CB Bells (Rpt) 25 &26th April

CB 81 Bells (Rpt)

Intro 1:  Voluntary for Organ, MJ Burrows

(Froso Church, Jamtland, Sweden)

Intro 2:  Carillon by Sibelius - Kallion Kirkon Kallot - Bells of Kallio Church

Hello and welcome to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  I’m Mike Burrows.

Introduced by a Carillon written for Kallio Church by Sibelius, today’s programme has the theme of bells in music.

Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942) and born in Sweden was a composer of wide accomplishment whose cause was perhaps not best served by his day job of music critic.  His acidulous reviews earned him at least one public boxing of the ears and he was as much despised as feared.  When one comes to his own music the picture is a lot more interesting.  He wrote piano pieces inspired by and on a par with Grieg’s and symphonies and incidental music that repay attention.  He lacked originality rather than a good style, and chose his models with real self-knowledge.  At least one of his Symphonies, the Third, Same Ätnam or Lapland should be well-known.

Our first piece today is one from his first book of Flowers of Frösö which were lyric pieces associated with life at his country home, Sommerhagen.  Vid Frösö Kyrka.  At Frösö Church.

Track One:  Peterson Berger:  Vid Frösö Kyrka.

Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) was a Modernist in modern times.  He was not wholly uncritical of the German and Austrian composers who dominated the Modernist movement, while despising the contemporary domination of Italian music by modish composers of verismo opera, men like Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavallo, who saw themselves as heirs of Verdi.  He worked as a teacher, a thorough-going editor of the music of long-forgotten Italian composers, polyphonists and instrumentalists including Monteverdi and Vivaldi, while developing his own quite individual and often bafflingly complex style.  He was in some ways a forerunner of Post-Modernism, mixing idioms ancient and modern and also writing symphonies that defy any conventional analysis and whose moods are often the only thread holding them together.  Famous and successful among international groupings of composers, he felt unappreciated at home although he rose to some eminence; his maturity coincided with the rise of Fascism and he had a poor and bitter relationship with the Party, where he was sometimes found embarrassing to the cause and at other times too independent-minded; very probably his talent and aesthetic were not understood by the Leader who was always right, let alone many of Mussolini’s court, and he was an unreliable  sycophant. 

Although the plum jobs and commissions never came his way, his reputation suffered greatly by his association with the regime.  His Third Symphony is entitled Of The Bells.  It was written in reaction to the occupation of Italy by Nazi troops after the fall of Mussolini’s government and Italy’s aligning herself with the Allies.  To him, bells symbolised an eternal power against which earthly tyranny could do nothing, as in much else in his life he defeated his temporal despair by a faith in religious or aesthetic tradition.  He was a very strange - or normal - kind of Modernist for the times.  Let’s hear the third movement, a Scherzo, marked Vivace or Lively. 

Track Two:  Malipiero:   Symphony No 3, ‘Delle Compane’.

Now, a Breton Adaptation for choir of a Russian folksong, Une Cloche Dans Le Matin.  A sleigh-bell is heard...  We leave off everything to sing a song in the wind - wait for the noise of black horses who long for the gallop.  It is a choir of a million voices on the wind, the song of those who can only dream of being riders.  The sun will return, the spring will bloom again.  The bell heard in the night is the song of until we meet again - it dies in the distance more completely than songs in the wind...

Track Three:  Folksong:  Une Cloche Dans Le Matin. 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  The theme of today’s programme is of bells in music.

William Alwyn (1905-1985), a writer and painter as well as composer, wrote music in many genres and is most famous for his film music.  He was an under-appreciated symphonist, writing five symphonies, a sinfonietta and numerous concertante pieces.  For his Fifth Symphony he wrote a short work taking its inspiration but no programme from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, a favourite work on ancient customs of urn-burial.

