Please note: Due to programming schedule pressure at Somer Valley FM and the introduction of the 'Listen Again' service (see opposite), this will be the last Sunday, 3pm transmission of Classical Break.
The programme will continue to be broadcast on Saturday mornings at 0900 and Sunday mornings at 0800, online and on air. If you miss one or you still want to listen at 3pm, you can get it at any time on the Somer Valley FM Listen Again service up to 3 weeks after the original broadcast on Saturday mornings at 9am.
Gurney
The programme will continue to be broadcast on Saturday mornings at 0900 and Sunday mornings at 0800, online and on air. If you miss one or you still want to listen at 3pm, you can get it at any time on the Somer Valley FM Listen Again service up to 3 weeks after the original broadcast on Saturday mornings at 9am.
Gurney
Below is the original script to this programme with slight
additions. Sadly, the opening and
closing songs, Cotswold Choice and Goodnight To The Meadow had to be
omitted on grounds of time.
Track 1: Cotswold Choice, Sanders
This is Classical Break, and
I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme,
researched and written by Mike Burrows, takes its name from the song we have just
heard, Cotswold Choice. Evocation of the Gloucestershire countryside is at its heart, as at the hearts of its composers.
The song itself, written by John
Sanders to a poem by Frank Mansell, is little more than a litany of
Gloucestershire place-names. Sanders was
organist and choir-master at Gloucester Cathedral from 1967-1994. His style here is what might be now described
as ‘accessible’. His strophic song’s melody
may remind of the old tune, beloved
of renaissance and later composers of passacaglie, La Folia.
The piano’s restraint in
accompaniment heightens an impression of unworldly nostalgia.
Named for the West Midlands’
great tidal river, Severn Rhapsody is
headed by a superscription from the Cambridge-set Grantchester, by Rupert Brooke:
“...Oh, yet/ Stands the church
clock at ten to three/And is there honey still for tea?” It is a richly scored piece whose arch-structure
owes much to the example of George Butterworth’s pre-War Shropshire Lad
Rhapsody and folk-song based Idylls.
In one sense it is literally a
tribute to Gurney, as it seems based on
one of his songs. The Severn Meadows-like main theme is
developed with resource but an almost Quakerish severity beyond Finzi’s
years. He was only 22 when it was
written; he believed on sincerity and inspiration and counterpoint-generated
form. The cor anglais lends its reedy
tone, and there is much doubling of woodwind, misalliances of higher and lower
registers creating a deep, solid, yet elegiac sound. The strings, particularly violins
and violas, help create their effects, but when the violins rise, they have a keen edge. This is music whose slow-growing web entraps
the mind. In spite of the
ironic-sounding superscription, its beauties are profound. The work was dedicated to an artist, the aptly
named Vera Somerfield. It won its
composer publication in the Carnegie Collection of British Music, an honour shared by his hero.
Track 2: Severn Rhapsody, Finzi
On the death of Ivor Gurney’s violinist-friend
and testatrix, Marion Scott, his manuscripts
reverted to his brother Ronald. As the
son who had taken over his father’s business of gentleman’s tailor whilst Ivor
had been getting above himself, and who had not
gone mad from fear of radio-waves, he had
no time for the ‘artistic’ productions of an utterly misguided lunatic: all along, Ivor had lacked self-discipline and
failed to hold down a job. Gurney’s champions, now headed by Gerald Finzi
as song-editor-in-chief, feared for the very survival of Ivor’s legacy. Eventually, Ronald was prevailed upon to
release the precious notebooks and scores, a huge corpus of poetry and
music. Joy, Gerald’s wife, carried them
from the baffled brother’s home in a wheel-barrow. There were hundreds of poems and songs, at least
one choral work, two orchestral scores, at least 3 string quartets, several
violin sonatas and piano sonatas all now kept in the Gurney Collection at
Gloucester Central library.
It was long believed that
Gurney was a disorganized miniaturist of almost accidental brilliance, a song-
or piano-prelude-writer incapable of working on the larger scale owing to
haphazard method and mental instability. It had taken years to win acceptance for his songs,
incidentally, although a few had been published in his lifetime, and he had won
two Carnegie Awards with his song-cycles based on poetry by AE Housman, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland. That he was brilliant should not be
doubted. Let’s hear a song written whilst
on active service on the Western Front, to verses by his best friend, FW
Harvey, and immortalizing his love of the Cotswolds, In Flanders.
