CB Gloucestershire 9 & 10 May

CB Gloucestershire

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

The trees talked it, and horses, went trampling by.

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

And we that are Gloucester’s own, since She has gracious grown

Will take a day of April as it is meant in mind.

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

She heard in twenty centuries of change, and strange people.

March with Her wind, which might be great, is kept friend;

For one day man is allowed equality, and/of/godlike mind

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

All love from all memory called out – Beethoven, Belloc,

The Lament Song – and watching the scarred hills, “Puck

Of Pooks Hill” – and my own music surging up and up.

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  Today’s programme presents two orchestral works by two composers from Gloucestershire:  Gustav Holst’s early work, the Cotswolds Symphony – later disowned by him – and The Gloucestershire Rhapsody.   Neither of these works represented a landmark in British music at the time of their reception, and only one of them was publically performed. 

 The Symphony in F Major, ‘The Cotswolds’,  dates from the end of the 19^th Century, the years 1899-1900; the then Gustav von Holst began it the year after leaving the Royal College of Music, at about

the time that he was writing the Wagnerish Walt Whitman Overture and Winter Idyll, filled with plans, though mainly vocal and operatic, and ruefully aware of the three influences on him, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Wagner.  He was also studying Sanskrit and Indian mythology; his theosophist step-mother being influential.  The transformation from Holst the student into Holst the artist was under way. He was born and brought-up  in Cheltenham, educated at Pate’s Grammar School for Boys, and loved the Gloucestershire Cotswolds-area, with its complex-curved hills and oddly secretive valleys; the bluffs of the hills rise above Cheltenham, sheep and agrarian country with added woods, rocky limestone outcrops, such as the Devil’s Chimney at Leckhampton, tiny local stone-built villages and hamlets, and wildness.  Country fairs take place in larger towns, and yet are a part of the lonely lives and comraderie on one farm – and wider friendships in pubs – of the local people.  In his late teens, he had served as church organist and choir-master at Wyck Rissington and Bourton-on-the-Water, respectively.

The first movement of the Symphony is all too brief, Allegro Con Brio, more like a voluntary for orchestra than a first movement as taught by Professors Stanford or Parry (Holst was one of Stanford’s boys).  F Major is a bright key, held to be evocative of nature:  Holst proves that other keys are bright and evocative by unusual tonal vagrancy, though the harmonies are quite clear and pleasant.  Beginning with a brazen fanfare, this piece is fresh and highly attractive in its mixed scoring, which is effective in all sections, favouring trumpets, higher woodwind and violins; its brief, Parryesque, therefore mildly 18^th Century first subject is robust and a little (attractively), crabbed and stubborn, but active and purposeful; the second is melting, sweet in the style of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov, airy and with nagging pendants that heighten its happy pathos.  The development is brief-to-unnoticeable, but neat, and refuses to become bogged-down in the hectoring scrabble that often passed for symphonic argument at the time. 

One guesses that Stanford, a hard task-master as Professor of Composition, had left, and had not left, his mark on the frail but innovative and determined Holst, just as he was to do on Ivor Gurney (who referred to his teacher as “that python!”).  Contemporary critical opinion was that the First Movement was the work’s weakest.

 Track 1:  Symphony in F Major, “The Cotswolds”: Allegro con brio, Holst

The mournful slow movement, Elegy (InMemoriam William Morris): Molto Adagio, may explain the Classical brevity and liveliness of the first.  In B Minor, it is in Stanford’s commemorative or symphonic vein, a slow march with pauses and asides that allow for llittle relief.  The brass and lower woodwind are heroic, the violins sighing and sliding in ornamentation.  All is as tightly packed and shaped as in a Brahms symphony, not over-repetitive, but its 8.35 minutes do impose; possibly the movement is too grave and powerful in its place in the scheme of this Symphony.  Holst, a lifelong Socialist, had had deep feelings for the head of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had heard Morris speak.  The Molto Adagio has led an independent life in the concert-hall.   With a different title, it might do duty as a superb War Elegy.  Cheltenham is a military town – officers of the Indian Army and civil servants of the Raj-administration settled there for the waters of the spa, and the Gloucestershire Regiment had had a long and fine career in the service of the Empire, losing many good men in the course of its expansion.  The War in South Africa was a nightmare to Imperialist and Socialist alike, the loss of volunteer soldiers to death, serious injury and, overwhelmingly, disease, sharpened people’s concern at the international disgust with which this cruel and foolish war caused the world’s other powers to regard Great Britain.  The movement ends smoulderingly, as it began. 

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

The Scherzo  in D and B-flat, returns us to the bluff bucolic style of the first movement.  As at least one commentator has written, it is like a fairground-scene.  Actually, for once, one can accept this kind of idea.   It teems with detail, syncopations, changes of emphasis; the trio adds a tone of intimacy or transcendence to the presence almost everywhere of barkers and murmurous or clamorous  crowds dawdling, riding or playing, and music courtesy of musicians or steam  - the eye is on a pair of eyes, or the cloudy-blue sky above bunting, tents and gaudy roundabouts.  Holst met his wife at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, but it’s tempting to read the couple into any picture of fairs and easy enjoyment of life, particularly after a tortured Adagio Molto.   The movement nips back to D by the close.

Track 3: lll Scherzo

The finale, in the Symphony’s home-key, is marked Allegro Moderato.  It is happy-go-lucky, Holst’s manner brassy,  suggesting assurance and rightful expectancy of the future – of an infinity of hope and joy in life.  His counterpoint and scoring are British Symphonism of the 1880s and 90s, striding out a little coloured by Wagner, but new in practical terseness and spare contrasts.  There is strenuousness, the rhythms are a little square, the brass insistent, but optimism prevails without too much forcing of the issue.  Rationed cymbals add a requisite touch of high-spiritedness.  The music is strong but has its feet firmly on the ground. 

