29 & 30 June

Another chance to hear this programme from June 2012!

CB  Cooler

Track 1: Sicilienne, Paradis

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax and think to - a near--hour of apparent idleness!  All you, the listener, require is the Summer, a comfortable chair and ice-cool drink.  Let music do the carrying.  

You have just heard a Sicilienne - a kind of dance in 6/8 rhythm by Maria-Therese Paradis, a woman-composer and keyboard-performer, blind from childhood, for whom Mozart wrote pieces.

The Prelude in D Flat, by Ivor Gurney shows no sign of having been written in the difficult times following his experiences as both private soldier and casualty in the Great War.

If anyone knew of the sufferings of people thought idle by materialists and so-called hard workers, it was Ivor Gurney.  Also, he enjoyed the consolations of music and poetry.  Their influence, however, consumed him.  For a time, he tried to hold down casual employment by day and work on his artistic occupations by night; this, along with depression and malnutrition perhaps cost him his reason.  He articulated suffering humanity but also a glorious idealism beyond bitterness in both music and poetry and prose.  His little-known Preludes for Piano are one of his most beautiful inspirations, in a style of refined but deepening harmony, the melodic line as subtle and true as those of an Elgar or Fauré.  Here is the delicate, greatly touching Prelude in D Flat.

Track 2:  Prelude in D-Flat, Ivor Gurney  

Next, a waltz from the days of ‘50s Austerity, by the American virtuoso mouth-organist, Larry Adler.  Genevieve, the story of vintage cars and skulduggery between friends on the London To Brighton Run is a good film, well directed and acted, but Adler provided its heart with his music!  It was not an easy score to write.  Yet the eponymous Darracq, and its Spyker-rival, their occupants and an escalating ordeal by British highways, museum-piece-cars and personal pride, are now inseparable from its delightful qualities...  Harmonica was an inspired choice of soloist; Adler’s melodies, his sly modulations and enharmonic shifts - and clever representation of cranking-up - are indelible  Who can think vintage-car--owners idle, if their labours of love and tussles are this happy--making for spectators ...?  Listen and hear!

Track 3:  Genevieve Waltz, Adler 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax - and think - to. 

Now, a short piece for voices and viols, in which the Flemish composer, Adrian Willaert arranges the song Lack of Silver:  love has cost a man all his silver, but he doesn’t mind - he has the love of his beloved.  Willaert was a master of counterpoint whose chansons were often built on existing tunes.  The skill in an accompaniment by strict canon (after-echo of the leading-note in an immediate successive part), to take one example, was much the true job of trained composers in the Sixteenth Century.  In six parts, the web spun is fascinating in itself, a reminder that technique is not necessarily meaningless discipline, but the making of music’s expressiveness, and of its liberating hypnotic hold on us.  A banal little verse is shown to be not so banal after all...  If a patron hears and chooses to pay his artist a little more... 

Track 4:  Faulte d’argent, Willaert

Edvard Grieg had many successors – Norwegian Art-music has proved one of the strongest traditions in all Western music since the mid-Nineteenth Century.  One predecessor was the fiddler, Ole Bull, who became an international celebrity from humble beginnings before Norway was much regarded for more than her scenery. Here is Bull’s most famous piece, an orchestral mood-picture of beauty - The Saeter-girl’s Sunday.  A saeter-girl herded cattle on a saeter or high mountain-meadow.  The life was hard and lonely, with a rough, turf-roofed hut to call one’s home, and frequent fog, rain and rough weather through Spring and  Summer.  Grieg’s later musical vision of Saeter-girls as ignorant, man-eating caricatures of valkyries came via Ibsen and Peer Gynt!  Bull allows his girl latitude for sentiment, and not from sanctimony but from knowledge.  His music is as passionate as any from quiet beginnings, humane and touching.

Track 5:  The Saeter-girl’s Sunday, Bull

A Royalist servant to the aristocracy, John Jenkins (1592-1678) is now best known for his pieces for consort of viols and other instruments, dances and fantasias, written for the entertainment of wealthy musical amateurs. He was a master of counterpoint in which a piece is generated by statement and successive entries modified by sequence (repetition of intervals at a higher or lower pitch, inversions - a figure played up-side-down - canons and imitations.  Let’s hear his Fantasia in C Minor, a grave little piece for viols supported by organ.  A piece like this invites the listener to look about one at less-than-severe surroundings unless the ear attends and follows.  There is beauty either way, even in the richest of old rooms.