  The finale is perhaps the most arresting section of the piece which seems a bitter expression of mortality and as such dominated by a representation of tolling bells in the brass.  Building from a quiet opening, this is a more concise and affecting movement perhaps than Holst’s Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, certainly it is colder and crueller and rises to a paradoxically strong, keening protest only for a dying fall of acceptance to find reconciliation a benignant influence.  It seems that fear or grief has nowhere else to run but down.  They have travelled a via dolorosa; or perhaps we have witnessed the rites of burial of Celtic or Roman Britain, a lonely procession, final tributes of tears and ululation, and interment.  The scoring warms, the violins and brass, which have been so powerful, pass with the soul’s fear and striving after survival - or grief at an unbearable loss.  In the consolatory thought of returning to the earth from which one came, there is something as warm as the sun.  The very terseness of this movement provides its close with real, hard-won room for pathos and pity, the sections of the orchestra interplaying at last and at something like peace  - catharsis of terror and pity occurs; the tragedy is over, its crimes forgiven, its misfortunes understood with humanity and accepted - and forms only a part of the Symphony’s claim on one’s memory. 

Track Four:  William Alwyn:  Symphony Number Five, Hydriotaphia,  Finale.

Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a Symphony, The Bells, based on a poem by Poe, but his output is haunted by the deep and tinny jostling of Orthodox bells - like its znamenniy, or chant, a symbol of the Church’s Byzantine traditions of ritual - from his teenage C-sharp Prelude to his last, greatest work, the Symphonic Dances.  There is something wild, uncontrolled and yet unrelenting about this sound:  one might almost think of it as a nightmare for overworked pianists, which the young Rachmaninoff certainly was from an unconscionably early age!  As summons to or signal of liberation - or New Life -  after, highly stipulative observance, it is not to be ignored or subsumed in secular life.  It dins itself into one’s consciousness in joy or merciless clangour, hope or condemnation.  Something of the fixity of its purpose is caught in the fourth of his Etude-Tableaux for Two Pianos, Opus Five, written when he was eighteen and a student at Moscow Conservatoire. 

The twice-played chant, Christ Is Risen is accompanied by an ostinato from the belfry.  Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, an expert in Orthodox music, was impressed by the piece at a perfomance given in the home of Beleiev, the important publisher.  He was impressed, with the proviso that the bells-figuration wearied the ear as never still; perhaps reserved for the repetition of the chant it would be more effective.  Rachmaninoff shrugged.  “’I was very stuck-up back then,’” he later wrote, “and I simply said, “Why,when in life it always comes together with the bells?!’  And I never changed a note.” 

Track Five:  Rachmaninoff:  Etude Tableau, Opus Five, Number Four, Paques (Easter) 

According to Balinese lore, improvisatory Indonesian gong-music, gamelan, may have had its origins in Japan.  It is based on traditional elements - led by double-headed drum, played on a mixed ensemble of large and small gongs, metallaphones - a kind of glockenspiel made up of metal bars - other drums, stringed and even blown instruments, in complex yet insistent time composed of several individual rhythms and melodies; there is no display of ego, the improvization a blend, conflicting or fitting according to what it accompanies in dance or spoken theatre - one genre accompanies all-night productions! - at work or at village- and family-festivities.  It is not a music of academic harmonic, tonal relations or formal balance as they were once understood in the West and must at first have seemed utterly primitive and alien to the crowds who witnessed performances at Exhibitions in Europe in the late Nineteenth Century, but since, it has become an influence on Classical musicians as far apart as Debussy and the Reichian minimalists, and on jazz- and popular music.

Gamelan has a number of forms and instrumental variations of its own, all with terms, down to the use of particular kinds of hard- and soft-headed stick, and has distinct Courtly and rural styles.

Here is Puspa Wresti, which accompanies  a ritual dance - as offerings are brought to a shrine.

