Richard Flury (1896-1967)
Orchestral Music Volume Four
Symphony No.2 ‘Ticino Symphony’ (1936)
Poème nocturne (1939)
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Paul Mann
rec. 2023, London
Toccata Classics TOCC0727 [67]

Richard Flury wrote his Second Symphony when he was establishing himself as a noted Swiss composer. Given the geography of Switzerland, his musical influences stemmed from Italy to the near-south and Austria to the north. He was a resolutely tonal composer, yet the works here, whilst not atonal, are modern in the sense that Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were.

Flury’s first marriage broke down in 1932. His wife and their four children moved to Canton Ticino. To have access to his offspring, over the coming years he spent holidays in Lugano. Whilst there, he made contact with the composer/conductor Leopoldo Casella who led the local radio orchestra. It was with that ensemble that Radio Lugano broadcast the first performance of this symphony.

Flury called the work his ‘Ticino Symphony’. The southernmost canton of Switzerland is a beautiful place, closely linked to Italy by virtue of history and language. Flury, committed to Romantic music and to the love of his homeland, tried to paint a musical picture of the region. He turned to folk melodies from Italian Switzerland, and distinctively put in the first movement the sound of the carillon from the Church of S.Maria di Pazzalino in Central Lugano. I did not find a recording of the bells on the Internet, but there are on YouTube their notes in the call-sign of Radio Svizzera Italiana.

The first movement opens strikingly; the full orchestra plays the first subject, backed by rhythmically thumping drums, an effect repeated throughout the movement. This struck a chord of memory, so I reached for a recording of Franz Schmidt’s masterpiece, the fourth symphony. Sure enough, he uses the same technique of drumbeats to add emphasis to the music. I think he does it with greater subtlety than Flury, who is all guns blazing from the beginning. Schmidt begins quietly and builds things up, and his melodic invention is more sophisticated.

Flury is also very committed to orchestral percussion, particularly cymbals; that adds colour to the several climaxes in the first movement. He avoids the obvious assignment of percussion to represent the carillon – a simple upwards scale. Instead, he allocates it to the flute or maybe piccolo, where it stands out prominently. I think that the same upward scale is distributed to the rest of the orchestra at various points in the movement.

The slow second movement, almost as long as its thirteen-minute predecessor, is a respite from the tumult. It is based on a moderately beautiful folk-melody Come in the Little Boat, and is presented by successively different instrumental combinations from the outset. Like many before him, Flury discovered that a beautiful folk-song may be a nice basis for a movement, but it needs something else as a supplement, rather as Vaughan Williams used the folk-tune Lovely Joan to complement the unforgettable Greensleeves melody. I find the movement very barcarolle-like; nothing wrong with that! Flury sticks to the one tune at his disposal. He repeats and varies it, making it less memorable as the movement progresses, rising to four or five climaxes once again capped by cymbals.

The scherzo, the shortest movement at around eight minutes, is built around the folk song Four Trotting Horses. The title aptly reflects the lively allegro molto tempo. Unfortunately, the melodic material is rather weak. Even the trio section, though it offers a welcome reprieve, remains unremarkable, culminating in yet another cymbal-capped climax. As the ‘trotting’ theme returns, it is reinforced by percussion, driving the piece to its conclusion.

The Allegro final movement takes fourteen-minutes, about ninety seconds longer than the first. Flury adopts the folk tune Farewell to the Army Barracks, widely popular at the time. True to his style, he scores the movement with a bold, martial character, with brash orchestration and frequent percussive elements. Yet, the movement is not memorable, despite its energetic composition. Still, the radio audience at the premiere would have recognized it, as it was performed by the Radio Lugano Orchestra.

I was disappointed by this symphony, fundamentally because it is unmemorable and assaults the ear too much, as if Flury was trying a bit too hard to make an impression.

The title of the substantial Poème nocturne must surely imply impressionistic effects. Its eighteen minutes are just the time span that such works often employ. The opening bars indicate a significant change in Flury’s style. This is a more chromatic approach and, for the most part, distinctly less pervasive percussion. There is no distinctive melody, but I prefer the piece to the symphony. The lengthy description of it in the booklet presumes that the composer provided the detail to a newspaper critic.

The work is supposed to represent a dream, so its themes surge and glide into one another, often chaotic, bacchanalian even, sometimes relaxing into quiet evaporation. To my mind, this makes it far more interesting than the Ticino Symphony. I will be far more inclined to indulge in repeat listening. To my surprise, Chris Walton’s very readable biography Richard Flury. The Life and Music of a Swiss Romantic (Toccata Press 2107) only mentions the piece in the tail-end list of his works.

Where would we be without companies such as Toccata who are regularly responsible for recording the works of neglected composers? Much poorer is the answer, and this is yet another in their series of CD’s presenting compositions by Richard Flury, who has been largely overlooked outside his native Swiss canton. The CD booklet, printed in both English and German, provides detailed insights into the works, featuring extensive quotations from contemporary critics. The recording is rich and dynamic, and
despite their probable unfamiliarity with the piece, the BBC Symphony performs it with enthusiasm and energy, doubtless inspired by conductor Paul Mann. He is represented not just by this recording, but by the twenty-six others that he has made under the aegis of Toccata Classics. Several of these have been devoted to the operas, ballets and concerted works of Flury, some in Mann’s own orchestrations, and the list of other neglected composers he has espoused is impressive, as is Toccata’s commitment to this quite rarified field.

Jim Westhead

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