Just where does one start with Frederick Stocken's Symphony for the Millennium, commissioned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and premiered by the RPO under Vernon Handley at the Albert Hall on Monday? What normal criteria can be applied to a work that would have been regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned at the turn of the last century, and would have hardly seemed ground-breaking 50 years before that?
Stocken caught the headlines in 1994 when he became a spokesman for a sad group of disaffected musicians calling themselves The Hecklers, who organised protests - pretty well-mannered ones, it has to be said - against what they saw as the iniquities of contemporary music. Their 15 minutes of fame duly came and went when they strenuously but ineffectually booed a revival of Birtwistle's Gawain at Covent Garden. Now, apparently, Stocken wants to put all that direct action behind him and let his own music do the talking. If this symphony, with each of its four move ments based upon a painting by Lord Leighton, is what he wants to say, then his message is a pitiful one.
Stocken is a born-again early romantic, writing in a style somewhere between Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as if to attempt anything more complex, let alone vaguely chromatic, would be too threatening to the audience he craves. Yet there's no sense of ironic distance in his use of this style; everything is to be taken strictly at face value. Even if it were pastiche, or written as a student exercise, it would be a fifth-rate effort. The symphony's melodic invention is earth-bound; its structure is clumsy, with blocks of indifferent material juxtaposed without any sense of crafted transitions; the scoring is muddy. There isn't a single memorable moment in the entire 30-minute piece.
In this postmodern world stylistically anything goes, and there are no longer any prescriptions for what composers can or cannot do. But whatever language they choose to use they still need some spark of originality, and to possess the technical equipment to reveal that they have something worthwhile to offer. On this evidence Stocken can't summon up any of those qualities, and what the RPO and Kensington and Chelsea thought they were doing in promoting him in such a way is impossible to imagine.
