11 & 12 January 2014

This is a repeat from 2012




Intro: In Freezing Winter Night, Britten

 

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is of winter music and was researched and written by Mike Burrows We have just heard In Freezing Winter Night from A Ceremony of Carols for three--part treble voices and harp by Benjamin Britten. This is Winter standing all about one: everywhere one looks, the frost bareness, a merciless beauty. Our earth is cold; yet the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul; we need never lose it. Wonder is in the frost whiteness as in the white fire of remote stars. Is this one’s everyday world? In awe, two boys’ voices move in canon, a third moving with the frost-feeling accompaniment. This music was written in a cabin on a neutral Swedish freighter crossing the Atlantic, as Britten returned tardily to Britain from the United States in 1942. Minus its generator-hum, a nearby refrigeration compartment perhaps aided his imagination... The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by winter: and yet, we have the Christmas story; this time of seeming frozen stasis is the illusion. If much sleeps or shivers, Spring is gathering its force under it all, merely in wait. From John Playford’s English Dancing Master of 1651, and words written later for broadsheet-sale, here’s All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away).

 

Track Two: All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away) Trad

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows. Its theme is Winter.

 

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was a lonely figure among the Generation of The Eighties - 1880s, that is. His style was personal: he was capable of close musical reasoning, a brilliant sense of instrumental colour in combination, but held to no one system of any aspect of music, save instinct. His music harks back to pastoral and courtly Italy, and forward into regions that are not for nostalgia or the musically faint-hearted.

 

It can be frankly illustrative of early music, birdsong, bells - or harsh, terse and distorted, and working progressions of thought through regardless of who can follow. Here is the fourth partita of his Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, which begins in chant and strict, four-part canon! It is in three movements, for this Sinfonia is in twelve subdivisions - one each for the zodiacal signs - and divided equally into four ‘Partite’ - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... The composer denied us the crutch of a detailed programme: what programme there was was, he said, not to be told. The Sinfonia was written in 1951. For its social context, the postwar period in Italy was a time of great bitterness, of the settlings of scores arising from the Fascist regime and its ruinous involvement in the Axis cause, an era of poverty, unemployment and the Marshall Plan. American aid in funds and food-parcels had as much to do with support for the Left in Italy as with the privations and sufferings of a defeated nation. In the 69 year-old Malipiero’s complex vision of Winter, there appears to be no place for hope, though there are moments of fleeting beauty and consonance. It The Partita and Sinfonia end in cruel, growling discord. Perhaps, as Thomas Hardy put it,

 

“If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’

 

Tracks Three to Five: Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, Winter, Malipiero

 

A near-contemporary of Caplet and Ravel, and taught by Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, Deodat De Severac was a composer of the Languedoc in Southern France. His output was largely of character--pieces descriptive of everyday life in this distinct region named after 1the language of its people, Oc. Here is a movement from his Georgic Suite, Le Chant De La Terre, or The Song of The Land. Les Semailles, The Sowings - of seed. In Winter, we think of - and look forward to - Spring.

 

Track Six: Le Chant De La Terre. Les Semailles, de Severac

 

To see a light moving on the ground in winter darkness is to wonder who carries it, where And why. It is one of the memorable images from long winter nights, when wits are sharpened and curiosity excited that much more strongly, or when we are tired and reflective, the cold slowing our minds so that we take time to watch and think. There can be thoughts of threat; who would be walking abroad on a night like this?

For the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lantern that moves along the night and that interests our eyes is the light of soul.  In his late choral and orchestral work based on Hopkins' poetry, Inscape, Edmund Rubbra set this idiosyncratic sonnet in a nocturne of some gravity.

“Men go by me whom either beauty bright

In mould or mind or whatnot else makes rare.
They rain against our much -thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite...”

Hopkins cannot help them, ultimately as out of sight is out of mind; but Christ minds,

 

“Their ransom, their rescue, and first, last, fast friend.”

 

Rubbra’s setting seems, aptly, to grow out of chant; the harp has an important, though sparely speaking role, heard bell-like and intermittently against other sombre colours of accompaniment.

 

Track Seven: Inscape, 2nd Movt, Rubbra

 

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, I will Go With My Father A-Ploughing. The words are by the Irish poet, Joseph Campbell. There is a wild quality to melody and harmonies - in Gurney’s musical vocabulary, they could be Celtic or Northern: a similar quality informs his songs On Black Stitchel (a poem with Northumbrian setting), and The Fiddler of Dooney (setting Yeats). This song has a tragic significance. Gurney’s Father, a Gloucester tailor, was his hero, and had lately died; Dad, of all his relatives, had understood and admired his musical talent and ambition: he had died during Gurney’s troubles after discharge from the Army, before he had so much as seen his son’s music in print...

 

Track Eight: I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing

 

The poor are always with us, as the scriptures have it. For some, there is a simple explanation. However unwelcome their attentions, however greedy and cruel they become in pursuit of other people’s fair shares; however many lives are broken or ended to provide that last refinement of power and luxury - the rich, too, are always with us. A folksong now, a carol: Cold Winter is Come. Let’s not tolerate its message. ‘A time to remember the poor’ is an institution in default of refusing at any time to regard poverty as social justice. The person or persons who composed it have earned no posthumous fame, owing to his or their class. An enlightened professional recorded it in 1891, before it, too, could die.

