19 & 20 October

CB  Autumn 3

Track One:  The Too-Short Time, Finzi  

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme is of music that depicts or suggests Autumn.  We’ve just heard Gerald Finzi’s song The Too-Short Time – Nine leaves a minute/Swim down shakily”, a setting for baritone and piano of a Hardy poem that laments the passing of Dame Summer; the last lines run:

 

“Saw you how Dame Summer drest?

Of all God taght her she bethought her!

Alas, not much!  And yet the best

She could, within the too-short time

Granted her prime.”

 

From the prelude, an angular, Britten-like impression of the falling of the leaves – the ever-scrupulous Finzi timed his onomatopoeia to match those nine leaves a minute – a halting processional gropes for hymn-like certainty and diatonic harmony, the piano providing strong chords and a building spinning motion as though weaving the vision of Dame Summer’s clothes before the qualifiedly affirmative close.  From 1949, this song predated Finzi’s discovery that he had leukaemia by less than two years.  It joined other Hardy-settings uncollected at his early death to form the Cycle, Before And After Summer.

Let’s stay with Finzi and Hardy, two inspired Autumnists.  Seeing the Winter in Autumn, Shortening Days – The first fire since the Summer is lit – is a song, the sixth, from another posthumous Hardy-cycle, A Young Man’s Exhortation.  Finzi toiled long and hard on his works, assembling them number by number, gathering groups of songs from many stages in his career.  Shortening Days was actually written in 1928, considerable number of years before The Too-Short Time.  The two songs are yet recognizably related in verbally-generated melody, harmonies and procedures. 

At its outset, spare in accompaniment and melodic line, Shortening Days seems an almost mystical treatment of prosaic observation heightened by its place in a poem :  until, at the window, the eye finds “Like shockheaded urchins, spiny-haired,

Stand pollard willows, their leaves just bared.”

 

Then,  “coming with pondering pace”, peasant sturdiness appears to rescue one from brown study with the sight of the cider-maker –

 

“And behind him on wheels, in readiness,

His mill, and tubs, and vat and press.”

 

Autumn has seen harvests of cereals and fruits, and so is, in addition, a time of brewing!

Track Two:  Shortening Days, Finzi

Harvest-home.  Autumn bares the trees and countryside of much colour, and birds have no time for leisurely song,  but with luck, Summer has left us with the means to over-Winter where we are, and we gather and prepare food for hoard.  Originating in a number – The Heavens Are Telling -  from Haydn’s Oratorio, The Creation, here is the harvest-home hymn from the Norwich Tune-book of 1844, The Last Full Wain Has Come, sung and played by The West Gallery Music Association of Hampshire, who specialize in the performance of Georgian church music, their choir accompanied by stringed and wind instruments that would have been familiar in Thomas Hardy’s  childhood and in his father’s heyday, before the organ replaced gallery-musicians in country churches.

Track 3:  The Last Full Wain Has Come, Tune by Joseph Haydn

(The following number was sadly  omitted on grounds of time

Let’s hear a partsong by Sibelius.  Autumn Evening is a strophic setting for mixed voices of a poem by the Swedish poet, Rydberg.  One of a group of partsongs that date from student-days, Autumn Evening begins in a world that lies in its bleak grave of Autumn, harried, withered, dead,  the blossoms of Summer passed and the forest silent - but looks up into the stars, from whence eternal home smiles upon the soul.

 

“Thus dream I in the Autumn evening, and see

How the leaves fall down from the birch,

A naked shore stands reflected in the deep bay,

And over the moon a silver cloud is sailing.”    

 

Autumn has its bleak side, matched here in the severity of chorale-like strains, dotted rhythms and some awkward rather than adventurous writing in the parts, but the twenty-three year-old composer has the measure of the poem’s sentiments.  If the setting is less flexible and imaginative than Sibelius’ later treatments of Finnish  verse, this may partly be due to the Germanic nature of the Swedish language, its totally different system of stresses – Finnish stresses first syllables – its  heavy consonants and less rich store of vowel-sounds, all of which lend themselves naturally to a Germanic  melody with little irregularity of metre, in which rhythmical variety is introduced with dotted notes.    

Track 4:  Autumn Evening, Sibelius

).

The Autumn and Winter are seasons for hunting.  Here is The Royal Hunt At Windsor, a Grand Sonata for solo harpsichord, by HB Schroeder, from the late 18^th Century.

Track 5:  The Royal Hunt At Windsor, Schroeder

A more characteristic work of Sibelius, now, the tone-poem, The Bard.  This extraordinary piece was written in the shadow of a possible throat cancer, in 1913, and at a time of international unrest and anxiety.  To contrast it with the early tone-poems is certainly to hear the change that had crept over his music.  Like his Fourth Symphony of 1911, drama is developed from the most slender of material, so that climaxes are reached with a startling edge and are representative of a  personal symbolism rather  than more conventional gestures.  In this instance, beginning with an evocation of a poet who accompanies himself on the Finnish zither (Kantele) in simple, rippled chords over an accompaniment by bare orchestral textures, mostly held notes on bassoon and oboe and imitations and promptings of the harp in the strings, a second section within the one-movement piece evokes wind in trees (the harp and lower strings have the power to do this owing to the former expressive compression) and the trombone provides a climax with a harmonically unresolving fanfare of three notes drawn from the rippled chords (and akin to the bassoon’s notes of  introduction at the very opening), to be followed by a warmer, placid close of quietness and stoical fulfilment.  An example of extreme concision  sombrely scored, The Bard, it should be remembered, was produced in the year of the riot-greeted Rite of Spring.  There was, as Sibelius himself said of his Fourth Symphony, “Nothing of the circus about it.”  His Autumnal bard has all the power of the natural world at his finger-tips, and the ability to cause the least modernistic processes to appear ahead of their time.  A mysterious musical wisdom  permeates a work that seems static, easily followed on the surface, yet economically strange at its height, and straightforwardly (but somehow rightly) conventional at the close.  The work is associated with lines about an old poet who dies after performing his last verses.

