CB Winter, 17 & 18 January

This programme is a repeat from last 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

Twelfth Night 10/11 January

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


CB 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 and Morisque - 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 Danserye was 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, including Twelfth 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.

New Year 2015, 2 & 3 January

Classical Break - New Year

This is a repeat from 2011.  A happy new year to all our listeners!

Here is a new poem by Mike Burrows:

A Sonnet On New Year’s Eve

(A Dream)

Quiet long took the high hills at a rush
And is all intent where ancientness dwells.
On turfed or wooded land, darkness brought hush
Murmurous with wind and traffic: no bells
Speak and swing true change; the word of a near
Ring pierces miles of chill in one’s trance...
In mind only, sounding to the walker
New Year in system of deliverance.
So faint, the twisting scales wished-for and dreamed
Under parishes of half-moon and stars –
Whose communities approve cloudy-streamed
Jubilancy – as jugganauts, like cars,
Shine flat-angled or burrowing headlights,
The lit roads they join now teeming all nights.

Copyright, Mike Burrows, 01/01/15

Track One:       Out In The Dark, Burgon,

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  It is of British music, and is inspired by the season of New Year. You have just heard a setting, for alto voice and chamber orchestra, of Edward Thomas’ poem Out In The Dark, by Geoffrey Burgon. 

This has some of the elusiveness of New Year feeling - of coming out of oneself into the night of change and always-has-been-if one-had-but-known-it.  It comes from the song-cycle  Acquainted With Night.

New Year...: not for nothing was the Roman god-gatekeeper, Janus given two faces, one for the past and the other for the future.  The New Year is a time when we look back as tenaciously - if we have sense - as we look forward.  Where we have been, the sum of our experiences and how we continue, are what we are and, to an extent, our hopes of continuance.  What do we enter upon under the high gate?

We are in the middle of Christmas, and New Year brings Epiphany in its train:  a time associated with the pilgrimage of the Three Kings to the cradleside of Jesus Christ.  Here is a movement from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Hodie, A Christmas Cantata of 1954, The March Of The Three Kings, music of this composer’s old age, although in its vigour and harmonic and colouristic imagination, it suggests that Vaughan Williams was not disposed to look backward more than he had to to continue to build on his achievements.  We too can journey.

Track Two:  Hodie, The March of The Three Kings, Vaughan Williams

Calennig is a South Welsh New Year observance - a gift given between the night of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day noon.  Parties, often of children passed from door to door giving presents of food or money, and organizing the whipround necessary!  Each carried a decorated apple supported on four skewers in order to preserve the decoration.  Here is a breathless traditional song for the occasion, recorded in Gwynedd.

Track Three:  Calennig

Ring Out Wild Bells, a setting of verses from Tennyson’s In Memoriam made by Percy Fletcher, a composer chiefly remembered now for his music for brass band.

Track Four:  Ring Out Wild Bells, Percy Fletcher

Set on New Year’s Eve in Terror Town, Sir Michael Tippett’s fifth opera, New Year, for which he himself wrote the libretto, sees the violence and visionlessness of Somewhere Today opposed by Nowhere Tomorrow - as inhabitants meet strangers from a space-ship - and face up to life and reality and their possibilities.  Here are three numbers from the orchestral Suite: Love-Theme For Jo Ann and Pelegrin, Ringing-in The New Year (spot the references to Auld Lang Syne) and The Space-ship Takes off Again. 

Tracks Five, Six and Seven:  New Year:  Love-Theme For Jo Ann and Pelegrin, Ringing-in The New Year and The Space-ship Takes off Again

Here is a poem by Mike Burrows, New Year

The Gatekeeper’s faces are calm with fate

Gazing both back and through the dark

                                              archway,

And on earth, bronze swings and sounds in

                                               tons-weight

Choirs of ancient peals.  Coming to day,

A stranger will show his face as new

And old and still unknowable; as yet,

He moves in clear concealment where 

                                              he grew -

His span drawn to us from the stars’

                                         bright mesh.

Morning will show him and deliverance

As what we earn, and as the bells clang

                                                      trust

That calms as notes soften to resonance

One’s fear is only that in truth he must

Contract from Eve to a day like others -

To the soul of his least humane brothers.

Sir Arthur Bliss’ music for the ballet Adam Zero was commissioned by the Australian dancer and actor, Robert Helpmann, who created the choreography.  It is the life-cycle of everyman, seen as the birth, growth through high times to maturity and collapse of life-work and death - the seasons -  of a single year.  Let’s hear The Birth of Adam and the strange, starry beginning of life. Incidentally, near the bitter close of the ballet, before the curtain falls, the stage is reset for...Adam Zero’s life to begin again.   