 

Track Nine: Cold Winter Is Come, Trad

 

Here’s a sonnet on Winter, written and read by Mike Burrows:

 

 

Winter

 

What comes down on the world is not held

                                                          back

By words, and protests remind of others –
Others when mankind was less far off-

                                                       track,
That were demeaning enough. Earth

                                                  mothers
The dead as well as she does the living –
If anything, hugs the dead with more ease,
The uncomplaining dead to whom giving
And taking go deep beneath clay and

                                                     freeze.
Below the living root they have to lie:
The poor man lies below the conduit
Of available wealth, and his sad sigh
Or rage is a matter of unspirit
To the soulless for whom those sacrificed
Are dwarfed by wealth as by the tree of

                                                     Christ.

 

©  Mike Burrows, February 2012

 

That last sprinkle of gold dust on a one-k-snifter as the world goes bust is a particular pleasure and acquired taste. Local charity replaces the Welfare State,the poor have no cultural ambitions nor skills, no worthy hopes in life, only the dignity of work that they don’t choose. Off waltz public amenities and common humanity and the rich do rather well - 60 Billion last year alone added to the assets of a thousand people now ‘worth’ between them nearly £400 Billion... Those who cut, close and sell off our inheritance at will, and those who cost the country over £100 Billion pounds in lost tax-revenues each year, and Billions more in expropriation-contracts, evidently think winter smiles on local charity and ‘austerity’... The relevance to music in this is who writes, performs, criticizes and broadcasts the art-music of tomorrow? Who grows up sufficiently in this atmosphere of falsehood and denial to create or assist creation in a rich tradition of a thousand years, the phenomenon of mankind’s musical communicativeness? As music-charities scrabble for a scatter of pennies, children from less well-off backgrounds, it seems, have no entree and need not apply, as most outlets and institutions concerned in musical development close or raise their fees and we return to the days of the common man’s carol we have just heard - of two nations, two musics. A composer once watched people as they took their seats in one of our opera-houses and said, “Music starves, but the wealthy could live for months on the fat between their ears.” Let’s hear Winter Wakeneth All My Care from John Rutter’s choral song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment, When Icicles Hang.

 

Track Ten: Winter Wakeneth All My Care, Rutter

 

 

 

Born into a highly musical family in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Edward German began as a composer mainly of symphonic and orchestral works and incidental music for the theatre, but in middle life became a successful tunesmith in light opera, regarded as a successor to Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre. Rather dead-headed criticism by George Bernard Shaw and other commentators had deterred him from more ambitious work, suggesting that his style was too theatrical! The tragedy of German is very English. ‘Successful’, he wound up confessing, “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...” A scrap of paper found among his last effects stated, “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...” To put his real talents into perspective, it’s believed that Elgar enjoyed his music more than that of any other contemporary. The trick is to listen to what German composed: it is obvious that he was a progenitor of most of our tradition of ‘British Light Music’ in the 20th Century, but if the imitations are discounted, he can be heard as Elgar heard him, as a fresh, cosmopolitan voice influenced by French and Russian rather than Teutonic models. His sound owes something to his Welsh blood (and the Welsh hymn-tradition), and the Marchlands in which he grew up, but nothing to the music of British academicians. Written for the Leeds Festival in 1899, The Suite, The Seasons, is a Symphony in all but name. The finale, Winter, is written in sonata--form, and is a stirring juxtaposition of a solemn hymn and brilliant tarantella, developed and combined at the close with Tchaikovskian fervour; the movement’s qualities are not a million miles from those of early Sibelius.

 

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM. I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon. Thanks go to associate producer, Miss Suvi Burrows, aged eight, who requested the Edward German! Goodbye!

 

Track Twelve: Winter from The Seasons, German

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4th & 5th January 2014

This programme is a REPEAT

Our Twelfth Night programme, from January, 2012, is a seasonal blend of merry-making and solemnity - 
"Or What You Will"!



Twelfth Night

Intro: A Childhood Memory, John Barry

Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows and is inspired by Twelfth Night. You’ve just heard A Childhood Memory, by the film-composer, John Barry, from his album, The Beyondness Of Things. Whatever the childhood memory described, and he himself gives no clue, it seems a confrontation between infant wishes and a hardening of reality in one’s surroundings, tailing off in fragments of Nick-nack Paddywhack... Six days into a hardening New Year, where are our Christmas hopes? Money has moved on, we follow. Who throws whom the bone, how many care?

The Beyondness of Things purports to be music of journeying, of seeking, perhaps finding. In the Church Calendar, the last day of Christmas is the first day of Epiphany: an epiphany is a glimpse of the holy that was beyond one’s view. The Three Kings, the magi or Wise Men, traditionally Caspar, Melchior and Baltazar, journeyed to meet the Christ-Child, following a star.