Track 6 :  Fantasia in C Minor, John Jenkins

Next, a Song of The Seashell from Japan.  This popular song was  written by  Hideaki Yashima  (1915- ) and is played in an arrangement for flute and stringed instruments, including harp, by James Galway and the Tokyo String Orchestra.

Track 7:  Song of The Seashell, Yashima

What can we make of ourselves if we have no leisure to dream or remember and take stock of events, ourselves and others?  The Portuguese Canadian composer, John Estacio, wrote a three-movement work for orchestra, Variations On A Memory.  In this, the original theme of the variations is not stated in full until the finale.  The movements are named Era Uma Vez (Portuguese for Once Upon A Time), Red Letter Day and A Memory.  Their topics are his childhood home; Canada Day celebrations in Vancouver, and retrospection on such memories later, at a difficult stage in his life.  A description of public rejoicing and its resonances is flanked by personal reflections, a childhood world of folklore and a warm stove, and a gathering-together of what has made us.  There is an important piano--part in the orchestral textures, and Coplandesque use of strings and woodwind, the brass having their main outing during the more extroverted Red Letter Day.  The lyrical poignancy is Coplandesque, too, of diatonic simplicity and clashes created by the intervals of the basic scale, the space between the parts kept open at more expressive moments.  The Red Letter Day is aptly congested and contrapuntal in comparison with the angular but telling lyricism elsewhere.  Its part in nostalgia and finding integration is found at its central section.  One nice touch in scoring, a microtonal glissando on tubular bell, occurs towards the end of the first movement.     

Tracks 8-10:  Variations On A Memory, Eustacio 

Musicians are losers - they work harder than most, so that someone can say that there’s no money in what they’ve done (or so the speaker hopes, given his exertions to ensure that such is the case), or that anyone could do what they have done, if they had the mind.  Sometimes, however, the artist feels that he wouldn’t be anyone else for the world. 

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his own soul?”  What’s affluence, when you can deal in inspiration?

Pub music recorded 50 years ago, now.  Shave The Donkey, performed on two fiddles and a piano.  If the soul revolts, it is a fact that self-taught musicians keep music alive where those who have been trained are not to be found.  Better self-expression and humour than a machine playing sounds.

Track 11:  Shave The Donkey, Trad  

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, written when he was attending the Royal College of music. It is called, simply, Sleep, and comes from the famous cycle known by the sobriquet The Elizas - so-named as it consists of settings of Elizabethan poetry:  He was twenty-two when he wrote this masterpiece, his mind weary from overwork but not yet clouded by war and the deadening pattern of life imposed by resettlement in conditions of Post-Great War austerity.  Come, Sleep...   Vocal line and piano accompaniment are reminiscent of Purcell or other masters of the arioso-style; there is an objective transcendence of ordinary suffering that is the source of its infinitely touching pathos, undemonstrative, spare and dignified.  It is a song, a melody, its harmonic implications brought out in simple slow figuration on the piano.  Each verse rises in supplication, and dies away into that figuration.  It seems not only timeless, but a key to escaping sense of time.  Here, Sleep is performed with much feeling and intelligence by local singer, Becky Livesey, and pianist, Gay Pullom.  The performance was recorded at a lunchtime concert at St John’s Church, Midsomer Norton.

Track 12:  Sleep, Gurney

A pre-war fit of anxiety that had necessitated a short spell of rest in a village on the Severn was adduced by the military authorities as proof that Gurney’s mental state before joining up pre-disposed him to become unhinged. That for years they had entrusted him variously with a rifle, bayonet, grenades and Vickers-gun, and he had made good use of them in others’ eyes, was meaningless  to the entirely objective adjudicators.   The same shift was no doubt used with many sufferers from shell-shock and related physical problems, to reduce costs at the War Office.  He was awarded a half-pension and  left largely to support himself.  He was the son of a tailor and not of independent means.  Such  pieces as the Prelude we heard earlier or Sleep...: are they products of wool-gathering, of inutility to society?  Hardly.  But they earned their author next to nothing, and an artist was driven to madness by the necessity to find and keep employment.  A Socialist, Gurney wrote of the ‘Unemployment Shame’ that destroyed countless post-war lives, yet he found time to create thousands of poems, hundreds of songs, mood--pieces and larger works, some still to be deciphered for publication...  When inspired, his handwriting could be appalling! 

