2 & 3 March

Classical Break America 2

 

Intro:    Mardi Gras, Mississippi Suite, Ferde Grofé

 

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme has been researched and written by Mike Burrows, and presents an anthology of American music.  We have just heard Mardi Gras from Mississippi Suite, by Ferde Grofé (1892-1972), a New Yorker, pianist in the Paul Whiteman band, popular composer and master-arranger whose best-known work was in the field of ‘tone-painting’ descriptive of America; he was not perhaps a great composer, so much as one who had a gift for melody, effective harmony and lively, frankly colouristic scoring.  An American Straussian, he was of German extraction and studied for a short time in Leipzig.  Given his orchestral expertise, one should not be surprized that he accepted a friend’s challenge and wrote two pieces descriptive of a bicycle-pump, one entitled, Theme and Variations On Noises From A Garage.

 

Ned Rorem has combined a free-wheeling, frankly diarized private life with a career of composition, performance and teaching.  His short piece for strings, Pilgrims dates back to 1958 and takes as its inspiration a French novel Le Voyageur sur la Terre, about the suicide of an alienated teenager.  Its North-Western-trained composer wrote it in a day at the Macdowell Colony.  Its elegiac style is tonal, lyrical, easy to follow, austerely-scored but expressive, and fits its purpose, its scenario, perfectly - and poignantly.  Adolescent feelings run deep, and however naive, their sentiments deserve to be taken seriously by those who can no longer think uncompromized, but who respect their earnestness!  There are curious, fleeting after-echoes of the opening of Dvorak’s American Suite, and also, one may be reminded of the music of Aaron Copland.  Rorem was born in 1923 and has written many fine, accessible pieces for orchestra and chamber ensemble, but is best-known for his art-songs.  Like many American musicians, he spent time in Paris and something of Gallic expressiveness is found in his music - lightness is in no way to be regarded as flippancy or glibness.  Similar comes from the pen of a Dutilleux or Francaix.  We were all pilgrims.  For some, Earth, is the shrine.

 

Track One:  Pilgrims, Ned Rorem

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, I’m Rupert Kirkham and today’s programme is of American music.

 

Now, from New England, and from rural New England’s greatest composer, Charles Ives, comes a short piece of musical mayhem, the Overture And March 1776.  Originally written for theatre band, it is here performed in an arrangement for military band.  It is a devastating display of ‘taking off’ small town music - rhythmical disjunctness, mistaken notes and fragments of popular tunes, some anachronistic to the War of Independence, but de rigeur at celebrations of the epoch. It does as it should, ‘stretch the ears’.  Ives’ own father was town bandmaster and loved country music-making, wrong notes and all; in his experience, wrong notes, collision in the parts and late or early entries must have been an essential ingredient in performance!  Making music was the thing, and note-perfectness had nothing to do with it.  Fourth of July celebrations are not that polite!  Ives is not poking fun at bad musicians; he is sharing his experience of community-music with us - the absurdity is in our rigidly limited expectations of players and of music’s being, its life in itself.  We should remember that stereotypical performance of stereotypical music can be deadening, and that Washington’s was largely an army of amateurs but great fighters! 

 

Track Two:  Overture and March, 1776, Charles Ives

 

Samuel Barber (1910-81) was the composer of Symphonic, concertante, orchestral, chamber music and many songs.  He was one of the latest of late romantics and was not a follower of any school, preferring to permit the work of the moment to determine the style employed.  He is remembered today for one piece, his Adagio, originally a movement from a string quartet, but later arranged for string orchestra and for unaccompanied choir.  He did not enjoy the popularity of the Adagio:  typical of composers of one popular piece, his attitude was that it was not characteristic of his best and most deeply-felt work.  In his defence, the Adagio is a well-written, affecting piece and has come to represent America in mourning or America feeling the Pity of War, but it can sound deeply bogus.  Whether or not it is more characteristic of him than the Adagio, let’s hear the haunting Canzone for flute and piano, his own arrangement for flute and piano of the first section and coda of the slow movement of his Pulitzer-prize-winning Piano concerto of 1962.

