When Sir Paul’s tone poem Standing Stone was first premiered, and then released as a CD in 1997, it attracted a very mixed reception.

Sir Paul McCartney

In fact I rather like to see the musical purists get their underwear in a bit of a twist when they try to tell us how bad something is, how derivative, how shallow, how it sounds as if it has been written by a committee, and, how dare you step over the musical boundaries and try your hand at “serious” music. In other words elitism at its worst. And believe me if there was a decree from No 10 and the White House tomorrow that all music be left in the hands of the purists, then music, all music, would die very quickly, and good riddance because none of it would be worth listening to.

And McCartney’s Standing Stone is worth listening to, and more than once.

Sir Paul’s first recorded effort at ’serious’ composing (as if composing hundreds of popular songs was not serious for goodness sake) was his 1991 Liverpool Oratorio which I remember as a tremendously moving piece of work that quite naturally showed the influence of Elgar (who made the oratorio his own in the early 20th century), but to my ears much more that of Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, plus a good helping of John Tavener and Malcolm Arnold, who were, and are, masters of assimilation, as is McCartney - you only have to listen to Sgt Pepper, the early Wings recordings, and some recent solo McCartney, to understand what I’m getting at; and without assimilation art, any art, cannot move ahead, cannot be creative.

And it’s the same with Standing Stone, McCartney’s first real stab at a symphonic piece. It worked in October 1997 when it was premiered and released, and it worked last night when, with Hilary, I listened to it again.

This is what McCartney has to say about Standing Stone in the liner notes to the CD:

” I’ve spent much of the last four years composing what has now become my second large-scale classical work, the symphonic poem Standing Stone. Unlike the Liverpool Oratorio which features prominent roles for four solo singers, Standing Stone relies entirely on colours and effects drawn from the orchestral and choral forces. With no soloists to propel the “story” and to help keep me on track throughout the writing of about 75 minutes of music I wrote a poem in which I try to describe the way Celtic man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of human existence…”

And it is there that we have the secret of this piece of wonderful music - that of man wondering what life is all about. It’s the same secret we discover when we look at Anthony Gormley’s 100 iron men looking out to sea from Crosby beach - their solitariness, their stillness and their fortitude. It is what we hear in this music, especially in Part 9, where McCartney introduces a melody of such simplicity and beauty that it almost breaks your heart (which has come from a good deal of contemplation and experience), and what we hear too in the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold who, like McCartney, was criticised by those damned purists for being popular. And the more I listen to Standing Stone the more I realise that Arnold has undoubtedly been a greater influence (consciously or subconsciously) than any other composer on McCartney’s symphonic music, but not in a negative sense. The underlying echoes of Arnold (Sir Paul might disagree) come through to me as a kind of homage to a man who shared many of Sir Paul’s ideals and beliefs, and, like Paul, wrote music from the heart.

Then it occurred to Hilary — who has recently started a campaign to save Gormley’s “Another Place” at Crosby — that McCartney’s Standing Stone is effectively the soundtrack to Gormley’s magnificent work on that haunted, industrial, almost derelict beach, and that McCartney’s wonderfully evocative, emotional music must, somehow, be performed there.

Standing Stone, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Lawrence Foster, is available on EMI Classics.

Steve Newman

No, that doesn’t refer to the BBC’s latest classic serial Lark Rise at Candleford, but to Vaughan Williams’s famous piece The Lark Ascending, which topped Classic FM’s listeners’ poll for their favourite piece of music.

It was Ralph VW’s year, for he also came third with his more substantial work Fantasies on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

Half a century after his death, the British composer’s 1914 programme piece of a lark singing over the English countryside took the number one spot in the Hall of Fame for the second year in a row.

More than 100,000 Classic FM listeners voted in the survey.

Darren Henley of Classic FM said: “The British public has spoken and declared Vaughan Williams their champion. In the 50 years since his death, Vaughan Williams has cemented his position as among the best-loved English composers of all time.”

At number two was Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, while Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Sixth Symphony took fourth and fifth place.

The full Top 20 :

1. Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending
2. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 2
3. Vaughan Williams - Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis
4. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 5
5. Beethoven - Symphony No 6
6. Mozart - Clarinet Concerto
7. Elgar - Cello Concerto
8. Bruch - Violin Concerto No 1
9. Elgar - Enigma Variations
10. Beethoven - Symphony No 9
11. Pachelbel - Canon
12. Barber - Adagio for Strings
13. Jenkins - The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace
14. Vivaldi - Four Seasons
15. Rachmaninov - Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini
16. Holst - The Planets
17. Grieg - Piano Concerto
18. Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
19. Mozart - Requiem
20. Handel - Messiah.

Two weeks ago, the Royal Albert Hall in London saw the musical resurrection. of John Foulds’s A World Requiem to mark Remembrance Sunday. The once popular piece had not been performed for 81 years.

It was composed in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) to commemorate the dead of all nations and was given a warm reception at the time.

For four years in succession, from 1923 to 1926, the Requiem was the centrepiece of the Armistice Day Festival, which in those days brought Britain to a standstill every 11 November.

The Requiem needed 1,250 musicians to perform such was the scale of the work.

Then the Requiem was dropped. So too was the composer, who never heard his piece played again. Foulds died of cholera 13 years later while living in self-imposed exile in India. His pacifist views were shunned by polite society and his work quickly forgotten.

John Foulds was born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra. He played as a cellist in promenade and theatre bands before joining the Halle cellos in 1900.

He had been composing since childhood. During his years as a cellist in the Halle at the beginning of the 20th century he wrote piano music, string quartets, symphonic poems and a vast 3-part concert opera for soloists, chorus and orchestra called The Vision of Dante, based on The Divine Comedy. Only a few of them were ever performed.

However, the conductor Hans Richter gave him conducting experience. Although Henry Wood presented some of Foulds’s early orchestral compositions at the Queen’s Hall Proms, he became best-known as a successful composer of light-music, such as the once-famous Keltic Lament (1911).

He is indeed a forgotten composer, who didn’t fit in with the zeitgeist of post-war Britain. The resurrection of his Requiem is a useful addition to the repertoire.

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is not much heard of nowadays. He was born in Brighton of a working-class family and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others.

Despite his “revolutionary” ideas, his composing career never took off. He later found success as a conductor.

Bridge’s pacifism didn’t go down well in World War I and his greatest solace came from the landscapes of the South Downs in Sussex. His biographer, Rob Barnett said, “Such was the spell cast by … the Downs and the seascape, that he was moved to write a musical nature poem, Enter Spring, which was his masterpiece.

Frank Bridge played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. He privately tutored a number of pupils, most famously Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher’s music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). Bridge died in Eastbourne.

Among Bridge’s works are the orchestral The Sea (1911), Oration (1930) for cello and orchestra and the opera The Christmas Rose (premiered 1932), but he is perhaps most highly regarded today for his chamber music. His early works are in a late-Romantic idiom, but later pieces such as the third (1926) and fourth (1937) string quartets are harmonically advanced and very distinctive, showing the influence of the Second Viennese School.