The intellectual strengths in these two outstanding works are not revealed through argument, but through cooperation.
But in both works there is a sense of unity of purpose in which the early romantic battle between first and second subjects, often characterized respectively as masculine and feminine, is no longer a driving force, and in which the pitting of soloist against orchestra, individual against society, has no place whatever. The Tovey is no less technically demanding and is unconcerned with display, though its rhetoric has both grandeur and vivacity. The Mackenzie is openly virtuosic, its Scottish bravura balanced by sentiment and wit. You see how this ghastly business touches us all in many queer forms.Īlthough composed within six years of each other, the two concertos are superficially strongly contrasted. Tovey’s came out just in time to beat the crushing deadline of the First World War while Mackenzie’s Scottish Concerto had been published in Leipzig seventeen years earlier, but was very nearly a casualty of the war-as he wrote to the pianist Frederick Dawson on 12 October 1914:īy the way, your (and existing copies in England) copy may well become very valuable! I see that the Germans are melting down all music plates for bullets: and as these are in Leipzig, no doubt by this time the concerto has been re-cast in another form, less musical, but more effective perhaps. The Germans, however, without the same cultural prejudices, were ready to promote anything that was good so the two works represented here were published in Germany. They gained little from their own exalted status and their music suffered the same neglect at home as that of other British composers British publishing houses were not prepared to support British works, least of all piano concertos.
Mackenzie was knighted in 1895, Tovey in 1935 (the year of Mackenzie’s death) and both men have suffered subsequently from being associated with the Establishment, though both were, in their own ways, quite radical. He could count amongst his honorary degrees music doctorates from St Andrews, Edinburgh, Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities. Mackenzie occupied a parallel role as Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in London (from 1888 to 1924), and although he had none of the academic pretensions of Tovey (who graduated with distinction from Oxford), Mackenzie was a fine linguist and had a mind of great sophistication and wit. Both composers share a Scottish connection: Mackenzie was Scottish in name, accent, blood and culture Tovey became Scottish by adoption, chiefly because he occupied Edinburgh’s Reid Chair of Music with great distinction for the last twenty-six years of his life.
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