 

Track Three: Canzone for flute and piano, Barber

 

The Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a gifted amateur musician.  He played the violin, guitar and harp and invented a variety of glass harmonica.  Here is a short work attributed to him - a String Quartet.  In five movements, Intrada Alla Breve, Menuetto, Capriccio, Menuetto, Siciliana, it is an object example of Eighteeth Century American chamber-music; like all but the most fashionable furniture of the time, this was characterful and rudimentary to a degree and often echoed European models of a pre-Classical era.  Throughout this brief suite of movements - for it is nothing more - the rasp and tang of the instruments - played on open strings - seem palpable, but the music is playful if unadventurous on the tonic and must have been (simple) fun to play.

 

Track Four-to-Nine:  String Quartet, Benjamin Franklin

 

A song commemorating an unknown soldier of the American Civil War, now.  From 1911, The Old Sword On the Wall, by HW Fairbank, was dedicated to the Union General, George H Thomas.

 

Track Ten:  The Old Sword On The Wall

 

The opera, Porgy and Bess, was the largest-scale work of the great George Gershwin, whose talents enabled him to accomplish art-music admired by Schoenberg, Ravel and others, his career having begun as a plugger or song-demonstrator in tin--pan alley.  A fine pianist as a boy, he enjoyed a career as a Broadway-composer, collaborating most successfully with his versifier-brother Ira, and did more than anyone to create non--improvized, orchestral jazz.  Porgy and Bess was his masterpiece, and grew out of musical theatre.  It burns with the same inspired, seemingly instinctive flame as his concert-music.  Cat-fish Row, where lame Porgy falls in love with Bess, kills a murderer for love of her; finds on being released from jail that she has left for New York, and sets out for the city, is no place for blacked up faces:  its mixture of numbers and recitative holds together elements of negro-music, work-songs, gospel, rag, lushly chromatic late-Romantic harmony and harsh dissonance.  Its first performance was given on Broadway, but its ambitions were very different.  For example,  Summertime is sung by a mother as the men play crap.  The character Sportin’ Life - one of his songs is It Aint Necessarily so - is a drug--dealer.  Sportin’ Life entices Bess to a life of drugs as well as the boat for New York.    Let’s hear Porgy’s Lament, Oh, Where’s My Bess, and the Finale of the opera - Oh, Lord, I’m On My Way.  

 

Track Eleven:  Porgy’s Lament and Finale, Gershwin  

 

God and Melville created whales.  Hollywood created the Western.  Jerome Moross created the Big Country.  There are many good film-scores for the films in which the United States took on outlaws, indians, Civil War renegades, Mexican bandidos, and won, latterly While being drenched in tomato ketchup, but, earlier, wearing corporate-style hairdos and streamlined Nineteen Fifties cowboy-garb, when a .45 slug hit home like heart-burn.  The Big Country, from 1958, boasted a big theme.  There is nothing to beat its impetus, its agog excitement and exhilarating orchestral sweep, with slowly swinging, striding bass and sectional, violin-unison-led melody developing by statement and reply.  The scoring is Russian and bold, the melody and harmonies could be those of a revivalist hymn.    

 

Track Twelve:  The Big Country, Moross

 

Only one composer wrote a Mount Saint Helens Symphony when the volcano exploded on the 19th May, 1980.  Alan Hovhaness (1911--2000) was an American of Scottish and Armenian extraction.  Immensely prolific, he wrote well over sixty symphonies, numerous concertante and large choral pieces. His work is characterized by strong, often chant-like melody, rich, modal or chromatic harmony and counterpoint, often on a massive scale.  His writing for hieratic brass and sonorous strings is matched by enchanting use of woodwind and pitched percussion.  One wonders where but in America his perspective, sense of space and large spirit might have grown.  Music flowed from him, occasioned by historical and even geophysical events, topography and the environment, the songs of the whale, the folk--musics, poetries and religions of East Asia, and polyphony of medieval and Reformation Europe. Its flavour is of ancientness, mystery, and worship of the sublime.  He was not universally admired by critics, and must have learned some synonyms for the words naive, fool and misguided, but his work seems to be gaining ground on the listening public’s regard. 

