Classical Break : The Sea
Hullo,
welcome to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.
I’m Mike Burrows.
Today,
we are going to hear music inspired by the sea, and we’ll begin with a justly
very famous song.
John
Ireland, who was born in 1879 and died in 1962, was fated to compose many works
that have not found acceptance on terms other than cold admiration of his
technique, which was considerable, and irritation at his inability to meld the
various influences on his style and so speak consistently for himself, which
was more considerable still.
Though
successful as a musician’s musician and teacher, he felt bitterly his lack of
public success. Yet in this perfect setting of a poem by John
Masefield, Sea-fever, he achieved
that most elusive thing, a popular masterpiece.
Track
1 John Ireland: Sea Fever
This
is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM.
And next in our programme of works inspired by the sea, we turn to Sir Arnold
Bax (1883-1953). From the outset of his
career, Bax wrote ambitious orchestral and chamber works characterized by a
brilliant talent for instrumentation in addition to an as-enviable talent in
cultivation of a late romantic symphonic style.
Descended from English Quakers, he was
fascinated by Celtic folklore, and, sympathetic with the cause of Irish Independence,
even wrote poems and short stories under an Irish pseudonym! His life-long, he was inspired also
by the Atlantic in its many moods. Tintagel was written in 1917 in Cornwall
where its thirty-four year-old composer was spending six weeks holiday with his
lover, the young pianist Harriet Cohen, for whom he would leave his wife and children. He had returned
from Dublin only because War had broken out and since then, a number of his
Dublin friends had been shot for their part in the 1916 Easter Uprising.
Quotation
of the Sick Tristan motif from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde relates the piece to Arthurian legend and the
conflicts caused by a passionate affair, but is placed within a score that,
beginning in an evocation of sea-birds wheeling and calling above the gaunt
ruined castle and brilliant, high-running sea in Summer, draws one into a drama
of the elements, nature and a man’s restless but uncompromizing spirit. A drama, too, of love. Bax once claimed to be ‘a brazen romantic’
and to have no time for ‘isms’ in music, but even if you have never seen or
felt Tintagel, the place, hearing his
Tintagel, the word that comes to mind as you listen may be idealism.
Track
2 Arnold Bax: Tintagel
That
was Tintagel, a tone-poem by Sir
Arnold Bax and not the last work that he would dedicate to Harriet Cohen, his beloved Tania.
The
Australian, Percy Grainger, 1882-1961, was at first primarily a pianist. Frankfurt-trained, he was inspired by the
example and friendship of the Norwegian, Edvard Grieg.
His
compositions were mined from his own peculiar temperament and energy in addition
to his deep study of folk-music in England, America, the South Seas and
elsewhere - like Bartok, he recorded singers and players in order to notate
their tunes with becoming accuracy, and delighted in scoring and rescoring his
folk-based work to recreate
not only the music but also the ‘atmosphere’, the unique, idiosyncratic nature
of realistic performance and make-up of choirs and instrumental groups!
He
pioneered the use of poly--rhythms and ‘elastic scoring’ to this end.
This
arrangement of Scottish folk-tunes -Strathspey
and Reel - What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor counterpointed - is
art-music that expresses uniquely something of music-making in context - in the
bar of a dockside pub or confines of the foc’sle. Grieg would have been fascinated by it. (1 m 32)
Track
3 Grainger: Strathspey and Reel
Sir
Herbert Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) was for many years a pianist-accompanist and
conductor of the front rank in British music.
He
was also a fine composer and wrote amongst other things two extraordinary Tone poems
on Irish Legend, With The Wild Geese, and
The Children of Lir.
We
are going to hear an extract from The
Children of Lir, an unaccountably neglected masterpiece by a great musician.
Towards
the end of his life, suffering from terminal cancer and on holiday in Ireland,
he saw a tapestry treatment of this strange story, in which the children of a
king are ransformed by a curse into swans and doomed to rest for three hundred
years on a lake near their old home, three hundred years in the stormy wastes
of the Sea of Moyle and three hundred years off a group of islands.
The
piece is as much of legend, coast and sea as isTintagel. It requires a
large orchestra and, in one place, soprano-vocalise, for performance, and lasts
for about half-an-hour in one continuous movement carefully divided into
chapters of the story.
The
idiom is less fluent or modern than Bax’s,
more openly influenced by the previous generation, composers such as
Tchaikovsky, and of the generation before that, particularly Berlioz - Harty’s
speciality as a conductor was music of this stamp. The scoring is coarser and bolder,
instruments are more obviously confined to customary roles. The Irish accent of Harty’s music, a matter of
speech-rhythms and familiar turns of synthetic folk-melody, is surprizingly
well-reconciled with the idiom of these models.
Let’s
hear Calm Seas and Blue Skies.
Track
4 Hamilton Harty: The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra: Calm Seas
and Blue Skies
Sir
Charles Villiers Stanford was born in 1852 and died in 1924. He wrote prolifically in every genre of
Art-music and was also the foremost teacher of composition and an important
festival-administrator in the England of his day.
