Classical Break

Saturday, 9 February 2013

9 February

This is a repeat from last February: a programme of reveries that is intended as a tribute to those who foster imagination as a path to human understanding, and to those who value their dreams of what might be as they do what is and may be: those who value the dreams of others as they do their own, and so value (and not only dream but work for) their happiness.

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!” Legendis 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

Friday, 8 February 2013

9 & 10 February

This week’s programme is a repeat from last year, a tribute to composers (not all of them famous), who helped define our notions of an Irish style in music.

CB IRISH MUSIC

Intro Track: Padraig The Fiddler

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is in celebration of Irish music, in time for St Patrick’s Day. We’ve just heard the song, Padraig The Fiddler, by Gregory and Larchet, performed by John MacCormack, the violinist, Fritz Kreisler, and pianist, Ludwig Schwab. Music has always been important to the Irish, as a demonstration of national identity. There are now, as for many centuries two Irish music-traditions; loyalist Protestant, sponsored by English and Anglo-Irish rulers of a conquered Ireland, and separatist catholic, actuated by a far older sense of nationhood. Both sides have their patriotic songs, and their champions in the world of music at large. For many centuries, Irish composing-talent found that the mountain would not come to Mahomet: to find fame, artists emigrated for recognition. For the catholic it was a harder longer road to success than for a Protestant; in London, the nearest nerve-centre for international Art-music, it was a matter of incredulity that Irish people wrote music fully as accomplished as the music of the international models, and to hold position in Ireland or be successful in England, one had either to be of the Protestant Ascendency or find liberal patrons.

At the turn of the 19th Century, the poet Tom Moore was an example of an Irishman with liberal patrons - he numbered Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt among his friends. His various books of national airs played fast and loose with the modal nature of folk-tunes, as did all educated editions for the rest of the century. Moreover, the words that the tunes were made to fit set the tone of ‘Irish’ songs and ballads for even longer, wistful, sentimental, nostalgic, or infectiously cheerful, in some sense articulating a distinct national character. To the English of the day, there were two possible Irish characters, the truculent maudlin drunkard or the charming, rumbustious but childishly sentimental rascal, the ‘spalpeen’ when he has drink taken - both feckless idlers. In some quarters, this view has perhaps never changed, and Tom Moore did nothing to counteract it; yet nationalism itself took him up. Here is The Last Rose of Summer, from The Groves of Blarney, arranged by Sir John Stevenson, an older contemporary of the poet.

Track Two: The Last Rose of Summer

The two real Irish stars in international music in the first half of the 19th Century were the pianist-composer John Field and singer and composer Michael William Balfe. Both did well in London and went further abroad; Field settled in St Petersburg; after much time spent in Rome, Milan and Paris, Balfe returned to conquer London where he had begun as a professional musician, his operas being performed in the very same theatre in which he had worked as a violinist in the pit. Any distinctive, let alone Irish qualities in their music was smothered by a pallid Italian lyricism and polish, whose models included Clementi, Rossini and Bellini, all fashionable names. Field was famous for his legato singing-tone and invented the ternary-form Nocturne taken over by Chopin. Balfe is remembered for a song from his greatest hit, The Bohemian Girl - I dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls (mentioned in Joyce’s Dubliners). Of his many songs, some recall Come Into The Garden Maud and Excelsior. Irishry, thanks to the fictitious works of Ossian, had become a metropolitan phenomenon in the mid-to-late 18th and early 19th Centuries, composers of international reputation, such as Joseph Haydn and Beethoven arranged ‘Irish’ melodies as a favour or in acknowledgement of lucrative temporary demand. For Beethoven, ‘picturesqueness’ was meat and drink to a Romantic, but if Irishry seemed ‘picturesque’, wild and exotic, his indifferent ‘Irish’ arrangements were done for money. To remind ourselves of the Irishness of this programme, one must go back or forward in time. Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738) was an itinerant harpist and poet, and has been considered Ireland’s greatest bard. Blinded by smallpox in his teens, he learned the harp, and set out with it, horse and guide, to make his fortune - or living. An Irish Catholic who could read and write, he spoke Irish, but could also speak English. He found patrons among the Protestant Anglo--Irish and his own people, and sang and played attractively for both communities. He wrote in song- and dance-forms from France and Italy, with what would now be taken to be an Irish accent. His style was modal and founded on incomplete scales, faults that 19th Century professors would have pronounced bad and cured with a few strokes of the ink-pen. Let’s hear two of his pieces: Jigg - To Mr James Betagh, and Carolan’s Devotion. Devotion typically admires a girl on the way to church.

