Poetic inspiration for Symphony

By WILLIAM DART

David Farquhar admits he "chased a commission" for his Symphony No 3, which the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will play in Auckland on Saturday night.

"I followed in [composer] Ted Carr's footsteps and got a birthday commission from the orchestra. My previous two symphonies have been separated by about 20 years so I decided it was about time for another one."

Farquhar was there when New Zealand music burst upon the scene in the 1940s, and he ended up heading the charismatic team of composers which gave Victoria University's Music Department the reputation of being the liveliest in the country.

His works range from the frothy dances of Ring Round the Moon (1953) and A Unicorn for Christmas, the opera written with Ngaio Marsh for the 1962 royal visit, to the more hard-edged, colouristic Evocation (1975) which the NZSO included in its programme last year.

Farquhar is cagey when it comes to definitions. For him, a symphony is "just the name for an orchestral piece which goes on for a certain time. It's not a form as such because it can encompass a huge variety of things."

Remembered Songs, the new work, refers to an earlier song-cycle which inspired it. Like Schumann before him, Farquhar celebrated his marriage to Raydia d'Elsa in 1954 with an outpouring of song, a creative flow that was still strong four years later when he wrote In Despite of Death.

"At the time I thought it was odd that a happily married young father would be writing about death, but then Berlioz was 27 when he did his Requiem and Liszt was writing three pieces about death at the age of 28. Perhaps it was an answer to a young man's obsession or anxiety."

In Despite of Death took on a new significance after his wife's death last year, and he was drawn to "rework some of the material in the song cycle. I can now see connections which I was not conscious of at the time, and can make them a bit more evident than they were in the original."

One soon gathers it's the evocative world of song that is closest to this composer. "I love the mixture of words and music. It's so basic. It happens in the pop world if you can hear the words and, in Maori music, when the music is borrowed, it is the words that are particularly important. Words can make music come back to life. Raydia could remember all sorts of pop music from the 1930s, whereas I didn't even come across popular music until the 1950s when I became enthusiastic about Gershwin."

If poets like Dylan Thomas and Robert Herrick (the moving Eternitie) are the unheard text behind Saturday's Third Symphony, Farquhar hopes his music will speak firmly and directly to its audience. He feels New Zealand composers are "reassuring in the directness of their language - things are less elaborate and convoluted than the sort of things that are happening on the other side of the world."

The past 10 years have been lean ones for commissions and even performances, although he can remember back to the 1950s when things were worse. "Back then, one's chief outlet was radio, the YC stations, who could make the composers feel performances were a favour rather than what to expect. Otherwise it was just performances by friends and at university. None of it was income-making in any sense of the word."

As far as other composers go, he feels a special affinity with Mahler ("I was drawn to the songs initially and the symphonies afterwards"), a confession prompted by a discussion of the harp writing in the final movement of Remembered Songs. He adores Schubert. The explanation? "All music is song."

Performance

* Who: The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Judd with pianist Roger Woodward

* Where: Auckland Town Hall

* When: Saturday, March 29