The Italian composer, Ottorino Respighi, a great, late romantic orchestrator, wrote his Trittico Boticelliano for small orchestra - with an important part for piano - in 1927. He intended these tone-poems to be a rendition in music of masterpieces by the Florentine artist, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510); a triptych is a group of three paintings. Two of the subjects of the paintings cited are pagan-classical, Spring and The Birth of Venus respectively; they flank a slower, central piece of great beauty and solemn process, The Adoration of The Magi. Its growth from the pifferaro-, that is, fife- or bagpipe-like, sounds of the opening is extraordinarily patient and smooth. Amongst the thematic material, you will recognize the tune of the old carol O Come O Come Immanuel in modal form, and chant-like moments whose origin was in Respighi’s love - and intense study- of Roman liturgical music.

Track Two: The Adoration of The Magi, Respighi

Amid solemn observances and mental pilgrimage, if not the real thing, this was a time for revelry, spectacle, for courts and kings as for peoples. Tielman Susato’s Danserye, first printed in 1551, contains many kinds of dance of the time and earlier that might add to the splendid effect of royal or affluent celebrations, masques, fancy-dress dances... Here are the Fool’s Dance andMorisque - morris-dance – in which we hear quaint fool’s licence, an essential distorting mirror to lordly brashness - and licence of another kind. Besides good tunes, the essence of a good Danseryewas the suitability of the music for either chaste or ‘extreme’ arrangements.

Tracks Three and Four: Fool’s Dance and La Morisque, Susato

Next, a solemn Padouana - a slow and stately dance that originated in Padua - here performed by a quartet of trombones - from the Musical Banquet (1617) of Johann Hermann Schein. Trombones - developed from the smaller-bore sackbutt - have been traditionally associated with musicians of the angelic orders - and are often called upon to mimic solemn priestly voices. Here, the dance and that tendency meet consonantly.

Track Five: Padouana, Schein

Anciently, Twelfth Night was not the night of the Twelfth Day, but the night of the eleventh day of Christmas, thanks to a different manner of keeping time that saw sunset as the beginning of the day... To confuse further, the Twelfth Day was once celebrated as Christmas Day. Our hard-and-fast customs are perhaps less stable than our faith in their unchangeability... Christianity appropriated unto itself a group of days and a pagan festival, and even then, the ground shifted. At one time or another, most of the forms our rejoicing takes have been banned - carols, mincemeat-pies (unless imported), seasonal church services..., dirty dancing...dare one say it, unofficial assembly...even live music - unless licenced or circumscribed by money-makers. Like spontaneous eating, relations between the sexes and music, small beer, gin, tobacco and leisure-time have all felt the hot breath of ancient and modern disapproval ... To this day, how many days of Christmas are there for most?

Some things remain hard to ban or unbannable, such as a quiet duet. Here is The Seven Joys of Mary a Somerset folksong and kind of creed.

Track Six: Seven Joys of Mary, Trad

Throughout the British Isles, Twelfth Night was riotous before the Age of Queen Victoria (an Age that was long and seemed longer). Once, it was surely the great festive binge of the season of Christmas: a drunken, promiscuous rout, a time for fancy-dress and mumming in at least two senses of the word. A popular item was the Twelfth Night cake, eithera large sweet pastry with marzipan filling or a rich plum duff - that contained in addition two beans - one bean to each half. Half the cake went to the men, the other half to the women. Whoever found the bean in his or her slice was crowned King or Queen of the party. A pleasant way to bring sweethearts together, perhaps, or to enjoy the great amusement of bringing together an eccentric or outright-antagonistic couple. Queen Victoria disapproved of rowdiness, and so Twelfth Night in Britain was subdued, partly to improve the morals and efficiency of the work-force, and Twelfth Night cake was altered to become that extra instrument of gustatory torture for us on Christmas day, as though anything in this line had ever been needful - Christmas cake. To soothe us, here is The Gouty Carol, in which a pilgrim suffering from the complaint, “My leg is aching worse,”imagines that meeting Christ in Bethlehem, his gout will be gone in a trice.

Track Seven: Gouty Carol Trad, arr Bowyer

Twelfth Night is also an occasion for Wassailing: a semi-pagan rite seeking blessing of the orchards, in which cakes and libations are returned to the earth from which they came in tribute to the year ahead; songs are sung and - sometimes - guns loosed off. Let’s hear Vaughan Williams’a cappella arrangement of the famous Gloucestershire Wassail Song - Wassail, Wassail, All Over The Town.

Track Eight: Wassail Song Arr VW

Next, Somerset’s Wassail.

Track Nine: Somerset Wassail

“Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Shakespeare’s romantic comedy with asides for philosophical foolery, derision of Puritanism and two fine specimens of elderly roisterer in Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Twelfth Night - Or What You Will, has attracted many settings of its songs, O Mistress Mine, Farewell Dear Heart, Come Away, Death and When That I was.

Here is a collection of these songs, beginning with O Mistress Mine, a setting by Shakespeare’s contemporary, and for a time near-neighbour, the Chapel Royal musician, Thomas Morley.

Track Ten: O Mistress Mine, Thomas Morley

Now, a setting of Farewell, Dear Heart by another of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Robert Jones.

Track Eleven: Farewell, Dear Heart, Jones

Roger Quilter, a member of the so-called Frankfurt Gang -students at the Frankfurt Conservatory, who included Percy Grainger in their number – was primarily a song-composer. His group of Three Shakespeare Songs, Opus Six, opens with a melancholy but beautifully touching Come Away, Death.