Track 6:  The Bard, Sibelius 

From a bard to a bird.  A drinking-song, Of All The Birds, from a collection of popular music made in the early 17^th Century by Thomas Ravenscroft.  Of all the birds, the owl ‘is the fairest in her degree,               

                 For all day long she sits in a tree,

                And when the night comes, away flies she.”

A song for drinkers, mocking drinkers.  It ends,          

                “Synament, and ginger, nutmeg and cloves

              And that gave thee thy jolly red nose.”

Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves are all febrifuges, tonics, warmers; like cider, wines and spirits, in hot punches of the same, much in demand to this day, when temperatures cool and the nights draw in.

Track 7:  Of All The Birds, Ravenscroft

From the composer Armstrong Gibbs’s LivelySuite for string orchestra and piano, Peacock Pie (in tribute to the book of children’s verse by Walter de la Mare,  here is the drily Brahmsian finale, The Fly-by-nights. 

The Fly-by-nights are, of course, witches!     

Track 8:  The Fly-by-nights, Armstrong Gibbs

In Night-scene, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, returned to Norway from adventures that took him around the world and made and lost him his fortune, confronts the emptiness of his achievements  on the fire-blackened heath near  his home.  Harsh chill is in the alternation of woodwind and brass chords and tiredly eddying strings.  He speaks defiantly – if he can.   In grim insistence, the voices of threadballs, withered leaves flying before the wind, sighs of air, dewdrops and broken straws in turn taunt him with all he might have been – he has stepped on the throat of his own song.  Wind-effects on flute and high violins, drumrolls, brass snarls:  organ-tones add uncanniness to the chants of inanimate things that, with significance to Peer’s state, have become the sternest of critics.  Near the close, he hears the voice of his mother, Aase, whom he comforted as she lay dying by describing how he drove her in a sledge to Soria Moria – a castle in Spain, or heaven:  now she shrieks that he tipped her into the snow.  Our ghosts, come old age and the heath of Autumn, may be found harder to bear.  Have we truly lived at all?

Track 9:  Night Scene, Grieg

Now, if the cold has seeped into your bones, sit by a fire and warm yourself.  Here is a lighthearted treatment of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,  the story of Ichabod Crane, schoolmaster, and his ghostly nemesis.  The Headless Horseman was written by Edgar Stillman Kelley, a little-known pianist and composer from New England – his ancestors were among the early settlers of America, arriving in about 1630, and founded his home town, Sparta, in Wisconsin. He could trace descent back to the governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, a voyager on the Mayflower!  A little older than Edward Macdowall, and also primarily a pianist, Kelley was trained in Germany, as were most American composers of national reputation in his day. 

His piece describes the dead Hessian’s pursuit of the would-be ladies’-man-schoolmaster one eerie Hallowe’en ...   Schumann is turned to semi-comic account, the first theme imitating the gait of Crane’s lolloping nag.  Crane’s amorous feelings are gradually swallowed alive as he rides home alone after having been told the legend in vivid terms by one of his boys.  In the pursuit, the poor nag does her best to flee! 

All ends in the dutifully frowning minor!

Track 10:  The Headless Horseman, Stillman Kelley

(The Following section was left out on grounds of space and time:

“Remember, remember the 5^th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot!”

Here is a poem commemorating a Bonfire-night party, written by Mike Burrows.

 

                     (Guy Fawkes Party At Tanybwlch Hall)

            Fireworks were never the same again.  There

            In the wood, standing in groups, the chill night

            Warmed by thick clothes, friendships - and embers

                                                                                bright

            And smoking in the incinerator -

            Some played with sparklers; all watched for the

                                                                               glare

            Of first banged colours to print threads on sight

            From volcano, or a rocket’s whooshed white

            Popped in stars.  This galaxy made me stare.

 

            For forms - wool hats, scarves, coats - the

                                                                   warden’s hand

            And ‘tached smile touched off such spells, or

                                                                checked spuds

            In glowing ash.  And the girl at my side

            Deepened, lit little, kissing.  Sombre land

            Lay silent, its true stars high-spaced - no duds -

            In bursts of aeons:  a lover’s thrilled pride.    

 

            Never the same, that powder-reek rejoiced

            In.  So it is my memory.  Rainbow-fire,

            Spittering glints, thick smoke billowing from pyre

            Of a tiny soul whose burnt body, hoist

            With its reason for being, I found by moist

            Autumn garlic next day, charred where, entire,

            I shook my head and went on:  the lost spire

            Of a roman candle scorched, lit, still voiced.

 

            To the beach and town - or college - simply

            A student in love.  Or a ghost years off,

            Picturing the next year as on each year,

            Self hoist by what I did not want to be.

            Sparks brilliant for others - smoke’s sharp cough

            Makes them smile, and aeons will shine them clear. 

