24 & 25 August

Another chance to hear our programme on Andalusia!


Classical Break:  Andalusia

 

Track one:  Los Pacos Els Pacos, Vincente Perez LLedo

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s music is from Spanish composers attracted to the theme of Granada and the region of Andalusia.  You have just heard Los Pacos Els Pacos, a festive ‘Moorish’ March associated with Christian Spain’s age-old driving out of its borders of the Arabian and Moroccan invader.  The composer was Vincente Perez Lledo.  The performers are the Sociedad Musica “La Alianza” de Muchamel (a town near Alicante).  The  timbre of the trumpets possesses the almost explosively effortful vibrato common to much of Spain.

 

They came to Andalusia, the Southern Kingdom of Spain, in force,  in  811AD:  the Moors of North Africa.  Their influence did not end with the Catholic reconquest of the Kingdom in 1492, when joint rulers of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella passed laws requiring Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave.  Andalusia had been occupied for over 6 centuries, and had been a place of trade with the whole of the Mediterranean for far longer than that.  The influence of North Africa and the Middle East was strong (incidentally, Sephardism was almost as important as Islam, before the Inquisition closed in), and Andalusians have been suspected of divided loyalties as well as a people of great cultural fascination for poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, proud and distinct. 

 

Spanish music has often been aped by Germans, Russians, Frenchmen,  Englishmen; it was á la mode throughout the 19^th Century, and - via South America to some extent - added to the melting-pot of popular music in the 20^th.  Frequently, just as Hungarian and zigeuner sounds have been confused, so Andalusian music  has coloured our idea of Spanish music plus non ultra standing for music of the other just as distinct regions.  Many of the catchy rhythmical patterns of what we take to be Spanish music originated in Moorish and Gypsified Andalusia.  Zapateados, Sevillanas, Alegrias, Bulerias, Tarantas, Malaguenas, Polos – many, flamenco steps - belong to the Andalusians, to a limestone-rocky, mountainous country of tropical vegetation that is lush near water, dusty and barren elsewhere, a land of cities such as Granada, Malaga, Alicante, Seville, and of villages perched on vertiginous slopes connected by high bridges or steep, dusty tracks, where water must be carried from a spring-head.  A land of religious processions, ferias, corrida, municipal bands, and folk-musicians. 

 

Here is a typical example of ‘Moorish’ Romantic-Nationalist music, a dance written by Enrique Granados (1867-1916), one of his Danzas Espagnolas.  It contrasts dusky, almost stealthy measures and a simple lilting and extremely touching song-theme developed from them.  The dance was composed for piano-solo.  Here, Edouado Fernandez plays his arrangement of it for guitar.      

 

Track 2:  Andaluza, No 5, from Danzas Espagnolas, Granados

 

Above Granada stands a monastery.  By an irony that suits the occasion, the water of the fountains, waterfalls and pools of the celebrated and most lavish Moorish palace in Spain, the Alhambra, is ducted from its spring.  Let’s hear some characteristic Gregorian chant from the Mass.  Gloria.

 

Track 3:  Gloria

 

The Andalusian School of music of the Moors was just one loss to Spain brought about by the reconquest of Andalusia.  Arabian music derives much of its hypnotic quality from short, self-repeating phrases and a firm, regular beat emphasized by percussion.  The vocalist or pipe-soloist is encouraged to perform straight or embellish a simple line above a bare instrumental background of sparse harmony.  The Sufic style that originally inspired Dervishes to entranced worship remained to colour Christian Andalusian hymns, secular songs and dances, and performance practices.  For ourselves, here in the 21^st Century, we may feel ourselves to be in realms of psychedelia – though not those of the contemporary Costa Del Sol.  Here’s the anonymous hymn to Allah, Jalla Man.   

