26 & 27 October

CB Blake

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  Let’s begin with a nocturne of great beauty written for tenor solo, solo viola, semi-chorus and orchestra, by Sir George Dyson, Night Hath No Wings, a conflation of verses by Robert Herrick and Isaac Williams.  It forms the third movement of a massive “Cycle of Poems” written for performance at the Three Choirs Festival:  Quo Vadis, or in English, Whither goest thou?  The austere timbre of the viola sets the tone for what follows:  an arioso not far removed in melodic or harmonic style from those of the Seventeenth Century of Herrick - incidentally, Isaac Williams was a Victorian and follower of the Oxford Movement.  Dyson sets the words with modest aptness, but smouldering intensity in which voice, viola and strings vie in pathos, woodwind - flute and clarinet - introducing a kind of sickroom closeness.  Pizzicati punctuate.    

 

Night hath no wings for him that cannot sleep;

And time seems then not to fly, but creep;

Slowly her chariot drives as if that she

Had broke her wheel...

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress...

When God knows I’m tossed about

Either with despair or doubt,

Yet before the glass be out,

Sweet spirit, comfort me...

 

Consolation comes slowly and unsurely with Isaac Williams’ smoother, longer-lined verse:

Unto the east we turn with watchful eyes

Where opens the white haze of silvery lawn

And the still trees stand in the streak of dawn...

 

The sub-chorus sing, first soothingly, then, after further protest from the soloist, with pizzicato tread of strings...With a restatement of Herrick’s verse beginning, In The hour of my distress, comfort is perhaps felt at the close, with its repetitions of the words comfort me, and a dying fall.  Written for the cancelled Three Choirs Festival of 1939, Quo Vadis was performed in full only in 1949.

 

Track One:  Quo Vadis, Night Hath No Wings,  Dyson   

 

Next, an improvization by the clarinettist, Richard Stolzmann and the percussion-group, Nexus.  Eternal Triangle Beckons. 

 

Track Two:  Eternal Triangle Beckons, Stolzmann/Nexus  

 

Now, a group of orchestral songs by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, all performed by Kirsten Flagstad, and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Oivin Fjelstad.  These are marvellously idiomatic renderings.  

 

First off, Since Then I have Questioned No Further, a setting of a poem by Runeberg, dates from early in its composer’s career, and was praised for its folkishly lyrical quality by no less a figure than Johannes Brahms, when performed at a soiree in Vienna.  In his maturity, Sibelius orchestrated the song in customary neutral tones of effectiveness. 

 

Why is Spring so fleeting,

Why does Summer never last

Thus did I used to wonder

And ask many a person in vain...

 

Track Three:  Since Then I have Questioned No Further, Sibelius

 

But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen is a song from Sibelius’ maturity, around the time of his Second Symphony, and instinct with pity and sadness that gnaws at the heart of mankind whatever the season.  The poem is again by Runeberg.  A girl longs for her lover, who does not return with Spring, the swan, the lark, the curlew...

 

Track Four:  But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen, Sibelius

 

The last of our Sibelius songs today is To The Night, a setting of AV Forsman-Koskiemies from the period of Since Then I have Questioned No Further.  The spirit of the singer hastens to meet comforting night.

 

Track Five:  To The Night, Sibelius

 

Now, a work for trumpet solo and string orchestra by the Armenian-Scottish American composer, Alan Hovhaness.  The great crisis in his career - rejection by his teachers at Tanglewood Music School after the award of a scholarship - was two years behind him when he set to work on this piece.   It portrays a heroic priest, the eponymous Khrimian Hairig, who led his people through many persecutions.  The trumpet intones as the voice of this man, the strings’ block-chordal responses growing in fervour and canonic contrapuntal independence.  Armenian semitones spice modal forms of chant.  There are moments of holy calm as at the beginning.  The fullest statement of the melodic material is reserved until the close, and broadens in typical idealistic statement, the trumpet like a golden crown.  The piece is subdivided into three sections:  The Chalice of Holiness; Wings of Compassion and The Triumph of Faith.  Khrimian Hairig, by Alan Hovhaness. 