  

Copyright, Mike Burrows, October 16^th, 2013

              

(FX Sounds of fireworks, bonfire and murmurs of spectators under).

).

As our time of Remembrance of the World Wars draws near, and in memory of all the fallen – in particular of Thomas Newby Singleton, a Leading Stoker killed on the destroyer HMS Shark when it was sunk during the Battle of Jutland – here is the powerful song that ends Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s set of sea-songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra, Songs of The Fleet,of 1910.  Farewell is surely a powerful homage to “the dead who died for me,” - those who “themselves they could not save”, the men who have perished in service of the world’s navies.  The brass fanfaring at the close quotes fittingly a phrase of the refrain of Sailing At Dawn, an earlier song in the set – “Lead the line!”    

Track 11:  Farewell, Stanford

For our last piece today, Grieg’s Lyric Piece, one of the Opus 43 set, Solitary Traveller.  Grieg was a major traveller in music in the second half of the 19^th Century, touring Europe  as pianist and conductor, and spreading the word for Norwegian art-music; if anyone knew the burden of resigned

as necessary travel, it was he.  If not at home, he missed it; if at home, there was the call of the South!  He often Wintered away from his country.

Between him and his piano there existed an enviable closeness in which he confided as Schumann had confided before him.  In Solitary Traveller, something of the sincerity and affection of the relationship is revealed.  It is a quiet pianism of unadorned expressiveness and memorability.

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

Track 12: Solitary Traveller   

12 & 13 October

 A Repeat from 2011:  Autumn 2

 

 

 

This is Classical Break, on SomerValley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and

written by Mike Burrows, and our subject is Autumn in music. 

 

Let’s begin with the folksong, John Barleycorn, an encapsulation of the agrarian farm-year and a link with fertility rites of the past.  John Barleycorn is the soul of ale.  The brewing of ales and wines is no longer, if ever it was, an activity confined to Autumn, but my dad didn’t know that. For the labourer, barley was for bread as well as for beer, but good ale took one pleasantly beyond a full stomach.  Often, water was added after brewing to ensure that it didn’t take anyone too far - small beer felled no-one.

 

Track One:  John Barley-corn, trad    

 

The song, Høstkvall - Autumn Evening - by Jean Sibelius, invokes falling night and the entrancing unrest of coastal Autumn as felt by the traveller.  It is thrilled by the powerful grimness of Autumnal images:  sunset, the screams of gulls and birds of prey, rain, forest and surging wind and sea, screams of pain heard in the forest, gathering darkness.  The poem ends in the question, Does our traveller’s soul feel in harmony with the song raised by starless night?  Does grief die like a soft note beneath Autumn’s mighty threnody? The orchestration by the composer lacks a part for flute, or indeed any instrument that would detract from a glowing sombreness of sound that favours deep--toned bassoon, trombones, tuba and double--basses; and utilizes oboe and clarinet and higher strings as additional inhuman voices.  A feature of the percussion section is the dry rattle of side-drum - rain, or the sea on shingle?  The very key of the music is dark and rich - D-Flat Minor.  This dramatic scena dates from 1904, coming between the heroic Second Symphony and ‘classical’ Third.  Its style is quintessential Sibelius, not Wagner, a massive, lyrical climax building from motifs but suggesting vast dimensions beyond mere duration, an absolute, tragic force of suffering and dignity, opening with what sounds like a cry of anguish.  Knife-edge suspensions resolved with the slowness of the cries of birds or the conflicting power of hypersensitive hysteria and stoicism recurred ever more strongly in the Finn’s imagistic music, long pedal notes an earth-deep foundation to whatever takes place above them.  The beauty is uncanny, the after-echoes are strange but right.  On another occasion, Sibelius wrote of learning assiduously from the cries of migrating cranes.  Autumn Evening is sung here by Kirsten Flagstad, accompanied by the L-SO, conducted by Øivin Fjelstad.

 

Track Two:  Høstkvall, Sibelius

 

Autumn is a time for reflection; every harvest has its aftermath and tares, and the leaves fly like so many billets or lost souls. Here is a song by Benjamin Britten, a setting of Paul Verlaine - Chanson D’Automne - for tenor and small orchestra.  It was written as the concluding number of a cycle of four by a fourteen year-old who had just begun to study music-composition with that modernist and majority of one, Frank Bridge.  The cycle was edited by Colin Matthews, the composer entrusted with the task of preparing a number of Britten’s juvenilia for posthumous publication.  A French, specifically Debussyan quality to the harmony - and spare but not austere scoring - and moreover the elegance of the word-setting, owe much to Bridge’s exacting standards, but impress more with every hearing as the achievement of a young boy.  The pre-echoes of the Serenade For Tenor, Horn and Strings, are as striking as the influence of Debussy - or Chausson - and of a highly-regarded teacher.  This warmly romantic piece on the fall of the leaf, a French Melodie in all but name, had to wait eighty years for performance.    

 

Track Three:  Chanson D’Autonne, Britten

 

Now, one of Finzi’s Five Bagatelles, for clarinet and piano.  Opus Twenty--three:  Forlana.  The forlana is a Sixteenth Century dance-form in triple or compound-duple time, characterized by dotted rhythms, and this one strolls with a certain dry wistfulness.

