16 & 17 February

Classical Break:  Richard

Track 1:  Twelve Little Pieces For Violin and Piano, Preambule, Parry

 

Hullo.   This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on British music was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  You have just heard The Preambule - To Gwen (Allegro) from Sir Hubert Parry’s Dvorak-tinged collection of Twelve Short Pieces For Violin And Piano of 1894.  Gwen was the younger of the forty-six years-old composer’s daughters.If calculated to please her, it must surely have succeeded! -  If it is a species of portrait, its hummable, out-of-doorsish but slightly distrait melody with odd asides shows Gwen in a very appealing light.

Now for an orchestral work of some topicality, thanks to recent events in a Leicester short-stay car-park....

The Shropshire-born composer, Edward German is remembered, if at all, for the faded comedy of light operas such as Merrie England and Tom Jones, but as an ambitious young man was highly successful in the field of Art-music - symphonies, overtures and orchestral music of a freshness and complexity admired by many colleagues, including Elgar.  Influenced by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and other non-Germanized continental lights, his style is one of contrasts, sombre fervency and lyrical grace, fleetness and strenuous, often sequential argument, seized-on triplets or other groupings of notes that sway backwards and forwards in the grip of drama, hushed passages and cymbal-capped points of tension.  The orchestration is bold but subtle in doublings.  Here is the Shakespearian Overture, Richard The Third.   

The fugal part of the development was subject to one of the Wagnerist George Bernard Shaw’s sillier shafts as a music-critic for the newspapers; he affected to think that  the fugal entries could have no other dramatic meaning than that numbers of little Richards  were leaping up from trapdoors to chase one-another around the stage.  In fact, this colourful and cogent Overture on the subject of Richard of York, brother of a king, magnate of the North, wicked usurper-uncle and last Plantagenet king, is more accomplished than the satire of German’s critic, to be seen as a character--study and curtain-raiser rather than a summary of the play.

 

Track 2:  Overture:  Richard The Third, German

 

Charles Wilfred Orr, born in Cheltenham, in 1893, the son of an Indian Army Captain of means, was educated until the age of fifteen at Cheltenham College, where the study of music was regarded as strictly extra-curricular.  After service in the Artists’ Rifles that saw him invalided out of the army with eczema before he could be posted to France, he cast around for a career until correspondence with Delius decided him on the profession of music.  He studied at the Guildhall School and seemed set on a life in London when ill-health enforced a return to Gloucestershire.  He moved to Painswick, where he lived a quiet life removed from metropolitan rivalries until his death in 1976.  His metier was song-writing, and every song has about it the quality of having been chosen out of personal necessity to express in musical terms the meaning found in the verses, the voice male, the piano unfolding strong but richly lyrical patterns in accompaniment and commentary.  Through Delius, Orr had met Peter Warlock, and the influence of Warlock - as of Warlock’s hero, Delius - on his work is clear. Chromaticism sighs under melodies shaped sensibly to the words set.  Rhythms rock gently throughout the more reflective examples, but monotony is avoided in matchless subtlety.  Here’s Orr’s setting of the Rossetti sonnet, a haunting evocation of Summer in the long grass, Silent Noon.  Written in 1921, it is very different from the famous, more numinous version by Vaughan Williams - soft, but not decadent, sensitive but fresh, sensuous but not cloyingly sensual.  Orr scoffed that the Vaughan Williams resembled too much a voluntary: one suspects that Warlock - instrumental in getting Orr’s song published - would have loved this haut-en-bas opinion on what Vaughan Williams himself would have thought love-music and nothing to do with church!  And perhaps Orr knew how to be on the right side of his friend’s satirical, anti--pastoral, anti-ecclesiastical streak.

Track 3:  Silent Noon, CW Orr

Three songs in contrasting moods by Gloucestershire’s finest song-writer, now.  Whilst a War-invalid in Edinburgh, Ivor Gurney, twenty-eight years old <actually twenty-seven,ed> fell in love with a nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond.  For a time he dreamed that he had found a soul-mate in this well--spoken, middle-class Edinburgh girl - she was actually a little older than he was - who showed interest in his abilities, as who wouldn’t!  He asked his sister to have his cap-badge gilded as a keepsake for her, and joked to a friend that Annie had money, something that he hadn’t known at first...  The romance fizzled out after he was discharged and posted to the shrammingly bleak depot at Seaton Delavel, on the Northeast coast, to prepare for a return to active service.  He was convinced that he wasn’t well, suffering from palpitations that he tried to steel himself against.  His father was sick with cancer of the stomach, and there seems to have been a séance held at which Gurney was present and perceived the spirit of Beethoven: -was this a practical joke got  up against him by mates who found him unworldly?  However unmaliciously the prank might have been intended, it would have destroyed his self-image as a scholar and artist capable of mucking in with the best.  What had his fellow-soldiers ever thought of him during his time with them, the men whom he had loved and those of them whom he mourned?  As to the true circumstances of the seance, during which Beethoven had favoured him, no-one will ever know.  (To add to the complexes arising, he came out of this strange meeting convinced that he was in telepathic communication with his father).  At any rate, just as all the cares of the world and soon-return to the Front were weighing on his shoulders, Miss Drummond ended an affair whose seriousness she may not entirely have realized, although Gurney was never less than forthright in relationships, ideation or cherished hopes. Four songs were written for this cool muse.  One of these, perhaps setting own words, is the beautiful, fey and verbally a little gauche Song of Silence.  Nothing more sweet and poignant has ever come of a hospital crush.