Track Three and Four: Jigg - To Mr James Betagh, and Carolan’s Devotion, Carolan

There is little trace of the history of 19th Century Ireland in Irish music, save perhaps references to crossed love, homesickness for the countryside or town, a departed Irish glory, bereavement, emigration, potatoes and drink. But it is a fact that during this period, poverty, famine, evictions, cholera, emigration and transportation for felony halved the population, as Punch, The London Charivari, delighted in the wonderfully ignorant, illogical ‘Paddy’. Paddy was a tricky, hot-tempered and drunkenly self--pitying character, known by his apish figure, prognathous jaw and dark nose, his garb of moleskins and gaiters, collapsed soft hat and shillelagh or club. His wife was more fearsome. English visitors were made fools of at horse-fairs but could read and write and didn’t believe in the little people. Behind the facade of Paddy’s quaint outlook and rhetoric - and, indeed, of publication of editions of Ireland’s ancient folk-music - a holocaust occurred. During the Great Famine of 1848, Poor Law Commissioners were advized that a rising tide of theft and poaching - and social unrest - in country districts, was due to the peasant’s urge to survive. Paddy loved his potatoes; - the potatoes had rotted from blight; Paddy had to poach game and loot food-stores. Few of the ordinary Irish owned land. Their hereditary landlords, Irish and English, and the Viceroy in Dublin enforced export of saleable food even as refugees from the country to the towns dropped in the streets from hunger, and cholera broke out owing to lack of adequate sanitation. England, utilitarian, corrupt and hopelessly disorganized, needed much of what remained of Ireland’s food-yield to feed its own urban poor. Widespread murder of officials and landlords and cannibalism among tenants were rumoured. In England, it was an imprisonable crime to roam without visible means and not to be in work, of course. As English magazines carried etchings of skeletal famine-victims and their living-conditions, repression went on. To support dirt-poor refugees without work or homes was an idle expense. All told, in the first half of the century, the hell came mostly Ireland’s way; in the second, Paddy organized, England and Anglo-Irish landlords came to fear not only the mob, but also the ‘Fenians’, a league of protest and violence, led by educated professionals and seeking independence from London. Landlords had much to fear; there’s an old joke that runs: “I hear Himself is to be buried on Tuesday.” – “Buried is it? Didn’t I hear they’re after sending him to be smelted?” It must have seemed that if St Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland, at least Ireland was spared some poison. But St Patrick’s Day came to be celebrated over an increasing extent of the globe because of a diaspora of a nation - unskilled labour, respectability and brilliance alike, all proudly Irish. Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, gained a grim reputation that it was not to lose until after the Civil War confirmed the Irish Free State in 1922.

Howard Ferguson, born in Belfast in 1908, wrote a Partita for two pianos or orchestra in 1935-6, that seems to breathe this dangerous atmosphere. Here is the initially Brahmsian courante, Allegro un poco agitato second movement, restless, clouded, eerie.

Track Five: Partita, 2nd Movt, Ferguson

At the turn of the 19th Century and into the early 2Oth, many names resounded in Irish literature, none more so than those of William Butler Yeats, esoteric poet, playwright and essayist and aristocrat-loving nationalist. Here is a setting of his early symbolist poem, The Withering of The Boughs, the third number in the cycle The Curlew, for tenor, flute, cor anglais and string quartet, by the English composer, Philip Heseltine, alias Peter Warlock. The myth and magic of the old Ireland is invoked with breathtaking intensity in an improvisatory-seeming aria of bird-calls, Winter wind and the dark imaginings of a broken heart. The work dates from the time leading up to the formation of the Irish Republic - 1920-2. Song runs out during the last, ghostly refrain - the singer speaks the last line.