 

Track Four:  Forlana, Finzi

 

Hallowe’en, a night of witches, ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night:  we once had more cause to fear this than now that it is a commercial fancy-dress function and opportunity for flat tricks and sticky treats.  Hallowe’en has outlasted plagues, broken hearts, magic and superstition, gibbets, witch-burnings and inaccessible places of suicide and murder - the burial of sacrifices to consecrate graveyards, or pinning-down of dead evil under the cross-roads.

 

Robert Burns’ satirical poem, Tam O’Shanter tells of a drunken man forced to flee witches in the dead of night - he escapes over a stream, but his mare loses her tail.  A humorous overture by Sir Malcolm Arnold portrays the story in delightful orchestral detail and considerable dour Scotch-snappiness.  Arnold, whose career began as a trumpeter in the LSO, brought the impishness of his comic film-scores into the concert-hall.  Tipsy flute and strings and then low woodwind invoke bagpipes-music, the brass threatening, a passage of some eeriness on tremolo strings as woodwind startledly rub their eyes. A tam-tam clash - and reprise of the opening theme leads to another clash, an upward scale on the brass...:  yes, it is a witches’ sabbath taking place in the churchyard, during which the drunken trombone has plenty of opportunity to make a fool of itself with the witches - one attracts Tam, her cutty-sark being too small for her...  The pursuit is as unclear and calls for intermittent piccolo and a whip as well as the mixture as before - much marking time on the surface - an effect like running in a nightmare - a series of typical upward-scale brass crescendos and reprise of bagpipes dissonant with brass snarls, a bell, string ostinati, the irrepressible piccolo all stirred in before the farce ends in brief hymn-like sounds on flute and clarinet, the melting away of the causes of panic and a pay-off chord.  Trick or treat?  You decide.

 

Track Five:  Tam O Shanter, Arnold

 

On Bonfire Night we see - if we choose - the momentary rushes, spurtles and reports of fireworks - rockets, air-bombs, catherine wheels, roman candles, fountains, bangers, crackers against the slow-motion real Autumn pyrotechnics of billions of light-years of universe.  In continuity, good and evil remain real on our planet, but politics seem flippant in the life of the universe.  The guy sags silhouetted in flames of a religious fire lit centuries ago.  There are actually still those who, for a sense of their Englishness, depend on this barbaric tradition of burning in effigy a failed Seventeenth Century terrorist - if that was what the original Guy, Guido Fawkes, was.  For the rest of us, sculptures of light that fade to after-image in the cold sky, and the thick reek of gunpowder have nothing to do with celebration of religious persecution, a weak king and scotched Plot, if we can help it.

 

Debussy’s Preludes, Book Two, contain music of the utmost refinement under adventurously poetic titles.  Like most other serious musicians, he distanced himself from the provision of onamatopeia alone; music was always a matter more of feeling than of painting.  All the same, in the mysterious resonance of lulls in the bass and sudden, florid bursts and flourishes in the treble, a similitude between music and intensities of light on a dark sky defies absolute music, that is, music written without a programme or the intention of bringing images to mind.  The point is that the resources of music are handled with exquisitely fluent harmonic and pianistic skill and taste.  Feux D’Artifice, Fireworks.

 

Track Six:  Feux D’Artifice, Debussy

 

As a contrast in treatment of the falling of leaves, let’s hear a piece by the Belgian harpist, Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912), Feuilles D’Automne.  This modest, expressive little work has an almost balletic quality in the gentle hispanified style so popular in the second half of the 19th Century.

 

Track Seven:   Feuilles D’Automne, Hasselmans

 

If only Autumn were simply a matter of gathering or of sweeping away.  It is the time for another kind of reckoning as it passes in mists, rain and bonfires and first frosts.  It is a time of ghosts in the leaf-strewn shadows, Halloween, All Hallows and All Souls.  Autumn brings, too, remembrance of those on all sides killed in War since 1914.  Every November, the poppies of Summer bedew the many cold monuments that were dedicated to them long ago with the dark red of blood-sacrifice, a peculiar image of peace.  Once, sacrifices to deities of fertility thanked and propitiated the earth before crops were again planted, and Rome communed with the spirits of dead warriors by pouring blood into a trench.

 

Cyril Rootham (1875-1938), a well-regarded academic musician and composer, is now famous, if at all, for being first to set the Great War poem, For The Fallen, by Laurence Binyon.  As he was writing his work, Elgar was drawn by the poet’s friends into setting what have become immortal verses.  Elgar hesitated, knowing that if he did so, it would squash Rootham’s best efforts, but permitted himself to be persuaded to go ahead.  His version is overwhelming, a miniature cantata in itself within the cycle, Spirit Of England, and as he feared, it did outdo Rootham, whose version fell by the wayside.  However, Rootham is not to be despised; his lesser conception of what is in the words still achieves all that one looks for in a setting:  a sombre, forceful orchestral accompaniment, a sonorous choir, no vocal soloists; smouldering Vaughan Williams-style chant and fanfaring from the brass, like the strings almost a choir in their own right; some imaginative detailing in the woodwind, and percussion including a snare-drum to go with fife-noises: plus something less looked-for, a sudden eruption of songs - including the Garryowen - that had been popular in the BEF on the outbreak of war, which last occurs during the second section of a tripartite structure.  Here is this second section of Rootham’s For The Fallen:  They Went With Songs To The Battle. 