Would he now be working part-time in Tesco’s, to seem hard-working?  People like to think that they now give Gurney his due, but he died in 1937.  His due has to have been more than our being good chaps towards him, eighty or ninety years too late... 

The tremendous efforts of the composer and performer are such that music may prompt great thoughts in good people, people who doubt themselves, perhaps, in what they say and do. A local politician has pronounced that we cannot live our lives in cotton-wool, presumably because he has no idea what cotton-wool costs - and let’s not give the Coalition ideas.  But we can wrap ourselves in music as dreamers of dreams:  to imagine a better future for one-another.  Our artists and we, if we choose, are music-makers - and movers and shakers.  We may develop empathy for our fellow human--beings, sympathies, sincere wishes to share - as say, Gurney shared - for the health and happiness of others: -  how else can we hope for health and happiness ourselves? – and a logical egalitarianism with which truly to build a Big Society.  Insight makes contact with like minds, and like minds reciprocate to bring change!

Now, a dance by the Spanish pianist-composer, Enrique Granados, and orchestrated by the founder of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, De Grignon.  This piece, Andalucia, comes from the collection Danzas Espagnolas. It  displays engaging characteristics fashionable in a certain strain of nationalist music popularized in the late Nineteenth Century by composers as various as Tarrega, Breton, Chapi, a sultry, slightly Arabic-sounding dance with a nostalgic song-like theme as its pendant.  Music for a lazy but thoughtful moment.  And with it, we shall leave you.  This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye! 

Track 14:  Andalucia, Granados

©  Mike Burrows 06/12

28 & 29 September

Musicke In The Ayre:  Crafted Consonances

A timely repeat for our programme show-casing the talents of the early-music group, Musicke in the Ayre, in advance of their concert, Time Stands Still, at the Holburne Museum, Bath, on 22 October, at 13:10

 

 

Today’s Classical Break consists mostly of a sequence of recordings from a concert – Crafted Consonances - held in the Augustan gallery of the Holburne Museum.  This very enjoyable concert of early music was given on Sunday, February the 24^th, as part of a series, Painted Pomp’,  by Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, of the group, Musicke In The Ayre.  The music consisted mostly of lute- or viol-accompanied song by Elizabethan-born Jacobean composers.

In the deepened, almost animated presence of paintings by artists such as Gainsborough, Kauffmann, Zoffany, Ramsay  and others, one heard something of the readily communicable soul of music of a time earlier than the Age of Reason and balance.  One stepped further back still, to  a legendary time of heroic warriors, courtiers, poets and musicians; of circles of influence, conspiracy and patronage, when religion, conscience and philosophy ran in complex strata best kept hidden from spies and enemies; a time of fate and pastoral dreams written by urban politicians, personal fortunes worthy of Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s tragedies, comedies and romances,  inward and outward exploration, the passing of Gloriana and accession of the Stuart King James The First.

Music and poetry (unlike in the 18^th Century) fell into in the most natural and expressive relationship of moods of the moment.  Ancient voices sang of love and grief, declarations and mortality, in thrall to harmony; applause might have come from Bath’s Georgian and Regency heyday:  but at an historical hour, both voices – one voice, Helen Atkinson’s, that is – and applause were actually of our 21^st Century.  Music has always been in the air – and the soul of man and of his forebears and descendants will always be most potently expressed by it.  Its tremulous vibrations, in songs of life and the collective yet refined spirit, awake and converse with the world – the catgut and vocal cords are frail with distance and yet not only speak but reply to our silence;  there are no questions for us to answer.  Here are 40 minutes of this illumination:  Musick In The Ayre’s concert, Crafted Consonances.  Our thanks go to the performers, Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, whose talents are here properly enshrined, but are also aired frequently and to the same effect in York, Oxford and London.

 

CONCERT

 

A poem written by Mike Burrows from several rows back, on the day! -

 

At Music In The Ayre – A Crafted Consonance

          To Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani

 

The voice and lutes! – and let their sober song

Be of an unkindness and barren sorrow

Of my durance in this most cruel wrong

That will not hear unless I do borrow

Such voices of harmony that have sprung

From the hearts of her preferred men:  but still,

Delights freed from throats and frets made true strungTo Musicke In The Ayre - Crafted Consonances

Prove, man or instrument, we bear goodwill.