Track Twelve: Come Away, Death, Quilter

When That I was And A Little Tiny Boy forms the transient afterword of Twelfth Night - Or What You Will, sung- or spoken - by Touchstone, the clown. With considerable skill and imagination, the jazz-performer and composer, Johnny Dankworth, who died recently, set these lines in a clock-like swing-idiom that is both distinctive and effective. Here is the song, performed by Cleo Laine, the composer - who was a great saxophonist and clarinettist - and associates.

Track Thirteen: When That I Was, Johnny Dankworth

Of Jewish blood, the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895--1968) was a friend of most of the foremost composers of Respighi’s generation. He was forced to emigrate to the United States by the Fascist regime’s Racial Laws which sought to purge Jews from responsible positions throughout the New Roman Empire after the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany had been signed.

He wrote 11 full--scale Overtures to plays by Shakespeare, includingTwelfth Night. The overture to Twelfth Night was written in 1933, along with another to The Merchant of Venice...

The score is headed by quotations from speeches of the chief male interest, Duke Orsino: “If music be the food of love, play on...” and “Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,/That old and Antique song we heard last night...” The page Cesario is in fact Viola, the chief female interest, though the Duke is in love with melancholy, music and another lady as the play opens.

The overture begins with a long tune on cor anglais, associated with Orsino. The household’s affected puritan major domo is Malvolio, whose theme is marked vivo burlesco - bassoons crabbily underscore this marking. There is a percussive, trumpet--theme to represent Sir Toby Belch, the soused nemesis of Malvolio. The Belch-theme sounds Bavarian as imagined By an Italian... The working-out is colourful, and concludes with the Orsino theme played in the major now, and involved with Malvolio’s. In the play Malvolio - bad-will- is forced to accept his humiliation at the hands of his mistress’ maid, Belch and the Duke’s clown: he has been made to believe that his mistress is in love with him, then locked up as a madman, the Clown posing as a doctor... His last words however are, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you...” The play’s one puritan is - of course - a hypocrite. A galliard-element represents the song When I was, and the coda suggests an ironic pay-off.

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 Fourteen: Twelfth Night, Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Owing to time, the Fool's Dance from Susato's Danserye and the Padouana of Schein had sadly to be omitted from the broadcast.

Christmas 2013

Hi there
This is Classical Break
And I'm Rupert kirkham.

This weekend, we've decided to do a choral show. The second half is Christmas music but the first half is going to be choral music not specifically written for Christmas, but very beautiful anyway and I think lovely to listen to at any time of the year.

This programme will actually go out for two weekends, so Mike, Jayne and I can have a bit of a Christmas break. But wether you're listening to the original programme on Saturday morning, the repeat on Sunday or you have decided, as you can here at Somer Valley fm, to revisit the programme through the listen again facility on the station website, we hope you enjoy the music and wish you all a very happy Christmas.

 This year it's the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten and if you're a regular listener  to Classical Break you'll know I'm a bit partial to Britten's works. That comes, really from my early days as a chorister at New College in Oxford, which I'll probably bore you about later. The second half of today's programme features the choir we used to think in those days and I'm talking 50 years ago here, we're our rivals, Kings College Cambridge,  singing Brittens  classic Christmas piece, 'a Ceremony of Carols'.

First though, a contemporary of Benjamin Britten was Herbert Howells.

Let's here our first piece of music, then I'll tell you a bit about Howells and the rest of the music we're going to hear today.

Composed in 1961 for the 450th anniversary of St. John's college in Cambridge, here's his motet, 'a sequence for st Michael' and it's sung by the choir of New College, Oxford in a 1989 recording directed by the choirmaster, Edward Higginbottom.

A SEQUENCE FOR St MICHAEL
10:00

Just after I left new college, I guess it was around 1966, the college finally coughed up the cash to build a new organ. If I remember correctly, it cost about 60 thousand pounds, which was the cost in those days of a very smart yacht. When I went back a few years later - I think it took them a year or
so to build it, I was absolutely stunned. On the front, it has a glass Swell Box, consisting of panels of glass which open and close to control the sound. As they do so, they catch the colours and reflections of the fantastic stained glass windows that run down the sides of the chapel. The organ itself, the arrangement of pipes and the sound of it, matches that startling look. It must truly be one of the finest organs in the world. Do go and have a look if you're ever in Oxford.

Next, from the same cd, which incidentally is one of two released in 1989, volumes one and two - of choral and organ music by Howells, are two organ pieces, Walton's Toye and Jacobs Brawl. Walton's Toye is based on a motif in one of William Walton's famous works, Crown Imperial, see if you can spot it.

WALTON'S TOYE, JACOB'S BRAWL

Walton's Toye and Jacobs Brawl.  more organ music later on.

The next choral piece was written specially for the choir of New College,  in 1953 by Herbert Howells. It's his setting of the canticles -  as choirmaster Edward Higginbottom puts it, 'a predominance of diatonic harmonies with a sprinkling of characteristic surprises and delights'.

Howells used to write choral music as much to suit the venue as anything else. The next piece was designed to be performed in New College chapel, which still, to this day, whenever I go into it, gives me a chill down the spine.

