(Photo by AJS)
Autumn
Track One:
Elegy For Strings, Elgar
Hullo,
this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is of music with an Autumnal air. The script was written and researched by Mike
Burrows.
Our
opening piece was Elegy for String Orchestra, by Elgar. This brief piece was written in the summer of
1909, two years after the First Symphony had been completed. It was commissioned by Alfred Littleton of
Novello’s, Elgar’s publisher, in memory of the late Warden of the Worshipful
Company of Musicians. It is a proof that
brief need not mean insubstantial. Its beautifully
worked textures are a masterpiece of scoring, its softly dissonant harmonies - much
use of baroque overlapping phrases and seconds-based clashes - and canny interplay
of treble, alto and bass instruments creating an illusion of broad yet haunting
melody; it sings, but no matter how it stays in the memory, remains unhummable;
its mood, likewise, is deeply sad but strangely consoling. It has something of the Celtic, specifically
Welsh about it, a magical reticence and yet plangency whose sensibility is
stoical but quick with magic.
Autumn. No sooner is the harvest gathered, than the
work on next year’s yield begins. It is
a nexus of fulfilment, loss and hopes for the future. This blend of satisfaction and discontent, of
curious interplay between present and past, harvest at the full and sad
decadence, is the human condition, also the mainspring of all we feel and do.
Here
is a short piano-piece, Minnen (Memories), which closes the Second Book
of Flowers from Froso, by the Swedish composer, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942). It is a meditation on the past Summer. Peterson-Berger had a house in the wilds of
Jamtland in Northern Sweden, to which he escaped if possible every Summer from his
life as a composer and music-critic in Stockholm. Famed for the forthright (and crushing)
opinions that he passed on other composers - Stenhammar, Sibelius and Nielsen
included - he betrayed a very different spirit in the Flowers From
Froso, music for the amateur pianist that in every way lives up to the
excellent example of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Character-pieces of the period married simple
tunes to aquarelle-light touches of modal or chromatic harmony, and maintain
their spell of poetic evocativeness of place and feeling. Peterson-Berger would return most reluctantly
by the Autumn to the wars that he himself provoked... Hence, perhaps, the end-of-school-holidays-feeling
to be detected in Minnen, Memories!
Track
Two: Minnen, Flowers From Froso,
Peterson-Berger
Harvest-time
is celebrated the world over, and music is to the fore in the form of songs and
dances. Here is a Dance of The
Harvesters by the Finn, Leevi Madetoja.
A pupil of Sibelius, he became a fine composer in his own right, more
indebted to his master in style than were many of his contemporaries, he wrote
three symphonies, many orchestral suites and two national operas. The Dance of The Harvesters comes from
music written for a film, The Struggle For The Homestead and reissued as
the last movement of a suite, Rustic Scenes, Op77. Its style is marginally neo-baroque, perky
and unpretentious, rhythmically generated, with important parts for high
woodwind and deep-toned strings, the bass stepping out angularly. Its mistily oscillating secondary material is
perhaps what may appear most characteristic of Sibelius. Madetoja was a good dancer and in youth
something of a gymnast - as a boy, he appeared in a circus tumbling-act with his
brother, his short career in the big top coming to include snake-charming, and
ended abruptly by a fall from the tightrope!
Track
Three: The Dance of The Harvesters,
Rustic Scenes, Madetoja
Now,
Moonshine In Autumn, a traditional tune from China.
A
time of produce is a time of country markets.
Autumn is the year’s time of wealth, if it but knew it.
The
American composer, Peggy Stuart-Coolidge wrote the music for the world’s first
ballet on ice. Later, she was the first American composer to whose work the
Soviet Union devoted a whole gala-concert.
Her music is often pictorial in intention, colourfully orchestral, with
broad contrasts, opposing solemn song- or hymn-like themes with pungently
irreverent song and dance - the effects are straightforward, the tunes square-cut
and harmonies either affecting or briskly astringent. There is a sense of jump-cuts, of filmic
episodes, lyricism alternating with what approaches slapstick or hoedown. Stuart-Coolidge worked for a time with Ferde
Grofé, whose fame as a musical illustrator has remained greater than hers. Let’s hear New England Autumn - Country
Fair. New England always seems to begin in a hymn.
Track
Five: New England Autumn, Country Fair,
Stuart-Coolidge
In
similar vein, here’s a short vision of Halloween, courtesy of Charles Williams
and the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra! Witches’
Ride!