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

During Holst’s lifetime, the Cotswolds Symphony was performed once in full, by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, conducted by the redoubtable Dan Godfrey, in 1902. 

The period from 1918-1922 was, in the life of the composer-poet, Ivor Gurney – who, pace his latest champions, did not love the War - one of the most exciting to be read about for its record of artistic achievements  against the odds and in the face of fairly arrogant and obtuse middle-class appreciation of our own “Schubert” – as Parry – squire of Highnam, just outside Gloucester - called him...  In March, 1919, he wrote to a friend that what with sketches of a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and other musical tasks (including the writing of a symphony), his  life wasn’t worth living!  There was nothing else on hand, save songs, a mass and string quartet, and a piece for violin and piano...

Ivor Gurney's colourful Gloucestershire Rhapsody was  a work of love, following on from his despairing last days as a number in Kitchener’s army.  In it surges the tidal  Severn, as the superfine nervous (and chromatic) system of Scriabin's strings and woodwind and Straussian harmony, soaring violins and burnished brass – a three-note trumpet call seems to have come straight straight from Also Sprach Zarathustra  - mesh with a further weave of British influences.  A recurring grand passage in full orchestra begins in the world of Parry’s Jerusalem, joins with an evocation of Elgar’s

Coronation March, to meet an upward leap that seems to suggest that Gurney may have known Herbert Hamilton Harty’s fine vocal and orchestral setting of Ode To A Nightingale, the climactic spirit of Holst's early Cotswold Symphony (and oompah-bass processionals of later), and Stanford's Brahms-influenced rhapsodic manner... 

The result is yet 100% Gurney, the Gurney of withdrawal from the world into contemplation perhaps of a clay shard or coin found amid the red-brown clods of a ploughed field, or of Sirius during a nightwalk in the hills, but also the Gurney of county fairs, football matches, the Gloucester Regiment in which, even as the convinced Socialist that he became, he was proud to serve, and the society of farm-  and dock-labourers, river- and fisher-folk - a Gloucestershire of the British Empire.  The sudden, mysterious hushes of the Severn plain or Cotswolds are there - moments when one stands on the hills above Cheltenham or by the Severn at Framilode, Saul or Frampton - where willows waft grey-green locks of glaring-backed leaves,and the weighty river feels its own length surprisingly little:  Gurney’s ghost may be with one.  Alto woodwind have a magical descending snatch that seems wood-magic in itself – the sighing response has what may be Straussian sixths and doubling of violins.  Possibly the ‘Moglio’ episode in Elgar’s Concert Overture: In The South – Alassio influenced Gurney.  Later on, there's a little, plodding tune on alto woodwind, to strummed accompaniment that may remind one (very slightly) of an old French Carol or song!  It seems mediaeval, and of course Gurney’s sense of history was profound.  As a Gloucester chorister and apprentice organist, he must have performed much church-music of long tradition.  The development of the tune is predictably lovely in all aspects.  

On the other hand, the Rhapsody has a more extroverted side that seems almost to invoke Georgian bandstand-music.  One trumpets-and-drums passage may seem like a march of adolescence in Summer or Autumn:  Gurney and his friend, the poet,  Will Harvey, arm-in-arm and singing preposterously on a country lane.  The finale of the Cotswolds Symphony seems evoked at the grand close, but the Cotswolds Symphony isn't in it!  The Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare is almost like a glorified  bugle-call - Lights Out – here (significant, that).  The final chords are quite definite, yet peculiarly unbrassy and austere, almost classical in weight of tone. 

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

That was the Gloucestershire Rhapsody by Ivor Gurney:  a lovely, consequential, yet fantastic piece,  beautifully-scored, with all the light and shade and sense of history that one finds in the embowering Cotswolds and on the lonelier, bleaker Severn Plain... Not Elgar, not Delius, not Vaughan Williams, nor Howells. The Elgarian phrase nags at one - Coronation March? The Young Olaf motif from Scenes From The Life of King Olaf seems closer...  Or possibly a moment from the partly Gloucestershire-based Falstaff .   One hardly expected to hear a rhapsody on the scale of, and written with as much skill as, a Bax tone-poem, from the pen of a composer once thought to be only a miniaturist of the piano and a songwriter. ... And no, it's not remotely like Bax, either.  But Gurney knew from where the word rhapsody was derived: in the ancient Greek, a rhapsode is an epic poet or bard.  A speaker for a nation – or county!  In his vocabulary, a rhapsody was not a japed-up orchestral medley of popular songs!  Gurney hoped for far more than fame; he wanted to live to see Socialism flourish in Britain.  He died in an asylum.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1937, a parcel of recognitions – including a number of the magazine, Music and Letters, that contained an appreciative article on his work – arrived for him.  It was handed over, he struggled to open it; in moments, let it slip, and relapsed on the pillow:  “It’s too late,” he said. 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you enjoyed our programme of music by Gloucestershire composers, scripted by Mike Burrows.  We leave you with the War Elegy by Ivor Gurney.  Goodbye.

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney

2nd and 3rd May 2015 - Operaletta

This weekend's Classical Break is an edited recording of Bath-based ensemble, Operaletta, performing their annual "Shakespeare's Birthday" concert at the Holburn museum, Bath. The concert took place on Sunday, April 26th.
You can see the programme and find out about the performers at www.operaletta.co.uk.
Thanks to all the performers and also Edna Blackwell, Director of Music for allowing Somer Valley FM to record and broadcast the concert.

In rehearsal

Click these links for more information
Concert programme
Performers

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!