 

Track 4:  Jalla Man, the traditional Andalusian School

 

Flamenco-toque is a busy style of guitar-playing associated with Andalusia.  Its origins are said to be in Moorish and gipsy wedding-dances.  The costumes are bright and fussy, the dance-steps complex, the intensity of displays is known throughout the world, but, even in Andalusia, not always as is claimed to be authentic!  Fandango, for instance, a form imposing accelerando and crescendo, may be a South American import.   A famous gipsy family perform flamenco at inhabited caves not far from the famous Moorish Alhambra and Generaliffe palaces of Granada.  Of the Alhambra, more anon!  Flamenco takes many forms, some sung; in the case of the Tangos, which is emphatically not to be associated with the Argentinian dance, it is traditionally built on its own Phrygian modal scale.  Here is a Tangos by the great Spanish guitarist, Juan Martin – entitled simply Malaga.     

 

Track 5:  Malaga (Tangos),  Martin

 

(Joaquin Rodrigo was a Valencian, and his celebration of his daughter Cecilia’s fifth Wedding Anniversary took the form of a pastiche song-cycle for soprano and orchestra, Songs of Love and War! – the wars in question being the overthrow of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada and exploits of the Moriscotes – former Muslims fought for the Christians in another conflict.  Rodrigo’s home-city, the third largest in Spain, was of course liberated from the Moors by forces led by Rodrigo Diaz De Vivar, El Cid, First Prince of Valencia, In The 11^th Century.  O Moon That Shines is a quiet paean to the Moon, which shines on in war and peace.

 

Track 6: O Moon That Shines! From Songs of Love and War, Rodrigo  

(Omitted owing to lack of time -Ed)

 

Tomas Breton was born in the city of Salamanca in the Western region of Spain, Castile y Leon.  He wrote fluently in many forms, in particular, in opera, zarzuela – a Spanish folk-form of the genre – and chamber and pictorial orchestral music.  His Andalusian Scenes are justly famous, a suite of four numbers, including a Bolero and Zapateado, and Polo.  Polo is an accompanied and sung form of flamenco.  Here’s Breton’s Polo, a beautiful example of scoring in which the sounds of string-pizzicato (ending on the cellos) seem to resonate as solo or tiered woodwind and even brass.  The sinuous phrases found in scalic figures, narrow melodic intervals and arabesques may be heard as Moorish – not far-removed from the Granados Andalucia we heard earlier.

 

Track 7: Polo, Breton  

 

(To the town of Muchamiel again for an eponymous pasodoble –two-step - by Manuel Berna.  Muchamiel.

 

Track 8:  Muchamiel, Berna  

omitted owing to lack of time)

 

(FX Collage:  Evening frogs, nightingale, Jalla Man – fades out before:)

 

The Alhambra was first built as a fortress, the Alcazaba, overlooking Granada.  Sultan Yusuf 1^st chose it for his home in 899.  Over hundreds of years, additions were made until it became an unrivalled example of the superb palatial residences of Sultans and Governors in Moorish Spain.  After the expulsion of the Moors, it was added to largely by Christian royalty in the 16^th Century – a whole new palace built within the gounds.  In reality, it is like a small town unto itself, with a huge pleasure-garden.  In buildings, the dominant colours are red, blue and yellow.   Art consists of non-representational geometrical patterns.  Filled with plainly adorned rooms and courts, fountains, cascades, its features also include tiled walls, colonnades, myrtle-, orange-trees, vines, roses...  In the park, there stands a copse of elms,  dating back to 1812, and gifted by the Duke of Wellington after the Peninsular War.  It is a place for tourists, dancers and musicians, a place of solemn contemplation of time and the greatness that lives on after its sponsors.

 

Andres Gaos-Berea, born in A Coruna, Galicia in North-West Spain, was a protégé of Pablo Sarasate,  a violinist of high reputation in South America - in especial, Argentina, where he lived for most of his life.  Our last work for today is his orchestral tone-poem of 1916, Granada – An Evening In The Alhambra.  It is scored for double woodwind, plus cor anglais and piccolo, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, full strings, and percussion that includes the dry festivity of castanets and tambourines.  The piece attracted accolades in Buenos Aires, A Corunna, Vigo and even Paris – there, in 1937, the famous Lamoureux Orchestra were conducted to great effect by the composer, himself, at the Salle Gaveau, and his masterwork of Alhambrismo was given once more the following year. 

