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Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony (1919-27) calls for 210 orchestral musicians (including six timpanists and 17 percussionists), four vocal soloists and a massive chorus.

The second is his admiration for Arnold Schoenberg. At a time when Schoenberg was often deemed a hoaxer or even a mental case, [Havergal Brian] consistently treated him as a worthy and intellectually fascinating visionary. He also has a high appreciation of Berg's theatrical genius. Nowadays, when you can live in the mountains of Idaho and order in Schoenberg's complete works, we can't imagine just how rarely his music was played back then.

[Havergal Brian] was born in 1876 and self-taught as a composer. He wrote the last 27 of his 32 symphonies between 1948 and 1968, and died in 1972. But it has always been his First Symphony, the \"Gothic,\" that has attracted the most intense cult admiration. Composed between 1919 and 1927 and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest-scale symphony ever written, the \"Gothic\" seeks to encapsulate the Gothic age by a symphonic evocation of Goethe's \"Faust\" and a choral setting of the \"Te Deum.\"

Slovak Opera Chorus; Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir; Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra; cond. Ondrej Lenard.

The Potteries born com-poser Havergal Brian wrote music of both length and obesity, which has its own cult following. He died in 1972 at the age of 96, and three of his 32 symphonies were promoted by the RLPO either in concert or on HMV disc. But his 1st symphony (The Gothic), written between 1919 and 1927 has proved an economic millstone to concert promoters, requiring a huge orchestra and vast choirs, and soloists. Another symphony of a thousand, and it lasts nearly two hours. Hats off then to the Slovak Philharmonic and Ondrej Leonard who recorded it in 1989, and it is now reissued on two CDs for under pounds 10 by Naxos. Brian was certainly a man full of ideas, although he is always impatient to move on to the next one. Robert Simpson once told me, that Brian was the finest composer for the Tuba.

[Havergal Brian] was born into a working class family in 1876. He left school at 12, taught himself composition and won admiration from Elgar and Richard Strauss. But he failed to make a significant mark on the London concert circuit until he was taken up by the composer and BBC producer Robert Simpson in the early 1950s. The BBC gave the first performance of the Eighth Symphony in 1954. It was the first time that Brian, then 78, had heard any of his symphonies performed. He completed his 33rd and last symphony at the age of 92 and died four years later, never having seen any of his output recorded commercially.