CB Autumn 3
Track One: The Too-Short Time, Finzi
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham.
Today’s programme is of music
that depicts or suggests Autumn. We’ve just
heard Gerald Finzi’s song The Too-Short
Time – Nine leaves a minute/Swim down shakily”, a setting for baritone and
piano of a Hardy poem that laments the passing of Dame Summer; the last lines
run:
“Saw you how Dame
Summer drest?
Of all God taght
her she bethought her!
Alas, not
much! And yet the best
She could, within
the too-short time
Granted her prime.”
From the prelude, an angular, Britten-like
impression of the falling of the leaves – the ever-scrupulous Finzi timed his
onomatopoeia to match those nine leaves a minute – a halting processional
gropes for hymn-like certainty and diatonic harmony, the piano providing strong
chords and a building spinning motion as though weaving the vision of Dame
Summer’s clothes before the qualifiedly affirmative close.
From 1949, this song predated Finzi’s
discovery that he had leukaemia by less than two years. It joined other Hardy-settings uncollected at his
early death to form the Cycle, Before And After Summer.
Let’s stay with Finzi and Hardy,
two inspired Autumnists. Seeing the
Winter in Autumn, Shortening Days – The
first fire since the Summer is lit – is a song, the sixth, from another
posthumous Hardy-cycle, A Young Man’s
Exhortation. Finzi toiled long and hard
on his works, assembling them number by number, gathering groups of songs from
many stages in his career. Shortening Days was actually written in
1928, considerable number of years before The
Too-Short Time. The two songs are
yet recognizably related in
verbally-generated melody, harmonies and procedures.
At its outset, spare in accompaniment and melodic line, Shortening Days seems an almost mystical
treatment of prosaic observation heightened by its place in a poem : until, at the window, the eye finds “Like shockheaded urchins, spiny-haired,
Stand pollard
willows, their leaves just bared.”
Then, “coming with pondering pace”, peasant sturdiness
appears to rescue one from brown study with the sight of the cider-maker –
“And behind him on
wheels, in readiness,
His mill, and tubs,
and vat and press.”
Track Two: Shortening Days, Finzi
Harvest-home. Autumn bares the trees and countryside of
much colour, and birds have no time for leisurely song, but with luck, Summer has left us with the
means to over-Winter where we are, and we gather and prepare food for
hoard. Originating in a number – The Heavens Are Telling - from Haydn’s Oratorio, The Creation, here is the harvest-home hymn from the Norwich Tune-book
of 1844, The Last Full Wain Has Come,
sung and played by The West Gallery Music Association of Hampshire, who
specialize in the performance of Georgian church music, their choir accompanied
by stringed and wind instruments that would have been familiar in Thomas
Hardy’s childhood and in his father’s heyday, before
the organ replaced gallery-musicians in country churches.
Track 3: The Last Full Wain Has Come, Tune by Joseph Haydn
(The following number was sadly omitted
on grounds of time
Let’s hear a partsong by
Sibelius. Autumn Evening is a strophic setting for mixed voices of a poem by
the Swedish poet, Rydberg. One of a
group of partsongs that date from student-days, Autumn Evening begins in a world that lies in its bleak grave of
Autumn, harried, withered, dead, the blossoms of Summer passed and the forest
silent - but looks up into the stars, from whence eternal home smiles upon the soul.
“Thus dream I in
the Autumn evening, and see
How the leaves fall
down from the birch,
A naked shore
stands reflected in the deep bay,
And over the moon a
silver cloud is sailing.”
Autumn has its bleak side,
matched here in the severity of chorale-like strains, dotted rhythms and some awkward
rather than adventurous writing in the parts, but the twenty-three year-old composer
has the measure of the poem’s sentiments.
If the setting is less flexible and imaginative than Sibelius’ later treatments
of Finnish verse, this may partly be due
to the Germanic nature of the Swedish language, its totally different system of
stresses – Finnish stresses first syllables – its heavy consonants and less rich store of
vowel-sounds, all of which lend themselves naturally to a Germanic melody with little irregularity of metre, in
which rhythmical variety is introduced with dotted notes.
Track 4: Autumn Evening, Sibelius
).