Such love as this let her so hear and find

Aright our truth of sincere expression –

And let us not languish, as to her mind

And heart our tones reach, and supercession

Comes not late, indeed, but when that it should,

As, moved, she meets our lowered state with all good.

(The Musician’s, or My Lord Essex’s, Fond Complaint -  The voice and lutes! and let their sober songBe of an unkindness and barren so wW    owWritten at the Holburne Museum, Sunday 24^th of FebruaryOf my durance in this most cruel wrong  That will not hear unless I do borrow2013)

That was Crafted Consonances - a concert given as part of the Season devoted to Jacobean music, Painted Pomp, held at the Holburne Museum, Bath,  earlier this year.  The performers were Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, two members of the early music group, Musicke In The Ayre.

Now, here are Edmund Rubbra’s Improvizations On Virginal Pieces By Giles Farnaby, For Orchestra, Op50.  These were written to offset costs of publishing Rubbra’s First Symphony!  They form a work that is, in fact, far from being a pot-boiler.  Farnaby (1560-1640), was born in Truro and died in London.  He composed, to a large extent, pieces for keyboard instruments – for performance in the stately home or town-house! – and, in contrast to this preoccupation - madrigals.  Much of his output is now held in the US.  Rubbra, a symphonist of the highest seriousness, and greatly inspired by the liturgical music  and polyphony of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Ages,  expanded Farnaby’s miniatures concinnately – that is, in a style appropriate to the originals – and orchestrated them with great care; his technique creating a palette of great beauty; these affectionate part-recompositions are deeply expressive, their moods ranging from the playful and capricious, to the wistful and grave.The scoring favours high to alto woodwind and the middle register of the string section (the violas lend dignity and an austere quality to more solemn measures).  The brass are light and mildly riotous or more sombre.

 Rubbra permitted himself the greatest freedom in treating the penultimate and last pieces, Loth to Depart and Tell me, Daphne, as these were popular songs arranged by Farnaby, rather than original works.  The names of the  movements are:  Farnaby’s Conceit,His Dreame, His Humour, Loth To depart, Tell me, Daphne.

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s number was researched by Mike Burrows, and we wish to thank Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani of Musicke In The Ayre for the beautiful performance-material from their concert at the Holburne Museum earlier this year, which formed the major part of our programme.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

 

Improvisations On Virginal Pieces by Giles Farnaby, Op 50, Rubbra    

8 & 9 June: Shakespeare

Classical Break:  Shakespeare

             This is a repeat from 2010!

Hullo, this is Classical Break, and I’m Mike Burrows.

 

Today on Classical Break we shall be hearing works inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, and we start with the concert overture  Julius Caesar by the German composer, Robert Schumann.  This year, in fact a few days ago, was the bicentenary of Schumann’s birth in Saxony on June the 8th, 1810.  He died at the Endenich Hospital outside Bonn on July the 29th, 1856.  Julius Caesar was written in 1851 and is intended to evoke the splendour of Caesar’s career and the vain masterfulness of his nature, as portrayed by Shakespeare, rather than actual scenes from the play.  The fact of Caesar’s assassination is turned around by a coda in the major.  Some have said that this piece could be about any tragic hero; how does it evoke Caesar or Ancient Rome, Circa 44BC?!

 

Track One:  Julius Caesar (Robert Schumann)

 

Perhaps he should have called it A Hero’s Life, and thus confounded our more literal-minded critics!  This is a very German Caesar - a Rhineland Caesar.  Though never of the extreme Nationalist tendency, Schumann was very conscious of his Germanness and desired to make German music.  For the rest, as in all his character studies, he identified with the figure portrayed. Here, in its monumental but unWagner-like scoring - some tricky parts for valved brass instruments and violins, a warm, glowing woodwind palette softening their effects - a strong bass and stubborn dotted rhythms - Schumann created a kaleidoscopic work of nobility and real determination - well worthy of Shakespeare, or Caesar!