Track Eight:  Adam Zero, The Birth of Adam

Wishes that loom so large at New Year are not always wise. In the poem, The Clock of The Years, a man imagines his dead wife made young again by the Spirit of time.  There is a terrible irony that will become clear as you listen.  This song comes from Gerald Finzi’s cycle based on poems of Thomas Hardy, Earth

And Air And Rain.  The song begins with a biblical quotation - Job, Four, Fifteen - recited over piano-flourishes, an appropriately hair-raising effect.  The poem is taken from Hardy’s collection, Moments of Vision. 

Track Nine:  The Clock of The Years, Finzi

So the young girl becomes a child, the child a baby, the baby goes to nothingness; the dead Wife is lost to memory.  It was the man’s choice, not Time’s, to mar the ordained.

All the same, this is a time for dreams of what were and what may be. Here is a setting of the poem of Yeats, He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven, by Howard Skempton, a friend of the Communist activist and modernist, Cornelius Cardew.

Track Ten:  He Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven, Skempton

Inspired by the writings on New Year of the essayist, Charles Lamb, here is an orchestral piece by Gerald Finzi:  Nocturne - New Year’s Music.  Written early in the composer’s working-life, when he resided in Gloucestershire, an agnostic idealist much inspired by Morris’ Socialist writings, the works of Thomas Hardy, Georgian poetry, metaphysical literature and Charles Lamb’s antiquarian mysticism, this sombre piece is an expression of landscape and solitude with Winter thoughts on mortality and man’s determination to grow more worthy of his self-chosen destiny.  Warm wistfulness amid frost becomes resolve.  Finzi’s life was in many ways a race against time; his Father died a lingering death from cancer and siblings were struck down by illness, War and suicide, until one Sister and his Mother remained.  He was made conscious of the ironies of life and blindness of fate too early on to be at ease unless concentrating on his passions of his wife and two sons, music, poetry, apple-arboriculture.  Written in the 1920s, as he was starting out, it was revized during the Second World War and first published in 1950 - not long before its composer was stricken with leukaemia.  The broad hymn that rises out of wistful contemplation of the New Year landscape and distant bells is on an unusually large scale for this composer, typical in its undermined diatonic harmonies but beautiful in its uneasy struggle and triumph.  The dying fall is dark and resigned but there is no sense of that melody’s having been in vain; it sweetens the darkness, not with what might be but what may be.  The means are within our grasp.  Wishes and resolutions for oneself and for all count for something.  What the young composer wished and resolved became his life, and many have been the happier for getting to know him and his music.

Track Eleven:  Nocturne, New Year’s Music, Finzi

We’ll end with a medley of Scottish songs for New Year’s Eve.  Scotland Ho!  Fill Your Glass; We’re No’ Awa Tae Bide Awa; Happy We’ve Been Athegither, Highland Whisky; The Christmas Carousel; If I’d Get A Dram I’d Take It.  This was Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  I hope that you have enjoyed our New Year programme and will join us again soon.  We wish you all the best for 2012.  Goodbye!

Track Twelve: New Year Medley, Trad

           

December 27th and 28th 2014

CB Christmas 2014

Due to popular demand, the fact that Christmas this year falls midweek and we all need a holiday from time to time, we have left the Christmas show in the system for this weekend.
Do let us know what you think of it....

Track One:  Sayings & The Holly And The Ivy

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

You have just heard an extract from a collection of traditional Somerset lore,  Calendar Of Somerset Customs and Superstitions , written by WG Willis Watson in 1920, and traditional carol, The Holly and The Ivy.  The melding of Christianity and pagan narratives and rites has been strong for hundreds of years in Britain and the rest of the world. 

This is our Christmas Edition, and, presented to us as a message in a bottle from Mike Burrows, would you believe it, it comes from the manorhouse of Numbleigh-On-The-Hill, the charming, decluttered home, for the past four years, of the Nabital-Crashe family.  Numbleigh, you may remember, is one of the more haunted houses in the West Country, with a knack for being A place of tragedy, treachery and inexpiable sin.   

Here, for centuries, the seasonal sounds of sweet-voiced carol-singers taking to their heels in terror amid a hail of seigneurial shot or rock-salt have told the village that Christmas has come and is best observed in famine and despair on the one hand, and interminable feasting and debauchery on the other.

Let’s hear a traditional song, the Stocklinch Wassail.  Wassailing – calling in on neighbours’ homes to celebrate the fertility of orchards and also Christmas in music, and requesting company, food and drink as an observance of gratitude to nature or to God  - was invariably regarded by Numbleigh’s magistrates either as a form of beggary or civil disorder tantamount to revolt, depending on the political situation, and on whether the offenders called in at the big house.   The composer of the Numbleigh Wassail went into hiding and For some centuries, the hiding-place of his masterwork has defied the efforts of folklorists and even cryptologists to discover.