 

Gaos’ piece begins in Debussyan whole-tone harmonics and level woodwind depth of twilight, a viola-shaded arabesque that fixes one’s attention, a tritone hinted-at in the relationship between arabesque and accompaniment; the cor anglais, accompanied by imitational alto and bass strings, sings a highly elegant and yet plangent song – piccolo and lower woodwind  suddenly providing brief bird-calls over this appealing sound.  The Alhambra is famed for its nightingales as well as walkers in the mild Summer twilight.  The tone lightens and builds bewitchingly in bassoon, brass and strings – castanets – and with clever play of rapidity over slowness – a Sibelian or Schubertian trick that precludes the audible ‘gear-change’ that disrupts impressions of expressive unity, we have a beautifully scored flamenco of syncopated beat, with tambourines and much exhilarating high woodwind detail, a variation deservedly repeated!  There is something autobiographical in the form of this dance.  It begins as Farruca. 

 

Farruca is a kind of danced flamenco thought to have come from Galicia – As a rule, it is characterized by minor key tonality rather than by a modal scale; the dancer comes in on a strong first beat, and syncopation - reinforced by clapping -gives rise to quick, unexpected twists and turns amid a complex step-pattern.  Significantly, it is associated with Galician travellers who feel far from home.

 

Farruca is a ‘male’ dance.  The ‘feminine’ reply that ensues is modal, regular, skippingly light in comparison, responsible for much of the exhilarating woodwind detail!  The birds comment on this dance almost in parenthesis.  A new theme on cellos adds its own commentary, about it, the bird-song plays.  It is the big, romantic tune in the piece, developed from the cor anglais tune of the introduction. The lead is turned over to violins for their higher-pitched fervour, and a quiescent, modal  chant follows its subsidence, wound about by flute and piccolo.  A guitar-like, deep pizzicato leads to a new, Moorish development on clarinet, the strings providing a bolero-like tread, and viola-shading.  It returns, and the modal chant  frames this austere, narrowly lyrical episode.  Abruptly, the flamenco is on us again, as high-spirited as before.  Instead of a two-fold repetition, Gaos plays what is surely his masterstroke in continuity – as the secondary crescendo launches straight into his passionate  big tune, full-throated in its fervour.  This seems the heart of Spain herself singing.  Extended, it is as though lifted higher by its  own afflatus, ending in the modal chant.  This muses lullingly, with great pathos and brings us back to the music of the rapt introduction, minus the opening tritonal passage – the strings draw out this lovely melody with Griegian harmonies which suggest that Gaos is more than loath to leave his dreamworld.  The birdcalls and dusky strings muse on this sublime, humane song of regret until it finds something of its own consolation, after which the birds sing more freely again.  The harmonics return, the ghostlier for what we have heard.  Flute and muted horn sound stealthily, almost mockingly, before the neither loud nor quiet last, repeated and extended chords of cadence on lower strings.

 

The success of this piece in Paris came as Spain endured the bloodiest Civil War in European history, the invader from North Africa and Canary Islands, this time, being the Spanish Army under the Fascistic, avowedly Christian General Franco.

 

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 our musical tour of Southern Spain, and will join us again soon.  Adios!

 

Granada, Un Creposculo En La Alhambra, by Andres Gaos-Berea.          

 

Track 8:  An Evening In The Alhambra, Gaos-Berea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 & 11 August

Classical Break - Harty

 

 

 

 

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.  At the turn of the Century, he won a prize for a String Quartet at the Feis Coeil in Dublin, an achievement that 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 subtler 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 most abrupt 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 again.  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 dies away in shadows of tremolando on cello in particular.  A further rise leads once more to the Irish dying fall.  One more 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.    

 

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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, Three Pieces, Harty

 

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!    

 

 

 

Track 7:  A la Campagne:  Lento ma non troppo

3 & 4 August: Spanish Guitar

Spanish Guitar-music

The programme was scripted by Mike Burows and performed by Rupert Kirkham, broadcast on July the 16th, 2011. 

Intro Track:  Nortena, J Gomez-Crespo

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and scripted by Mike Burrows, and is a presentation of largely Spanish guitar-music. We have just heard Nortena, a piano-piece drawn from an Inca lullaby by the Argentinian composer, J Gomez-Crespo, 1900-1971,  and arranged by the great guitarist Andres Segovia, of whom more later.  Besides the lilt of melody, aided by the rhythmically defined though sweet-harmonied accompaniment, notice the use of rapping of the soundbox, an effect more resounding than can be gained by the tapping of strings con legno of a bowed instrument.

