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The Fourth Symphony was written in response to a commission from the New York Philharmonic for a work in commemoration of its 125th season; this is the reason (and the only reason) for the subtitle "New York." Like all the major works of Gerhard's final decade, Symphony No. 4 has but one movement, owing little to traditional symphonic form. It owes much, however, to the ideas of orchestral virtuosity displayed upon the largest canvas. In this quality of sheer exuberance it is the natural successor to the Concerto for Orchestra of 1963. In fact Gerhard took the opportunity to score the Symphony for an even larger orchestra than the Concerto, featuring quadruple instead of triple woodwind, a larger brass section comprising 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and tuba, and a very large percussion battery. The Symphony embodies all of the most radical and exploratory features of the musical language which Gerhard had evolved in his final decade, and in their most developed state. And yet it frequently evokes, in an almost surrealistic manner, elements of the 'Spanish nation' idiom familiar from the works of Falla and Albeniz (and from Gerhard's on early music), suggesting a new rapproachment with the composer's cultural roots. The Janus-headed work, which looks boldly forward and both nostalgically and tragically back, may thus be considered an ultimate creative synthesis, the culmination of Gerhard's orchestral music.
Indeed the juxtaposition of opposites -- not in terms of idiom, but of activity, texture, color and density of substance -- appears an all-embracing structural principle in his late works, an index of their vigorous intellectual concentration. Symphony No. r is continuous, but in its single movement passages of rapid motion, whose explosive kinetic energy discharges a fusillade of ideas in a short space are opposed to areas of near stillness, whose sense of stasis (expectant or reflective) is always deceptive. He likened such areas to "action in very slow motion," creating "a magic sense of uneventfulness."
Robert Gerhard (who only consistently adopted the form 'Roberto' after he was exiled from Spain) was born in Valls, near Tarragona, Spain, the son of a German-Swiss father and an Alsatian mother. He was predisposed to an international, multilingual outlook, but by birth and culture he was a Catalan. He studied piano with Granados and composition with the great scholar-composer Felipe Pedrell, teacher of Albéniz, Granados and Falla. When Pedrell died in 1922, Gerhard tried unsuccessfully to become a pupil of Falla and considered studying with Charles Koechlin in Paris but then approached Arnold Schoenberg, who on the strength of a few early compositions accepted him as his only Spanish pupil. Gerhard spent several years with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin. Returning to Barcelona in 1928, he devoted his energies to new music through concerts and journalism, in conjunction with the flourishing literary and artistic avant-g