Track 4:  Song of Silence, Gurney

Our second song by Gurney is the irresistible Walking Song, setting  words by his friend, the poet from Minsterworth, FW Harvey, in delightful, throwaway manner fixing his love of his home-county and of the wooded hills outside Cheltenham, extolling Cranham ways, rather than the City!  Only the British can be so mildly riotous, and Gurney so wittily humorous?  As Principal at the RCM, Parry, whose music we heard at the outset of this programme, is said to have seen Gurney the entrance-candidate’s submitted manuscripts and been reminded of the hand of Schubert; seeing Gurney for the first time, he exclaimed, “Good God, it IS Schubert!”  Here’s Walking Song, by Ivor Gurney.

Track 5:  Walking Song , Gurney

For our third song by Gurney, here is Dreams of The Sea (words by WH Davies). In this smouldering, passionate piece, the lad who as a boy had lived not far from the exotic bustle of Commercial Road and port of Gloucester, expresses a love that never left him.  As a student in London, that lad wore habitually a reefer-jacket.  All his life, he admired sea-goers, explorers, wanderers over the oceans; his poetry shows what a gift he had for capturing the sea in all its moods - it matched him passion for passion and its salt depth and power as well as sight and sound entranced him (Baudelaire at Honfleur would’ve been one with him here) as invitation to a voyage.  If you have stood by the sea on a day of irresolute feeling that you projected onto the waves, you will sense every eidetic image in the intent vocal line and its various, yet mesmerizing harmonic and rhythmical piano-accompaniment. 

Track 6:  Dreams of The Sea, Gurney

Another graduate of the Royal College, For many years, Gustav Holst worked as music-teacher at the St Paul’s School For Girls in London, a perfect haven, this job, for a composer.  Amongst his most famous works were two sets of pieces for string orchestra, the St Paul’s Suite and Brook Green Suite, for performance by his pupils.  The second movement of the St Paul’s Suite, Ostinato, is highly characteristic of his technically brilliant but touchingly direct invention in these miniatures, as light as air, playful and wistful.  Perhaps he had the liveliness, hopes and unwitting poetry of the young girls in his charge in mind:  here, such qualities seem to be expressed in the flutter of textures, breathless harmonics and artlessness of the nursery rhyme-like melody.

Track 7:  St Paul’s Suite, Ostinato, Holst                                             

The opening flourishes - and a recurring motif of - Edward Gregson’s Symphonic Study for Brass Band, The Plantagenets owe something to the music for the wizard in Holst’s The Perfect Fool.  Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Symphony may be another ghost summoned up by play made with duple and triple rhythm.  Other moments later may remind of the dark chants and chomaticism of Ireland’s orchestral piece Legend.  To seek to express in musical material of adequate worth something of the character of England’s and Wales’ longest-reigning Royal dynasty in a single movement is a young man’s job, and Gregson was in his twenties when he wrote The Plantagenets.  A striding, all--purpose ‘swashbuckling’ theme is of its time - the 1970s - and less imposing, but soon broken up by cornet and trumpet fanfares and more lyrical strains based on ‘Holst’, slowed elements of the theme and ‘Ireland’.  The Holst flourish brings in a Waltonian fugato - reaching the gallop! -  and the reprise.  The close is curt, the bold bass-drum beats peremptory. This composer has rightly made a name for himself as a gifted and effective writer of brass-band music.

Track 8:  The Plantagenets, Gregson. 

To end our quodlibet, a work from the close of Sir Edward German’s composing life:  written for the Royal Academy of Music’s centenary in 1922 - the year in which Ivor Gurney was certified and removed to a mental hospital -  the Tone-picture for Orchestra, The Willow Song is a kind of developing fantasia on the old traditional song “A Poor Soul Sat Sighing’.  It represents something of a reaction against German’s ‘popular manner’, while retaining to the full his skills in orchestration, with varied use of woodwind and strings, including harp, and strong but controlled use of brass.  The falling fifth contained in the tune’s opening phrase becomes like a fate-motif.  The overall sound is recognizably German’s in the combination of instruments from different sections, particularly from strings and woodwind, and a sighing or soothing quality distantly Tchaikovskian but now more reminiscent of Elgar.  The Willow-song occurs in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello - Desdemona, the slandered young wife of the jealous moor sings it artlessly in her chamber shortly before he confronts and strangles her for her supposed infidelity.  As the fantasia dies away into a time more remote than Tchaikovsky or German’s hey-day, one wonders if this beautiful miniature is an obvious celebratory tribute to the college that he had attended as a young student. Its muted colours, intense atmosphere of grief and scarcely sublimated hurt are representative of a composer at the height of his powers, one who has won through to real vision and constructive skill, building on the objective donnée of a folk-song by an unknown author...  No bitterness, just hurt.    “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...”  “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...” 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Our programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you liked it and will join us again.

Goodbye!

Track Nine:  The Willow Song, German

 

Next week, we hope to broadcast and dicuss Ivor Gurney's very fine, newly recorded Violin Sonata in E-Flat, a work that was written in 1918, revized a little later and put on one side by both its composer and the musical world.  It's a 35 minute piece in 4 movements - by a craftsman once thought too ill-disciplined and woolly-minded to accomplish anything worthwhile apart from songs and piano miniatures.  Its style is infuenced by Parry, Elgar and Brahms, all of whom achieved masterpieces in the medium; Gurney's sonata is both his own and worthy of their company!  Don't miss! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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

© Mike Burrows 2/12

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.