Track 3: In Flanders, Gurney
Committed to Barnwood Asylum
outside Gloucester in September, 1922, then, after escape-attempts, to Dartford
Mental Hospital in Kent, Gurney, though prey to many terrifying phobias,
delusions and sullen despair at his institutionalization, had gone on writing with clarity until 1926. In
his next to last book of poems, the
defiantly entitled Best Poems, he may
have referred directly to the main work in
our programme today, a violin sonata in E Flat.
From the poem Sounds, inscribed in Best Poems:
Dear to the heart
Violin and piano
sound a note apart,
The heart
Catches them, one
alone on the high hills
And happy is known.
One note
Out of the
limestone or rot
Of leaves,
When Autumn grieves
–
The chalk,
Or tranquil meadows
where the Abbey shows.
Out of these comes
The one note of
Romance.
The single
Tone which sounds
alone
The true secret
The heart’s thought
with nothing does ever mingle.
Gloucester sounds
third,
Chilterns has a
word
Of Midland truth
In her beech woods
smooth
Of trunk, leaves
yet unstirred...
Let’s hear the Gurney Violin
Sonata in E Flat; a work never performed publically in the composer’s lifetime and
which has just been issued on CD. It was
begun at the Napsbury Hospital at St Albans, where Ivor was receiving
treatment for what was described as Delayed Shell-shock. He was delighted to find the next best thing to
a cathedral nearby –St Albans Abbey.
Work began furiously in September 1918.
The piece was revised the following year.
It could not begin more
insouciantly – and artfully. A
bells-like motif on piano is entered upon by a lyrical arabesque that leads in turn
into a quicker up-and-down passage of
Brahmsian or Schumannian to-ing and fro-ing between violin and piano – the duo
exchanging imitative figures and wavering between major and minor; further
rhythmical motifs are introduced, including a brief fanfare-like figure – a
quiet rising scale on piano brings stillness:
a far vision, the sound of a quieter more distant ring of bells – seems
to draw one away from the here and now, and in a development, the various fragments in the
exposition are modified in abstract pitch-transformations and canons, a certain
amount of baroque-like passagework. The dutifulness
of the procedures is actually fitting – and the bells return suddenly with a
greater sense of mystery and the open air, the suggestion of a passing bell. Is this the recapitulation? The arabesque steals in and is followed by
the quicker answering principle: there
is the sense that there is no traditional sonata-form resolution to their
conversational tussles. The piano has its quiet ascending scale of
tranquillity: the bells return, again imaginatively
altered – but as though nothing had interposed; with piano trill, a working up
to the coda builds, the piano’s oppositional rising chords burning,
retrospectively like a kind of carefully laid powder train. There is no explosion, but logic has been served. The bells console and the violin has a rising
semitonal cadence. This is a dry account
of a piece of Sibelius-like plasticity of manner, complex instincts and feeling
skill. It is mysterious music,
withholding secrets but not random, nor slack-minded. A powerful intelligence and, indeed, charm
are at work.
Track 4: Violin Sonata in E Flat, l Piu Allegro,
Gurney
The second movement continues
the evolution most delightfully – a private world of quiet happiness. The piano proposes bell-like changes and then
melody; the violin continues the
figuration pizzicato. A Brahmsian
broadening and deepening of things revives something of the first movement but
leads back to the opening melody and figuration, and a brief close. A
snapshot of contented solitude, an inner song, scarcely 3 minutes in duration. Gurney’s capacity for happiness, like that of
many troubled people, was enviable and his by the way gift for expression means
that we can share it. Like Schumann, he was a man of charming
warmth and sincerity, and understood the higher purpose of music to share the best
of life with others. Also, like Schumann, he recognised two forms of
logic – equally valid – the formal logic of thematic development and the related
logic of song or axiom, that finds its own shape on the moment – the moment
caught on the wind, so to speak, and fixed by the universal effectiveness of outright,
unique personal expression. Thematically
it is related to the matter of the previous movement and advances argument about in a form of sudden apercu
owing to changed mood. It is almost by
the way in itself, yet a further delight is its place further along the
road. Gurney the poet made frequent use of parentheses!
Track 5: ll Scherzo, Andante Con Moto
The slow movement moves
further. It is the heart of the work, a
lyrical meditation of subtle expressiveness, perhaps haunted faintly by Gurney’s
own song, Sleep. It is an arioso of Brahmsian formal integrity
and shadowy mood – its chief motif questioning, an English Beethoven’s, “Must it be so?” Sombre and halting
measures bring us to tersely arpeggiated sequences of deeper pathos – achingly
regretful, it seems, the piano accompanying the violin – or is it
vice-versa? A pianist, Gurney was
capable of being an adept, unselfish chamber-music player, and knows how to
divide his material. The violin climbs higher and, over lugubrious
piano-chords, seeks its angular way to resolution. More luminous moments bring us back to where we
began, and further elaborations.