Track
Six: Witches Ride, Williams
Autumn
brings ghosts and spirits and a feeling of the uncanny, perhaps in its storms
and stillness that we know is not still while the ferment of decay goes
on.
Henry
Cowell was one of a group of early experimenters in modernist music - Ives,
Varese, Becker, Ruggles and he were mutually supportive in their own spheres of
musical expression - a kind of American Mighty Handful, although the association was looser than that of
Russia’s 19th Century group, Moguchaya Kuchka.
Here is Cowells’ Banshee, a miniature from his Irish Suite
for piano-strings and small orchestra.
The atmospherics are achieved by use of harmonics and the powerful
resonance built up by playing the strings of the piano with one’s hands.
Track
Seven: Banshee, Irish Suite, Cowell
From
that to the ghost story in which the ghosts appear flesh and blood until the
crisis to which they bring a mortal, when their malevolence becomes belatedly
clear. The music for the feature-film, Haunted, in which a ghost-hunter
is played for a fool by the ghosts of incestuous grown-up siblings who torment
their former nurse, was supplied by Debbie Wiseman. Here is an arrangement by
the composer, in which the uncanny and lyrical elements of the score are
presented in one movement. The
tritone-based uncanniness at the outset is perhaps more impressive than the
love-theme associated with the ghost of Christina Merriel. In it, chill is established by violin
harmonics and trills, some use of the piano’s strings, the keys employed in an
abridged and deformed arpeggio, bass chords and tone-clusters played
orthodoxly.
Track
Eight: Haunted, Debbie Wiseman
Now,
from Halloween, we perhaps reach All Saints and All Souls. a short choral-piece by the Swede, Fredrik
Sixten, born in 1962, who has been much involved in the modernization of
Swedish church-music. Here is his
setting of a poem by Erik Blomberg, Be Not Afraid of The Dark.
Track Nine: Be Not Afraid of The Dark, Sixten
That
Igor Stravinsky studied with Rimsky-Korsakov is plain to hear in his short
symphonic poem, Fireworks, a piece written while still a student. The thematic terseness, whole-tone atmosphere,
bright and acerbiccontrasts in scoring got by economical means come straight out
of the old master’s late operas.
Something of the Dukas of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is heard in droopingly
strange harmony and refined, limpid, violins-led orchestration of a short passage
near the opening, the nearest the work comes to lyricism. There’s a foretaste of the rhythmical
momentum of musique mechanique in this functional, not to say,
perfunctory exhibition of bursts of colour and clamour.
Track
Ten: Fireworks, Stravinsky
“He dreamed of the wandering Somerset lanes, the ashtrees
and beeches of the Mendips, the plane-trees of Wells and Bath... The straggly willows of the levels... Beech, hawthorn and elder-hedges... The pasture and arable fields open to
grey-white clouds and golden sun in brisk, cold skies... Or fogs and desolation on the living
landscape, cattle, sheep and horses...
Garths filled with fruit, apples, pears, plums... Wayside berries and nuts provided by chance -
for the tramp or middle-class conserve- or wine-maker.
He, he was the richest man in the world, but he had been
that, he knew now, all his life.”
We
began with an Elegy and, to end, here is another in all but name: Herbert Howells’s early Suite for
Orchestra, The B’s - written swiftly in the Autumn of 1914, and inspired
and dedicated to his student-friends pictured within, one of whom was Bartholemew
- Ivor Bertie (pronounced Bartie) Gurney.
Howells and Gurney were old friends by the time that they won places at
the RCM, coming from the same county, Gloucestershire - Howells from Lydney and
Gurney from Gloucester - and sharing the same teachers. Gurney was just two years older and some
inches the taller, and his friendship with Howells was bedevilled by Howells’
early success, which he tended to put down to Howells’ technique and talent for
pragmatic ingratiation... That Howells
understood Gurney well can be felt in Lament: Batholemew, a proud, lonesome pastoral
for an awkward character of great inner beauty - and bravely faced
conflict. Professor Stanford told
Howells once, “Depend upon it, some day, that boy will be mad.” It took the War to End All Wars for
Bartholemew to fulfil their composition-teacher’s prophecy. At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.
We play this
in tribute to those whom we cannot forget and whose sacrifice we celebrate
every November. This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s programme (researched
and written by Mike Burrows) was of music with an Autumn air. We hope that you enjoyed it and will listen
in again soon! Goodbye!
Track
Eleven: Lament, Bartholemew, Howells
