Be interested to hear this, eruanto. Do you have a performance planned ?
Ferguson also wrote "Overture for an occasion" . . .

Did he have any particular occasion in mind, autoharp?

Which other composers have retired, btw? It's an interestingly rare phenomenon. Gordon Crosse did, I think, although he may have been ill. Did Gordon Jacob, or have I confused him with Ferguson?

Douglas Young ?

Yes he did. I remember when I first met him (about 1984) he had just taken the decision to. I think it was just a sober realisation that, in his own view, he had run out of things to say. He subsequently went into IT, as I remember. Fair enough, but a shame because there are a lot of very good Crosse works out there.

By your use of the phrase "the same thing" here I presume you to refer to the music he'd been writing during that period rather than that he'd been telling people for 40 years that he'd nothing more to say but carried on saying it nevertheless(!). I don't think that Brian's last 40 years was as bad as you imply, but I do agree that he never at any time before or since went anywhere near scaling the heights that he achieved between the wars. The "Gothic" Symphony, despite never having yet received a performance worthy of its content, is, to my mind, one of the finest symphonies ever written by an Englishman and the handful of symphonies that immediately followed it most certainly deserve more and better exposure than they've ever had; sadly, however, there's not a whole lot else in his output that I've heard that seems to suggest anything like the importance of some of his contemporaries and compatriots and it rather strikes me that he just continued to write and write with insufficient regard either for the value or the practicality of what he was doing (and for those who have only heard some of the baseless rumours, I should perhaps add that most of his 32 symphonies are on nowhere near the scale of the first few). The enthusiastic support of the late Robert Simpson and the more recent advocacy and scholarship of Malcolm MacDonald have done much to try to bring Brian's work into focus but, as yet, the best works still aren't gaining the acceptance they deserve and a more widespread knowledge of the very existence of the sheer amount of the rest is probably not helping his case any.

I take your point yet, in so doing, it occurs to me that the matter may just be that little bit more complex again than you suggest. Composers who consciously decide to retire is one thing, but what I think you're really after here is composers who have not merely taken but also publicly announced such a decision; even Sibelius might have consciously decided to retire, for all that we can ever hope to know, but he certainly kept very quiet about it if so (and there was no obvious health issue in his case as there was, to some degree, with Ives).

Best,

Alistair

Bearing in mind the recent posts concerning Ferguson elsewhere, perhaps it's time to reopen this thread.

I've just been listening to Amore langueo, first performed at the 1956 Three Choirs Festival, as well as two recordings of the piano concerto. The 1956 piece (for tenor solo, semi-chorus, chorus and orchestra) was his op.18, and thus his penultimate work.

I wonder whether the composer was beginning to feel that his time was already past: for all its craftsmanship, the piece harks back to an earlier age. Indeed, its language is highly reminiscent of the 'By the waters of Babylon' sequences from Walton's Belshazzar's Feast; the least advanced passages of a seminal work first performed a full quarter of a century previously.

 Perhaps he sensed that what suited that most conservative of festivals was increasingly out of step with what was going on around him: possibly, the death of his great friend Finzi in the same year influenced his decision, too. Moreover, Vaughan Williams was dead by the time his final work was performed, and even within a rather insular Britain the musical landscape was starting to shift perceptibly. Established composers were altering their language; Britten was moving towards a terser, dark style; Tippett, similarly, away from the ecstatic richness which had energised his post-war works. Walton was beginning to sense that he had lost direction, and would soon approach a younger serialist (Humphrey Searle, who had studied with Webern) for lessons and advice.

 Based as he was at the RAM during this period, Ferguson must have been very aware not only of these changes, but also, almost certainly, of the more startling developments further afield.

And by 'learnt' I can confirm Eru really does mean learnt here. The big Op 8 Sonata (as indeed the rest of his recent recital) performed from memory <thudstofloorinawedadmirationemoticom>.