CB
Winter
Intro: Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes, Gurney
This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by
Mike Burrows and takes winter as it’s theme.
We have just heard a song by Ivor
Gurney, whose benign shade wanders often into the mind. The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes sets a
poem by Ernest Casson. It is a song for
contemporary shepherds watching their sheep.
Now, a setting of a sonnet of Edmund
Spenser made by Edmund Rubbra. It comes
from his set of Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra, a
work of his mid-thirties, first performed in 1935. After the first performance, he amplified the
original string quartet accompaniment, very likely as the textures of the
string parts are often strongly contrapuntal and played on only four
instruments may not bear the weight; of course, to thicken the lines may
overpower the soloist’s contribution.
The sonnet’s compact structure of fourteen lines, balanced phrases and poised
rhythms, comparatively long lines and an argument developed tautly within
strict metre and rhymes, is not easy to set - its form being a single verse,
frequently stating abstract propositions in a manner that does not imply any
melody other than its own. In the case
of New Year Forth Looking Out Of Janus’ Gate, the tenor sings above a fugue;
the quiet climax brings voice and instruments together in a broadened statement
before the stalky opening subject, a tempo primo, ends the piece abruptly.
Track Two: Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String
Orchestra Rubbra
Tchaikovsky’s twelve piano pieces, The
Seasons, were written month by month for the journal Nuvellist. They were intended for readers to play, they
were written to deadlines, work on them being often prompted by Tchaikovsky’s
valet. It was fortunate for us that Alexei
remembered. Small-scale and unambitious as
they are in form, The Seasons are anything but ephemeral as music. Each was headed by a quotation from Russian
poetry. January (At The Fireside) is
headed by words from Pushkin: “A
little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire
is dying in the fire-place, and the candle has burned out...” There you have it, two of Russia’s more
sophisticated artists of the 19th Century:
but the piece is a miniaturization of much that is best in Tchaikovsky,
the song, the thought-provoking forays into rhythmical contrast and overall charmingly
sensitive affect conveyed with notable melodic and harmonic skill, all this in
a form of simple alternation.
Track Three: January (At The Fireside), Tchaikovsky
Schubert’s Winterreise,
composed only two years before his death, frightened his friends. One can imagine that Schubert stared for too
for long into its icy regions for their comfort: how far their friend could travel by staring into
the flame of a candle and thinking... A
twenty-four song-cycle setting poems of Muller, it tells the story of a journey
into cold and nightmare, snows and madness, undertaken by a disappointed
lover. Here are three contrasting songs
from the cycle, No 11, Frühlingstraum, No 18, Stürmische Morgen and
No 20, Der Wegweiser - Dream of Spring, Stormy Morning and The
Signpost. Spring is the hope of
salvation; storms and cold are too much to the lover’s mood; the lover has his path;
it is shown him by the sign-post; the beloved did not have to make this journey
- she has a home. The wanderer’s journey
is far from over.
Track Four, Five, Six: Winterreise - Fruhlingstraum and Sturmische
Morgen, Der Wegweiser, Schubert
When news broke that Schubert had died,
the eighteen year-old Schumann was heard to sob nightlong. Here is the Slow
Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor. This arioso is possibly Schumann’s
most beautiful concertante creation. The
entire concerto was written and scored within a few days in the October of 1853
and during a spate of inspiration. It
was his last major work and was composed for the young Hungarian violinist, Josef
Joachim, who with the twenty-year-old Brahms had done much to brighten what was
a difficult time in his professional career.
