What does London mean to you? A place to live, a place to work, a place to visit? Noisy, polluted, overcrowded? Spacious parks, world-class museums, music, theatre, shopping and restaurants? On Tuesday evening I sought the opinion of two people who, like me, came to live in London.
Joseph Haydn was 58 when he was enticed away from Austria and the Esterházy family to London in 1791. He stayed for four years and composed twelve symphonies, the last of which is known as his London Symphony (No 104 in D Major). Although he lived another fourteen years (he died in 1805) it was the last symphony he wrote. On Tuesday evening it was performed at the Proms by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It is a beautiful piece of music but, at least to me, it did not conjure up London.
After the interval another symphony – Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony. He composed it in 1913 and it is a substantial work requiring a large orchestra and lasting almost an hour. It has been described as an extended tone-poem, portraying the city from dawn to night-time. The first movement RVW says “may perhaps suggest the noise and hurry of London, with its always underlying calm”. Harp and clarinet enunciate the half-hour of the Westminster chimes. Subsequent movements evoke Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon, the street cry of a lavender-seller, a hansom cab in the distance, the Embankment in the evening, the chimes of Big Ben and finally leaving London on the ebb-tide at night.
Obviously I did not recognise any of these allusions but I did enjoy the work. I will listen to it again on the wireless. As usual the Albert Hall was sold out and the audience attentive to the point of not clapping between movements.