The New College Service, by Herbert Howells in its first ever recording in New College chapel, by the choir.

NEW COLLEGE SERVICE
9:33

Two more pieces by Howells performed on the organ at New college, Oxford, by choirmaster, Edward Higginbottom.

Flourish for a Bidding was written to raise money at a charity auction for the Royal College of Organists and De la Mares Pavane was transcribed for organ from his clavichord works.

FLOURISH, PAVANNE

Now the Christmassy bit!
We now present, In its entirety, Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, performed by the choir of Kings College Cambridge, in a cd of Britten's choral music made in the early 1970's with Sir David Willcox  conducting and Ossian Ellis on the harp.

Goodbye and Happy Christmas to you both.

A CEREMONY OF CAROLS
Benjamin Britten

7 & 8 December

This programme is a repeat from earlier this year!

CB Winter

Intro:  Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes, Gurney

 

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows and takes winter as it’s theme.

 

We have just heard a song by Ivor Gurney, whose benign shade wanders often into the mind.  The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes sets a poem by Ernest Casson.  It is a song for contemporary shepherds watching their sheep.

 

Now, a setting of a sonnet of Edmund Spenser made by Edmund Rubbra.  It comes from his set of Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra, a work of his mid-thirties, first performed in 1935.  After the first performance, he amplified the original string quartet accompaniment, very likely as the textures of the string parts are often strongly contrapuntal and played on only four instruments may not bear the weight; of course, to thicken the lines may overpower the soloist’s contribution.  The sonnet’s compact structure of fourteen lines, balanced phrases and poised rhythms, comparatively long lines and an argument developed tautly within strict metre and rhymes, is not easy to set - its form being a single verse, frequently stating abstract propositions in a manner that does not imply any melody other than its own.  In the case of New Year Forth Looking Out Of Janus’ Gate, the tenor sings above a fugue; the quiet climax brings voice and instruments together in a broadened statement before the stalky opening subject, a tempo primo, ends the piece abruptly.

 

Track Two:   Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra Rubbra

 

Tchaikovsky’s twelve piano pieces, The Seasons, were written month by month for the journal Nuvellist.  They were intended for readers to play, they were written to deadlines, work on them being often prompted by Tchaikovsky’s valet.  It was fortunate for us that Alexei remembered.  Small-scale and unambitious as they are in form, The Seasons are anything but ephemeral as music.  Each was headed by a quotation from Russian poetry.  January (At The Fireside) is headed by words from Pushkin:  “A little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire is dying in the fire-place, and the candle has burned out...”  There you have it, two of Russia’s more sophisticated artists of the 19th Century:  but the piece is a miniaturization of much that is best in Tchaikovsky, the song, the thought-provoking forays into rhythmical contrast and overall charmingly sensitive affect conveyed with notable melodic and harmonic skill, all this in a form of simple alternation.  

 

Track Three:  January (At The Fireside), Tchaikovsky   

 

Schubert’s Winterreise, composed only two years before his death, frightened his friends.  One can imagine that Schubert stared for too for long into its icy regions for their comfort:  how far their friend could travel by staring into the flame of a candle and thinking...   A twenty-four song-cycle setting poems of Muller, it tells the story of a journey into cold and nightmare, snows and madness, undertaken by a disappointed lover.  Here are three contrasting songs from the cycle, No 11, Frühlingstraum, No 18, Stürmische Morgen and No 20, Der Wegweiser - Dream of Spring, Stormy Morning and The Signpost.  Spring is the hope of salvation; storms and cold are too much to the lover’s mood; the lover has his path; it is shown him by the sign-post; the beloved did not have to make this journey - she has a home.  The wanderer’s journey is far from over.   

 

Track Four, Five, Six:  Winterreise - Fruhlingstraum and Sturmische Morgen, Der Wegweiser, Schubert

 

When news broke that Schubert had died, the eighteen year-old Schumann was heard to sob nightlong. Here is the Slow Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor.  This arioso is possibly Schumann’s most beautiful concertante creation.  The entire concerto was written and scored within a few days in the October of 1853 and during a spate of inspiration.  It was his last major work and was composed for the young Hungarian violinist, Josef Joachim, who with the twenty-year-old Brahms had done much to brighten what was a difficult time in his professional career.  In the event, the concerto was suppressed by Schumann’s musical executors, his pianist-wife, Clara, Joachim and Brahms after a private run-through with an orchestra, two years after the composer’s death.  Nearly eighty years later, during a seance, a spirit contacted another Hungarian violinist, Jelly D’Aranhji, and the objections of Schumann’s last remaining daughter, Eugenie, merely delayed performance and publication of the concerto a short time, which took place after Eugenie’s death, in 1938.  We hope to devote space to the entire work and the fascinating story surrounding it, in a future programme.  Marked Langsam -Slow - and beginning on cellos, the slow movement treats an introduction and violin solo melody to ornamentation and development in ternary form; near the close, the violin sings its melody a third lower and in the minor.  Filled with baroque touches, canons, imitations, appogiatura and trills, this is music instinct with the skills of old music made anew, and with all the dignity of the old.  The movement as a whole expresses a depth of sadness unusual in Schumann, and yet the sheer, full-hearted purity of means and ends and beautiful sense of form one finds in it confers on it an air of wisdom innocent of self-pity.  It seems to sing over the cradle of the vanity of human wishes.  Schumann loved his children, six of whom he watched grow:  here, it is as if we watch a dear child at the window, its dark eyes hypnotized by the twisting fall of snow-flakes, the fall that seems to rise.  We feel the sadness of how much young promise must learn by suffering through a too-short life.  This is not to sentimentalize either Schumann’s fascination by the baroque, or his own winter thoughts. “Work,” he had written to himself some time earlier, “while there is still light...”        .     