 

We hope to play the Mount St Helens Symphony some other time soon.  Today’s music by Hovhaness consists of the slow movement and scherzo of his Symphony Number 22, Opus 236, City of Light.  He said of this work, “I was thinking of a million lights, an imaginary city...”  The Largo is subtitled Angel of Light, a reference to a Christmas childhood experience of the composer’s.  The Allegretto Grazioso is based on themes from an opera that he had written while in high school, ‘Lotus--blossom’.  The work was commissioned for the centenary of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra of Alabama in 1971.

 

Tracks Thirteen and Fourteen:  Largo and Allegretto Grazioso, Symphony No 22, City of Light, Hovhaness

 

We can journey inside a whale thanks to Thomas Newman, a scion of the Newman dynasty of Hollywood film-composers.

This is his piece Haiku, drawn from his music for the Disney film, Finding Nemo, of 2003.  It exemplifies the minimalist style much used in Hollywood these days, but is beautiful in its trance-like lyricism.  Its roots are recognizably like those of Copland and Hovhaness.

The strings chant in flattened common chords and accompanied by more complex drum off-beats. 

Mysterious, comforting, it is like music of the womb.

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed our time in the Big Country and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

Track Fifteen:  Haiku from Finding Nemo, Thomas Newman

 

Postscript On HW Fairbank

Henry Waterman Fairbank was born on the 18/04/52 at Linden, Michigan, given his father’s names and mother, Harriet Waterman’s, maiden name.  He took a degree in music at Michigan State University and married in 1874.  He and his wife lived in Detroit throughout the 1880s and he was listed in census as a seller of instruments.  By the turn of the century, he had moved to the Chicago area and was a composer of Baptist hymns, patriotic pieces, songs, character-pieces for piano (such as a Mazourka Elegante dedicated ‘In Remembrance’ to Miss Mollie Bush of Newtown Pennsylvania), a highly respected choirmaster with the Chicago South Side Sunday Schools, and head of music at Chicago’s Normal College (a Ladies Teacher-training College).  As a choirmaster, he was capable of conducting choirs of 2-3000 girls and boys, his concerts attracting anything up to 4,000 listeners.  There is that about the informal journalistic descriptions of such concerts that one wishes one might have ‘been there’.  Hymns, patriotic songs, displays of virtuosity on the cornet or organ (on the organ, a Suppe overture, perhaps), and even a song-performance by a  4 yr old boy .  As a teacher, Fairbank became a much-loved figure, as one can tell from his obituary in the Normal College’s annual Year-book, the Emblem, 1925 Issue, given with portrait below.  He published his  work, such as The Old Sword on The Wall, through his own publishing company.  He died on 11/01/25, aged almost 73. As noticed in the Chicago Tribune, his wife took his body back to Linden for burial. 

 

My view of Fairbank has changed considerably through this information, got chiefly from kind friends of a friend on Facebook.  At first, I visualized a grizzled man in shirt-sleeves, trilby on back of head, cigar butt causing a more-than ordinary twist to sardonic lips and the near-permanent closure of one eye as he pounded out songs for Vaudeville – once in a while, this hard case had a rush of blood to the head and hopeful feeling in the wallet while perpetrating a commemorative song dedicated to Victims of The Late Disaster (whatever it was).  Somehow, this man had achieved The Old Sword on The Wall, certainly the best self-published song I have ever heard.  Maybe, he had stolen it from a brilliant young plugger who had come to less than nothing as a result.