Track Six:  Gamelan,  Puspa Wresti

Claude Debussy wrote La Cathedrale Engloutie, The Engulfed Cathedral as the tenth of his first Book of Preludes, completed in Nineteen Ten, when he was forty-eight.  Rather than with keys, he headed these pieces with highly symbolic, not to say self-conscious, subtitles, a daring innovation as recently as the age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.  These are - he would sneeringly have said - ‘impressions’ for imbeciles, and what he would prefer to call ‘realities’, poetic in the Baudelairian sense of ‘correspondances’ between the Arts rather than easy evasions of  the conventional, clearly-hewn walk through the twenty-four keys.  Innovation is not the only aim.  New, valid expression of the spiritual joint-relationship between images, poetry, music and life itself, between conscious Art and the eternal beauty and truth that are veiled by what we more or less take for real.  They leave classical harmony far behind, influenced by Russian whole-tone and Balinese Gamelan-music, but are no less complex and skilfully-made for that:  as a dandyish student, he had enjoyed improvizing before lectures for his classmates at the Paris Conservatoire, his harmonic progressions shamelessly undoctrinaire on the professorial piano on which would be played examples from the approved piece analysed during the lecture! 

On a solitary Breton bay, amid sounds of the upper world and highly coloured waves the body of a cathedral, ruined or by some miracle, whole, is pictured in the reverberance of deep, solemn bells, which rises to its loudest and fades into silence, tantalizing those who have ears to hear them for a few short minutes and may never hear them again:  can one imagine the holiness made of a proud cathedral lost forever to the ultimate otherness of the sea, now that the bells are mute...?

Perhaps music paints and verbalizes something of this. 

Track Seven:  Debussy: Preludes, First Book, No 10,  La Cathedral Engloutie

In most Christian National cultures, the driving off of evil or the otherworld of earthbound spirits can be achieved by the sound of Church-bells.  Our next piece illustrates this phenomenon.  Everyone knows In The Hall of The Mountain King, by Edvard Grieg, characterized by him as a piece of cow-dung, so ultra-Norwegian Nationalist in tone that he couldn’t bear to hear it.     It is a number from his incidental music to Peer Gynt, the most inspired shaggy dog-story told in verse by modern man.

The peasant, Peer, is an irresponsible dreamer descended from a once-wealthy family of the same.  His vain, idle life of tall tales, more filled with stretchers than any medical man’s, is plunged into existentialist drama when he abducts a not exceptionally reluctant girl who is about to be married.  After ruining and leaving her on the mountain-side, he encounters three cow-herdesses with meadow-morals, and after this runs his head against a rock; after which, he meets the Woman In Green.  He rides off to her home with her on a pig.  She turns out to be the daughter of the Dovre-Gubben - the King, literally, the Gaffer of the Trolls. 

He likes their complacent motto - it could be his - Unto thyself be...enough, but after entertainment, he refuses to scratch his eye out and wear a tail in order to see the world as the huldra-folk do and thus be fit to marry a troll.  This is unfortunate.  The trolls pursue him from their hall shouting, “Slaughter him!”.

At the height of this action, church bells are heard and they cause the hall to collapse in unholy confusion and cacophony - in the panic, he escapes.  For now.  His life of travel and a long, empty search for his soul is just beginning. 

There is a menace and malicious energy to Grieg’s music that gives the unanswerable lie to all who believe his incidental music to be sweet and sentimental, or its writer to have been any less daring in his chosen field than was his dramatist in his.  Peer  Gynt  Chased By the Trolls.    

Track Eight:  Grieg:  Incidental Music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peer Gynt Chased By the Trolls.  

Our last track is one I remember from childhood and the B-side of a forty-five that redeemed whatever Side A was.  It is by Ronald Binge, (1910-1979), a composer of light music  which reminds one of the truth of Tchaikovsky’s remark that there is no light music, only good or bad music.Sailing By, Elizabethan Serenade, The Watermill, Inamorata, Autumn Dream were once well-known.  Cornet Carillon has been a staple of Christmas brass-band programmes for many years, and with good reason.  It is quiet, beautifully-written in its simplicity and not for trolls.  To write good music in any idiom is given to few composers; this is a masterly airing of scale-phrases and common chords ending on a final bluesy discord - the perfect cadence, given that bells are hypnotic in their resonance, a matter of partials, overtones and undertones, each bell emitting a jumble of notes, and can clash with a quiet sweetness as strange and memorable as any New Year’s Eve full peal heard from the standpoint of those pulling on the sallies.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, presented by Mike Burrows.  I hope you liked this programme and will join me for the next.  Cheers.