 

Track Seven:  Violin Concerto, 11 Langsam, Schumann

 

The four North Country Sketches were the Bradford-born Frederick Delius’ tribute to his home county, Yorkshire.  Most of his life was spent in France with periods when he was resident in Florida, Germany and Norway, but in 1913-14, he wrote an orchestral suite depicting the Yorkshire countryside that he had loved and explored as a boy.  Frederick. or Fred, Delius came of German stock, and was named Fritz.  As a man he had a curious accent, but at the bottom of a weakness for French idioms and beyond fencing of slightly German gutterals softened by the Norwegian of his wife, one encountered the tell-tale flat vowels of his county of origin.  His view of the moors in Winter, Winter Landscape, has the characteristic breadth and light and shade of all his pictures in music, but the violins, violas and woodwind bring an edge, the higher-pitched instruments at first chiming in coldness, the horns subdued, flute and oboe and clarinet only gradually becoming the hope of warmth.  The chromaticism of the harmony and rocking ostinati beloved of this composer are restricted and end unresolved, as though keen perceptions of Winter have no contrivable end in themselves, and simply fade out as the focus of one’s gaze is claimed elsewhere...

 

Track Eight:  North Country Sketches, Winter Landscape, Delius

 

Now, a Branles de la Torche from Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore or book of dances, of 1612.  Torch--dances were a favourite courtly spectacle at this time, torches borne aloft throughout.  What a symbol for defiance of harsher winters than we know now!

 

Track Nine:  Bransles de la Torche, Praetorius,  

 

The American composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote many fine film-scores:  but also a number of equally striking concert-works, where his colouristic imagination was given full play.  Here is his glistening evocation of February, from the song-cycle, Fantasticks, to words by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton.

 

Track Ten:  February, Fantasticks, Herrmann

 

Another traditional song: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, otherwise known As Dives and Lazarus.  In this,

The miserly contempt of the rich man for the presumably undeserving poor man brings its own reward...

 

Track Eleven:  As It Fell Out Upon One Day, Trad

 

To Bernard Herrmann the film composer.

 

Let’s hear his Sleigh-Ride, written for the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which a Midford farmer sells his soul to the devil (Scratch) for Hessian gold.  The Scots song on which the cue is based is one thing;  the prominence of the tritone - the devil’s interval in music - in the harmonies quite another, seeming to be telling us where the enriched Jabez Stone is ultimately headed...

 

Track Twelve:  Sleigh-Ride, Herrmann

 

“Great God, this is an awful place!”

 

If one wants to take on Winter and win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other men, all of whom are starving.

To end, here’s a suite of cues from Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in 1911-12.  Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished from cold and scurvy on the return journey. 

 

Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, or the photography of the Terra Nova expedition – the artistry of Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five extraordinary men.  It is music of human endeavour and the inhumanity of the elements.  Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment - strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness, of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...

 

The cues are entitled:  Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.

 

This is 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!

 

Tracks Thirteen - Nineteen:  Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 30-December 1 2013

CB  America IV

This weekend's programme is a repeat of last week's show, by popular demand!

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today, we continue our exploration of music of the United States.  The script was written and researched by MikeBurrows. We began with a setting of Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, for mezzo-soprano, choir and organ by the Michigan composer, Leo Sowerby (1895-1968).  This work was written in the composer’s late twenties, after war-service in a US Artillery unit, and is remarkable for its serene, blues-tinged simplicity.  The melodic line is narrow, overwhelmingly syllabic, the accompaniment sparse and largely chordal, the choral counterpoint limited but effective, the soloist preceding and following the affirmatory chorus, who have the last word – a single, syllabic Amen.  Sowerby was a great and well-regarded writer of music for the Anglican Episcopal Church.  He held a number of positions as organist and choirmaster – for example, at the St James Episcopal Church – now, cathedral – in Chicago.  Self-taught at first – studying from books and the scores of composers such as Franck and Reger – and taking a correspondence-course with the Chicago Conservatory whilst in the Army, he was a modest practitioner who may have had much in common, as man and artist, with Cesar Franck, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ of St Clothilde’s and Paris Conservatory. 

Any ‘blues’ in this piece are owed more to the innocently Wagnerian Franck than to the jazz that as beginning to enliven most forms of American music in the first quarter Of the 20th Century.