 

After seeing utterly anomalous cuttings from a friend of a friend, I found The Emblem, 1919, on the Net.  This began with pages of portraits of some 70 teachers, which gives an idea of the scale of the very Gothic and sylvan-seeming  Normal College (quite a lovely Teutonic-Attican academy).  The first sight of HW Fairbank was dispiriting.  Could this phlegmatic, chubby-faced man be the composer?  I didn’t find it easy to believe, though I thought that he might have been confident, intelligent and energetic enough to conduct 1000s of youngsters in a concert – he looked so truly unSchumannian in physiognomy that I thought he would be a muscular enough Christian, too.

 

Then I noticed that the top corner of Fairbank’s page was missing, some of the Science-tutor’s title showing.  I flipped back the page.  Yes.  Head of Science. 

 

A fearsome face glared out from further down the Fairbank page next to a female tutor’s name and title.  Could Fairbank’s portrait have been displaced to rest there?  What a cruel joke for an unmissish teacher to endure down decades.   This bespectacled baleful scholar of lean jaw, thin, pursed lips and frown-marks might be intense enough to be a creative artist.  He was clean-shaven, his longer-on-top, slightly wavy hair well-brushed but mildly electric-looking.  This man could be a crusty don-like teacher, born in the same year of Professor Charles Villiers Stanford of Cambridge and the Royal College of Music and outliving the Irish academic basilisk by a short time. 

 

No. The fearsome face glared out through a hole.  Flipping back one or two pages, I found that the intense pedant was, in fact, Head of Geography.

 

I tried the Emblem of 1925 and found this:

 

 

 

  

This is the man who wrote a song of remembrance and reconciliation to an Unknown Officer fallen during  the war that had riven the United States in his boyhood.

 

I have to say that I like this portrait and the affectionate tribute more than any of my imaginative  leaps that fell flat.  I’d add that this looks like a composer and man who devoted his life not only to music but to people; for forty years fostering through integrity and humour not only learning and proficiency in his art, but also the happiness of his fellow man.  As such, he deserves respect over and above regard for a song, the only song of his that I have heard.  It is an inspired song, a real song for humanity however, and I so wish that someone out there would enable the public to hear many more of the works of this peculiarly modest artist, HW Fairbank:  I suspect that it would be worth their while to record, and worth ours, at last, to listen.  

 

Thanks, once again, to my informants!

 

Mike Burrows

23 & 24 February

Please note: Due to programming schedule pressure at Somer Valley FM and the introduction of the 'Listen Again' service (see opposite), this will be the last Sunday, 3pm transmission of Classical Break.

The programme will continue to be broadcast on Saturday mornings at 0900 and Sunday mornings at 0800, online and on air. If you miss one or you still want to listen at 3pm, you can get it at any time on the Somer Valley FM Listen Again service up to 3 weeks after the original broadcast on Saturday mornings at 9am.



Gurney

Below is the original script to this programme with slight additions.  Sadly, the opening and closing songs, Cotswold Choice and Goodnight To The Meadow had to be omitted on grounds of time. 

 Track 1:  Cotswold Choice, Sanders

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, takes its name from the song we have just heard, Cotswold Choice.  Evocation of  the Gloucestershire countryside is at its  heart, as at the hearts of its composers.

The song itself, written by John Sanders to a poem by Frank Mansell, is little more than a litany of Gloucestershire place-names.  Sanders was organist and choir-master at Gloucester Cathedral from 1967-1994.  His style here is what might be now described as ‘accessible’.  His strophic song’s melody may remind of the old tune, beloved of renaissance and later composers of passacaglie, La Folia.  The piano’s restraint in accompaniment heightens an impression of unworldly nostalgia.

 Now, an orchestral piece written in a spirit of Arts and Crafts pastoralism during the Nineteen Twenties by the young Gerald Finzi, Severn Rhapsody.  Inspired by the generation of artists that fought and in many cases died in the Great War – his own first teacher, Ernest Farrar, a pupil of Stanford, was killed in the Autumn of 1918 – Finzi avoided music college by – as he himself put it - picking the brains of composers and teachers such as Vaughan Williams and RO Morris.  After hearing his song, Sleep, he idolized but never met the greatest contemporary influence on him, the Gloucester poet and composer, Ivor Gurney.  Of independent means, in 1923, after a spell in London, he settled in Painswick, near Cheltenham, and waited for fitful inspiration to call by.