 

Track Eight:  For The Fallen, They Went With Songs, Rootham

 

Something slightly less daunting in prospect than going off to war is to be young and starting the school-year, or, to be less partisan - to be older and a teacher who feels personal responsibility for the welfare and education of the eternal foe.  For those on both sides who have not already fallen during the Autumn campaign, we programme a school song.  It was written by Richard Adinsell (1904-1977) for the fictitious Brookfield School for Boys, and the 1930s film adaptation of James Hilton’s idealistic bestseller Goodbye Mister Chips, which starred Robert Donat and Greer Garson.  An institution that passed most schools by but that still afflicts some in the private sector, the school song, usually composed by Old Boys, is given its apotheosis complete with effulgent orchestration in addition to choir.  Unmediated by modish cynicism, it may just work on the hardened child as on the nostalgic adult...  As for Mister Chipping - the teacher who learned to be lovable and teach from experience and by example, in defiance of the exam-standards of snobs - may now be too exotic a figure to be believed in...     

Track Nine:  School Song from Goodbye Mister Chips, Richard Adinsell

 

Lastly, a piece for piano, by an amateur who wishes to remain anonymous.  It wasn’t me, sir,it was Mike Burrows...  Some apologies  have to be made for the sound-quality, as it was recorded in the performer’s front room and with a dictaphone. It is called Leckhampton after the hill just outside Cheltenham, and is intended to evoke a brisk walk with brisk thoughts on a bright Autumn afternoon, in leafmeal-scented air, to stand by the famous rock-formation The Devil’s Chimney and look out on his home-town. Autumn is a time for home and deep feelings for all that is and all that has passed - all we have gathered against Winter. Leckhampton was made up as it was played and as the mood took ten fingers.  It was considered for as long as it took to play.  There is some of the appearance of a fugue, but Mike has no classical training; his piece has spontaneity, love of Autumn, the Cotswolds and music. 

 

Everyone has moments like this; everyone has a harvest each year, everyone drinks Autumn air as though it were new wine or beer, stands on the sea-shore at some stormy time as it grows dark and there is darkness within as black as any stormy night.  Everyone watches falling leaves with a sense of transience and mortality.  Everyone has ghosts that people the mist out of the corner of an eye; there are always witches and terrorists (perhaps politicians see these most clearly, but are happy to apprise us of their presence).

 

One goes to school to believe one’s teachers, even go to war as well as live long and at peace.  There are intimations ripe for music.  Thing is, to act on them!

 

This was Classical Break on Somer Vallwy FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you have enjoyed our Autumn miscellany, researched and written by Mike Burrows, and will join us again, soon.  

 

Track Ten:  Leckhampton, Mike Burrows

 

 

5 & 6 October 2013

This programme was  first broadcast in April 2009 and the theme is Seasons. There are seasonal compositions by Vivaldi (Spring from the 4 Seasons - the one they make you listen to when you call the DWP about your benefits!); Mozart, Beethoven, Handel (water music), Debussy (Jardins sur la Pluie), Eric Satie, Cesar Frank, Samuel Barber's Adagio, Granados and Rachmaninov's  Vespers. The programme opens with the Comedy Overture, by British composer Granville Bantock (1868-1946) and performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.

As I remember, I recorded the programme 'as live' so the links are not quite as polished and professional as you're used to on this programme! (Who am I kidding?). Anyway, hope you enjoy it and the chances are we'll have a completely original programme next week - fresh from the pen of young Mike Burrows, my co-producer on Classical Break.

Don't forget, if you have any requests or you would like to make a Classical Break - we're here to help. This is a community radio station, so it's your right to bombard the airwaves with just about whatever you feel like as long as it's legal.

Take care and let's have your feedback! Just email rupertkirkham@gmail.com and make us happy.

Rupert

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    

21 & 22 September

Classical Break:  Battle of Britain

Intro:  RAF March-past, Davies/Dyson

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme showcases the colourful Ron Goodwin score for the feature-film, Battle of Britain, made in 1969, directed by Guy Hamilton and produced by Harry Salzman. 

The historical Battle of Britain represents one of the enduring legends of British involvement in the 2^nd World War.  Britain - and her Empire - stood alone; the salvation of civilization for the many rested on the actions of the Few.  Spitfires and Hurricanes overcame odds of over four-to-one to defeat the armadas of Dornier, Heinkel and Junkers bombers and Messerschmitt fighters, day after day flying sorties in which their only advantages were the superior cause – the chain of radar-stations positioned along the South and South-east coasts of the country,and the tightly-disciplined plotting organization behind flight-controllers who ‘vectored them in on’ the enemy.

The brave defence of these islands by an RAF Fighter Command that faced the world’s mightiest airforce at full stretch throughout  the Summer of 1940, was given popular dramatic treatment in this outstanding release.