“Only one thing is more beautiful to hear than a guitar, and that is two guitars,” so Chopin professed.  Developed from the lute and mandolin, the guitar has the lute’s fretted neck, but a flat-backed soundbox nipped in at the flanks that appears to owe something to the viol-family.  The breadth of the body and length of neck promote resonance and an ease in finding notes, it is light for its size and a comfortable shape to hold aslant the midriff and lower chest by left hand on neck and right elbow and forearm.  It comes in a variety of sizes, usually with four strings, its pubescent or matronly figure capable of a wide compass.  It does not require the speed of note-production needed on, say, the mandolin, to create a sustained sonority.  No other stringed instrument is easier to play well.  In its simplicity, it can be supremely expressive, neither as heavy nor as over-resonant as a piano, and less scratchy than a bowed instrument.  For centuries, it has been at home in most parts of the world, an instrument of choice for both colonialists and native peoples overtaken by European and American incursions.  Beginning among hired musicians and courtiers, its use has thus spread until in both acoustic and electrical forms, it has become a pillar in the edifice of modern blues, pop- or folk music.

The Valencian, Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-99) wrote a number of concertante guitar-works in an approachable idiom that owes much to folk-music and Art-music in Spain, all sadly overshadowed by the admittedly justly popular Concierto D’Aranjuez.  Blinded in an accident at the age of two, he was trained in his home town, Sagunto, and at the Madrid Conservatory.  He arranged the music of such composers as Soler and the courtly composers of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, revealing both a long historical perspective on the music of all Spain’s provinces and considerable imagination in orchestral scoring whose richness approaches that of Respighi, yet, as Respighi’s does, preserves the tang of an earlier period.  This is achieved by favouring clear contrasts in the blending of the sections and treble, alto and bass registers of the orchestra. 

Here is a movement, Canario, from his colourful four-movement Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, a homage to the 17th Century performer and composer Gaspar Sanz (c1650-c1710), the gentleman of the title, and based on songs and dances from Sanz’s published collections.  This Fantasia was composed in 1954 for performance by Rodrigo’s friend Segovia. 

            A Canario is a variety of lively dance from the Canary Islands.

Track One: Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo

Often, we cry for the authentic, and decry the efforts of those who paid homage in the age before ours.  We can check on an original in this instance.  Gaspar Sanz’s Canario or Canarios in its solo-form shows us how brilliantly Rodrigo treats and develops his material. 

Track Two:  Canarios, Sanz 

Now, let’s hear the set of Six Catalan Folksongs by the Catalan guitarist-composer, Miguel Llobet-Soles (1878-1938).  Born in Barcelona, Llobet was one of the great artists of the guitar. A contemporary of Maurice Ravel, much of whose supersensitive sensibility and craftsmanship he shared, in Spanish music, he occupies an honoured position re-established by the end of the Franco-regime, which had subordinated all regions of Spain to rule from Madrid..  He lived a quiet life as a travelling musician welcomed by many countries around the world, and resident in Paris for long periods.  His tours exhausted him (however!) and he returned to Barcelona.  Tragically, he lost his mind during the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936.  His collapse came when his local church was fired; according to his wife, he was left with the mental image of an eyeball gouged out of its socket.  His final illness followed swiftly, pleurisy ending his life soon after Barcelona was subjected to its first and heaviest air-raid.

 Six Catalan Folksongs consists of:  The Son of the Mother (A religious song), Amelia’s Testament, Robber’s Song, The Nightingale, Heir of The Rieras, and Christmas Night.  We have heard the guitar dance, now let’s once again hear it sing. 

