the virtuosic attainments of many private orchestras and the cultured taste of aristocrats who commissioned a constant stream of symphonies and lighter chamber music.
Mr. Muhly described Mr. Corigliano's Clarinet Concerto (1977) and First Symphony as "constant companions in my formative high-school years" and added that a live performance of the symphony was "a life-changing experience, because the small musical gestures existed in a very well-constructed, larger architecture".
Which finally bring us back to Constant Lambert: in situating his symphony in this mode of slow, reflective concentration, Vaughan Williams risked forfeiting this piece's "symphonic" credentials.
He and the orchestra have just recorded the symphonies for Decca and in this exclusive audio podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the journey he and the orchestra have taken to bring their readings of these pieces together as one coherent entity - a symphonic odyssey like no other; not just 9 symphonies but 36 movements in a constant process of evolution, not to say revolution.
The one constant is that every class starts with the Mobile Symphony, where students play their ringtones conducted by the instructor, as shown in the video below.
This "destructive" impulse, elements of which may already be heard in Haydn, led to constant reevaluation of the basis of sonata form and hence of the symphony as a whole.
(His definition of red songs is broad — Paganini's works and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are red songs, he said, because they are "very healthy" and "about constant improvement").
The "Pathetique" is another overworked standard needing constant revivification, and there was no particular reason to expect it from Mr. Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, whose work together in recent years has often exuded a sense of weary routine.
In the Stravinsky closer, "Symphony in Three Movements," dancers, space, time and history seem all to be in a constant state of flux: they and we are caught in imagery of engines, transcultural exchanges, inexorable processes.
The Second Symphony, premiered by Charles Münch in Boston in 1959, continued the antagonistic preoccupations of the First, with a constant smaller orchestral group formally acknowledged in the score.
