Michelle Ende' The Symphony No. 4 'Pastoral'

Rec.: The Bay Area Philharmonic

    So stumbled across this when looking for other pastoral symphonies on Spotify and decided that I should correct my lack of knowledge of symphonic music by women composers... so in other words it inadvertently made me kick off a week of symphonies by women composers. Too bad this symphony totally doesn't do a thing for me and researching it may have driven me slightly mad.

    So before I get in to the symphony itself I'll get in to the madness. While listening to this I was trying to find ANY info I could on this composer, the conductor, and the orchestra and came up with like next to nothing. From what I can glean from the program notes on cdbaby The Bay Are Philharmonic is a volunteer orchestra based in Tampa Bay and was formed by Michelle Ende' and Simon Parsons and from what I can tell it exists to promote new music, exclusively by Ende'. I say this because there are like 10+ recordings of her music from the group, but composer, the conductor, and the orchestra all have ZERO web presence. Not a homepage or social media page to be found on any of them. I'm pretty sure I'm listening to something that doesn't exist written and performed by people who don't exist. How do you end up with 10 released cd's and no trail of anything to find online...

    Anyways, to the music. Erm... I don't think this symphony is particularly good. A lot of it reminds of the score to one of the worst movies ever made, After Last Season, a bad movie notable for having an equally bad soundtrack. There are lots of timid gestures that seem to enter in at irregular times and I'm not sure if they are using a synthesizer to reinforce or replace parts or if it is in the score or what, but there is this synthetic sound going on somewhere that was making my orchestrator sense tingle the whole symphony. The melodies are mostly long, aimless tunes, although the very opening is interesting in that it kind of sounds like the deconstruction of a Copland piece. The movement also kind of just ends, not like it dies off, or builds to an abrupt ending, but just seems to end mid-thought.

   And the complaints above? They pretty much apply to every other movement in the symphony. Which is kind of a parallel to the Vaughan Williams 3rd symphony I listened to yesterday. They both have very similar affects across all movements and similar tempos throughout, but while the Vaughan Williams managed to pull this off though changing use of colors in the orchestration, this symphony just kind of flatly repeats the few orchestral ideas it seems to have and lacks the passionate volatility of the RVW symphony. My notes for the work starting around the second movement are just mad scrawling trying to figure out what is going on with the orchestration and what I'm supposed to be getting out of this either emotionally or intellectually. There are pseudo minimalist ideas going on here, but lacks the establishing of harmonic language that makes that music work. The piccolo in the 3rd movement was driving me nuts, cause it sounds completely unnatural.

    The final movement is basically the same thing but with a faster underlying part supporting the long and aimless melodies. There is an interesting idea right before the end with an abrupt timpani solo, but it is over before you can even begin to enjoy it and then the music just stumbles to the end quickly afterwards.

    I don't know, maybe this is kind of like the Ades (I swear that I like contemporary music) and would reward knowledge of the score or study to the listener. But I'm of the opinion that a good symphony, like any good piece of art, should have a satisfying surface level that draws a person to want to examine it more. Or be SO out there that it is obviously breaking the mold (looking at you copy of Finnegan's Wake that I've got through the first 2 chapters like 5 times of). And this symphony just doesn't dissociate me enough from my expectations in it's own language to be satisfying. Maybe this was just an off work for her though, I'll have to check out some of her other symphonies. Anyways, hopefully tomorrow will be better!

Tomorrow: Elfrida Andree No. 2