Track Nine: Ronald Binge: Cornet Carillon

Play-out Track:  Musette Francaise for church organ, MJ Burrows

Cb Sea 2 18 & 19 April

CB The Sea 2

Track 1: Whiskey Johnny, Trad

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I'm Rupert Kirkham. This week's programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and showcases music inspired by the sea, the ships that sail on it, and the men who work them. You've just heard the shanty or work-song, Whiskey Johnny. It would have accompanied concerted efforts of hauling on deck: in the days of sailing-ships, the common toil was sufficient almost to blind the sailor to the dangers of being on the open sea: led by one voice, the responses are from the watch; the result seems almost like unholy liturgy.

Next, Alan Rawsthorne's characteristic music for the 1953 film, The Cruel Sea, based on the novel by Monserrat. This combines fanfare-motives in portrayal of the bravery of the men who undertook convoy-escort-duties in the Atlantic and Mediterranean throughout the last War, and impressionistic washes in which those fanfares are made to sound gaunt and hollow – washes both beautiful and delicate and menacing born of chill fogs and mists of broken scoring and strings divisi. The harmonies are bitter and subduing, filled with multiple downward steps, discord and false relations, shifting unexpectedly to undercut the more certain, recognizably consonant moments; the fanfaring favours angular fourths and fifths, Waltonian or Hindemithian in their sardonic edge, and dissolved in the sea's fluid chromaticism... Still, however laconic and ironic the music appears at first, it discloses considerable hypnotic, evocative power. This an affecting elegy for the “many good ships and good men” lost to German bombs and torpedoes, and to the common enemy – the sea, whose moods have a strange, deceptive and cruel beauty.

Track2: The Cruel Sea, Rawsthorne

A tone-poem by a Scottish composer, now, The Ship O'The Fiend, by Hamish MacCunn. Born in the ship-building city of Greenock in 1868, and known more as a conductor than as a composer in his later years, MacCunn in fact began as a composer, and wrote many impressive orchestral works in the last decades of the 19^th Century. His career as a concert-composer began with the superb Overture, The Land of Mountain And Flood, when he was still a teenager. His style is an interesting blend of Scots folkishness, Mendelssohn and Wagner, economically scored, avoiding excess in either mood or manner., but bold in contrasts. His tone-poems evoke Scots ballads and the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott. He is equally at home writing for the brass, woodwind or strings. His percussion often capped by cymbal clashes that punctuate themes portraying the dashing courage, triumphs and disasters of his heroes and heroines. This mannerism is devoid of toe-curling Lisztian bravado. His orchestration is mixed well, to permit the sections to share and share alike the spotlight. A theme that begins softly in an introduction on horn, oboe or strings will perhaps become a strident chant dominated by trumpets at the climax.

The Ship O'The Fiend is a ballad that tells of how a captain returns to his sweetheart, carries her on-board with him. In the course of several stanzas it is borne in upon the sweetheart and reader that the ship is a ghost-ship with ghost-crew and ghost-captain, heading for hell... The music acquires hollow, Wagnerian brass (trombones prominent), and a clock-like jog-trot in the lower strings, where until now the fullest mingling statement of the thematic material in duet – oboe and horn standing for girl and man - and ardent conversation ending in outright passion - has lured us into thinking only of love. Trumpets and cymbals over stormy seas of string-rushes render as climax the theme of the demon-lover, now an elemental force beyond belief. All subsides as it must. A hushed few rippling and then pityingly quiet moments on the strings – are ended by quiet held notes on horn answered by what sounds like muted brass and strings, and a single loud, curt last, trumpets-and-cymbal-capped chord. No trace remains of the Ship O''The Fiend.