A large cast of British (also Commonwealth, Polish and French) and German film-stars and fleet of Spitfires, Hurricanes, CASA bombers  and Hispano Buchon fighters - Spanish licence-built Heinkel He 111s and Messerschmitt Bf109s – did battle in the air.  Action was placed in a strong context of personal stories and a presentation of tactics and strategies on both sides.  A well-recreated mise en scene on the ground gave more meaning to  dogfights  filmed from a converted B25 bomber of wartime vintage.  Owing to vicissitudes of time and history, there were no still-flying examples of Dornier 17 – the Flying Pencil – and Junkers 88s, the other main Luftwaffe twin-engined medium bomber; no Messerschmitt 110 Destroyer escort-fighter – a twin-engined aircraft that, although heavily-armed and faster than a Hurricane, was so unmanoeuvrable and fragile that it, itself, came to need escort...  The infamous Stuka – Ju 87 – dive-bomber was not available in the alloy, so to speak, and proved impossible to fabricate; however, it was shown attacking radar-stations and being hacked down by British fighters, thanks to the skills of a special-effects team, who were also responsible for fibre-glass models of all aircraft that were shot down or bombed on the ground in the course of this latterday campaign...  On the British side, there are no Boulton-Paul Defiants – the Defiant was a vulnerable single-engined fighter with four-gun turret for armament; no Bristol Blenheim bombers either, though the Blenheim raided German general shipping and invasion-barges throughout the Battle, and became the first radar-equipped British nightfighter during the Blitz.  No seaplanes or air-sea rescue craft were shown on either side.  Even with these omissions, the film has considerable claims to authenticity.

Two stunt-pilots were killed during filming the aerial sequences, which emerged as possibly the most thrilling ever achieved  in movie-history, marvels of formation and milling movement, all requiring  split-second timing.  It seemed as though no holds were barred.   More about that anon.

Here’s the official Battle of Britain Theme, which you will hear at many points of the soundtrack, standing for squadrons of the RAF.

Track One:  Battle of Britain Theme

Next, the Luftwaffe March, Aces High. This accompanies an inspection of bombers made by a Luftwaffe Airfleet-commander; a French airfield notable for the immense ranks of Heinkel twin-engined bombers drawn up wing-tip to wing-tip and standing on either side of the runway; guards take the salute as the band plays and  the staff-car moves by.  All the arrogance of spotless Teutonic

discipline, knife-edge creases and technical competence are on show, orders barked, the show dominated by inanimate power given life by one shared mind. 

Track Two:  Aces High

Right at the outset of the score, then, we have the music of two national sides.  Also, we have a marvellous evocation of the air, military aggressiveness  and gunfire, manoeuvre in a big, blue white-clouded sky.   In the Theme, The RAF are identifiable with the bowmen of Agincourt – though they fly, and their aircraft carry eight Browning machine-guns in the wings.  In Aces High, the Germans have a pastiche Bavarian-style march that possesses immense, tuba-grounded confidence and verve.  Goodwin was a past-master at blending latino rhythms with timeless, English- sounding melodies, and a dab hand at counterpoint.  His writing for the British showcases  noble trumpets and horn,  the rat-at-tat of snare-drum and high strings imparts a skip or skid of agility as certainly as it represents the bark or crash of machine-guns.    The Luftwaffe Aces High March isn’t merely a matter of solid scoring and two  Bier-kellerish tunes.  You notice the economical piccolo, clarinet and deep brass running accompaniments – very decorative – and appoggiaturas that scrunch; the trio that bellows male fanfares.  A pattern of two against three enlivens the rhythm.  The blend of woodwind and brass is more than able, the harmonies are strong and the percussion, glockenspiel and side-drum, as splendidly confident:  the return after the trio is adroit rather than to the same standard, but the effect remains strong.    The third cue represents the sun-drenched day at dispersal on one of the main airfields of Eleven Group  – where a flight from one squadron sit reading or chatting in deck-chairs, awaiting an alert.

After anxious string chords, the clear sky of leisurely strings swaying above pedal notes, and flecks of woodwind, is blue, the clouds drift:  it is an almost yawning variation on the Theme ; it is as though a bird flies as the flute leaps high and warbles - this glassy effect of crystal fresh air is repeated as part of the aforegoing pattern;  a more purposeful quality enters on cellos, a matter of a few stubborn, near-fanfare- like notes, only to subside in a reprise of dreamy leisureliness.  The Lull Before The Storm.

Track 3:  The Lull Before The Storm  

Speed and punch open the next cue:  Work and play begins with a brassy staccato - abrupt, savage machine gun fire.  A lone British pilot is missing:  he has gone up for an instruments or engine-check,

but really to encounter the enemy.  A Messerschmitt 109 has accounted for him; it passes over a prone body left floating, still attached to an open parachute, in the channel.  The Jagdflieger joins his friends after landing and taking a bath in the substantial surroundings of his comfortable requisitioned billet.  The gemutlich tune that accompanies his return and hurry to get ready is a soulful, deeply German song without words; there is a slightly maudlin feel to its caressing, intertwining sounds of woodwind and sliding massed violins, the square-cut phrasing softened nigh unto bonelessness.  It has been developed from the trio of the Luftwaffe March, of course.  The victorious pilot and a friend are summoned with trumpets and Aces High-peremptoriness from professional discussion in a local bistro to a briefing .  To get there, they’ll employ the locally-commandeered car in which they were about to go out on the town.  

Track 4:  Work and Play

Death and Destruction – the aftermath of a bombing-raid on an RAF Station:  a very frequent scene during the Battle.  RAF and WAAF personnel on the ground suffered fearfully.  It is a little-known fact that the Aircraftmen – maintenance staff -  at Manston struck, refusing for 15 days to come out of their shelters, when the Luftwaffe onslaught was at its height.  The music here is as is due:  no heroics.  Jagged violins and violas, ostinato scalic figure of low woodwind and possibly a marimba, interspersed with fanfares –a brassy climax of horror – accompanying a rank of WAAF corpses lying under blankets in the film - and more sustained cello-deep emotion of shock and endurance.