Track Three:  Llobet:  Six Catalan Folksongs 

 

The guitar originated in Southern Europe and always had its strongest advocates in Italy and Spain, where there were many gifted craftsmen and a love of music and dance of a kind that favoured its use, until the vogue for Grand Tours among the wealthy, and the coming of factory-manufacture, of mass-education, of a culture of home-making and the development of Empires and global trade-links.  The use of the lute and allied instruments had spread throughout Europe, and so the way had been well-prepared.  The guitar, like most instruments, had its periods of favour with the classes, cycles of fashion.   In this country and in much of Northern Europe, the guitar had a golden age from the first third of the Eighteenth Century until the middle-class guitar gave way to the pianoforte in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century, as the family instrument; in the colonies, pianos travelled remarkably, but it was easier to take a wind instrument, guitar or violin on a voyage to some out-of-the-way station!

Undoubtedly, many Europeans knew the guitar from the experiences of well-heeled travellers in Spain and Italy, and during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, a vogue for the Italiana and Espanole swept society at all levels.  Serenatas, canzonas, tarantellas, saltarellos, canciones, danzas de las hachas, fandangos, even flamenco, could be imitated on the piano, and were, but to hear them played on mandoline or guitar or vihuela - a kind of guitar favoured by wealthy Spaniards - was that bit more exotic an experience.

The Eighteenth Century had many guitar-composers, but it was a Spaniard, Fernando Sors (1778-1839), who brought the guitar into the 19th.  He settled in England, and taught, wrote and propagandized for the guitar, and was much favoured by fashionable Society.  Known as the Beethoven of The Guitar - the Cult of Heroic Ego was taking hold - he wrote concertante as well as chamber pieces, and developed the notion of the virtuoso in his own instrument. Here is a set of Variations On A Theme of Mozart by him, written in the lingua franca of the time, common to all Western civilization, rather than a style more characteristically Spanish.  The polite theme comes from The Magic Flute.  The fastidiously careful layout of this piece suits the guitar’s nature as aptly as one would expect.  A fairly simple, square-cut melody is subjected to processes of modification, adornment, rhythmical sequence-making, display coming to the fore towards the emphatic close.  Nimbleness in articulation is necessary in most guitar-music, rhythmical attack can be made wonderfully crisp and exact as well as soft.  The stronger and more flexible the joints of the plucking and pitching fingers, the less force need be exerted, and the better the tonal clarity that may be achieved. The guitar’s resonance requires little encouragement to sustain a note and create harmonic decay of a pleasurable kind as further notes superimpose themselves on it and the air. 

Track Four:  Theme And Variations, Fernando Sors

Without doubt, even if the pianoforte cut in, the Nineteenth Century song and dance were good to the guitar, and not only in the development of the science of guitar-design.  The invention of genre-pieces, short ‘poetic’ pieces of a particular character for a particular instrument, grew out of the John Field or Chopin Nocturne, the Schumann Novelette and Liszt Harmonie.  This, and a certain - in some places political - penchant among nations towards the picturesque elements of ‘nationalism’, stimulated a massive growth in interest in music-making, and mass-market in sheet-music.  Mass-publication, using the new factory printing-processes both met and further increased the demand.   At the highest levels, it paid composers to write well-turned miniatures.  Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the audience for virtuosity and serious musical entertainment widened, and at home or in musical and other clubs, at one level of accomplishment or another, something of the genius of hero- or heroine musician rubbed off on the public.  A good piece contrasting slow or quick A and quick or slow B sections, with or without development, provided people with entertainment and a challenge.  We mentioned the vogue for Italianacy or Spanishry earlier, and from Spain came the next impulse. 

The Castilian, Francisco Tarrega y Eixea, 1852-1909, was the teacher of Llobet, whose Six Catalan Folksongs we heard earlier.   Tarrega was a virtuoso and composer, known internationally as the ‘Sarasate of The Guitar’.  He wrote many genre pieces for his instrument, but, more, transcribed many piano-pieces by his colleagues.  He was educated at Madrid Conservatory, pursued a national career as a performer and achieved great success in Paris and London in 1880.  His piece for solo guitar, Recuerdos de La Alhambra, was perhaps his most popular piece, akin to a Neapolitan song in its melody and supported by tremolo-figuration throughout.  An intense presence on stage, Tarrega was perhaps less gifted as a composer, but his memories of the Alhambra, the Moorish fastness situated in Granada, was to be seen as a contribution to ‘Alhambrismo’; Granada was a place of fascination to Spain as a whole, and Andalucian music was not written by only Andalucians! 

