Disruptive music by Boccherini

Luigi Boccherini: Six Symphonies à Quatro, op. 35

Earlier today, I was listening to a symphony by Muzio Clementi that impressed me by its complete blandness, and I thought how wonderful it is that at one point in the late 18th Century there were three absolute geniuses writing music at the same time: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The gap between these composers and Clementi seems too large to bridge. But luckily, there's a second tier of composers in between, including Bach's sons, the Bohemians Franz Benda, Carl Stamitz & Christoph Willibald Gluck, and an Italian who spent most of his life in Spain: Luigi Boccherini.

These Six Symphonies are billed as being in four parts, but they're actually in five: two violins, viola, cello and bass. They could be played one to a part, but here, with the wonderful Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, we have a small chamber orchestra: five first and four second violins, three violas and cellos, and a double bass and harpsichord. Boccherini was of course a master of chamber music, but this music sounds exactly right in this orchestral guise.

The two discs begin with the Fourth Symphony in F major, which in its first movement takes off immediately in an exciting gallop. Clearly, unlike Clementi Boccherini has something positive to say, and an exhilarating and original way of saying it. In his fine liner notes, Emilio Moreno compares Boccherini's op. 35 Symphonies with Mozart's Haffner Symphony, K. 385 and Haydn's Symphonies 76-78, all of which were written in 1782. (Beethoven, meanwhile, was only 12 years old; his first orchestral music was well in the future). Moreno doesn't hear much Haydn or Mozart in this music:

"Boccherini conceives of a discourse very close to that of the divertimento in which the unconventionally emotional goes beyond the structural and the Dionysian goes beyond the Apollonian, without its formal and harmonic ease of construction corresponding to predetermined models and schemes."

Boccherini disrupts the galant schemas, whereas Haydn, and especially Mozart, work their special magic largely within the structures that have come to be called classical. Boccherini worked, at least in 1782, in what Friedrich Schlegel called the 'poetry of the frenzied', as opposed to the 'poetry of the sober.'

The slow movement of the Sixth Symphony is quite wonderful, and it's played here with grace and style, with passion occasionally bubbling up from beneath the surface. This movement brings to mind the wonderful music Geoffrey Burgon wrote for the 1981 TV version of Brideshead Revisited; I don't know if Burgon knew Boccherini, but I hear in both a nostalgic sadness: Charles Ryder's for Sebastian and the Brideshead of the past; Luigi Boccherini's, perhaps, for his Italian homeland to which he would never return.