Track3: The Ship O The Fiend, McCunn

Galway Bay is the Atlantic at its roughest. For centuries, the men-folk of the Aran Islands had left their rocky shores in light craft to fish and hunt basking--shark for a living, and to supply their communities with food and oil, when the nationalist musician, playwright and poet, John Millington Synge visited, studied their people's Irish dialect, gathered their legends and customs. He returned to the mainland with enough knowledge and experience to write a book of reminiscences and stories and a short but powerful play, Riders To The Sea, inventing an English that followed the local speech-rhythms for the characters of the latter to speak.

Vaughan Williams once notated the preaching of a Scottish minister, interested in the element of song in the man's speaking voice. When he composed his One-act opera to Synge's text, he made no attempt to celticize his music; evocative as it is of sea, human courage, death and grief, there was no need... As Synge wrote a play that follows Aristotelian principles of unity of time and place, and death takes place off-stage, Vaughan Williams very likely saw in this piece a universal, Englished Greek-style tragedy, Irish speech-rhythms – to which he remains sensitive - and all. The final soliloquy in the spartan, through--composed opera is typical of the work as a whole: the main character, Maurya sitting in her thin-walled cottage with the relics of her lost ones, and white coffin-boards prepared for the penultimate lost son, sings of the last of her children and menfolk's being gone now – all dead, all drowned in the sea. The sea can do no more to her. 

Ghosts and presages of other Vaughan Williams works haunt the piece: a later work in Dona Nobis Pacem – a protest against War; an earlier in Flos Campi, based on The Song of Songs!; the symphonic works and film music of the late period. One of the notable features is the use of soprano voices keening Irishly, an elemental, menacing sound like but not like the screaming of the wind (a wind-machine is also called-for in this opera): this device was later to recur in the music for the film, Scott of The Antarctic. Synge's words have a beautiful simple dignity, and are the stuff of tragedy in the face of the sea.

“No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.”

Track 4: They Are All Gone Now, Riders To The Sea, Vaughan Williams

Highly successful before the turn of the century with his song-cycle, Sea Pictures, Sir Edward Elgar approached the life of seamen some years later, via the verses of Kipling. 

In The Fringes of The Fleet, the true, unofficial poet laureate had published a tribute in poems and prose to Britain's seamen at the end of 1915, a kind of seaman's eye-view of the War at sea. Elgar seized on the verses and wrote a cycle of four songs for performance in revue at the London Coliseum Theatre. He did ask Kipling's permission, but was not to know that Kipling had lost his adopted son, John, an athletic but acutely short-sighted youth, during the Battle of Loos, a matter of weeks before the booklet's first publication. Last seen wandering on the battlefield with his lower jaw shot away, John had no known grave. In Elgar's “best bloomin' beggar” style – as Stanford might have called it - and 'broad, saltwater style” as he himself did call it - well-sung by chosen singers, the songs proved an instant hit at the Coliseum. Thereafter they received a number of performances at theatres around the country – until Kipling stepped in to end the tour.

The songs are good of their kind, highly effective in all aspects, and form a cycle that expresses the experiences of many men who served at sea during the Great War - experiences at the hands of the Navy – and the sea itself.

The very effectiveness of the songs perhaps damned them in the poet's eyes. He was sick of war: later, the man who had written of “the Hun at the gate”, popularizing the cause of the Imperial armed forces in this war to save Western civilization, would publish a couplet:

“If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

There is, in fact, an astringency to the verses Elgar set, a weariness, a cynicism, yet determination to do one's duty and carry on, side by side with the stoicism of the men, that Elgar would have understood well.