Track Six: The Withering Of The Boughs, The Curlew, Warlock

In 1855 appeared a tune that is often taken to be a folksong, but may not be, after all. Londonderry Air. It may have been written for a competition by an anonymous lady. Described by one irreverent author as “a song with capital bottom”, it has a claim to be the best--known theme in all Irish music. Its melancholy has suited various sets of verses, usually of renunciation. It has been arranged by many composers, including Stanford, Harty and Percy Grainger. The great tenor, John MacCormack, a nationalist, but, like Carolan, capable of appealing to Irish and Anglo--Irish alike, was one of Ireland’s and Eire’s greater musical ambassadors of the 20th Century. He set down his own account of the origins of ‘the most lovely folksong in the world’, as a preface to a broadcast performance in Edwin Schneider’s arrangement. Londonderry Air.

Track Seven: Londonderry Air, Anon

In 1866, the first Irish Symphony was performed. It was written by a young man, twenty-three years old, part-Irish and part-Italian, the son of a bandsman, a former chorister at the Chapel Royal and Mendelssohn Scholar at the Royal Academy, and the possessor of both exquisite manners and a dashing, emotive style. It was the non-partisan product of a holiday in Northern Ireland made a couple of years before. Here is the Scherzo - as captivating in its first subject’s hopping from major to minor, and in its earnest but idealistic trio now as then. After a little bardic tuning-up, what a sprightly foreground and what a landscape in perspective in the alternating Allegretto oboe tune and deep-breathed moderato scalic theme; everywhere, cheeky or heartfelt harmonies! The young composer? Arthur, later Sir Arthur, Sullivan.

Track Eight: Irish Symphony, Sullivan

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was a middle-class Ulsterman. His Irish brogue was strong, but he was a typical artistic product of the Ascendancy, erudite, clear-minded and hard-working; music took over his life. He loved folksong, Loyalist or Nationalist, and became both a talented composer and superbly negative teacher, one, furthermore, who drew foremost European composers to Cambridge for doctorates. He was proof against Brahms’ sarcasm and got on well with Dvorak, Verdi and Boito, who actually turned up; coped with Tchaikovsky; knew how to handle Saint-Saens, Bruch or Grieg. He wrote voluminously; symphonic works, chamber-music, songs, large-scale choral pieces. His Irish Symphony (at least once conducted by Mahler) and six Irish Rhapsodies were influenced by the example of Dvorak, rather than Liszt. Much that he composed for the concert-hall went unpublished and achieved only one or a few performances. In spite of his caustic self-confidence, the coming of Elgar embittered him. All the same, he could write something like this - the Andante con moto, ma piu tranquillo of his Clarinet Concerto. Not one of his more self-conscious ‘Irish’ pieces, it owes something to Brahms’ late clarinet chamber works, but Brahms’ melodic style is not far removed from that of Irish Art--music’s idea of Irish folk-music, anyway.