 

Julius Caesar has been described as magnificently aggressive!  Schumann was forty-one when he wrote it, starting out on a new career as Kapellmeister at Dusseldorf.  His first year in his position - from 1850-1 was successful; this piece was written with his work with the orchestra in mind.  In music, he could feel with a conqueror:  in life...it was not to be. 

 

When a patient at Endenich, the Overture may have been the last music that he played with another - the young Brahms visited and they performed it together in its piano-duet-arrangement.  Poignantly, Brahms remarked later that Schumann confessed to being out of practice.         

 

This is Classical Break and Somer Valley Radio, and I’m Mike Burrows.  We’re hearing music inspired by the plays of Shakespeare.

 

For our second piece I have chosen music by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, born in 1865, who again came to Shakespeare surprizingly late in his career, most substantially when he was asked to write incidental music for a prestigious Copenhagen production of The Tempest.  Overall, this music seems to me quite possibly the greatest expression in music of Shakespeare’s magic and romance.  As the entire score lasts just under an hour, it was extremely difficult to choose a number from it; many of them last under two minutes, some only a matter of a few seconds, but all are miracles of economical expression and character.  Others have written striking music to The Tempest, composers as diverse in time and style as Purcell, Tchaikovsky and Frank Martin, but to me, Sibelius simply comes closest to realising the Shakespearian interplay between the magic of elementals and the warmth of human love and anger.  My excerpt comes from Scene Two Act Two, The Oak Tree:  the Spirit of the Air contemplates the punishment of being imprisoned in an oak tree as threatened by his master, Prospero the magician.  Sibelius wrote extensively for symbolist plays by Finnish, Swedish and French dramatists and writes here in a similar, infinitely subtle, terse and uncanny strain.

 

Track Two:  The Oak Tree (Sibelius)

 

My next piece is the song from As you like it:  It was a lover and his lass, and this was the work of Thomas Morley, whose dates are 1557-1602.  He was the organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.  He and Shakespeare were neighbours for a time and his would have been the tune used in contemporary performances of the play. 

 

Track Three:  It was a lover and his lass (Morley)

 

Now we move on to the music of Sir Edward Elgar, who lived from 1857-1934 and was born and died in Worcestershire.  Falstaff, A Symphonic Study, dates from 1913.  This tone poem portrays the famous character from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V as opposed to the Falstaff of the Merry Wives of Windsor.  A complexly comic figure, this man, a Knight, has lived out the end of his life in the stews of London trying to maintain a riotous pace in the company of the young Prince Hal and his more fashionable companion, Poins, and the common folk of the tavern, figures such as Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol. 

 

Like Shakespeare’s prose, Elgar makes the most of his larger-than-life personality.  Latter Spring, All-hallown Summer.  We shall hear the death-bed scene at the very end of a highly eventful score.

 

The old King has died; his son, whom Falstaff thought his friend is now Henry the Fifth, and has banished Falstaff and his Eastcheapers, commanding them sharply never again to come near his person on pain of death.  We are with the old Knight - perhaps we are he - in his last, slowly lapsing moments when, stricken by flux, ‘he babbles o’ green fields’, drifting in and out of consciousness, the thematic material not merely pathetically descriptive of his state but recalling former times. The violin-slide at the start is like a bed-curtain lifted.  We hear him stirring, his deep, unsteady voice rising out of the murk he feels about him.  A soft music seems like echoes of the orchard or childhood.  Mistress Quickly is recognised dimly, he hears her, not so shrilly as during the rest of the tone-poem...  Softly, very fondly, there is a full statement of the Prince’s theme, the strings leading it.  All seems to drift away.    Falstaff tries to respond, but sinks deeper.  At last, listen for the clarinet - beautifully despairing and swooning, a brass C-major cadence - and a leap, brazen and with side-drum - the old man starts up for the King, all Hal’s humanity has been purged away, his title, perhaps, is a last cry - before a still more abrupt, pianissimo, pizzicato chord tells us that he falls back, dead.  A terrible war was about to change Elgar and the world forever.