To complete the work, a fortnight after the beginning of the show's run, Elgar added a fifth song, setting Sir Gilbert Parker's poem, Inside The Bar. Most sea-shanty-like of the songs it is a song of home, men free ashore, and fickle sweethearts...

The performance you will hear is from an acoustical recording made on the 21^st of July, 1917, by the original soloists – without the benefit of costumes or a set portraying the yard outside a dock-side pub - and their highly professional band, conducted by the composer in the first four songs only. The star of the show and recording was – and is - the gifted young baritone, Charles Mott, an excellent singer and actor who lost his life on the Western Front in the following year. Kipling ended the progress of the show in the theatre only after the recordings had been made, and the resultant album of records remained a hugely popular staple of the HMV catalogue for many years.

A loud, susurrating sound-effect heard during the 3^rd song, the deep and murky Submarines, was achieved by the use of blocks of wood surfaced with sandpaper!

The five songs are entitled, The Lowestoft Boat; Fate's Discourtesy; Submarines; The Sweepers; Inside The Bar.

Here is the song-cycle, The Fringes of The Fleet, by Edward Elgar.

Tracks 5-9: The Fringes Of The Fleet, Elgar

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 you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon. Goodbye!

11th and 12th April 2015 CB Rivers

Classical Break - Rivers

Yellow River

Intro:  The Yellow River Concerto, Movt 2, Ode To The Yellow River, Yin Chengzong, Chu Wanhua, Sheng Lihong and Liu Zhuang   

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We have just heard the second movement of the Yellow River Concerto, a collaboration between four Chinese composers, Yin Chengzong, Chu Wanhua, Sheng Lihong and Liu Zhuang, which represents a condensation of a cantata setting poems written during the 1939 Japanese invasion of China.  The second movement, Ode To The Yellow River, portrays a mighty river and also expresses patriotic awareness of the Chinese people’s massive achievement of maintaining millennia of civilization on its fertile but dangerous banks. 

The style of this committee-concerto intentionally owes much to film-composers’ imitation of Rachmaninoff. Ideology demanded a Western populist manner that accommodated distinctive characteristics of Chinese folk-melody whilst at the same time symbolizing cosmopolitanism and urbanization of Chinese society.  
   

Today's programme consists of music inspired by rivers.  We begin with a short piece by Claude Debussy, from his Petite Suite for two pianos, which was colourfully orchestrated by his pupil and assistant, Henri Busser.  En Bateau is an evocation of boating on the Seine in the late Eighteen Eighties. 

Claude Debussy

 As was the Thames at about this time, the Seine was a place where vogues in costume and conveyance presented a colourful sight.  There were regattas and parties celebrated by painters of the day, even as the less-resorted stretches were polluted by dye-mills, chemical-works, factories, foundaries, and tons of goods of all kinds were transported in and out of Paris and other population-centres.  Debussy’s music is an instrumental melodie, lazy and sensuous in manner, slow-moving in deep Summer greens and browns, with a hint, perhaps of the pipes of Pan about it.   The middle of the piece rouses itself to some genteel amusement, skylarking or affectionate banter.   
The river was a playground those who knew it were haunted by when older. The orchestration is faithful to the spirit of the original, flute and clarinet prominent in imitation of dancing ripples and haunting refrains of birdsong, the strings sonorous but not heavy.  The river was pushed out on, saw an outing, and carries home the party at dusk - unless they have the sense - or time - to camp and enjoy a night by or on the river. 

Track One:  En Bateau - Debussy

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme consists of music inspired by rivers.

Next, a song that was made famous by a bass-baritone who made three thousand recordings and sold twenty-five million discs in a career that spanned some six decades.  Old Father Thames was written in 1933 by Ray Wallace and Betsy O’Hogan, and sung and recorded most famously, perhaps, by the great Peter Dawson.  Such is his diction that the text is as near-indelible as the music.  At a dark time in the memory of a generation now almost no longer with us, this song did much to maintain a sense of national identity:  it is not sentimental, any old father who behaved like the Thames might be justifiably accused of egregious parenting; yet this is an affectionate and likeable song and good enough to be regarded as a classic. 