Track Five:  Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Tarrega

The two great pianist-composers in Spain at the turn of the century were Isaac Albeniz and Enrigue Granados.  Both produced voluminously for piano, and only a proficient amateur can say that he plays from the works of either.  Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909), a Catalunian like Llobet, gave his first concert at the age of four!  He was refused entry to the Paris Conservatoire at seven, and at eleven stowed away to America, where he toured, supporting himself by playing the piano!  Studies in Leipzig and Brussels followed on his return to Europe.  He next went to Barcelona, where he met the composer Pedrell and first studied folk-music.  In 1889, he studied piano-technique with Liszt, after which he toured England.  In 1890, he studied with D’Indy and Dukas.  Back in England, he found patronage - Francis Burdett-Coutts, Lord Latymer, the banker, and in return composed operas to his Lordship’s libretti.  Opera was not his strong suit, and only one opera, Pepita Jimenez, of 1896, was a success.  He settled in Paris and concentrated on cycles of piano-music.  Altogether, his catalogue reaches to well over 200 Opus-numbers.  Even the collapse of his health - tuberculosis - from about 1899 - did not prevent him from accomplishing just the kind of music - piano-music and songs - of a national quality and harmonic and rhythmical sophistication that made it irresistible to Spanish guitarists. The Paris of Debussy, Ravel, Severac, Dukas, D’Indy, Messager, Schmitt and others helped to create the dynamic impressionism of Suites Espagnolas and Iberia.   

Here is an arrangement for two guitars by Llobet of a song, Bajo La Palmera, Beneath The Palm-tree, Number 3 of Cantos de Espana, Opus 232.  In this recording, it is performed by Julian Bream and John Williams.  The two parts demand concentration, but are both together and easily audible in partnership here.

Track Six:  Beneath The Palm Tree, Cantos De Espana, Op 232, No 3, Albeniz     

An instrument for a lover to play - to serenade his girl in languorous, rippling phrases that create a sense of contented laziness; good humour or longing. An instrument to play rapid, syncopated rhythms on, plucking, sliding, damping - even tapping strings or rapping soundboard - at a dance.  The guitar has two personalities, sentimental, sensitive to the point of just-audible stillness, and vital, aggressive and predatory.  It sings, it can mimic human movement in sound, it is a percussion instrument.  Art music took some while to match folk-music in all its variety and primitive but spontaneous skill.

Here is a modern example of flamenco dance-music composed and played by the Andalucian, who is much influenced by the work of Segovia, Juan Martin.  From his Andalucian Suite No 3, Jerez - Buleiras.

Track Seven:  Jerez - Buleiras, Juan Martin  

From Granada, Andres Segovia-Torres (1893-1987) had a concert career that lasted three-quarters of a century.  From his debut in Granada at the age of 15, he made his way throughout the Western World, becoming a good friend of Llobet, who greatly admired his skill and gift for interpretation.  His right hand was possibly stronger than that of any predecessor, and showed new possibilities in composition; perhaps the example of pianist-virtuosi had by now piqued guitarists into equivalent feats of simultaneous detail of rhythm and decoration, just as Paganini had piqued pianists in the early Romantic age!  Segovia transcribed many works for guitar and inspired the composition of works by many composers, and became an ambassador for Spanish culture, as well-regarded by fellow musicians as was Pablo Casals.  Here he is in a Fandanguillo written for him by Joaquin Turina (188-2-1949).  

Track Eight:  Fandanguillo, Turina

Estudio sin Luz, or Study Without Light is one of Segovia’s own finest miniatures, worthy of his composer-friends.

Track Nine: Estudio sin Luz, Segovia

To end our programme, here is a Pavanne by Luis Milan (c1500-flourished 1536-61), who served at the court of the Dukes of Valencia and wrote many collections of songs and pieces for the Vihuela.  The Pavane was a fashionable measure, so-called possibly because it was intended to be danced in the manner of a peacock - in English, it was the pavon or pavan; we have also the word pavonine, peacock-like.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to having your company again, soon. 

Goodbye!

Track Ten:  Pavanne, Luis Milan