Track Nine: Clarinet Concerto, Slow Movement, Stanford

A Catholic Irishman, Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty wrote a number of works based on folksongs or given folksong character. Born in the 1870s, he made his name as a pianist-accompanist in Ireland and England, His Irish Symphony is a beautiful piece. Back in the 1970s, a critic, writing in The Listener, opined that in it, “Poor Paddy thinks he's Mahler...”, thus demonstrating how far England had come in overcoming its prejudices about Irish culture seventy years on from when the Symphony was performed to acclamation at the Feis Ceoil Festival, having carried off first prize in the category of a Symphony built Dvorakishly on Irish airs. “The place of honour in the prize compositions must go to Mr Hamilton Harty’s symphony - a work of very great ability and one that displays a very remarkable knowledge of orchestration,” wrote the London-based Musical Times, in 1904. Using tunes such as The Croppy Boy; Avenging And Bright;The Blackberry Blossom; Jimin Mho Mhile Stor; The Girl I Left Behind Me and Boyne Water, this is Home Rule music. In the finale, The Boyne Water of Ulster collides with and falls away from an awe-inspiring reprise vision of Jimin Mho Mhile Stor. For the sake of the wearing of the green, and the sake of St Patrick, it’s tempting to play The Twelfth of July, but here is a treat of an Irish fife band playing in traditional parallel fifths, fiddlers, a good reel and some lovely touches of humour (and xylophone), the Symphony’s second movement: The Fair Day (a time of horse-trading, games and customary public order offences of many kinds). Moreover, the composer conducts in this recording of 1929. Here, Manchester’s Halle Orchestra play out of their skins, not only faster but also more vibrantly and characterfully than anyone has done since!

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme of Irish music was written and researched by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.

Here’s to Ireland, herself!

Track Ten: Irish Symphony, The Fair Day, Harty

Sadly, we were forced to omit Jigg - To Mr James Betagh and The Star of The County Down, owing to length. A second programme on Irish music has been recorded, including The Star of The County Down! The bulk of the line-up of this second programme is of Irish folk-music, Stanford's 1st Irish Rhapsody, and the finale of Moeran's Violin Concerto; all culminates in Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty's vividly heroic and beautiful tone-poem based on the poetry of the nationalist poet, Emily Lawless, With The Wild Geese.

Friday, 1 February 2013

2 & 3 February

CB Where The Rainbow Ends

Intro, Track One: Quilter - Where The Rainbow Ends Suite: 1. Rainbow Land

Track Two: Allan Gray: A Matter of Life and Death

Track Three: John Tavener - To A Child Dancing In The Wind

Track Four: Farnon - Pictures In The Fire.

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

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...

Track Seven: Rootham: The Stolen Child

Track Eight: Elgar – Owls, An Epitaph

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.

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

Thursday, 24 January 2013

26 & 27 January

Intro: In Freezing Winter Night, Britten

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is of winter music and was researched and written by Mike Burrows We have just heard In Freezing Winter Night from A Ceremony of Carols for three--part treble voices and harp by Benjamin Britten. This is Winter standing all about one: everywhere one looks, the frost bareness, a merciless beauty. Our earth is cold; yet the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul; we need never lose it. Wonder is in the frost whiteness as in the white fire of remote stars. Is this one’s everyday world? In awe, two boys’ voices move in canon, a third moving with the frost-feeling accompaniment. This music was written in a cabin on a neutral Swedish freighter crossing the Atlantic, as Britten returned tardily to Britain from the United States in 1942. Minus its generator-hum, a nearby refrigeration compartment perhaps aided his imagination... The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by winter: and yet, we have the Christmas story; this time of seeming frozen stasis is the illusion. If much sleeps or shivers, Spring is gathering its force under it all, merely in wait. From John Playford’s English Dancing Master of 1651, and words written later for broadsheet-sale, here’s All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away).

Track Two: All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away) Trad

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows. Its theme is Winter.

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was a lonely figure among the Generation of The Eighties - 1880s, that is. His style was personal: he was capable of close musical reasoning, a brilliant sense of instrumental colour in combination, but held to no one system of any aspect of music, save instinct. His music harks back to pastoral and courtly Italy, and forward into regions that are not for nostalgia or the musically faint-hearted.

