Thursday 17 November 2011

November 19th and 20th - Remembrance 2

Further to last week's edition of Classical Break Music for Remembrance Day, here is another selection of music of remembrance, with works by Bernard Herrmann, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Copland, Delius, Finzi, Gurney, Bliss and Walton, two hymns - Eternal Father, Strong To Save and Crimond and the Last Post.  It opens with an orchestral piece, For The Fallen, which evokes the atmosphere of the large Allied war-cemeteries in France and the Low Countries

Other highlights are a Letter From Home, a Spring Offensive (an orchestrally-accompanied reading of the poem by Wilfred Owen) and a Battle In The Air.

There's also a new poem about the return from war, by Mike Burrows, Classical Break writer and producer.

SCRIPT

Classical Break -  Remembrance Plus

Intro:  For The Fallen, Herrmann (6.19 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham.  This programme was researched and written by
Mike Burrows. There’s so much music based around the horrendous effects of war,
that we've decided to do an additional Classical Break
of English and American remembrance-music this week –
a sort of Remembrance Plus. 

We have just heard For The
Fallen, by Bernard Herrmann, an evocation
of the sunlit spaces of Western
Europe’s War Cemeteries.

Let’s hear the Prelude to the
1940 film The Forty-ninth
Parallel, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Track Two:  The Forty-ninth Parallel, Vaughan Williams (2.33 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM.  Today we're playing more Remembrance music.

Sir William Walton wrote music for
the film The Battle of Britain
(1968); much of it
was discarded by the director, but
not the eidetic cue, Battle In
The Air.

Track Three:  Battle In The Air, Walton (4.50 min)

And now, Letter From Home, a
short orchestral idyll written for Paul
Whiteman in 1943 by Aaron Copland.

Track Four:  Letter From Home, Copland (7.20 min)

Now here's a new poem from Mike Burrows.




Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote a secular Requiem
during the First World War, which,
as an expatriate Englishman with German
blood and resident in France, was
a time of great bitterness for him. 

Here is the fourth movement,
I Honour The Man Who Can
Love Life.

Track Five:  Requiem, 4th move, Delius (4.16 min)

Next, a setting of Thomas Hardy’s
First World War poem, In The
Time of The Breaking Of Nations,
made by Gerald Finzi in his
Requiem Da Camera of 1924.

Track Six:  Requiem Da Camera, 111, Con Dignita  Finzi (3.57 min)

Here is a brief song by
the soldier-musician and poet Ivor
Gurney (1890-1937),
The Cherry Trees:  it is a
tiny elegy founded on a poem
by  Edward Thomas, who died at
Arras at Easter on the first
day of the Third Battle of
Ypres, in 1917.

Track Seven:  The Cherry Trees, Gurney (1.07 min)

A melodrama from Sir Arthur Bliss’
Symphony, Morning Heroes of 1928: 
Spring Offensive - illustrating the poem
by Wilfred Owen.  Bliss was wounded
but survived the Great War, his
brother Kennard did not.  The symphony
was dedicated to him and to
those of Bliss’ comrades who had
died.  It was written after a
series of worsening nightmares, and proved
cathartic.

Track Eight:  Morning Heroes, Spring Offensive, Bliss (5.59 min)

A hymn for the Senior Service now:  Eternal Father Strong To Save.

Track Nine:  Eternal Father Strong To Save (1.07 min).

Now, a work for choral and
orchestral forces, Ode To Death, a
tribute to fallen musicians by Gustav  Holst
(1874-1934), dating from 1919 and
setting Walt Whitman's “When lilacs last
in the door-yard bloomed.”

Track Ten:  Ode To Death, Holst (12.27 min)

You've been listening to Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM with Rupert Kirkham.

Thanks go to Mike Burrows for
researching and scripting this programme.  We hope you
will join us again soon.  Our last
piece today is Crimond and Last Post.  Goodbye!

Track Eleven:  Crimond and Last Post.(2.44)

Homes For Heroes (read by Mike Burrows)
They march towards me, in fours of all hope
To now, crumpled and muddy, their helmets
Dipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.