Named for the West Midlands’ great tidal river, Severn Rhapsody is headed by a superscription from the Cambridge-set Grantchester, by Rupert Brooke:  “...Oh, yet/ Stands the church clock at ten to three/And is there honey still for tea?”  It is a richly scored piece whose arch-structure owes much to the example of George Butterworth’s pre-War Shropshire Lad Rhapsody and  folk-song based  Idylls.   In one sense it is literally a tribute to Gurney, as  it seems based on one of his songs.  The Severn Meadows-like main theme is developed with resource but an almost Quakerish severity beyond Finzi’s years.  He was only 22 when it was written; he believed on sincerity and inspiration and counterpoint-generated form.  The cor anglais lends its reedy tone, and there is much doubling of woodwind, misalliances of higher and lower registers creating a deep, solid, yet elegiac sound.  The strings, particularly violins and violas, help create their effects, but when the  violins rise, they have a keen edge.  This is music whose slow-growing web entraps the mind.  In spite of the ironic-sounding superscription, its beauties are profound.  The work was dedicated to an artist, the aptly named Vera Somerfield.  It won its composer publication in the Carnegie Collection of British Music, an honour  shared by his hero.

Track 2:  Severn Rhapsody, Finzi  

On the death of Ivor Gurney’s violinist-friend and testatrix, Marion Scott,  his manuscripts reverted to his brother Ronald.  As the son who had taken over his father’s business of gentleman’s tailor whilst Ivor had been getting above himself, and who had not gone  mad from fear of radio-waves, he had no time for the ‘artistic’ productions of an utterly misguided lunatic:  all along, Ivor had lacked self-discipline and failed to hold down a job.   Gurney’s champions, now headed by Gerald Finzi as song-editor-in-chief, feared for the very survival of Ivor’s legacy.  Eventually, Ronald was prevailed upon to release the precious notebooks and scores, a huge corpus of poetry and music.  Joy, Gerald’s wife, carried them from the baffled brother’s home in a wheel-barrow.  There were hundreds of poems and songs, at least one choral work, two orchestral scores, at least 3 string quartets, several violin sonatas and piano sonatas all now kept in the Gurney Collection at Gloucester Central library.

It was long believed that Gurney was a disorganized miniaturist of almost accidental brilliance, a song- or piano-prelude-writer incapable of working on the larger scale owing to haphazard method and mental instability.  It had taken years to win acceptance for his songs, incidentally, although a few had been published in his lifetime, and he had won two Carnegie Awards with his song-cycles based on poetry by AE Housman, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland.  That he was brilliant should not be doubted.  Let’s hear a song written whilst on active service on the Western Front, to verses by his best friend, FW Harvey, and immortalizing his love of the Cotswolds, In Flanders.

Track 3:  In Flanders, Gurney

Committed to Barnwood Asylum outside Gloucester in September, 1922, then, after escape-attempts, to Dartford Mental Hospital in Kent, Gurney, though prey to many terrifying phobias, delusions and sullen despair at his institutionalization,  had gone on writing with clarity until 1926. In  his next to last book of poems, the defiantly entitled  Best Poems, he  may have referred directly to the main work  in our programme today, a violin sonata in E Flat.     

From the poem Sounds, inscribed in Best Poems:

Dear to the heart

Violin and piano sound a note apart,

The heart

Catches them, one alone on the high hills

And happy is known.

One note

Out of the limestone or rot

Of leaves,

When Autumn grieves –

The chalk,

Or tranquil meadows where the Abbey shows.

Out of these comes

The one note of Romance.

The single

Tone which sounds alone

The true secret

The heart’s thought with nothing does ever mingle.

