Talking of eccentrics, has Leif Segerstam got to symphony No. 260 yet? He can't be far off...
...pieces with fanciful titles (I hesitate to say 'silly names')...
Well, with Segerstam you get both, quite often, many of his symphonies having quite bizarre subtitles; ah, well, that's Leif, I guess. As of the end of August this year, the symphonic tally was 258, many of these symphonies occupying precisely the same duration - 24 minutes - and if the subtitle of the most recent one,
Enchanted by the famous pigletpettattoes of Viola Segerstam, isn't perverse, I'm not quite sure what is. That said, his conducting of other repertoire - especially that for which he's perhaps best known - seems to me to be anything but eccentric or at least achieves wholly uneccentric and often utterly thrilling and compelling results.
OK, back to topic, which is the life of the symphony in Britain. Years ago, when I got a place to study at RAM with Alan Bush (which in the event I was unable to take up), I recall that on the curriculum of the history classes was an "Is the symphony dead?" question and, I suppose, it's a question that still has pertinence today, but the evidence is that it remains alive into the 21st century and doesn't look set to disappear any time soon unless far more symphony orchestras meet their demise as a consequence of financial difficulties. David Matthews (who is perhaps generally accepted as one of Britain's finest living symphonists) once wrote to me "THERE WILL BE NO MORE SYMPHONIES!!" (meaning from him); for the record, he had six to his name at that time...