 

Track Four:  Falstaff (Elgar)

 

And now, we're going to hear Watchman’s Song by Edvard Grieg, who was born in Bergen in Norway in 1843 and died in hospital in Oslo in 1907.  Watchman’s Song comes from the first book of Lyric Pieces for piano.  He wrote ten books of these genre pieces. They were extremely popular in the Nineteenth Century and more than once, Grieg bewailed the popularity of his simple music for amateur performance, on one occasion, writing that itwasn’t his fault that his music was played in third-rate restaurants and by schoolgirls.  It was his misfortune, no-one else’s, it has to be said.  Every time he mailed the later books, his publishers, on receipt, raised a flag on top of their buildings!  This music was written in Copenhagen, not long after he had left the Leipzig Conservatoire.  It owes much to the character pieces of Schumann.  The watchman is the porter in Macbeth.  The central section, comprised chiefly of little scale figures perhaps suggests the man’s superstition and...things that go bump in the night.  For such a short piece, Watchman’s Song is very effective and memorable. 

 

Track Five:  Watchman’s Song (Grieg)

 

That was Watchman’s Song.  At the age of three I listened as my mum played it.  Either you grow up with music like this or it grows up with you. Grieg loved his country’s folk-tunes but was also one of the most exciting harmonists in Nineteenth Century music.  Throughout his career showed that it was possible to use harmony to create a size in music alike to Wagner on a miniature scale.  It may be because of this and because he was extraordinarily gifted at paring back his style that he remains one of the more consistently fresh voices in music. 

 

Our next piece is an overture to The Taming of the Shrew by the Liverpool composer, Alfred Reynolds, who was born in 1884, and died as recently as 1969.  This work is about as far as you can imagine from Kiss Me Kate and belongs to what is known as the British Light Music tradition - which in practice often used to mean warmed-over Sullivan.  This is much much better than that!  It is a lively, brightly-scored piece and has a poignant humour about it that makes me wish it were much better known.  It was composed for a 1927 production at the Lyric Theatre.  Reynolds worked chiefly as a conductor and composer for the theatres of London.

 

Track Six:  Overture, The Taming of the Shrew (Reynolds)

 

Gerald Finzi was born in 1901 and died in 1956.  He was a musician quite different from Reynolds. One of the more self-critical and anxious of composers, he wrote in the traditions of the folksong/pastoral school of British music.   Like all the best of such composers he  was not over-indebted to existing melodies. Like many driven artists, he had other interests to fall back on. Besides building a wonderful library of contemporary poetry - he was a superb song-writer - he planted an orchard of rare strains of British apple in the garden of his farmhouse at Ashmansworth in Berkshire.  He refused to make his living from professional music-making or, for most of his career, from teaching.  He did not solicit commissions, either, believing that inspired music was the only music worth writing.  Inspiration was fitful and it was only towards the end of his life that he produced works on a large scale.  Here is a song from the cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, which was written between 1929 and 1942, the year in which he wrote O Mistress Mine, from Twelth Night. 

 

Track Seven:  O Mistress Mine (Finzi)

 

Back to Sibelius:  a setting of Come Away, Death (from Cymbeline) in Swedish translation.  It is one of two settings of songs from Shakespeare, the other being When that I was and a little tiny boy.  Sibelius wrote these two songs at the age of forty-four and living with the threat of throat cancer.  On this recording the soloist is the great and versatile soprano, Kirsten Flagstad.  Her performances of Sibelius songs with orchestral accompaniment date from near the close of her long career.  The music looks forward to the mysteriousness, rich technique and emotional appeal of the music for The Tempest. 

 

We return to The Tempest for a part-song by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), whose gift for ‘magic’ ranks with that of Sibelius.  Of the Three Shakespeare Songs we are going to hear Full Fathom Five.  This was written to a commission associated with the Festival of Britain in 1951.  Vaughan Williams - it was always Vaughan Williams, not Williams - refused the commission, then changed his mind.  He sent them these songs with the words “Here are the three Shakespeare settings, do what you like with them.”  This wasn’t the spleen of a famous composer put on the spot but his habitual attitude of modesty towards his own productions.  You may remember that he said of his devastating Fourth Symphony that he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it was what he had meant at the time! 

 

Track Eight:  Full Fathom Five (Vaughan Williams)

 

Vaughan Williams wrote a piece for brass band descriptive of the Battle of Agincourt.  In it he employed two of the tunes that were used also by Sir William Walton in his soundtrack for Sir Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V.  This music, written in the middle of a war whose outcome was becoming more certain and on which far more depended than it had on Henry V and his band of brothers, is one of the finest achievements in not only patriotic British music but also art-music as a whole.  I choose to end this programme, then, with two pieces from the later stages of the film, the Battle of Agincourt and the Agincourt Song.  The means of describing battle are little different from those of say, Prokofiev’s portrayal of Alexander Nevsky’s defeat of the  Teutonic knights in the Battle on the Ice (also written for a film), but the music remains terse.