Track 5:  Death and Destruction   

Briefing the Luftwaffe.  Preparations for mounting any air-raid are intense:  crews must know the likely weather-conditions, expected wind-speeds at the heights at which they must operate, the areas of most enemy activity on the flight-path, besides the other all-important details of formation, rendez-vous points between bombers and escorts – and target.  Having shrugged off the brazen Aces High motto in short order, this cue is no more than a close-harmonied, narrow-themed ostinato, stiff, stalking, remaining until the louder close at mezzo-forte:  warning brass, mainly horns and harsh trumpets, punctuate it and end it with a crotchet and triplet.  The pit of one’s stomach knots to take that curt blow.

Track 6:  Briefing The Luftwaffe

After a brassy but hollow chord dissonant with what follows, The Prelude to Battle juxtaposes the leading motif of the RAF, dropping or rising scalic figures, the dropping figures with harp, a climbing bass urging excitement higher, a sense of the Briefing music now mounting with bursts of trumpeting aggression from the British.

Track 7:  The Prelude To Battle

Victory Assured.  Based in Norway, which the Allies had lost to the Nazis a few weeks before the collapse of France, the bombers of Luftflotte Links made one confident daylight raid on the North of England.  They ran escortless into the delighted arms of Fighter Command in spite of Luftwaffe Intelligence’s joke that “Even a Spitfire can’t be in two places at once.”  The bombers were met  as they moved in stately formation and high assurance over the North Sea.  Slaughter ensued.  Deutschland uber alles, one feels, is in Goodwin’s themes of gemutlichkeit and Aces High, march and trio; they move in solemn certainty – to meet an upward scale and sudden rat-tat-tat cadence.

Track 8:  Victory Assured

Defeat.  Here, like the CD, we conflate two scenes.  A lone Heinkel bomber labours home, streaming smoke from an engine,  its wounded gunner-bomb-aimer writhing in the fully glazed nose of the plane.  Often, it was possible to get home on one engine, so long as one had plenty of height.  Luftwaffe medium-bomber crews were all grouped, pilot, navigator and gunners, in the front of their aircraft for the sake of morale.  All the armour-plate was concentrated to the rear of the cockpit save for a strip in the undernose gondola from which a gunner, prone, fired the ventral gun (his position was known as the deathbed).  Under frontal attack, four men could be killed or wounded in a single burst of accurate fire through Perspex no thicker than household glass.  One had a magnificent view of what killed one.  In Goodwin’s music, the downward trajectory of the bomber as it crosses the sea is caught with a repeated falling figure and, derived from the Briefing music, checked sequences relentlessly repeated, violins screaming, oboe and clarinet writhing, the onward flight sustained intermittently by the same now menacing phrase of Aces High.  At last, the plane crash-lands behind the defences of Fortress Europe.  The pilot, a shocked bystander, watches as fire-crew try to cut his wounded friend free of the wrecked cockpit of their aircraft – and finally turns away.

Track 9:  Defeat   

Hitler’s Headquarters.  Berlin.  A brief, melodically and colouristically self-explanatory cue.

Track 10:  Hitler’s Headquarters

There follows a qualifiedly romping return for the victorious Few – ending in uncertain strings tremolando .

Track 11:  Return To Base

Life in Berlin goes on – without blackout:  until the first British night-raid – a retaliation for the accidental bombing of London.  From now on, cities, especially Great Britain’s capital will be the target, and wiped-out.

Track 12: Threat

Hitler’s revenge in turn was the beginning of the Blitz.  Evacuations limited the death-toll among civilians only a little.  The film shows that some families stayed unnecessarily, and were killed.  Goodwin depicts the human cost and fire and rubble, the efforts of ARP and Fire-Brigade units to save people and buildings in spare, daunted strings-lyricism, baroque string-runs shaking themselves out over darkness and destruction, a discord tutti, malign harp caresses and a detached whimper from twinned flute and oboe that seems to stand for the eternal last exclamation  one did not hear from one’s child... 

Track 13:  Civilian Tragedy

The Blitz was one of the two great blunders that saved Britain – the repeated bombing of radar-stations and airfields (and as not shown in the film, factories) was increasing the disorganization and demoralization of the RAF:  now the Germans attacked the civilian population instead.  Offensive Build-up is a cue that begins with a brief trumpet-fanfare: at Fighter Command Headquarters:  looking out on the glow of London burning, Air Marshal Dowding, Commanding  Officer, comments, to warm major- and upward-tending sequences coloured by the strings, that the RAF may now regroup and survive:  for the first time, German efforts will be predictable and limited in the main to their assault on London.  The whole remaining weight of Fighter Command numbers can be concentrated on intercepting large but localized formations.

This vision is followed by the aerial mixture as before:  climbing orchestral measures punctuated by RAF fanfares – and the triumphant statement of the Battle of Britain Theme, percussive edge honed.  It ends abruptly.

The other great blunder?  The Messerschmitt 109 had swooped down on climbing attackers, hunting freely in advance of their bombers – the Frei-jagd, the German fighter-pilots  called it.  Now, they were ordered to stick by the bombers – in practice, this meant that their Schwarme – or swarms of four aircraft - kept to a fixed height above their charges until engaged  in the battle below them, zigzagging  in flight as this was the only means of flying at the bombers’ cruise-speed.  Fighter-pilots knew  that acceleration, preferably in a dive, was the key to attacking aircraft of similar sprint-performance.  The Messerschmitt was fast, but not that fast.  The initiative was lost, the vital couple of seconds.  At the heights most combats now took place, the 109 had very slight edge in acceleration or no edge at all, and both the Spitfire and Hurricane could out-turn it:  to pounce had been its pilots’ best hope of destroying RAF interceptors – knocking down perhaps a section of unwary climbers in a single firing pass before zoom-climbing to gain height and attack again...     

