Ah well, there lies the problem for me. It is impressive, it sounds grand, it engages my intellect.....but there is something missing, something intangible, something as allusive as the music itself. Ultimately....it does not move me, it fails to elicit an emotional response-as I respond to Wagner, or Bruckner, or Sibelius, or Vaughan Williams, or Shostakovich, for example.
Why ??? Well partly that lies in my own emotional aesthetic and its response to the music I hear but it is also, it seems to me, that Brian is so terse, so elliptical that he does not allow the music the time to grow and expand in my consciousness...........as it does over the long haul of a symphony say by one of the composers I listed above.
Spot-on, Colin! I experience the exact same problems with Brian's later works. They are fascinatingly complex but there is not enough "heart" in them to cause an emotional response. There just isn't much that makes me sit up and get involved with the music. Still, I regard Brian as a seminal composer and will continue to admire his earlier work :)
