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Symphony No. 3: “English”

Michael Kurek composer

Release Date: February 7, 2025
Catalog #: NV6700
Format: Digital

SYMPHONY NO. 3 from composer Michael Kurek is a tribute to the history and natural beauty of England. The work is fundamentally Romantic, but is also influenced by Edwardian English music. The composer draws inspiration from personal memories, nature, poetry, and art; “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside,” recalls the composer’s emotional reaction to the lush, pastoral beauty of the English countryside. “Stonehenge” reflects the austerity and timelessness of that ancient monument,  while “The Lady of Shalott” nods to Waterhouse’s colorful, pre-Raphaelite depiction of Tennyson’s famous poem. The symphony’s conclusion, “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest,” celebrates the roughly 1000-year-old tree in Nottinghamshire and is perhaps the most climactic of Kurek’s works.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Symphony No. 3: “English”: Upon a Walk in the English Countryside Michael Kurek The European Recording Orchestra | Robin Fountain, conductor 14:25
02 Symphony No. 3: “English”: Stonehenge Michael Kurek The European Recording Orchestra | Robin Fountain, conductor 10:14
03 Symphony No. 3: “English”: The Lady of Shalott Michael Kurek The European Recording Orchestra | Robin Fountain, conductor 11:51
04 Symphony No. 3: “English”: The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest Michael Kurek The European Recording Orchestra | Robin Fountain, conductor 14:19

Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to project cost contributors H. Stephen Harris, Jr., Duncan Stroik, and Mark A. Hall, also to bowing adviser, cellist Ovidiu Marinescu and for ongoing concept feedback and moral support from Dr. Paul Deakin and author Joseph Pearce.
— Michael Kurek

Recorded September 22-23, 2024 at Bulgarian National Radio Studio 1 in Sofia, Bulgaria
Recording Session Producer Michael Kurek
Recording Session Engineer Vladislav Boyadjiev
Editing & Mixing Lucas Paquette, Michael Kurek
Additional Editing Melanie Montgomery
Mastering Melanie Montgomery

Cover Photo The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Chris Robinson

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Aidan Curran
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Michael Kurek

Composer

American composer Michael Kurek’s music is receiving increasing acclaim for its lush, neo-traditional, melodic, and narrative style, reminiscent of the early 20th century symphonists. It has garnered performances by numerous symphony orchestras and chamber groups throughout the United States and in 15 countries on five continents, in addition to online streams in over 100 countries on six continents. His works have been heard nationwide on NPR and other countries’ national radio broadcasts, and have also been profiled in national print media and music journals.

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Robin Fountain

conductor

Robin Fountain is Emeritus Professor of Conducting at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. He has accepted engagements to conduct in America, Europe, and Asia, including concerts with the Singapore Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic the Tennessee Philharmonic, Traverse City Symphony, the Sudettic and Opole Philharmonics (Poland), Holy Trinity Symphony (Haiti) the Kemerovo and Omsk Philharmonics (Russia), and many others. He led the Tomsk (Russia) Philharmonic on a tour of China in 2003. He has recorded for PARMA Recordings/Naxos, Navona Records, and Blue Griffin records, most recently Michael Kurek’s Symphony No. 2 with the European Recording Orchestra. In 2024 he conducted members of the South Bend Symphony in the premiere of the same composer’s Raffaella Ballet.

Under his direction, Vanderbilt University Orchestra was invited to perform at the MENC: The National Association for Music Education, and on two extended tours of China. He won the university-wide Madison-Sarratt Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Blair School of Music’s Faculty Excellence Award. The Ensemble Musician — a monograph on the art of ensemble playing he co-wrote with Vanderbilt Wind Symphony conductor Thomas Verrier — is published by GIA Publications.

In 2020, Professor Fountain concluded a 14-season tenure as Music Director of Southwest Michigan Symphony. Under his artistic leadership the orchestra created a summer series (the Water’s Edge), a choral partnership (the SMSO Symphony Chorus) and a teaching program for underserved youth (Music Makers). He had previously enjoyed an equally long and productive tenure with the Williamsport Symphony in Pennsylvania.

Fountain was educated at Oxford University, The Royal College of Music in London (where he studied with Norman Del Mar and Christopher Adey), and at Carnegie Mellon University. He was an Aspen Conducting Fellow and was later privileged to have the opportunity to train with members of the famed Berlin Philharmonic at The Conductors Lab in Aix-en-Provence.

Notes

My third symphony (composed 2023-2024), subtitled English, has four movements, as listed below. I am an anglophile, but the most important connection among these titles is not only that they are all English, but rather that each of them stimulates a strong musical response in my imagination, perhaps because, for me, each has a kind of mystery about it. I would even say I hear all of them secretly singing their own songs. I have imagined this to be a fundamentally Romantic work and perhaps also more serious and poetic than my second symphony. I also love the Edwardian English composers, so you might hear a bit of their influence mingled among my several other influences, albeit without their English folk melodies. Here are some comments about each of the movements.

