Concerto for String Orchestra Op.39

Lento sostenuto

Molto ritmico

Adagio maestoso, all marcia e largamente – Allegro precipotoso – Largo ed alla marcia

By birth and by education – he was born in Wakefield, trained as an Anglican cathedral chorister and studied at Oxford – Kenneth Leighton was an English composer. But he was also, in a real sense, an Edinburgh composer. He spent more than 30 years teaching at Edinburgh University, the last 18 as Reid Professor of Music, and played a prominent part in the musical life of the city, not only as an academic but also as a conductor and pianist. Many of his major works were written in Edinburgh and first performed there.

It would be wrong to assume from this, however, that his music is in any way provincial or parochial. His early works, like the Symphony for Strings of 1949, are certainly very English, in the Vaughan Williams tradition, but his months of study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome in 1951 widened his horizons more than a little. By the time he came to write the Concerto for String Orchestra in 1961 he was a very much more sophisticated, even cosmopolitan composer who had absorbed the most important developments in 20th century European music. He did not, on the other hand, abandon traditional values.

The melodic line on muted violas at the beginning of the Concerto might, in its extreme chromaticism, sound like a Schoenbergian twelve-note row, but it isn’t one and doesn’t actually behave like one. While it is the source of later thematic material, it does not exclude tonality – the work gravitates towards C major –-    and it does not dominate Leighton’s structural thinking, which is more spontaneous than the serial appearances would suggest. Nor does it inhibit his melodic imagination, which flows freely in a score characterised above all by a contrapuntal virtuosity comparable to that of Tippett’s    Concerto for Double String Orchestra.

The most significant aspect of the viola melody that opens the Lento sostenuto is the motif formed by its first four notes. It is presented again and again, though not in the same rhythm, as second violins, cellos and basses, and then first violins make their respective entries. There are two more main themes: one is introduced quietly by second violins over a dotted-rhythm ostinato on cellos;    the other appears on second violins and violas to be joined by the rest of the ensemble in imitative counterpoint that grows in intensity as it approaches a central fff tutta forza climax. The apex of the arch construction having been reached in this way, the tension is gradually relaxed    as, over pizzicato cellos and basses, the opening theme is lyrically recalled on violins, all but dying out on muted solo instruments just before the closing bars.

The rhythmically ingenious, brilliantly sonorous, scherzo-like second movement, which is played pizzicato throughout, might well owe something to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta –- not least the “Bartók pizzicato” resounding against the finger board towards the end. But its material, with a prominent minor third, derives from the pizzicato episode in the middle of the Lento sostenuto.

The slow introduction to the last movement seems, with its    heavily articulated double-dotted rhythms reminiscent of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, to be going in a different direction. At an early stage, however, violins introduce an idea derived from the Lento sostenuto which, as the tempo changes, is taken up at twice the speed as the robustly vigorous first theme of the main Allegro precipitoso section. It retains its impetus as broader melodic lines are set against it, just as they are set against busy fugal and scherzando episodes. They lead, intermittently but with ever gathering strength, to another fff con tutta forza climax, now arresting the impetus to make way for a coda recalling both the tempo and the emphatic gestures of the Adagio maestoso introduction to the movement.

Gerald Larner © 20009