Michael Kurek: Symphony No. 3 “English” (CD Review)

by Ryan Ross

Robin Fountain, conductor; European Recording Orchestra. Navona NV6700 

Well, look what we have here: a four-movement Third Symphony with the subtitle “English,” complete with descriptive movement headings mostly relating to the eponymous countryside. Of what does this remind us? Perhaps Ralph Vaughan Williams’s own Third Symphony, itself subtitled “Pastoral”? Okay, Vaughan Williams’s movements do not have such headings. But while Mr. Kurek does not own up to it in this recording’s liner notes, it is difficult to listen to his Third and not think of the Englishman’s masterpiece as a model. A certain consistency in contemplative mood marks both. In a now-infamous critique of the RVW score (from a rather spicy book titled Music Ho!), Constant Lambert writes of “a particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood” and of a “monotony of texture and lack of form.” Recent critical and academic opinion has revised Lambert’s somewhat wrongheaded descriptions. But what made me think of them is how the word “monotony” more unavoidably describes Kurek’s bland and overlong Third. 

Let’s be frank: Kurek is a deft orchestrator and craftsman, but he doesn’t have anywhere near Vaughan Williams’s level of individuality. He can do little more than come up with short, nice-ish, but ultimately forgettable ideas, and repeat them with insufficient variation or contrast for stretches of 10-15 minutes. Worse still, there is not enough differentiation between his four movements at large to provide much relief at all. The result is a 50-minute symphony that wears out its welcome by the end of the first movement. This is notwithstanding the aforementioned colorful headings such as “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside.” Indeed, they rhetorically only accentuate the problem. In this regard I was strongly reminded of Romantic-era symphonies by Joachim Raff and Rued Langgaard, which sport similar disparities between lofty intent and actual realization. 

In other words, the music here, while certainly not “bad,” feebly supports its work’s pretensions. A more suitable setting that kept coming to my mind is the nature documentary. Some properly distilled version of this content would have worked out beautifully as the soundtrack for a film narrated by whomever has taken over from the signature voice of Sir David Attenborough. As it stands now, however, there is just not enough interesting musical material here to constitute an extended, mood-consistent symphony.