This May I happened to be in London for two newsworthy events, each with a decided New York connection. The first was the self-indulgent, personally financed premiere of the Lorin Maazel opera “1984” at Covent Garden. The second was the surprising and controversial appointment of the inspirational but undisciplined and often inconsistent Valery Gergiev as the new music director of the London Symphony Orchestra. This major coup, or colossal blunder, was engineered by Clive Gillinson, as his last official act before leaving the LSO to become executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall. At least we have learned that he is not afraid of bold strokes.

Although I am not able to attend every major orchestral evening in New York, I do keep abreast of all of the events by the diligent perusal of brochures. A few seasons ago, it occurred to me that there was a significant hole in the repertoire offered as concert fare. Just to make sure that I was not having a senior moment, I systematically reread the schedules of the two venues that comprise virtually the entire symphonic scene in this town and tabulated my findings.

Out of the hundreds of concerts that occurred in the seasons 2000-01 and 2001-02, the sum total of presentations of 19th-century orchestral Russian music not written by Tchaikovsky consisted of one set of performances by the Philharmonic of “Scheherazade” and another of the overture to “Ruslan and Ludmila.” As shocking as that was, the news turned out to be even more discouraging if one tracked the number of pieces for orchestra written in the first three-quarters of the 20th century in England, not counting the work of Benjamin Britten. The tally for the two years in question was:

Carnegie Hall 0
Lincoln Center 0

Considering that these figures included visits by several Russian and British ensembles, the net result is staggering. The Russian situation has now been ameliorated somewhat, especially with the ascendancy of the ubiquitous Mr. Gergiev, but what of the British? In the season just ending, the results were only marginally better. Hilary Hahn did perform a brilliant Elgar violin concerto with the Philharmonic, but that was it at Lincoln Center. Carnegie could only boast of a short but gorgeous piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, “The Lark Ascending,” offered by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, whose conductor happens to be Scottish. To quote that most lovable of all English characters, “more, please!”

In the early years of the 20th century, Leos Janaceky visited London and, when he heard a newsboy whistling in the streets he remarked “that is the music of England.” The great revival of classical music – the English Renascence – that began at the turn of the 20th century was inspired largely by the folk tradition. All of this music should be played in the concert hall. Champions must arise to present it.

As a member of the pastoral movement that reacted against the horrors of the Boer and Great Wars and bemoaned the deaths of the flower of English youth and the demise of the civilities of the 19th century, Sir Edward Elgar brought English music into the front ranks of orchestral writing. Cecil Sharp was highly influential as a collector of folk songs, searching for his roots all the way from south Australia and America to the north of England.

Many composers joined the pastoral movement, including Herbert Howells, Rutland Boughton, Gerald Finzi, and the poet and composer Ivor Gurney. Gassed at Passchendaele, Gurney was eventually committed to a mental hospital and remains a symbol of the lost generation of men of intellect, such as the poets Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, who died in the war. I am surprised that no clarinetist tours with the colorful works for their instrument and orchestra written by Finzi.

Much of this music inspired a new orchestral tradition. The folk song plays a major role in the pastoral music of Frederick Delius. Pieces like “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring,” “North Country Sketches,” and “Brigg Fair” are all tone poems meant to evoke the quiet life of the countryside. Gustav Holst also collected folk songs and reproduced them in a pastoral setting in such works as “Brook Green Suite” and, with delicious British irony, in the two “Suites for Military Band.” He was also interested in more exotic folk music and wrote the “Japanese Suite” and “Beni Mora,” a tone poem based on North African native music. It beats me why the Chicago Symphony or Los Angeles Philharmonic, with their colorful brass sections, don’t champion these works – especially the popular but seldom performed “The Planets.”

Arnold Bax, an important symphonist, followed the pastoral tradition in such tone poems as “The Garden of Fand,” “Tintagel,” and “The Happy Forest.” Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the most significant symphonic composers of the 20th century, and his nine works in the medium stand the equal of any other of the era. He certainly compares well with Mahler, Sibelius, or Shostakovich, yet he does not seem to have this reputation outside of England.

A student of Holst and a renowned music critic, Edmund Rubbra, emerged as the 20th century progressed as a brilliant symphonist, composing 11 inventive examples in the genre as well as many fine pieces of chamber music. Rubbra’s music develops organically, following less of a traditional Western pattern and more of a colorful, thematic universalism. His conversion to Catholicism is passionately depicted in the “Sinfonia Sacra.”

William Walton’s career spanned the period from the avant-garde 1920s to the early 1980s. Walton became famous for his collaboration with the Sitwell family in a work called “Facade.” A jazzy, irreverent score was coupled with Edith Sitwell’s reciting of her absurd poetry through a curtain of painted lips via a megaphone. Walton did not stay on an iconoclastic path, however, choosing instead a relatively comfortable method of modern composition rich in harmonic inventiveness. He was also an adept composer of film scores.

Walton’s contemporaries included Havergal Brian, a composer of a remarkable set of 32 symphonies virtually never heard in America, and Michael Tippett, a pacifist who actually served time at Wormwood Scrubs Gaol during World War II. His oratorio “A Child of Our Time” is about the assassination of a Nazi member of the German Embassy in Paris in 1938 by a young Jewish boy and how a seemingly justifiable act of violence leads to horrific global slaughter.

Finally, no composer in history, not even Verdi in Philip’s soliloquy from “Don Carlo,” has ever expressed modern man’s elemental loneliness as well as Vaughan Williams did in his riveting “Sinfonia Antarctica.” He, too, was a pastoral folklorist and wrote many pieces that express that uniquely wistful quality of 20th-century British music. Although he considered his output tame, often praising his friend Bax for his more colorful chords, his music is actually incredibly rich and powerful and comes closest to the ideal of nostalgia for “Merrie Olde England.”

It is a scandal that we have so rarely heard his compositions, or those by any of these men, in the past few seasons. There is, however, much to celebrate about next season: Two entire concerts will feature gems from this buried treasure chest.

The London Symphony and Sir Colin Davis will deliver the mighty Symphony No. 6 of Vaughan Williams, coupled with the Walton First. And Leon Botstein and the American Symphony will present a trio of pieces under the rubric “The Gathering Storm.” In addition to “Oration” by Frank Bridge – Britten’s teacher – and the Piano Concerto of Arthur Bliss, Mr. Botstein will offer perhaps the greatest of all English pieces, the Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony, written in the darkest days of what seemed to be the imminent destruction of civilization. Add to these two significant events the Walton Violin Concerto at the Philharmonic and Elgar’s “Introduction and Allegro,” performed by the National Symphony under Leonard Slatkin at Carnegie, and maybe, just maybe, a trend will develop.

The world of music is a rich landscape. All we are asking for is a champion. Perhaps Mr. Gillinson is just the one.