In the event, the concerto was suppressed by Schumann’s musical
executors, his pianist-wife, Clara, Joachim and Brahms after a private
run-through with an orchestra, two years after the composer’s death. Nearly eighty years later, during a seance, a
spirit contacted another Hungarian violinist, Jelly D’Aranhji, and the objections
of Schumann’s last remaining daughter, Eugenie, merely delayed performance and
publication of the concerto a short time, which took place after Eugenie’s
death, in 1938. We hope to devote space
to the entire work and the fascinating story surrounding it, in a future
programme. Marked Langsam -Slow
- and beginning on cellos, the slow movement treats an introduction and violin
solo melody to ornamentation and development in ternary form; near the close,
the violin sings its melody a third lower and in the minor. Filled with baroque touches, canons,
imitations, appogiatura and trills, this is music instinct with the skills of
old music made anew, and with all the dignity of the old. The movement as a whole expresses a depth of
sadness unusual in Schumann, and yet the sheer, full-hearted purity of means
and ends and beautiful sense of form one finds in it confers on it an air of
wisdom innocent of self-pity. It seems
to sing over the cradle of the vanity of human wishes. Schumann loved his children, six of whom he watched
grow: here, it is as if we watch a dear
child at the window, its dark eyes hypnotized by the twisting fall of snow-flakes,
the fall that seems to rise. We feel the
sadness of how much young promise must learn by suffering through a too-short
life. This is not to sentimentalize
either Schumann’s fascination by the baroque, or his own winter thoughts. “Work,”
he had written to himself some time earlier, “while there is still
light...” .
Track Seven: Violin Concerto, 11 Langsam, Schumann
The four North Country Sketches were the
Bradford-born Frederick Delius’ tribute to his home county, Yorkshire. Most of his life was spent in France with
periods when he was resident in Florida, Germany and Norway, but in 1913-14, he
wrote an orchestral suite depicting the Yorkshire countryside that he had loved
and explored as a boy. Frederick. or
Fred, Delius came of German stock, and was named Fritz. As a man he had a curious accent, but at the
bottom of a weakness for French idioms and beyond fencing of slightly German gutterals
softened by the Norwegian of his wife, one encountered the tell-tale flat
vowels of his county of origin. His view
of the moors in Winter, Winter Landscape, has the characteristic breadth and
light and shade of all his pictures in music, but the violins, violas and woodwind
bring an edge, the higher-pitched instruments at first chiming in coldness, the
horns subdued, flute and oboe and clarinet only gradually becoming the hope of
warmth. The chromaticism of the harmony
and rocking ostinati beloved of this composer are restricted and end
unresolved, as though keen perceptions of Winter have no contrivable end in
themselves, and simply fade out as the focus of one’s gaze is claimed
elsewhere...
Track Eight: North Country Sketches, Winter Landscape,
Delius
Now, a Branles de la Torche from
Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore or book of dances, of 1612. Torch--dances were a favourite courtly
spectacle at this time, torches borne aloft throughout. What a symbol for defiance of harsher winters
than we know now!
Track Nine: Bransles de la Torche, Praetorius,
The American composer, Bernard
Herrmann, wrote many fine film-scores:
but also a number of equally striking concert-works, where his
colouristic imagination was given full play.
Here is his glistening evocation of February, from the song-cycle,
Fantasticks, to words by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton.
Track Ten: February, Fantasticks, Herrmann
Another traditional song: As It Fell Out
Upon One Day, otherwise known As Dives and Lazarus. In this,
The miserly contempt of the rich man for
the presumably undeserving poor man brings its own reward...
Track Eleven: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, Trad
To Bernard Herrmann the film
composer.
Let’s hear his Sleigh-Ride, written
for the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which a Midford farmer
sells his soul to the devil (Scratch) for Hessian gold. The Scots song on which the cue is based is
one thing; the prominence of the tritone
- the devil’s interval in music - in the harmonies quite another, seeming to be
telling us where the enriched Jabez Stone is ultimately headed...
Track
Twelve: Sleigh-Ride, Herrmann
“Great God, this is an awful place!”
If one wants to take on Winter and
win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the
coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other
men, all of whom are starving.
To end, here’s a suite of cues from
Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about
Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in
1911-12. Captain Scott, Doctor Edward
Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar
Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished
from cold and scurvy on the return journey.
Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery
may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill
Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The
World, or the photography of the Terra Nova expedition – the artistry of
Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five
extraordinary men. It is music of human
endeavour and the inhumanity of the elements.
Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned
percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment
- strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness,
of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of
snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...
The cues are entitled: Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing
The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.
This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley
FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us
again soon. Goodbye!
Tracks Thirteen - Nineteen: Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams
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