CB Where The Rainbow Ends
Intro,
Track One: Quilter - Where The Rainbow Ends Suite: 1. Rainbow Land
This
is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched
and written by Mike Burrows. You’ve just heard Rainbow Land, the first movement
of a suite Where The Rainbow Ends, written for a play of this name by
Roger Quilter. It introduces a programme of largely British music of dreams and
otherworld fantasy, some of it what Edward German would have called ‘good light
music’. Where The Rainbow Ends was a Christmas fairy-tale, produced at
the Savoy Theatre - famous for the D’Oyly Carte Company and the operas of
Gilbert and Sullivan, first performed in 1911. For many in those days, the
fairy world was no faraway Shangri La, as was to be shown when, a decade later
and after the Great War, Conan Doyle revealed The Coming of The
Fairies to an astonished public. Where The Rainbow Ends tells
of children who travel on a magic carpet to save their ship-wrecked parents
from a dragon, and are protected in their adventures by Saint George...
“This
is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” The Archers film, A Matter of Life and Death, drawn from a
Robert Nathan novel by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell. It
tells the story of a Lancaster pilot who jumps from his burning aircraft
without a parachute; survives to fall in love with a WAAC from Boston, Mass,
and is visited by a heavenly messenger who wants to conduct him up a celestial
stairway to the training-centre for another world. Terrestrial scenes were shot
in colour, scenes in Heaven in black and white. The fantasy may be the result
of a thought-unimportant head-injury, or it may be real. In any event, the film
culminates in emergency brain surgery and an Appeal heard in the Highest of
Courts. Intended to promote Anglo-American relations, and invoking every
species of idealism of outlook, it owes some of its glamour to the score
composed by the Polish émigré, Allan Gray. Here are elements of the score - a
fanfare, piano-music connected with sensory disturbance and the escalator, and
romantically swooping but distinguished love-theme of its time (used for
end-credits).
Track
Two: Allan Gray: A Matter of Life and Death
The
first film of one of the stars of A Matter of Life and Death, Roger
Livesey, was a silent adaptation of Where The Rainbow Ends. released in
1921 - the year Conan Doyle’s The Coming of The Fairies was published...
Now,
a song from a cycle of Yeats-settings, To A Child Dancing In The Wind,
by John Tavener (B 1944). A soprano is accompanied by flute, viola and harp. In
its tessitura of wide intervals, the vocal part calls for sublime breath
control - and the lightest of touches from the instrumentalists. The vision of
the unself-consciously graceful and sensuous young girl in a world of her own
exists in a harsh world on a Western shore, where work and widowhood await, but
the melisma is of the self-hypnotized unmarried girl... A world within the
world...
Track
Three: John Tavener - To A Child Dancing In The Wind
There
are as many worlds within the world as there are people and products of the
artistic imagination. One may need only a fire to sit by to find one’s dreams.
The Canadian, Robert Farnon was for many years a composer and conductor of
light music. He specialized in mood-music and miniatures as did many romantics
and late-romantics. His best is good indeed, vivid, natural and skilfully
written - the orchestration fits the melody and harmony like a soft glove, a
blending of the sections that favours the woodwind, horns and strings, often
including harp - his pieces bloom from simple, but affecting elements developed
with great care and distinction. Here is Pictures In The Fire, a kind of
canzona for violin and orchestra with notable asides from flute, oboe, clarinet
and bassoon - and fleeting piccolo.
Track
Four: Farnon - Pictures In The Fire.
Edward
Elgar, self-taught, composed from the age of about ten. His father gave him the
run of his music-shop and his mother did all that she could to foster the
child’s interest in literature with the result that the young Edward and
siblings wrote a play, The Wand of Youth for which he composed the
music. Grown-ups were lured across a stream into the world of childhood
imagination, with the result that they developed an understanding of children
and so scolded them less severely in future. The miracle was achieved by moths
and butterflies, little bells, fairy pipers, fairies and giants, tame and wild
bears, a sundance and other such cues. Household music was transformed forty
years later in 1907 when, his mother and father now dead, Elgar took up the
score and developed and arranged its numbers for full orchestra with unself-conscious,
magical results.
The
beautiful variety in style, mood and scoring of the finished pieces is proof
that the excitement of having the run of a music shop had never left him, and
that his mother’s literary dreams and the ambition to express philosophical
constructs in poetic imagery and music had been passed on. The titles and
‘little tunes’ are inseparable. Here, the grown-up couple are lulled to sleep
by Fairy Pipers.