The Autumn and Winter are
seasons for hunting. Here is The Royal Hunt At Windsor, a Grand
Sonata for solo harpsichord, by HB Schroeder, from the late 18th
Century.
Track 5: The Royal Hunt At Windsor, Schroeder
A more characteristic work of
Sibelius, now, the tone-poem, The Bard. This extraordinary piece was written in the
shadow of a possible throat cancer, in 1913, and at a time of international
unrest and anxiety. To contrast it with the
early tone-poems is certainly to hear the change that had crept over his
music. Like his Fourth Symphony of 1911,
drama is developed from the most slender of material, so that climaxes are
reached with a startling edge and are representative of a personal symbolism rather than more conventional gestures. In this instance, beginning with an evocation
of a poet who accompanies himself on the Finnish zither (Kantele) in simple,
rippled chords over an accompaniment by bare orchestral textures, mostly held
notes on bassoon and oboe and imitations and promptings of the harp in the
strings, a second section within the one-movement piece evokes wind in trees
(the harp and lower strings have the power to do this owing to the former
expressive compression) and the trombone provides a climax with a harmonically
unresolving fanfare of three notes drawn from the rippled chords (and akin to
the bassoon’s notes of introduction at
the very opening), to be followed by a warmer, placid close of quietness and
stoical fulfilment. An example of extreme
concision sombrely scored, The Bard, it should be remembered, was
produced in the year of the riot-greeted Rite
of Spring. There was, as Sibelius
himself said of his Fourth Symphony,
“Nothing of the circus about it.” His
Autumnal bard has all the power of the natural world at his finger-tips, and
the ability to cause the least modernistic processes to appear ahead of their
time. A mysterious musical wisdom permeates a work that seems static, easily
followed on the surface, yet economically strange at its height, and straightforwardly
(but somehow rightly) conventional at the close. The work is associated with lines about an
old poet who dies after performing his last verses.
Track 6: The Bard, Sibelius
From a bard to a bird. A drinking-song, Of All The Birds, from a collection of popular music made in the
early 17th Century by Thomas Ravenscroft. Of all the birds, the owl ‘is the fairest in her degree,
For all day long she sits in a
tree,
And when the night comes, away
flies she.”
A song for drinkers, mocking drinkers. It ends,
“Synament, and ginger, nutmeg
and cloves
And that gave thee thy jolly red
nose.”
Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and
cloves are all febrifuges, tonics, warmers; like cider, wines and spirits, in
hot punches of the same, much in demand to this day, when temperatures cool and
the nights draw in.
Track 7: Of All The Birds, Ravenscroft
From the composer Armstrong Gibbs’s
LivelySuite for string orchestra and
piano, Peacock Pie (in tribute to
the book of children’s verse by Walter de la Mare, here is the drily Brahmsian
finale, The Fly-by-nights.
The Fly-by-nights are, of course, witches!
Track 8: The Fly-by-nights, Armstrong Gibbs
In Night-scene, Grieg’s Peer
Gynt, returned to Norway from adventures that took him around the world and made
and lost him his fortune, confronts the emptiness of his achievements on the fire-blackened heath near his home.
Harsh chill is in the alternation of woodwind and brass chords and
tiredly eddying strings. He speaks
defiantly – if he can. In grim
insistence, the voices of threadballs, withered leaves flying before
the wind, sighs of air, dewdrops and broken straws in turn taunt him with all he
might have been – he has stepped on the throat of his own song. Wind-effects on flute and high violins, drumrolls,
brass snarls: organ-tones add
uncanniness to the chants of inanimate things that, with significance to Peer’s
state, have become the sternest of critics.
Near the close, he hears the voice of his mother, Aase, whom he
comforted as she lay dying by describing how he drove her in a sledge to Soria
Moria – a castle in Spain, or heaven:
now she shrieks that he tipped her into the snow. Our ghosts, come old age and the heath of Autumn,
may be found harder to bear. Have we
truly lived at all?
Track 9: Night Scene, Grieg
Now, if the cold has seeped into
your bones, sit by a fire and warm yourself.