Track Two:  Stocklinch Wassail, Trad.

For some, Christmas is a feast against Winter.  Once, many landowners and other employers gave generously in kind – in food and drink and a place to enjoy them together - to their employees. 

Mrs Nabital-Crashe has left us now, to return to the kitchen; she has to order Christmas from various suppliers, most of them in London and Paris.  The servant-problem is vexing as ever.  She tells us that the housekeeper, two maids and cook have all gone down with scurvy, leaving the butler and strange girl with piercings to cope as they can with a mountain of meat-produce from the GM-fed home-farm .  They’re having difficulty telling which end of the lamb, pork and beef carcases is which, where the animals in question developed two heads.  The potatoes scorn those who try to peel them, and brussels sprouts have united in bringing a class-action against their landowner.  Onions, damsons, apples and medlars play I Spy.  The apple brandy ginger-snap (a liqueur), glows uncannily on being poured, and asks if its glass suits it (the trick is to drink from a schooner, should you dare drink at all).  

You may think that all this trouble is owing to managerial inefficiencies, even ineffectivenesses, at the hall, but in fact the finances of the household at Numbleigh have never been in such health, at any rate, not  since Sir Morton de Hoote agreed to pay his grateful servants and labourers a starvation-wage in 1640, the first de Hoote to pay his serfs any wage whatever.  Now that the workforce are on zero-hours contracts, have to reapply for their positions every year, face eviction if sacked - and agreed to a 20% pay-cut at the outset of Austerity – overheads are startlingly low.  

Undoubtedly, giving over three fields and a wood to affordable housing in 2013 helped.  Sadly, the wind-turbine erected on the hill-top in 2012 blew up, owing to demand from the electrical systems in the Nabital-Crashe children’s bedrooms. 

As we sip our Kenco Really Rich and dunk Asda Jammie Dodgers before an empty hearth,  enjoying the seasonable chill that radiates from a large, empty, limestone fireplace, and the Green Man andirons glare with a hint of old brass because someone polished them, we can feel exactly what Christmas, the Season of Goodwill has ever meant in this ancient house. Here is a German carol, O Du Frohliche, O, You Happy.  The performance gets in as it is from a live occasion.

Track Three:  O Du Frohliche 

A carol whose tune and words were originally written by Martin Luther in the 1530s, now.  It is generally known as Vom Himmel Hoch – from heaven above.   Here, as a traditional carol from Finland, it is called Enkeli Taivaan, An Angel From On High.  The message is the same:  the announcement of the birth of the Christ-child, sung to the shepherds on Christmas Night, when, to quote another carol, glory shone around.

Track Four:  Enkeli Taivaa, Luther 

Another Christmas song now, Gesu Bambino, Jesus, Boy-child, written in 1917 by Pietro Yon.  Born in Italy, Yon emigrated to the US in 1907 and, from then until his death in 1943, held the post of organist at New York’s Cathedral of St Patrick. This indelible piece, with its gentle, quietly fervent melody and adroit inworked reference to Adeste Fidelis, has been sung by many great soloists, singers and choirs, often accompanied by large orchestras.  

It has to be said that it been performed with as much effectiveness as a purely instrumental piece, or by a solo singer with piano-accompaniment.  

When we hear opulent arrangements of Christmas music, we should bear in mind that, at its most heartfelt, it  can – and does - come all too often from a mouth-organ played on a street-corner where no-one else hears - let alone listens - and the performer plays against cold, desolation and despair.  Christmas tells us that a loving Christ is present to listen – as should be any true Christian who can be.

Track Five:  Gesu Bambino, Yon

Down In Yon Forest is a symbolical, traditional carol noted down by Vaughan Williams.  It has possible connection with Arthurianism, the spring and hawthorn at Glastonbury.  Here it is, performed with deep expressiveness by folk-musicians, Magpie Lane.

Track Six:  Down in Yon Forest, Trad

Four pieces bringing before us stages in the Christmas story, now.  The Annunciation to Mary, a Magnificat – Mary’s song of gratitude; news of The Birth in a cradle-song, and a Bell-carol of praise, including shepherds and wise-men!

Here is a contemplative setting of the Ave Maria from the England of the 15^th Century, obviously written with a large stone-bounded acoustic in mind.  The counterpoint and harmonies are sparse.