Track 14:  Offensive Build-up

Attack!

Track 15:  Attack

Fire killed and injured horribly a great many fliers on both sides.  The science of the treatment of burns and skin-grafting made huge strides – in the terms of the day.  One of the film’s chief  characters, a Canadian pilot, is seen  to bale-out – allright...  But his aircraft was a flamer.  In Personal Tragedy, his Wife, a WAAF-officer is told that “they can do miracles these days.”   There is a

shortened reprise of Civilian Tragedy.

Track 16:  Personal Tragedy

We reach possibly the greatest-ever  evocation of air-combat in all music.  Sir William Walton was the first choice of composer for The Battle of Britain.  At the age of 66, he proved unable to create a viable score, even with the assistance of that great composer for concert-hall and films, Sir Malcolm Arnold.  Sad, this, given his brilliance in providing the music for Lesley Howard’s film, First of The Few, of 1942.  Remember Spitfire Prelude And Fugue?  His music for The Battle of Britain was largely rejected.  You must take on trust from us, that it is too lacking in breadth or real engagement, stuck in a groove of waspish portrayals of aircraft, Façade-like attempts at popular music (surely anachronistic in 1940), and interminable repetitions of Siegfried’s horn-call from Wagner’s Ring.  It is too small-scale, too scherzando-ish.  And yet, how to describe his Battle In The Air?  This cue was used to accompany combat on the Battle’s climactic day – September The Fifteenth, now Battle of Britain Day.  It accompanies a scene that is otherwise almost entirely mute, during which individual fates on both sides are summarily sealed.   All the unfortunate score’s mannerisms save ‘20s giddiness are concentrated in it, this nightmare, stabbingly fearsome, unnervingly complex piece, which, possessed of razor-sharp wit, portrays in full the split-second timing and terror of this form of war.  It begins in hollow deep woodwind and string tremolandos of irresolution, succeeded by oscillation in cello-harmonics – contrails above one? –into which swoop the measures that prove to be a refrain; an accelerando hastes one into the fight; jerking bursts like gunfire bring on more feverish panic.  Flutter-tongued trumpets and horns, rapid Elgarian runs on trombone and stabbing wasplike sounds, strings and brass – and off one goes into the refrain – and so on for four minutes.

Imagery stays in one’s mind – aircraft swooping, rolling, firing, white glycol-vapour or fire streaming from an engine.  Two sprog pilots go down, one drenched in sweat and shaking in terror as he tries to slide back his canopy – it sticks fast, the Spitfire, wreathed in flames, explodes - the other wincingly unable to leave his diving aircraft as he has been shot through the thigh, a WAAF voice from the control-room trying to raise him on the radio till the moment that his Spitfire hits the sands below...  A German pilot peers as his windscreen fills with black oil thrown back from a damaged engine – his Messerschmitt banks and blows up.  Another RAF pilot turns his aircraft upside-down (textbook, this), to bale out – he trails a long, glaring white ribbon of harness and goes on falling...  A Heinkel is hit in both engines; goggles down, the crew hastes to leave it – the last man struggles, straining every sinew as the dive deepens, to reach the escape hatch.  He fails as all is ending in a terrific rising minor scale, a tutto expressing the awfulness of this death, all death in war – it is a climax that loses none of its force from being the single most famous mannerism of Sir Malcolm Arnold in comedy film-music mode.  The Heinkel breaks up on the sea.   

Track 17:  Battle In The Air, Walton

Garlanded gaps at the dinner-table cause weary silence among Luftwaffe fighter-pilots.  The arrangement of Aces High, shorn of trio and played slowly on trombones-dominated brass speaks volumes, becoming something like one of those solemn Aequali for brass-ensemble and cathedral-performance, at which German composers of the 16th and 17^th centuries excelled.

Track  18:  Absent Friends

The Battle of Britain ends for the film as the Luftwaffe fail to show up one bright morning.  There is no rejoicing, only a sense of personal exhaustion.

The Plum, spam and Raspberry Jam march written for the end-credits by Walton is sometimes used before the end-credits in prints of the movie.  It sounds like the trio of Orb and Sceptre and is undoubtedly rousing so far as it goes, but curiously detached in context, like a book of remembrance that leaves out the Sergeant-pilots.  1960s Welfare State idealism is brought to bear by Goodwin.    After Luftwaffe fanfare and shocked Somewhere-in-England string chords dug in deep, a superb crescendo builds and  his reprise of his Battle of Britain theme in full panoply seems near to bursting with due brazen pride and considerable folk-songish heft – the New Elizabethan expression?  - the woodwind carolling in old-world, bowmen-and-yeomen exultancy, vying whirlingly with rich, sustained brass,  the staccato, latino drive of his Browning machine-gun-music breaking out, and brought to heel before the unstoppable, percussion-based close!

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, based on the soundtrack of the United Artists film, The Battle of Britain, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  “This is Red Leader, I see ‘em!  Tally-ho! -Attacking, now!” 

Track 19:  Battle of Britain Theme – End Title