It can be frankly illustrative of early music, birdsong, bells - or harsh, terse and distorted, and working progressions of thought through regardless of who can follow. Here is the fourth partita of his Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, which begins in chant and strict, four-part canon! It is in three movements, for this Sinfonia is in twelve subdivisions - one each for the zodiacal signs - and divided equally into four ‘Partite’ - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... The composer denied us the crutch of a detailed programme: what programme there was was, he said, not to be told. The Sinfonia was written in 1951. For its social context, the postwar period in Italy was a time of great bitterness, of the settlings of scores arising from the Fascist regime and its ruinous involvement in the Axis cause, an era of poverty, unemployment and the Marshall Plan. American aid in funds and food-parcels had as much to do with support for the Left in Italy as with the privations and sufferings of a defeated nation. In the 69 year-old Malipiero’s complex vision of Winter, there appears to be no place for hope, though there are moments of fleeting beauty and consonance. It The Partita and Sinfonia end in cruel, growling discord. Perhaps, as Thomas Hardy put it,

“If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’

Tracks Three to Five: Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, Winter, Malipiero

A near-contemporary of Caplet and Ravel, and taught by Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, Deodat De Severac was a composer of the Languedoc in Southern France. His output was largely of character--pieces descriptive of everyday life in this distinct region named after 1the language of its people, Oc. Here is a movement from his Georgic Suite, Le Chant De La Terre, or The Song of The Land. Les Semailles, The Sowings - of seed. In Winter, we think of - and look forward to - Spring.

Track Six: Le Chant De La Terre. Les Semailles, de Severac

To see a light moving on the ground in winter darkness is to wonder who carries it, where And why. It is one of the memorable images from long winter nights, when wits are sharpened and curiosity excited that much more strongly, or when we are tired and reflective, the cold slowing our minds so that we take time to watch and think. There can be thoughts of threat; who would be walking abroad on a night like this?

For the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lantern that moves along the night and that interests our eyes is the light of soul. In his late choral and orchestral work based on Hopkins’ poetry, Inscape,

Edmund Rubbra set this idiosyncratic sonnet in a nocturne of some gravity.

“Men go by me whom either beauty bright

In mould or mind or whatnot else makes rare.
They rain against our much -thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite...”

Hopkins cannot help them, ultimately as out of sight is out of mind; but Christ minds,

“Their ransom, their rescue, and first, last, fast friend.”

Rubbra’s setting seems, aptly, to grow out of chant; the harp has an important, though sparely speaking role, heard bell-like and intermittently against other sombre colours of accompaniment.

Track Seven: Inscape, 2nd Movt, Rubbra

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, I will Go With My Father A-Ploughing. The words are by the Irish poet, Joseph Campbell. There is a wild quality to melody and harmonies - in Gurney’s musical vocabulary, they could be Celtic or Northern: a similar quality informs his songs On Black Stitchel (a poem with Northumbrian setting), and The Fiddler of Dooney (setting Yeats). This song has a tragic significance. Gurney’s Father, a Gloucester tailor, was his hero, and had lately died; Dad, of all his relatives, had understood and admired his musical talent and ambition: he had died during Gurney’s troubles after discharge from the Army, before he had so much as seen his son’s music in print...

Track Eight: I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing

The poor are always with us, as the scriptures have it. For some, there is a simple explanation. However unwelcome their attentions, however greedy and cruel they become in pursuit of other people’s fair shares; however many lives are broken or ended to provide that last refinement of power and luxury - the rich, too, are always with us. A folksong now, a carol: Cold Winter is Come. Let’s not tolerate its message. ‘A time to remember the poor’ is an institution in default of refusing at any time to regard poverty as social justice. The person or persons who composed it have earned no posthumous fame, owing to his or their class. An enlightened professional recorded it in 1891, before it, too, could die.

Track Nine: Cold Winter Is Come, Trad

Here’s a sonnet on Winter, written and read by Mike Burrows:

Winter

What comes down on the world is not held back

By words, and protests remind of others –
Others when mankind was less far off-track,
That were demeaning enough. Earth mothers
The dead as well as she does the living –
If anything, hugs the dead with more ease,
The uncomplaining dead to whom giving
And taking go deep beneath clay and freeze.
Below the living root they have to lie:
The poor man lies below the conduit
Of available wealth, and his sad sigh
Or rage is a matter of unspirit
To the soulless for whom those sacrificed
Are dwarfed by wealth as by the tree of Christ.