Eventually, we are left with a final statement, dusk and – perhaps - the
bells of the first movement.
Track 6: lll Lento
The questioning mood and its
material continue into the finale as an introduction. A free-wheeling rondo taken entirely on the
wing in the style of Franck or, indeed, of Elgar in his slightly
earlier-written Violin Sonata, is not Gurney’s way; the road is more tortuous, more
modulatory and in short periods worked together
involutedly, with a possible cheeky reference to the Elgar in the midst of much
else. The piano provides much of the
momentum, but not obtrusively. There are
moments of turbidity and keen held notes
from the violin – references to the slow movement and earlier; when at last, the
sorrows come down on us again, the impression of the sound of bells returns,
with imitation, and is not halted-for long. Again, violin and piano are equal and corresponding
partners. The movement works its way to
the close, which is commendably curt – with something in the nature of a
call-sign or Bachian four-note final statement on the violin, clinching the tonal plan; the piano is given the tonic note. This figure, with tonic note, sounded on violin near the outset of the
movement-proper and recurred – and, with all the joy of inspiration and musical logic, may seem to have evolved
from its opening. In fact, it occured in its final form, as regards pitch, 'by the way' in a brighter moment of the slow movement. After a few listens,
it may put one in mind of a persistent memory of birdsong – a memory that gees
one up, to which storm or stress has no answer.
Track 7: lV Introduction (Lento) – Allegro)
There’s an intensity of detail
and yet something of the dynamism of landscape in the piece as a whole: not a romantic nor far-fetched idea: Gurney’s love of Brahms found room for an
appreciation of the Autumnal colours and horizontal shape of the German
master’s music – which reminded him often of Cotswold country. A piece by his friend Herbert Howells called
forth a similar response. To Gurney, as
to many hypersensitive musicians, the play of treble, alto and bass on the down
or up signified light and darkness, colours and land-contours.
The writing for the violin is grateful
but not trilling nor self-consciously florid; the piano is a wonderful partner,
with all the arrestingly strong or melting tone-colours one would expect of
this composer. With one point in three of the four movements - 2-4 -
where it must double-stop, the violin, if no prima-donna, should be satisfied!
Tonally, the movements are
pitched in keys that form a single triad of C-minor; with room for a sense of
travel in key and providing a source of satisfying tautness to the work as a whole. The only movement to be pitched in C Minor,
the relative minor in a work in E Flat, is the third, the heart of the
work. The second movement is in G Major,
a third up from the E Flat-major of the first, the third movement a third down. The second and third movements a strong perfect
fifth apart from eachother; certainly they seem different in character, yet
also to follow. The return to E-Flat in
the finale seems close but unlaboured.
This kind of tonal pattern may be Brahmsian. In a piece filled with chromatic harmonic
complexity, tonal certainties are like subliminal sign-posts to the listener.
You can say that the Violin Sonata
in E Flat doesn’t sound entirely characteristic of anyone you know; a more rewarding thought may
be that no one else wrote a Violin Sonata quite like Ivor Gurney’s. It is formally most impressive, but also
displays a command second-to-none of the expressive side of the musical
language. It is mature; for a young
composer, doubly so. In another
programme, we urged our listeners to prize the superb qualities of the Hamilton
Harty Piano Quintet. This work is finer,
if anything. It is a piece in which four
movements discover endless shades of meaning in motifs and their horizontal and
vertical possibilities in question, answer and combination, and in which
inspiration, skill and pluck provide their possessor with the authority to
personalize his approach to form.
He was appreciative of
Sibelius and enjoyed the Finn’s String Quartet, Voces Intimae, Intimate
Voices: here, like Sibelius, at a
difficult period in his life, he may have written an Intimate Voices of his own
– those of the church-bells that had resounded throughout his childhood in
Gloucester, perhaps. The work was begun
within earshot of the bells of St Albans Abbey.
This was Classical Break, and
I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme
was researched and written by Mike Burrows.
We’ll leave you with another song by Ivor Gurney, setting Robert Graves, Goodnight To The Meadow.
Goodbye!
Track Eight: Goodnight To The Meadow, Gurney
© Mike Burrows and Rupert Kirkham, February 2013
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