Gloucester sounds third,

Chilterns has a word

Of Midland truth

In her beech woods smooth

Of trunk, leaves yet unstirred...

Let’s hear the Gurney Violin Sonata in E Flat; a work never performed publically in the composer’s lifetime and which has just been issued on CD.  It was begun at the Napsbury Hospital at St Albans, where Ivor was receiving treatment for what was described as Delayed Shell-shock.  He was delighted to find the next best thing to a cathedral nearby –St Albans Abbey.  Work began furiously in September 1918.  The piece was revised the following year.

It could not begin more insouciantly – and artfully.  A bells-like motif on piano is entered upon by a lyrical arabesque that leads in turn into a quicker  up-and-down passage of Brahmsian or Schumannian to-ing and fro-ing between violin and piano – the duo exchanging  imitative figures and wavering between major and minor; further rhythmical motifs are introduced, including a brief fanfare-like figure – a quiet rising scale on piano brings stillness:  a far vision, the sound of a quieter more distant ring of bells – seems to draw one away from the here and now, and in a development, the various fragments in the exposition are modified in abstract pitch-transformations and canons, a certain amount of baroque-like passagework.  The dutifulness of the procedures is actually fitting – and the bells return suddenly with a greater sense of mystery and the open air, the suggestion of a passing bell.  Is this the recapitulation?  The arabesque steals in and is followed by the quicker answering principle:  there is the sense that there is no traditional sonata-form resolution to their conversational  tussles.  The piano has its quiet ascending scale of tranquillity:  the bells return, again imaginatively altered – but as though nothing had interposed; with piano trill, a working up to the coda builds, the piano’s oppositional rising chords burning, retrospectively like a kind of carefully laid powder train.  There is no explosion, but logic has been served.  The bells console and the violin has a rising semitonal cadence.  This is a dry account of a piece of Sibelius-like plasticity of manner, complex instincts and feeling skill.  It is mysterious music, withholding secrets but not random, nor slack-minded.  A powerful intelligence and, indeed, charm are at work.    

Track 4:  Violin Sonata in E Flat, l Piu Allegro, Gurney

The second movement continues the evolution most delightfully – a private world of quiet happiness.  The piano proposes bell-like changes and then melody;  the violin continues the figuration pizzicato.  A Brahmsian broadening and deepening of things revives something of the first movement but leads back to the opening melody and figuration, and a brief close.   A snapshot of contented solitude, an inner song, scarcely 3 minutes in duration.  Gurney’s capacity for happiness, like that of many troubled people, was enviable and his by the way gift for expression means that we can share it.  Like Schumann, he was a man of charming warmth and sincerity, and understood the higher purpose of music to share the best of life with others.   Also, like Schumann, he recognised two forms of logic – equally valid – the formal logic of thematic development and the related logic of song or axiom, that finds its own shape on the moment – the moment caught on the wind, so to speak, and fixed by the universal effectiveness of outright, unique personal expression.  Thematically it is related to the matter of the previous movement and advances argument about in a form of sudden apercu owing to changed mood.  It is almost by the way in itself, yet a further delight is its place further along the road.  Gurney the  poet made frequent use of parentheses!

Track 5:  ll Scherzo, Andante Con Moto

The slow movement moves further.  It is the heart of the work, a lyrical meditation of subtle expressiveness, perhaps haunted faintly by Gurney’s own song, Sleep.  It is an arioso of Brahmsian formal integrity and shadowy mood – its chief motif questioning, an English Beethoven’s, “Must it be so?”  Sombre and halting measures bring us to tersely arpeggiated sequences of deeper pathos – achingly regretful, it seems, the piano accompanying the violin – or is it vice-versa?  A pianist, Gurney was capable of being an adept, unselfish chamber-music player, and knows how to divide his material.  The violin climbs higher and, over lugubrious piano-chords, seeks its angular way to resolution.  More luminous moments bring us back to where we began, and further elaborations.  Eventually, we are left with a final statement, dusk and – perhaps - the bells of the first movement. 