Track
Five: Edward Elgar - Fairy Pipers
The
pianist, philosopher and mystic, Cyril Scott, was a composer of great ambition
and talent for symphonic music, admired by Vauaghan Williams and Bax, and
Elgar, who credited him with inspiring the more daring harmonies of his late
period! Scott worked as well in small forms, often orchestrating his own
piano-music. Here is his orchestral miniature, Lotus-Land: the heavy,
sweet blossom of the lotus was reputed by the Greeks to induce dreaming
lethargy, a narcosis forgetful of home or a life of action, as Odysseus found
to his cost during his travels.
Track
Six: Cyril Scott - Lotus-land
The
composer Cyril Rootham wrote at least one fine choral-orchestral song in The
Stolen Child... Setting Yeats, it is an enticement to the life of faery, of
an escape from the human world:
Come away, O
human child,
To the waters
and the wild,With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full
of weeping than you
can understand...
The
song is beautiful, the scoring and variations in accompaniment well-suited to
the imagery, but this refrain, with its flute flourish on the second and clever
scansion of the long, subtlely rhythmical last line, more than anything else,
stays with one. It is, after all, such a hard journey to that otherworld, one
made (or expressed) by any serious artist. Childhood is the origin of so many
of our fantasies of beauty and truth, even enlightenment...
Track
Seven: Rootham: The Stolen Child
Not
all dreams are welcome: not all fantasies are an escape from the anguish of
living. Here is a short partsong by Elgar, dating from a couple of years after
the Wand of Youth Suites, and written whilst on holiday in Rome. It is
an evocation of dread, of the thing that dies in the night, and of Owls.
Here, the composer - according to his own story - sets verses written by his
daughter Carice’s pet white rabbit, Pietro D’Alba, in reality, self-penned. The
deliberately uncertain tonality is wedded to a hushed funereal processional,
intensely ghostly, the owls’ antiphonal voices caught to peculiarly unsettling
effect....
Track
Eight: Elgar – Owls, An Epitaph
One
of the Australian composer Percy Grainger’s least-known professional interests
was the search for a machine to play ‘free music’ - music that truly sounded to
the pitches and pulses of the elements. The idea first came to him as a
youngster as he watched sunshine on waves and currents. Here is a short piece
of Free Music, arranged for string quartet. Another world within this world and
the literally hypnotic, fantastical world of music...
Track
Nine: Percy Grainger - Free Music
Lastly,
a long piece for piano-soloist and orchestra by John Ireland. The Legend,
opening with a modal horn signal, evokes the Sussex downs: it concerns the
atmosphere of a particular spot, a district of stone--age civilization, near
where there was a post-Crusades leper-colony - the lepers worshipped through a
small slit in the wall of a local church. Out for a solitary walk in this
hilly, windblown landscape, Ireland stopped for a picnic. He told later of how
as he ate he became aware of a group of children dancing and playing in a
circle close to him as though oblivious of him. He was annoyed, but then it was
borne in on him suddenly that they played quietly and that their clothes were
‘archaic’. He looked away, looked back and found that they were gone, leaving
him alone on the hillside... A friend, the psychical researcher, mystic and
ghost--story--writer, Arthur Machen, heard of this experience and wrote a
postcard to him, saying simply: “So you’ve seen them, too!” Legend
is fittingly large-scale, an awkward gear-change from the opening horn--theme
to quicker music got over better in some performances than in others. By the
middle of the piece, it is as if the mind clears of gong-clash, bluster and
dramatic outlines, pianistic gestures, woodwind fragments, an obsessively
menacing liturgical element threatened by chromaticism, a feeling of rising
damp and decay. There comes another, clearer, fresher vision, as hallucinatory,
in which the orchestral sounds stream hypnotically in light-footed movement - a
thinner orchestration of sunshine and swift cloud-shade - and children of
another, ancient time dance and play, and the piano-part moves between freedom
and thematic matter of earlier... The piano is induced to accompany the dream.
It’s not so much that these children are innocent or aesthetically charming,
though they are, it’s that life and time have not overcome their natural zest
for life, the faith and hope they find in living.
Adults
have fantasies of what they are and what life truly is, but perhaps wouldn’t be
happy here even if they could be! Because there are always new generations of
children, happiness and hope spring eternal. The episode reminds one that the
word maze has many meanings, including dance and trance; that
mazes can be an adjunct to religious ritual, often of initiation,
preparation and purification, and, like the best in musical expression can
represent acceptance, enlightenment and progress.
The
horn-signal recurs affirmatively, harmonized in the major. A long dying fall
reprises nightmare elements amid calm, the piano introducing the chromatic
sounds, dwindling away to nothing - perhaps into the depths or distance.
This
was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it
and will join us again soon. Goodbye!
Track
Ten: Ireland - Legend For Piano and Orchestra
© Mike Burrows 2/12