 

Track Nine:  The Battle of Agincourt (Walton)

 

The Agincourt Song rises in full glory of choir, brass and strings in-filling.  It is grandeur on the greatest scale, though within short duration.  It has much to do with who we might be and nothing to do with football! 

 

You have been listening to Classical Break from Somer Valley Radio, and this is Mike Burrows.  Hope to have your company again, soon.

 

Track Ten:  The Agincourt Song (Walton)

 

© Mike Burrows 2010

 

 

 

 

 

1 & 2 June

(This is a repeat from August 2012)

Chamber Music by Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty (1879-1941)

Intro Track:  The Star of The County Down

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  This week’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  To begin the programme, we have a re-discovery lately recorded:  the Piano Quintet of the twenty-four years--old Herbert Hamilton Harty.  It was first performed in its entirety in 1906, two years after it had won him First Prize in a small privately-endowed competition arranged by a wealthy London socialite. 

Between early days as an accompanist, an organist, pianist and violist in the County Down and Dublin of the ‘Nineties, and 1904, by which time he had settled well after emigrating to London, Harty produced a series of chamber works, a Violin Sonata, two String Quartets and this Quintet.  He won a prize for a String Quartet at the Feis Coeil in Dublin at the turn of the Century, which helped to smoothe his path in London. 

The Piano Quintet in F Major begins with a movement in sonata form marked simply, Allegro.  A rather crabbed Brahmsian flourish is responsible for most of the material that follows, a strikingly stressful First Group succeeded by the traditional feminine contrast, a tune whose scotch snaps are Irish in origin, and whose influence briefly mellows the impassioned music of the outset before providing the piano with the opportunity of more large, sonorous chords.  The development begins with more subtle contrasts of string sound and piano timbres, the parts skilfully interwoven in counterpoint; the viola is conspicuous as the music dies down and slows for the recapitulation to come in and be made to seem more reflective between fits of gustiness. 

The second subject is given beautiful full sonority on piano and diminished note-value decoration underneath, and a triumphant climax - quietness on viola again sounds and the flourish ends this brilliantly fluent movement.

Track One:  Allegro

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  The prize for the Piano Quintet and another award at the Feis Coeil for an Irish Symphony in 1904, brought Harty some fame as a composer, but he was to be known to posterity for other skills.  As a pianist-accompanist to singers - including his wife for some time, the soprano, Agnes Nicholls, as a formidable conductor of the LSO and Halle Orchestras, and as an arranger of other men’s music, he was seen for what he was.  As a composer, ambition drove him, but was not fulfilled. On the evidence of his actual compositions, this has been a great loss to the concert-going public.  This man, who was not an alumnus of a London music college, was possibly as gifted a composer as any Briton working at the time.  Fame enourages true genius to develop:  like so many other gifted provincials in this country, he was denied what would have been a far preferable destiny.

To return to the Piano Quintet:  after a dramatic, well-set-up opening movement in sonata-form, contrast is called-for: a Scherzo, in fact.  Marked Vivace, it is like a Brahms intermezzo, and also sports a neat jig-rhythm in tribute, perhaps, to an Irish muse. If it begins a little nervously as well as skittishly, it soon opens out in piano arpeggios and slurred lyricism for the violin and viola in particular.  Harty evidently likes the effect of darting pizzicati, also.   The piano has a delightful treble chuckling downward scale figure.  Shifts between major and minor increase the charm of this movement.  Contrasts are subtle - this is no workaday scherzo with trio - and it ends circularly in the lightest and abruptest of fashions. What one should not miss amid the banter is the cunning of Harty’s skill in cyclical variation - this movement is a further development of thematic, rhythmical and harmonic elements of the Allegro; the motto flourish haunts it.  

