Havergal Brian's "Gothic" Symphony is the biggest, grandest, and most monumental symphony ever written. Composed in two gargantuan parts of three huge movements each, the Gothic's opening instrumental movements get progressively wilder and his closing choral orchestral setting of the Te Deum gets progressively weirder. Draped in gaudy colors and gigantic sonorities and driven by the mighty rhythms of an enormously enlarged orchestra, the Gothic strives to rise above its overwhelmingly bombastic rhetoric, but it inevitably collapses into incoherent banality and finally into unintelligible muttering. Ultimately, Brian's "Gothic" Symphony is so vast as to be incomprehensible and so long as to be unendurable.
But aside from bootlegs, there was no way for listeners to hear Brian's Gothic and find out for themselves until the release of this 1989 studio recording with
Ondrej Lenard, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a host of Slovak choirs. It is a magnificent achievement in every way but one: Brian's music is awful. The opening Allegro assai is a mixture of dramatic sonata form with undigested chunks of folk song. The following Lento espressivo e solenne is a massive funeral march in gauche 5/4 time. The following Vivace is an eccentric Scherzo that becomes an out of control Rondo. But while the a cappella opening of the Te Deum is as close as Brian ever got to inspiration, and all
Lenard's hosts sing splendidly, the movement spends itself rambling and mumbling. And while the colossal "Judex" outdoes even Berlioz's Te Deum in its stupendous waves of sound, the music itself is so simple-minded as to be stupefying. And while the closing "Te ergo" is as cogent as it is ever likely to get, it still sounds like music with delirium tremens and delusions of grandeur.
Naxos' sound is better than the music.