— Michael Kurek

1. “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside.” During my walks there, those lovely scenes always seem to be silently singing with a symphonic or even epic quality, which is to say calling forth my deepest dreams and emotions – interior landscapes not merely pastoral but, for me, lush and sublime. This is by no means a new idea. It was more or less the attitude of some of my favorite Romantic landscape artists, the British landscape painters Turner and Constable, who I think also saw nature through the lens of an interior vision, and especially the German Caspar David Friedrich, for whom a landscape was a projection of the divine and an allegory to the inner life. In common with the other three movements, this one is titled after scenes that would usually seem to be relatively free of emotion, but whose interior emotional reactions can be revealed through music. That is to say, Monet was not painting water lilies but how he felt about water lilies.

— Michael Kurek

2. “Stonehenge.” You might imagine a haunting ambience without melody to represent this silent, iconic monument about which so little is known. This time, instead of the bucolic vistas of seemingly serene hills and trees in the first movement, we now have a great silent (and again, not apparently emotional), stoic stone formation. But Stonehenge communicates more symbolically to me — as an embodiment of pure enigma, a longing for meaning, and a somber pendulum of timelessness — the mysterious and unknowable nature of the eons of time — marked here by a slow, three-note ostinato that repeats over 50 times. For me, though, these qualities do elicit great interior emotion and do require melody. If you listen closely, perhaps you can hear the great stones singing. Some sing sadly, some tenderly, some cry out increasingly throughout the movement, and, at length, the stones joyfully welcome those sunbursts that, like epiphanies, pierce between certain aligned stones at every solstice. Thus, the stones do have the last word, as the climax of the movement comes at the very end — not in frustration over the unknowable, but in the now-acquired strength and confidence of the knowledge that everything is not meant to be known.

— Michael Kurek

3. “The Lady of Shalott.” I have always loved Waterhouse’s colorful, Pre-Raphaelite depiction of the Lady of Shalott on her boat, about to float down to Camelot singing her song of love and death, as described in Tennyson’s famous poem. She has so many mixed emotions, and her story is so complex that I would not attempt in music to tell it fully in a chronological narrative. Rather, I have immersed my imagination into her world and, like the Lady, freely woven my own tapestry of its elements. The rondo form allows for many themes and variants of the traditional third-movement dance style, be they a stately, antique minuet, a romantic waltz, or a spritely scherzo. So, I mix all of them up in an ever-changing riparian fantasia, as in a dream of her journey. This is as close as the symphony comes to comic relief, if only in the form of a lighter touch. As she begins in a hopeful quest to find the love of Sir Lancelot, the first of the melodies sounds like a breezy boat theme, though it does also have a melancholy tone. The swirling scale figures could represent the river in Tennyson’s poem. It is only in the middle, slow section of the movement that an overtly passionate melody makes its outburst, revealing the hidden emotion in the scene, much like the emotional eruptions of melody in the first two movements. But, as Tennyson describes it, her poignant songs of love gradually become a song of her looming death, when she realizes that the curse she is under will soon take her life. At the end of the movement, death comes peacefully, as her boat glides silently, bearing her body into Camelot.

— Michael Kurek

4. “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest.” Estimated at nearly 1000 years old and the largest tree in England, its trunk is 33 feet wide at the base. Such a mighty living monument would seem to cast a long shadow across a history of ancient wisdom and nobility. In awe, one can barely imagine how many long-forgotten lives, events, and cultures it must have witnessed, endured, and silently transcended. This echoes the themes of the Stonehenge movement, which also has its massive, timeless, and ancient monuments. Like that movement, it makes further use of the chimes as a marker of time. It has in common with the first movement an anthropomorphic view of nature, with latent but erupting emotions. That I naturally want to personify this tree is surely thanks to Tolkien’s Ents. Each time it reappears, the majestic introduction (with its “Major” chords) suggests the tree’s grandeur.

The modified sonata form’s first theme group, in two parts, lasting until about three minutes, could suggest some of the pastoral-sounding tunes our tree might have heard passing it by over the centuries in Merrie England. The first of these is heard amongst the swirl of its thousands of leaves, sparkling in the breeze. The more serious second theme in lush strings could suggest the emotional response in song of all the trees of Sherwood Forest, collectively compassionate toward the human condition throughout history. After this exposition, herald trumpets announce the development of themes. I will leave the rest of this very loosely told story to the listener’s own imagination, save for some swashbuckling hints of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, since we are, after all, in Sherwood Forest, and then the Major Oak’s majestic voice emerges in broad strokes of Brass and Timpani.

All the elements are tied together during the last few minutes, as if the symphony is being conducted by the great tree itself, with its branches acting like many arms holding many conductor’s batons, and the music intensifies into what I think is the most climactic ending in any of my works. Apart from its thematic formal elements, the movement does not follow a typical classical sonata’s key scheme. Rather, symbolic of the cyclic nature of time or perhaps the rotations of the earth, the movement’s tonality travels steadily around the clock face of music’s “circle of fifths,” tolling each new key’s home note with a single chime stroke a fifth higher than the previous one, totaling fifteen pitches in all. In spite of my not using a classical sonata key scheme, it so worked out, quite by accident, that one complete rotation of the circle of the fifths landed the key of the first theme’s return in the Recapitulation in the same key in which it was introduced in the Exposition, as if the movement self-determined to obey some kind of classical rules. So be it.

— Michael Kurek