His
music was often performed abroad - his Third Symphony, the Irish, was presented by Mahler, amongst others. He
wrote seven symphonies, several concertos, six Irish Rhapsodies, chamber
music, many operas, cantatas, much liturgical music, including Anglican Services,
songs and other pieces, including parodies of ‘modern’ music, which he regarded
as ‘damned ugly, me bhoy’.
We
will hear the opening song from Songs of
The Fleet. This cycle, his second
dealing with the patriotic British nautical tradition, was once highly popular,
like its predecessor, Songs of The Sea,
a staple work for choral festivals, concert-recitals, and in piano-reduction,
home-performance and early recording. In
its original form, it is a demonstration in full of his choral, orchestral
technique, in which vivid melody, rich harmony, dovetailing and scoring all
play their part. In its inspired and
inspirational tone, it is simply the expression of sailors’ feelings on leaving
port, as the latest representatives of the breed of sailors who ‘Lead the line’ and face both the sea and
battle, today. As such, it could express the pride to be
taken in any courageous endeavour - in life itself. Here it is:
Sailing at Dawn.
Track 5
Stanford:
Sailing at Dawn from Songs of the Fleet
The
American, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) wrote for many films. His best score
before Hitchcock called by was written for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, the story of a
young widow who goes to live by the sea and takes a cottage once owned by an
old sea-captain, whose ghost haunts her and who becomes the love of her
life. As the author of Blood and Swash, the tale of her
captain’s life at sea, she meets and falls in love with a philanderer. In the film, the ghost effaces himself with a
powerful speech made to her as she lies sleeping.
The
cue that we shall hear accompanies this: in the course of Farewell, we hear many of the leading-motives of the soundtrack. The mixture is much as before: light - but not easy - textures involve the
high woodwind or violins, and dark and impassioned or less certain moments are
conjured up by deeper strings, bassoon and brass. The brass is usually reserved for expressing
storm and stress or - utilising the French horn - romantic warmth. Above all, the music is touching because
impressionistic, harmonically complex, notes constantly qualifying
straightwardness; it remains music independent of the images it accompanies,
but almost feels its way in life as must even ghosts.
Captain
Gregg talks of her situation, the
wonderful places of his travels, which
they will now never experience together - she will forget him or think of their
association as a dream. The passion in
the speech at last appears to gust - but be cut off by the futility of talking of
all they have both missed: she has made
her choice - life. The ebb and flow of
the tide is ever-present, the swell and undertow of the sea are as powerful a
force as the pull of human attraction is irresistible - whether reciprocated or
not - and as merciless.
Track 6
Bernard Herrmann: The Ghost and Mrs Muir: Farewell
We
return to Hamilton Harty, to hear the last section of The Children of Lir, which describes
how the bewitched are rescued by an island hermit after their nine centuries of
wandering, only to age and die on being christened. The stillness at that point is that which one
feels on coming indoors out of the stormy sea-air, still feeling a humming of
the wind in one’s ears, hardened coldness of face and dry brightness of
vision. A bardic peroration of varied
scoring builds and subsides stoically with the lonely, resolving sound of a
holy bell. The brusque fanfare with which the piece ends rings out much as in
the beginning, but with finality.
Track 7
Hamilton Harty: The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra: Transformation, Baptism and Death
So
we reach our final work for today. The
Finn, Uuno Klami, was born in 1900.
Over-shadowed as all contemporary Finnish musicians were by the
international reputation of Sibelius, it was perhaps out of an instinct for
artistic self-preservation that Klami looked to the France of Ravel and Les
Six, and to Stravinsky for his influences, though the undertow of folksong and
Sibelius meant that he did not entirely avoid imitation of the great man, or at
least found no means of his own of creating a new national style or content in his
brittle, less consistently-inventive music.
Written for the most part between 1930-31, in the conducive surroundings
of his coastal birthplace, the six numbers of the orchestral Suite, Sea Pictures were originally intended
for a Sea Symphony. As a skilled sailor,
he intended the last movement Force
Three, to convey not the appearances of the open sea, but the feelings of sailing with a Force Three
wind behind one! The result, one might
say, culminates in something akin to Bolero
In The Finnish Gulf, but even Ravel’s Bolero
a work first heard by Klami not long before, was a little--known modern work once, and reminiscences of it
would not have seemed so obvious in the 1930s.
Really,
the resemblance does Force Three no
great harm, being carried off almost as well as Bax’s slighter though perhaps
more appropriate quotation from Tristan
und Isolde in his Tintagel, which
we heard earlier!
You
have been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, We hope that you
have enjoyed our programme and that we’ll have your company again soon. This is Mike Burrows casting off with ForceThree, by Uuno Klami.
Track
8 Uuno Klami, Sea Pictures, Last Movt,
Force Three