Track Seven:  Ave Maria, Anon 

Now, a setting of the Magnificat made by a shortlived, highly-gifted composer who entered the service of three monarchs in the space of a few years of almost unimaginably contortionist yet brutal change within the church in England:  John Sheppard, circa 1515-1558.  Edward The Sixth and  Mary The First made use of his talents – he served both dutifully.  He was awarded livery by Elizabeth The First in her ignorance of his death.  This ornate, beautifully spacious work in English comes from his First Service (c1549).  It is of a style that would inspire much imitation in the 20^th Century.

Track Eight:  Magnificat, Sheppard  

A beautiful carol by the New Englander, Charles Ives, setting his own words.  An intimate nocturnal picture of the nativity, beginning with the star that stood above Bethlehem, it ends with the angels who sing, “Venit adoremus Dominum.” that is,  – “He comes that we may adore God.”  A Christmas Carol, by Charles Ives.

Track Nine:  A Christmas Carol, Ives

A lively Bell-carol, of rejoicing and praise, now, words and music again by its composer, in this case, the Welshman, William Mathias.  This piece for choir, organ and percussion was commissioned by the Bach Choir to celebrate conductor Sir David Willcocks’ 70^th birthday, and first heard at the Royal Albert Hall in December 1989.

Track Ten:  The Bell Carol, Mathias

So, to Christmas parties, which carry on riotous in spite of Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria.  Here is a thumbnail sketch of the generous celebrations afforded by some squires in the country, from an 18^th century Spectator article by the essayist and politician, Joseph Addison – Sir Roger de Coverley’s Christmas.  Tory sentiment is not what it was, even on paper. 

Track Eleven:  Sir Roger de Coverley’s Christmas, Addison

An Overture on French Carols by Philip Lane, next.  The carols are, Il est Ne le Divin Enfant, Pat-a-pan, Noel Nouvelet Quele est Cette Odeur Agreable, Masters In This Hall and Quittez,Pasteurs.  The work arose from the effect of shopping in France to the accompaniment of various stores’ public-address-systems…   

The treatment of appealing tunes is brisk and light as in most modern, picturesque, pleasant and development-light overtures, and the feel of its colourful harmonies and scoring is tres agreeable!

Track Twelve:  Overture on French Carols, Philip Lane  

By Dulcie M Ashdown’s  anthology, Christmas Past, a description of a Christmas game rarely now played.  It was popular at Numbleigh as, down the years, no fewer than 3 lords and ladies of the manor died in separate flash-fire accidents involving flaming brandy.  

 

Track Thirteen:  Snapdragon

(Music under following passage from Ivor Gurney’s Gloucestershire Rhapsody). 

There’s a good reason why Christmas is for children.  They still believe in people.  They want something for nothing, and so should we all.  To be without something for nothing throughout life is actually a form of hell.  If we do not receive, the last thing that we want to do is give.  We’re trapped in feeling niggardly; in feeling put-upon by the less-fortunate, ungrateful for any blessing that we receive because we think that we were put through some kind of mill for it.  Why should we be the ones to fall for hard luck stories?   All morning, in the distance, we’ve heard Mrs Nabital-Crashe’s impromptu disquisitions on the subject.  

When those who could give but don’t are the ones who divert blame for poverty from themselves  by speaking bitterly of the chance that someone else somewhere gets something without contributing, how may anyone else do as he wishes?  It enforces mean survival , greedy self-seeking – or giving as one can.  What can we afford, when earth stands hard as iron, water like a stone, and Christmas is consumerist or neo-liberal?  Our hearts?  Not likely! 

Ex Nihilo, out of nothing, still comes…Christmas.  The season of sharing, of gratitude, of goodwill and good company, of faith, hope and love; it remains true that it is arranging one’s life about anything other than commonwealth that is silly.  In fact, if Christmas can survive long enough to bring its usual blessings to most this year, it is all that it is cracked up to be.A short song for baritone, setting Thomas Hardy, by the young Gerald Finzi:  The Oxen.  The words are perfectly straightforward and touching, the poem of an atheist trembling momentarily on the brink of agnosticism, imagining the sight of oxen on their knees by the stall in which Mary laid her baby...  The style that Finzi adopts  is akin to something of the 16^th or 17^th Century with imitational accompaniment from a string quartet that seems to impersonate music for a consort of viols.  The result is, itself, infinitely touching.    

Track Fourteen:  The Oxen, Finzi

So, here we are outside the gates of picturesque Numbleigh Manor, three miles from the nearest bus-stop (which is at Vobster), as Mrs Nabital-Crashe had forgotten that she was entertaining a few City-chums today.  We wish you all a very happy Christmas.  Wassailing around here is out of the question, but we’ll get home somehow.  Join us again, soon.  Goodbye!

Credits: Track 1 (Sayings), taken from FSW/Halsgrove  1 CD

Tracks 11 and 13 taken from The Christmas Collection, Naxos Audiobooks, 214912