That last sprinkle of gold dust on a one-k-snifter as the world goes bust is a particular pleasure and acquired taste. Local charity replaces the Welfare State,the poor have no cultural ambitions nor skills, no worthy hopes in life, only the dignity of work that they don’t choose. Off waltz public amenities and common humanity and the rich do rather well - 60 Billion last year alone added to the assets of a thousand people now ‘worth’ between them nearly £400 Billion... Those who cut, close and sell off our inheritance at will, and those who cost the country over £100 Billion pounds in lost tax-revenues each year, and Billions more in expropriation-contracts, evidently think winter smiles on local charity and ‘austerity’... The relevance to music in this is who writes, performs, criticizes and broadcasts the art-music of tomorrow? Who grows up sufficiently in this atmosphere of falsehood and denial to create or assist creation in a rich tradition of a thousand years, the phenomenon of mankind’s musical communicativeness? As music-charities scrabble for a scatter of pennies, children from less well-off backgrounds, it seems, have no entree and need not apply, as most outlets and institutions concerned in musical development close or raise their fees and we return to the days of the common man’s carol we have just heard - of two nations, two musics. A composer once watched people as they took their seats in one of our opera-houses and said, “Music starves, but the wealthy could live for months on the fat between their ears.” Let’s hear Winter Wakeneth All My Care from John Rutter’s choral song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment, When Icicles Hang.

Track Ten: Winter Wakeneth All My Care, Rutter

Here’s another song by Gurney. It sets a poem by Edward Thomas. Snow is a brief portrayal of a little girl’s thoughts as she plays in the snow. The little girl in question was the poet’s younger daughter, Mywanwy. A strange, dream-like epiphany of universal suffering is treated with fugitive strokes as in a sketch. The after-impression is of sensitivity and kindness: the human warmth that snow cannot pretermit. Gurney loved children and shared their games, preoccupations and humour with genuine enjoyment. Edward Thomas was a less certain companion, oversensitive, afraid of derision and often simply impatient; there is a stressed unease in his words: you might say that in his anxiety to be truthful and avoid sentimentality, he could not find the way back to being young. He would have been surprized and made sadder to know how his children loved and looked up to him...

Track Eleven: Snow, Gurney

From snow to The Snowdrop, a song for female choir and orchestra from 1909-10, by the late romantic Russian composer, Alexander Grechaninov.

Track Twelve: Snow-drop, Grechaninov

Born into a highly musical family in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Edward German began as a composer mainly of symphonic and orchestral works and incidental music for the theatre, but in middle life became a successful tunesmith in light opera, regarded as a successor to Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre. Rather dead-headed criticism by George Bernard Shaw and other commentators had deterred him from more ambitious work, suggesting that his style was too theatrical! The tragedy of German is very English. ‘Successful’, he wound up confessing, “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...” A scrap of paper found among his last effects stated, “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...” To put his real talents into perspective, it’s believed that Elgar enjoyed his music more than that of any other contemporary. The trick is to listen to what German composed: it is obvious that he was a progenitor of most of our tradition of ‘British Light Music’ in the 20th Century, but if the imitations are discounted, he can be heard as Elgar heard him, as a fresh, cosmopolitan voice influenced by French and Russian rather than Teutonic models. His sound owes something to his Welsh blood (and the Welsh hymn-tradition), and the Marchlands in which he grew up, but nothing to the music of British academicians. Written for the Leeds Festival in 1899, The Suite, The Seasons, is a Symphony in all but name. The finale, Winter, is written in sonata--form, and is a stirring juxtaposition of a solemn hymn and brilliant tarantella, developed and combined at the close with Tchaikovskian fervour; the movement’s qualities are not a million miles from those of early Sibelius.

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM. 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. Thanks go to associate producer, Miss Suvi Burrows, aged eight, who requested the Edward German! Goodbye!

Track Twelve: Winter from The Seasons, German

This script was edited and two pieces – Snow by Ivor Gurney and Snow-drop by Alexander Grechaninov – left out owing to lack of time! The sonnet was written while the programme was being put together and was retained.