Track 6:  lll Lento

The questioning mood and its material continue into the finale as an introduction.  A free-wheeling rondo taken entirely on the wing in the style of Franck or, indeed, of Elgar in his slightly earlier-written Violin Sonata, is not Gurney’s way; the road is more tortuous, more  modulatory and in short periods worked together involutedly, with a possible cheeky reference to the Elgar in the midst of much else.  The piano provides much of the momentum, but not obtrusively.  There are moments of turbidity and keen held notes from the violin – references to the slow movement and earlier; when at last, the sorrows come down on us again, the impression of the sound of bells returns, with imitation,  and  is not halted-for long.  Again, violin and piano are equal and corresponding partners.  The movement works its way to the close, which is commendably curt – with something in the nature of a call-sign or Bachian four-note final statement on the violin, clinching the tonal plan; the piano is given the tonic note.  This figure, with tonic note, sounded on violin near the outset of the movement-proper and recurred – and, with all the joy of inspiration and musical logic, may seem to have evolved from its opening.  In fact, it occured in its final form, as regards pitch, 'by the way' in a brighter moment of the slow movement.  After a few listens, it may put one in mind of a persistent memory of birdsong – a memory that gees one up, to which storm or stress has no answer.

Track 7:  lV Introduction (Lento) – Allegro)

There’s an intensity of detail and yet something of the dynamism of landscape in the piece as a whole:  not a romantic nor far-fetched idea:  Gurney’s love of Brahms found room for an appreciation of the Autumnal colours and horizontal shape of the German master’s music – which reminded him often of Cotswold country.  A piece by his friend Herbert Howells called forth a similar response.  To Gurney, as to many hypersensitive musicians, the play of treble, alto and bass on the down or up signified light and darkness, colours and land-contours.  

The writing for the violin is grateful but not trilling nor self-consciously florid; the piano is a wonderful partner, with all the arrestingly strong or melting tone-colours one would expect of this composer.  With one point in three of the four movements - 2-4 - where it must double-stop, the violin, if no prima-donna, should be satisfied! 

Tonally, the movements are pitched in keys that form a single triad of C-minor; with room for a sense of travel in key and providing a source of satisfying tautness to the work as a whole.  The only movement to be pitched in C Minor, the relative minor in a work in E Flat, is the third, the heart of the work.  The second movement is in G Major, a third up from the E Flat-major of the first, the third movement a third down.  The second and third movements a strong perfect fifth apart from eachother; certainly they seem different in character, yet also to follow.  The return to E-Flat in the finale seems close but unlaboured.  This kind of tonal pattern may be Brahmsian.  In a piece filled with chromatic harmonic complexity, tonal certainties are like subliminal sign-posts to the listener.  

You can say that the Violin Sonata in E Flat doesn’t sound entirely characteristic of anyone you know; a more rewarding thought may be that no one else wrote a Violin Sonata quite like Ivor Gurney’s.  It is formally most impressive, but also displays a command second-to-none of the expressive side of the musical language.  It is mature; for a young composer, doubly so.  In another programme, we urged our listeners to prize the superb qualities of the Hamilton Harty Piano Quintet.  This work is finer, if anything.  It is a piece in which four movements discover endless shades of meaning in motifs and their horizontal and vertical possibilities in question, answer and combination, and in which inspiration, skill and pluck provide their possessor with the authority to personalize his approach to form.

He was appreciative of Sibelius and enjoyed the Finn’s String Quartet, Voces Intimae, Intimate Voices:  here, like Sibelius, at a difficult period in his life, he may have written an Intimate Voices of his own – those of the church-bells that had resounded throughout his childhood in Gloucester, perhaps.  The work was begun within earshot of the bells of St Albans Abbey.           

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We’ll leave you with another song by Ivor Gurney, setting Robert Graves, Goodnight To The Meadow.

Goodbye!

Track Eight:  Goodnight To The Meadow, Gurney

©  Mike Burrows and Rupert Kirkham, February 2013

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.