Track 2: Vivace

The motto-theme, smoothed, is present  in the third movement.  This masterpiece, marked Lento, is solemn, but gloriously feeling and lyrical, beginning in violin, viola and cello-tone.  A yearning melody grows in large chords on piano, rolling itself out and accompanied by counterpoint, and dies away into a crescendo in sequences; this is a striking foretaste of the Elgar Piano Quintet of 1918.  It dies away in smouldering ‘Irish’ manner - only to begin to rise again, with the violins in unison.  The most passionate material in this movement arises:  repose always regathers itself here, in order to deliver a stronger message of loss or longing.  Again, the apparition passes - it seems like an apparition, and fades in shadows of tremolando on cello in particular.  A further rise returns us to the Irish dying fall.  A strong unisonal, chordal, tremolando and trilled climax and one is left in peace and the close.

Track 3:  Lento

The finale is a rondo, Allegro con Brio.  It is as glorious in its own fashion as the other movements.  It hints at every turn to the other movements’ material, too.  The clever counterpoint of canons, imitations, diminutions and augmentations and colourful interplay between instruments are as ever merely a means to expressive power, in this case, fervent happiness and a contrasting melancholy. An inspired, exciting fragment of melody succeeds the exultant stamping opening, and there’s something of a reprise of the opening section.  A more mysterious segment following, derived from subsidiary phrases, is carried into cheerfulness, only to be reasserted by viola and violin, courting scalic responses from the piano.  The piano is the author of much of the sanguine or humorous tone of this music, but its quicksilver runs - which impel jogging cello pizzicati, do not prevent the stubbornly shadier bowed sounds of the strings - led by the lovely but melancholy solo viola - from developing into a brown study, the poetic core of this movement:  Irish Brahms, but perhaps more spontaneous.  The brown study harks back craftily to the slow movement!  The happier material rises up out of this, the first subject and its inspired pendant striding out again, the piano either playing block chords or arpeggiating.  The quicksilver runs bring back a more cheerful viola and cello amid stirring textures and all builds to a confident, succinct climax;  the brown study music returns in a typical change in character through change in tempo  - appropriately, it now hustles the Quintet to a close, accompanied at last with a Brahms-like downward glissando on piano.  This is an unstoppable finale, superbly proud and optimistic, with genuine deep shadows to contend with.    

   

Track 4:  Allegro Con Brio

Harty’s Piano Quintet in F Major was performed in full once and once only, at a function held at the Langham Hotel....

The prize that this splendid score attracted, the in-those-days large sum of £50 - was awarded to the young composer by  Benno Schonberger - a pianist - and Frederic Cowen and Alexander Mackenzie, two eminent composers.  Why it went unpublished and dropped out of sight or sound for 106 years is a mystery.  Judged as music, It comes perilously close to perfection in all respects.  Its loss to the concert-hall then and later was a dunderheaded, very British tragedy.  Did Paddy think he was Brahms?

Three Pieces for oboe and piano date from 1911, and were first performed in orchestral dress at a Wood Promenade-concert in that year.  These are character-pieces in a Romantic tradition that reaches as far back as Robert Schumann.  In a ternary form - a first subject with contrasting material - all three display lively invention and skilful workmanship which, although operating at a lower artistic level than the Piano Quintet, are unforeseeably evocative and touching.  Here is the first, entitled:  Chansonette: Andante con moto.

Track 5:  Chansonette: Andante con moto,

Here is the second of Harty’s Three Pieces for oboe and piano. Orientale: Grazioso e con moto. ‘Orientalism’ was a long-lasting fashion in European concert and domestic music.  The same clichés did duty  for ‘Turkish’, ‘Arabic’, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Japanese’.  Harty’s Eastern music is not thorough-going, Irish turns occurring even here.  Perhaps by Eastern, he meant London or Paris, rather than County Down or Dublin...  There is a witty middle part.

Track 6:  Orientale: Grazioso e con moto

Last of these engaging miniatures is a pastoral, A la Campagne:  Lento ma non troppo.  Interestingly, when Harty devized a book-plate for his library, he took two bars from A La Campagne to accompany a picture of a shepherd playing a pipe.  It may be the most inward-turned movement of the suite.

If the orchestral version of Three Pieces is vividly colourful, the duo arrangement permits one to enjoy the work’s rhythmical qualities and the melodic contours in higher relief, as well as a more intimate mode of address.  What will be noticed -along with the big reach needed by any accompanist - is the very musicianly balance in the oboe and piano-parts - tact, given that Harty was a full-blooded pianist!  

  

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 that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!