Here is a lighthearted treatment of The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the story
of Ichabod Crane, schoolmaster, and his ghostly nemesis. The Headless Horseman was
written by Edgar Stillman Kelley, a little-known pianist and composer from New England
– his ancestors were among the early settlers of America, arriving in about 1630, and founded his
home town, Sparta, in Wisconsin. He could trace descent back to the governor of
Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, a voyager on the Mayflower! A little older than Edward Macdowall, and
also primarily a pianist, Kelley was trained in Germany, as were most American
composers of national reputation in his day.
His piece describes the dead
Hessian’s pursuit of the would-be ladies’-man-schoolmaster one eerie Hallowe’en
... Schumann is turned to semi-comic account, the
first theme imitating the gait of Crane’s lolloping nag. Crane’s amorous feelings are gradually
swallowed alive as he rides home alone after having been told the legend in vivid
terms by one of his boys. In the
pursuit, the poor nag does her best to flee!
All ends in the dutifully
frowning minor!
Track 10: The Headless Horseman, Stillman Kelley
(The Following
section was left out on grounds of space and time:
“Remember, remember the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot!”
Here is a poem commemorating a Bonfire-night party,
written by Mike Burrows.
(Guy
Fawkes Party At Tanybwlch Hall)
Fireworks were never the same
again. There
In the wood, standing in groups, the
chill night
Warmed by thick clothes, friendships
- and embers
bright
And smoking in the incinerator -
Some played with sparklers; all
watched for the
glare
Of first banged colours to print
threads on sight
From volcano, or a rocket’s whooshed
white
Popped in stars. This galaxy made me stare.
For forms - wool hats, scarves,
coats - the
warden’s hand
And ‘tached smile touched off such
spells, or
checked spuds
In glowing ash. And the girl at my side
Deepened, lit little, kissing. Sombre land
Lay silent, its true stars
high-spaced - no duds -
In bursts of aeons: a lover’s thrilled pride.
Never the same, that powder-reek
rejoiced
In.
So it is my memory.
Rainbow-fire,
Spittering glints, thick smoke
billowing from pyre
Of a tiny soul whose burnt body,
hoist
With its reason for being, I found
by moist
Autumn garlic next day, charred
where, entire,
I shook my head and went on: the lost spire
Of a roman candle scorched, lit,
still voiced.
To the beach and town - or college -
simply
A student in love. Or a ghost years off,
Picturing the next year as on each
year,
Self hoist by what I did not want to
be.
Sparks brilliant for others -
smoke’s sharp cough
Makes them smile, and aeons will
shine them clear.
Copyright,
Mike Burrows, October 16th, 2013
(FX Sounds of
fireworks, bonfire and murmurs of spectators under).
).
As our time of Remembrance of the
World Wars draws near, and in memory of all the fallen – in particular of Thomas
Newby Singleton, a Leading Stoker killed on the destroyer HMS Shark when it was
sunk during the Battle of Jutland – here is the powerful song that ends Sir
Charles Villiers Stanford’s set of sea-songs for baritone, chorus and
orchestra, Songs of The Fleet,of 1910. Farewell
is surely a powerful homage to “the dead
who died for me,” - those who “themselves
they could not save”, the men who have perished in service of the world’s navies. The brass fanfaring at the close quotes fittingly
a phrase of the refrain of Sailing At
Dawn, an earlier song in the set – “Lead
the line!”
Track 11: Farewell, Stanford
For our last piece today, Grieg’s
Lyric Piece, one of the Opus 43 set, Solitary
Traveller. Grieg was a major
traveller in music in the second half of the 19th Century, touring
Europe as pianist and conductor, and
spreading the word for Norwegian art-music; if anyone knew the burden of
resigned
as necessary travel, it was
he. If not at home, he missed it; if at
home, there was the call of the South!
He often Wintered away from his country.
Between him and his piano
there existed an enviable closeness in which he confided as Schumann had
confided before him. In Solitary Traveller, something of the sincerity
and affection of the relationship is revealed.
It is a quiet pianism of unadorned expressiveness and memorability.
This was Classical Break, and
I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was
researched and written by Mike Burrows.
We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon. Goodbye!
Track 12: Solitary
Traveller