Old Father Thames

Track Two:  Old Father Thames Keeps Rolling Along, O’Hogan

Ronald Binge wrote nothing finer than his short orchestral piece, The Watermill.  Its style has something of Debussy about the use of strings and woodwind, while the benignant atmosphere of this quiet hymn to a way of life has something Beethovenian in its generosity of melody and diatonic harmony.  This is not the tragic, romantic mill of Schubert, but a modern reanimation of a vision of nature that belongs to the 18th Century Augustan Enlightenment.  Birdsong is caught by flute and clarinet, the dappled shade of trees and rich movement of air and water in the middle of the small orchestra.  Even the turning of the wheel (it seems a wheel of time) is suggested, by a slow, creaking ostinato in the depths of the strings.  The oboe has the melody much of the time, and has uncomplaining warmth and pathos; the melody is finely varied, flowing; all seems to be moulded by it in its subtle but simple-seeming development.  If this is a piece of light music, it is also an outstanding miniature.  

Track Three:  The Watermill, Binge

Rivers have witnessed scenes of desperation or recklessness; every riverbank, every bridge of any height has fleetingly supported its suicide or accident-victim.  Ophelia, teasingly led on and then roundly rejected by Prince Hamlet, goes mad and slips out into the countryside about Elsinore Castle, gathering flowers including those of a name that hints at something more than her having been led on.  Trusting the strength of a branch, she leans too far out over the waters of a brook,  the branch gives and she falls in. Singing vain little songs, she floats with the current until the weight of her clothes pulls her down.   

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) wrote a short tone-poem on this subject, taking its title from a line in the play:  There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook.  In it, Ophelia’s reedy singing voice, distracted breathing and thought-processes are captured by solo oboe, the branch-shaded, glassy waters depicted in the strings - the moment in which she falls - is vivid, a soft splash and sunlit eddying in the violins that is rapidly - delusorily - soothed.  The oboe sings or chatters on, but the pull of the depths is there.  Gradually, the ower strings grow in weight; the music takes on the nature of a funeral procession by night, a solemn lament - grief held in but to be felt; the voice of the young girl has been extinguished without a struggle by murky waters that seemed to comfort her in their lap.

There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook

Track Four:  There Is A Willow Grows Aslant A Brook, Frank Bridge

Like life, good stories and music, rivers have a beginning, middle and end.  From spring to estuary, from hill-stream freshet to lazy breadth purling between silted banks on the alluvial plain, the river maintains distinct districts of life in symbiosis with vegetation and air - and with us.  It is no coincidence that most people readily see the life of the river as an image of time and stages in human life.  Our sense of flow and development might not be as it is were man not so closely attuned to the nature and apparent moods of moving water.  We use a phrase like I’m reflecting on to mean I am thinking about, and in similarly banal manner, we talk of things coming on-stream.  Music, movement and language have fluency!   Now, the sound of gospel-singers, the London Adventist Chorale in the spiritual, Deep River.

Track Five:  Deep River, Trad

Now for a haunting song by John Jeffreys, who was born in 1927.  It is a setting of a Great War poem by the underrated poet, Wilfred Gibson, now best-known as a friend and legatee of Rupert Brooke, but, in his youth, highly regarded as an author.  The Otterburn is a river in Northumberland - Gibson’s home country - and Otterburn is an elegy to a nameless Northumbrian soldier killed in Flanders.  It is written for tenor and piano, in an idiom strongly influenced by the folk-song-like, faintly bluesy, modal-chromatic manner popular among composers between the Wars.   

John Jeffreys

The slow tread of the verses is decorated here and there with ripples in the piano part, but presses on, the undemonstrative vocal part syllable-by-syllable with natural stresses, matching the terseness of the poem.  That folk are formed as well as sustained by the rivers they live by seems to be the words’ philosophy; one is reminded of Elgar’s deathbed request that his ashes be scattered on the bank of the Severn.  Here, the Otterburn in flood, in Summer and in spate fills the dreams of the dead soldier who lies in Flanders mud and will not return.