 

Track 6:  Khrimian Hairig, Alan Hovhaness

 

Our last work today is the Clarinet Concerto by Howard Blake.  Blake, a Londoner born in 1938, studied as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music, his lessons in composition given by the Belfast-born pianist-composer, Howard Ferguson.  His catalogue of works is massive, running into over nine hundred opus numbers:  but he has worked intensively as an accompanist and conductor, this secondary hectic career involving much travel and exposure to many styles of music ranging from pop, through jazz, to modern art-music.  A brilliant pasticheur, he has written much music in a tonal idiom recognizably influenced by that of his own teacher, Ferguson, Gerald Finzi, Hindemith, Delius and Peter Warlock.  You will know him by his music for the film, The Snowman. 

 

It is fair to say that this much-commissioned composer has an ability to create music that is sometimes described as ‘accessible’.  The idiom is approachable and recognizably of a tradition.  

 

It’s not revolutionary in style, and for many decades, this was to say that music was dull or fake: in the days when a culture of ‘lightning war’ seems to have been the anti-aesthetic believed on by all fashionable terrible infants and BBC Controllers. . 

 

Blake’s Concerto is structurally akin to that by Gerald Finzi (who was himself under-appreciated by movers and shakers in his life-time), and covers much the same emotional range, beginning with a flourish - though one provided by the soloist rather than strings.  The first movement, Invocation: Recitativo-Moderato, Molto Deciso,  opens in near-blues, which are supplanted by a mediaeval chant-sounding first subject coloured by the clarinet. Brusque onward movement is held back by the tug of doubt or sadness, complex canonic or imitational textures or semitonal sighs.  The scoring is harsh, with many misalliances in instruments’ weaker registers; the sense of driven-ness not to be put away as the flourish and chant are developed against an ever-changing background of counterpoint.  The semitonal sighs are heard most affectingly in a moment notable for high violin harmonics and held notes in the horns.  The inexhaustible energy and variety in the music builds to baroque or Finzi-like use of high strings with bass accompaniment, leading to a stalking climax, jabbing Dies Irae unisons punctuating the chant-theme.  The opening flourish - and clarinet - enter, and a slow fading chord coloured by horns ends the movement. 

 

Track Five:  Invocation:  Recitativo-Allegro Deciso       .

 

The Second Movement, Recitativo - Lento Serioso, is possibly haunted by Ravel’s piano-piece, Le Ghibet, another emotionally complex inspiration.  It begins with the flourish that began the first, but soon, the matter is proved to be a development of the high violin harmonics figure in amongst the imaginative thematic transformations later on.  Again, the horns are involved.  The clarinet and violins with cautionary matter from other parts of the orchestra build to a brief climax - underpinned by an upward scale - and a lowish consolatory sound is made by horn and warbling clarinet and other woodwind in exchanges of the melodic line.  Tension comes in on the high strings, stridency bringing back the swaying semitones on misallied woodwind - oboe noticeable - and brass.  Again, the music seeks to expand, and the oboe has its moment, answered by the clarinet.  The upward scale is heard from underneath.  Again, there is consolation, and the strings lead the warmer but quietly peremptory winding-down. 

 

 

Track Six:  Ceremony:  Recitativo-Lento Serioso

 

The Finale is a Round Dance, marked Vivace.  An impish variation on the solo flourish leads to a jog-trot similar to the chant of the first movement.  Woodwind have a counter-melody that is flat in curve, more blues-like or jazzy and so modern in sound.  It may remind one of the spikier inspirations of Malcolm Arnold.  The clarinet soon dominates it, as does the opening matter.  The semitonal swaying from the first two movements is heard with pizzicato accompaniment and what become roulades in the solo-part.  The chant-like theme is still there.  A crescendo grows with chuckling outbursts from woodwind and a more haunting air in the clarinet’s restricted figures.  The opening music of the rondo returns - barer, more gaunt.  Time is passing, even the clarinet is audibly flagging - or a final effort is inspired by the counter-melody, scotched at last by horn and rounded off by woodwind, strings and brass - the clarinet in at the very last.

 

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 Seven:  Round Dance:  Vivace

 

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