Track 1:  Psalm 121:  I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes, Leo Sowerby

Some of the most tatty, rackety Instrumental playing ever recorded was issued In the teens of the Century In albums of New Orleans jazz.  It has a raffish gloire all its own that increases the breadth of one’s smile when one is told of how  American church leaders, social crusaders and municipal authorities campaigned with high zeal for crackdowns on jazz-clubs, and Jazz-performances after midnight, if not for a total ban!  Jazz destroyed the moral fibre of all who heard it; it was the music of sexual abandon, alcoholism, drug-addiction and gambling!  Jass was the negro word for sexual arousal!  This appalling threat to religion and public morals began at revival meetings, in theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, bars and brothels  and on bandwagons; many of the performers were blacks or poor whites, self--taught and, worse still, talented and, to a high degree, rightly cocky. 

Growing out of rag-time and blues,and also Jewish klezmer, Jazz’s  busy textures and frantic manners would be nothing without the momentum Created by characterful rivalry for predominance in the hectoring vividness of the band.   Cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and percussion – a typical early jazz-line-up - form a brilliantly humorous or sardonic combination – possibly originating in the  theatre orchestra-pit: a raucous, gaudy combination, razzing all classical or romantic concepts of their natures .  Here is one of the earliest jazz-recordings:  The Ostrich-walk, composed by Nick LaRocca, cornetist extraordinaire, and performed by him in the company of his Original Dixieland Band, in 1917.

Track 2:  The Ostrich Walk, LaRocca

One may say that the aggressive on-olling sound moves faster than tanks of the day, to crazy effect. 

The tune comes in for treatment – It is made to be an indestructible ‘standards, made up by someone who had a  talent for invention; apparently, LaRocca  was the only member of his band who could read music:  improvisation, very often an informally-acquired skill,  took over, the piano and percussion maintaining rhythm, the cornet,clarinet and  trombone given the spaced, repeated hooks, imitations and discoveries that characterize this idiom.

In contrast to LaRocca’s “white jazz”, here are Jelly-roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers in Dr Jazz, by King Oliver, recorded In 1925.  It Is matter for conjecture why the boys of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, surrounded as they were by black bands, were the First recorded jazz-musicians.  They have impetus and blague not matched by Morton and his fellow band-members, a comic timing hard to define but real.  In comparison, the black band appears less abrasively assertive, but it is arguable that LaRocca and Co have less poise and self-awareness, less independence within their ensemble – less-developed solos; overall,  theirs seems the less fluent accomplishment...

Track Three:  Dr Jazz, Oliver

There’s no doubt that early jazz, whether white or black, was an accomplished form of music; its practitioners could say that if they were not concert-hall musicians, it might be equally said that concert-hall musicians hadn’t the first idea of how to make jazz-music.  The skills of self-taught folk-musicians who conceal awkward note-acquisition, pentatonic modality, unmigrating tonality and harmonies discovered whilst a-wandering  behind quick tempos, repeated notes and daring or wrong-right harmonic or contrapuntal shifts, are often coveted by trained virtuosi.  So it is between jazz- and Art-musicians.  At the same time, folk-music has a lyrical pathos of simplicity, and jazz had developed in that direction, too, in slow blues and Spirituals.  The blues originated in work-songs, The spiritual in white hymns.  Jazz is neither Black nor White.  It is migrant:  it is the music of the oppressed – of Italians, Jews and African Americans – all victims of the post-Civil War settlement and a competitively capitalist industrial society  in which the Dollar is President, and slum-dwelling, low-paid labour, deprivation and the poorhouse are the lot of those who give him his wealth in return for uncertain  employment and subsistence.  How’s this for thrift:  the poor turn misery and defiance into music - and that music beggars spoilt rich people’s best efforts in verve and expressiveness:  sooner than wealth can synthesize this elixir vitae, it finds itself paying true exponents, whose genius changes and reinvigorates bourgeois art-music forever.  Good jazz is a locus classicus for unpermitted culture and dexterity, spirit, intelligence and expressiveness.  It was once seen as revolutionary.  It is a music of passive or active resistance and folkish self-assertion, a music that illuminates fashionable life to this day, at its most characteristic when provided by brilliant, burn-out-risking illuminati among the poor or descendants of the poor of all races.

Let’s hear the traditional song, I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven,performed by the Hall Negro Quartet, in 1941.

Track 4:  I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven, Trad 

Archishman Ghosh is a young Indian scientist and musician.  He composes songs and piano-pieces in his spare time, inspired by German romantic poetry and the music of Romantics such as Chopin, Wagner, Wolf, and, most recently, Grieg and Grainger.  He earns his place in this programme as he resides in Florida and as hewrites as well as anyone, having both the ‘can-do’ attitude and faculty of stern self-criticism to boost his undeniable technical skills.  Out of many influences, he appears to be forming himself, as any American would be proud to do.  One has a few small but well-made piano-pieces, and thoughts that potential is already realizing itself.  Here is the March in A, a droll march and more searching trio.  The piece ends with both flourish and question-mark – an achievement in itself!    Its material is rich and enharmonically modulatory, while the direction remains adroitly clear. 

Track Five:  March in A, Archishman Ghosh

Peter Boyer, born in 1970, wrote a work that expresses much of the awe, gratitude and trepidation felt by immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration reception-point lying off New York City, watched over by the Statue of Liberty.  Ellis Island:  The Dream of America is a melodrama – a piece for speakers and musical accompaniment, in this instance, a symphony orchestra.  Actual memories are linked by orchestral commentary and interludes.  The style of the music is filmic. Its sturdier moments, in the currently revived everymanish Copland-era idiom, are surrounded by a neo-romantic lyricism suited to epic movies, and more imaginatively conceived passages of menace – of which modern film-composers are well-capable.  Here are the Second Interlude and memories of Lillian Galleta, who emigrated from Italy in 1928.  

Track 6&7:  Ellis Island:  The Dream Of America

The United States had its share of pianist-composers formed in the mould of the European tradition.  Such an one was Henry Holden Huss, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey.  Born to an affluent, musical family – his father was a friend of the much-travelled lion of the keyboard, Anton Rubenstein – he was trained at Munich and became not only a Fine pianist with a national reputation, but also a purveyor of excellently-crafted salon-pieces that became popular with pianists of the parlour.  Books of character-pieces, dances, album-leaves, reflections and the like flowed from his pen.  A class or more up from hymns, patriotic or sentimental songs, ragtime or darky-music, it is music wonderfully well-turned by a hand that has worked hard enough to conceal all effort in the making.  Then again, it is of its time as experienced by a very isolatedly cultured class.  Formally unexceptional in every regard, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, tonal and developmental, it must be heard on its own terms.  Isn’t this true of all music of another age?  Much of it was of another age when composed.  Francophile, Russophile, Brahmsian?  It is none the worse for its conservatism, it seems.  Here is the Menuet Rococo,  Number one of Three Pieces, Opus 26, published in 1917.       

Track 8: Menuet Rococo, Huss

All Day and All Night, Music.  The 13^th Century Sufic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi Wrote a work of six books, the Mathnawi; 64,000 lines of verse that have exercised men’s minds ever since.  Once a source of wisdom for New England’s Transcendental philosophers and novelists, Rumi has inspired a thirteen-movemented cantata by that hugely active figure in modern American Art-music, Christopher Theofanidis.  At the time of its composition, there was increased curiosity about Islam, owing to the suicide attacks on the WTO buildings and Pentagon.  Nine-Eleven Is not to be seen as An inspiration or influence on the form that this work took.  Written in an idiom similar to that of Carmina Burana, with clear lines and harmonies and rhythmic spring percussively underlined, largely homophonic or chordal writing for the choir, and bold contrasts in orchestral tone, The Here and Now is a further example of contemporary attempts to relate post-modern Art-music to the moods and musical sense of the public.  It reminds us of concepts of  Gebrauchtsmusik of the ‘20s and ‘30s of The Last Century, perhaps without the sense of educational zeal.  This is practical music with a social purpose, a commissioned message.  Here is the Fourth Movement, All Day and Night ,Music.

Track 10:  The Here and Now, 4. All Day and Night, Music, Theofanidis

 Meredith Willson, from Mason City, was given formal training at the Damrosch Institute in New York, where he became a flautist, paying his way through school by performing as a cinema-pianist.  He was offered a place in Sousa’s famous band, and from there made his own name as a composer.  A hit on Broadway with such musicals as The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, he also wrote concert-music, including two symphonies in the pictorial manner of Ferde Grofe.  His Second Symphony, The Missions of California, dates from 1940, and commemorates in particular the missionary work of a Spanish Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra.  The finale is a celebration of the building of a road that connected the missions.  As might be expected of an alumnus of Sousa’s band, the writing for all sections of the orchestra is impressive in blend and contrast, bright-toned, and the overall mood both active and optimistic.  Themes from the earlier movements are redeveloped and combined and come to a brassy, bell-capped climax.  A fine work.

Track 11:  Symphony No 2, lV, El Camino Real, Willson

The murder of a President of the United States causes reverberations that last for decades.  Horror that such a deed against the person of the supreme elected official of the Union remains possible is increasingly succeeded by suspicions as to who ‘put the assailant up to it’.  The United States has a highly organized Society, with powerful sectional interests that have very little to do with democracy if they can help it.  In September, 1901, it was President McKinley who lay dying, reportedly singing Nearer, My God, to Thee.  In New York digs nicknamed Poverty Flat, Charles Ives wrote a Memorial Slow March that has sadly not come down to us in its original form.  On the other hand, he worked on another piece at about this time.  Scored for trumpet, trombone and four sets of bells pitched in different keys, From The Steeples and The Mountains originated in a childhood memory of his father’s trying to reproduce the effect of Danbury’s church-bells on the family piano as they were rung in a rainstorm.  George Ives was every much as revolutionary a musician as his son, a Civil War Army bandmaster – thus the Taps-call at the outset - who had his own ideas.  Charles’ mother remembered that the bells were rung in alarm in the middle of the night, after a lightning strike on a row of a houses.  This piece speaks of those bells – and, also, of how the age-old New England hills take up the shout of New England bells.  It sounds like a reaction to the death of a McKinley – or a J F Kennedy.  From The Steeples and The Mountains, by Charles Ives.  We began our programme looking to the hills, like Leo Sowerby, and end it by looking to them in the manner of Charles Ives.  It’s the American way.

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on music of the United States, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!   

Track 12:  From The Steeples and The Mountains, Ives