Otterburn had to be reconstructed along with ninety-nine other of Jeffreys’ songs when he destroyed much of his work in a fit of despair.  It was published in 1983. 

Track Six:  Otterburn, John Jeffreys

The Housatonic At Stockbridge is an orchestral piece, one of the triptych, First Orchestral Set - Three Places in New England by Charles Ives. It grew out of a song setting a rural poem that is filled with detail of an Autumn morning and apostrophizes the river as ‘Contented river!  In thy dreamy realm...’ but asks later if the river is discontented still...  Ives himself remembered the genesis of the piece as a misty morning walk that he had taken by the Housatonic with his wife the Summer after they had got married.  From across the water, they had heard a church choir singing.  The sight of the river, elmtrees and countryside about had been as memorable.   

Charles Ives

Ives’ style is unique.  He believed that a composer should stretch the muscles of the listener’s ears.  Quickly, the strangely detached sounds of a hymn in strings and woodwind, then brass - wisps of violin tremolos denoting mist - are joined by broad discords of a detached piano’s own key.  Interestingly, one hears the oboe with some distinctness - as in There Is A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook!  The celesta sounds later, still more detachedly; the climax is reached seemingly arbitrarily as if, on impulse, the morning sought to reach over the stolidly kept-to verses of the hymn, whose response is to sing more loudly and try to climb higher.  At the height of this, there is sudden hush.  Where the music was in this scene was Ives’ question:  the river, the elm-trees, the wind, the mist or the choir.  The answer may be in all or none of them.  In this world, it is not only poetry that seeks the condition of music.  He returned to this piece more than once to add to both the orchestra and the degree of dissonance worked in throughout.

Track Seven:  The Housatonic At Stockbridge, Charles Ives

Now two works from nearly the beginning and nearly end of a composer’s career.  First is an arrangement for piano of a Japanese folksong, Fukagawa or Deep River.  A very different deep river from the one that we heard earlier, it is played here on the harp.

Track Eight:  Fukagawa, Japanese folksong, arranged by Edmund Rubbra

The second piece by our composer is a short song for soprano and harp.  It comes from a group of five, The Jade Mountain, setting poems from the T’ang Period and translated by an American.  It is called A Song of The Southern River:  

“Since I married the merchant of Ch’u’t’ang

He has failed each day to keep his word...

Had I thought how regular the tide is,

I might rather have chosen a river-boy.”

Edmund Rubbra

Our composer is Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986), whose musical and philosophical interests took him far and wide.  Here, his style is admirably terse and attractive. 

Given constant motion by the harp, A Song Of The Southern River is a fluid, lively piece, ironical under the accompaniment’s surface darting impulsiveness, until a slowing for the words a river-boy. The brief close is the harp’s, and returns to the former briskness.

The soprano part is difficult to bring off with the deftness and sustained tone necessary. 

   

Track Nine:  A Song Of The Southern River, Edmund Rubbra

Lastly, the song that ends Vaughan Williams’ cycle of settings of A.E Housman, Wenlock Edge, for tenor, piano and string quartet.  Clun.  Here, Housman’s words, famous for their bitter irony, generate a heart-easing generosity and warmth in Vaughan Williams’ response that resound long after the song’s hushed end.  This is where the rivers of the country for easy livers bear one:

“‘Tis a long way further than Knighton,

A quieter place than Clun,

Where doomsday may thunder and lighten

And little t’will matter to one...”

Peace, perfect peace!  There exists an orchestrated version, but let’s hear the original, accompanied by piano and string quartet.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you have enjoyed our river journey and that we shall have your company again soon.  Cheers!

Map of Clun, Shropshire

Track Ten:  Clun, from Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams