Autumn (4) -10 & 11 October

Classical Break:  Autumn 4

Intro:  Picking of Sticks,  Playford

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and presents a programme of music that, intentionally or not, seems to evoke Autumn.

Grieg’s Concert Overture, I Hoest – In Autumn  - was an early work revized  in the midst of the most active phase in his compulsive Europeantours.   It dated from the first years after his abridged time at Leipzig Conservatoire, and after his friendship with Richard Nordraak, a young nationalist composer who had done much to  show him where his future path and style lay.  In Rome for the first time, he was living with the guilt of having left Nordraak on his deathbed in Berlin to see Italy; Nordraak who described his galloping  tuberculosis in tones of zest as ‘a grand case’ in the eyes of his doctors, had died waiting for him to return.  Grieg, himself, was plagued as an adult by chest-trouble – he had lost a lung to pleurisy - at Leipzig; for once, he had perhaps absented himself in a spirit of self--preservation, though there is evidence to suggest that he had failed to realize how sick Nordraak had become.

The Overture was based on a song written a year previously, Autumn Storm, and quotes and adds to the sonata-form brew a folktune, a springdans from Hardangerdal.  The long--established Danish symphonic composer, Niels Gade, was meant to be impressed when Grieg returned from Rome and showed him the work, but wasn’t.  It begins with drone-fifths to represent the Norwegian fiddle, the hardingfele:  there is a slow, brooding introduction that leads to a more venturesome first subject – an extensive quote from the song - a tenderly-begun second subject and  snatch of the springdans,  The development is short-breathed but strenuous, darting, impulsive, modulatory and occasionally mysterious, before the recapitulation and fuller, more brazen treatment of the springdans, bring things to a conclusion.  The scoring is impressive, as revised,  sustaining the curt brevity of the music’s gestures.  The woodwind and strings, given the most affecting and elementally evocative moments, stay in one’s memory as much as the blustering brass.   It is a fascinating piece, one of Grieg’s few conventional attempts at ‘form’.  It’s as though he sought to answer academic Leipzig in the person of the self-consciously folkish Nordraak!   

Track 1:  In Autumn, Grieg      

For Scandinavians, Autumn is a severe change from Summer, wild, wet and cold, a time for harvest and battening-down, looming darkness and the  promise of months of Arctic chill.  All this may be felt in a piece that Grieg conducted first at Birmingham in 1888, and was proud enough of to send with other favourites among his works to a new friend, Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Let’s hear a partsong by Sibelius.  Autumn Evening is a strophic setting for mixed voices of a poem by the Swedish poet, Runeberg.  One of a group of partsongs that date from student-days, Autumn Evening begins in a world that lies in its bleak grave of Autumn, harried, withered, dead,  the blossoms of Summer passed and the forest silent – but looks up into the stars, from whence eternal home smiles upon the soul.

“Thus dream I in the Autumn evening, and see

How the leaves fall down from the birch,

A naked shore stands reflected in the deep

                                                                    bay,

And over the moon a silver cloud is sailing.”   

Autumn has its bleak side, matched here in the severity of chorale-like strains, dotted rhythms and some awkward rather than adventurous writing in the parts, but the twenty-three year-old composer has the measure of the poem’s sentiments.  If the setting is less flexible and imaginative than Sibelius’ later treatments of Finnish  verse, this may partly be due to the Germanic nature of the Swedish language, its totally different system of stresses – Finnish stresses first syllables – its  heavy consonants and less rich store of vowel-sounds, all of which lend themselves naturally to a Germanic  melody with little irregularity of metre, in which rhythmical variety is introduced with dotted notes.   

Track 2:  Autumn Evening, Sibelius

Oh, Autumn,

let thy deepest colours

shine in bold abandon

for our joy!

“The Michigan Handel”, Leo Sowerby, was a master of word-setting; his church-music is highly regarded in the United States, but he was also a great song-writer.  His development followed a long and fruitful course, and his Paean To Autumn,  setting words by Jeanne de Lamartier,  is a late work, gnarled and making much use of whole-tones, but following the natural stresses of the lines in a scrupulous manner that may make some think of Gerald Finzi.

Track 3:  Paean To Autumn, Sowerby

A Harvest Song, now.   This folksong urges beer on tired labourers.  Its stressing of the hardness of agricultural labour and the joys of sinking a quart of beer no doubt derived from the fruits of that  labour is understandable in this age of strivers and skivers – and the song blesses the employer for his generosity!  Workers in the fields have never had much protection from long hours and low pay; further, casual labourers continue to see even less reward than retained.  Of course, a poor harvest once meant a starved-out year, the harshest conditions being reserved for the labourer.  One should point out that down three centuries, many thinkers on employment – strivers to a man or woman - have decried drink – like smoking - as an evil influence on the ordinary worker, as much as anything, because it affects optimum productivity.   

Track 4:  Harvest Song, Trad

Come the night of October the 31^st, everyone who is anyone on another plane is all dressed up with somewhere to go.  On this one night of the year, Mr – or Ms - Ghost goes to town  almost with our approval.  What he – or she - makes of trick-or-treating is anyone’s guess. Ghosts are a part of a tradition that has outlasted many fads.  For them, the next big night will be New Year’s Eve, when ghost-stories are told.

The dapper ghost conjured up by trombonist, Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, including a trumpeter of great style, is evidently a one-time figure in jazz-high-society.  ^,

Track 5:  Mr Ghost Goes To Town, Dorsey

“Remember, remember the 5^th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot!”

Here are two sonnets, the first commemorating a Bonfire-night party and the second, its morning after,  written by Mike Burrows.

                     (Guy Fawkes Party At Tanybwlch

                                               Hall)

                Fireworks were never the same again.  There

                In the wood, standing in groups, the chill night

                Warmed by thick clothes, friendships - and  embers bright

                And smoking in the incinerator -

                Some played with sparklers; all watched for the glare

                Of first banged colours to print threads on sight

                From volcano, or a rocket’s whooshed white

                Popped in stars.  This galaxy made me stare.

                For forms - wool hats, scarves, coats - the warden’s hand

                And ‘tached smile touched off such spells, or checked spuds

                In glowing ash.  And the girl at my side

                Deepened, lit little, kissing.  Sombre land

                Lay silent, its true stars high-spaced - no duds -

                In bursts of aeons:  a lover’s thrilled pride.

                Never the same, that powder-reek rejoiced

                In.  So it is my memory.  Rainbow-fire,

                Spittering glints, thick smoke billowing from pyre

                Of a tiny soul whose burnt body, hoist

                With its reason for being, I found by moist

                Autumn garlic next day, charred where, entire,

                I shook my head and went on:  the lost spire

                Of a roman candle scorched, lit, still voiced.

                To the beach and town - or college - simply

                A student in love.  Or a ghost years off,

                Picturing the next year as on each year,

                Self hoist by what I did not want to be.

                Sparks brilliant for others - smoke’s sharp cough

                Makes them smile, and aeons will shine them clear. 

Copyright, Mike Burrows, October 16^th, 2013

Our Remembrance piece this year is a setting of AE Housman’s tribute to the military dead of all wars, Soldier From The Wars Returning, made by the reclusive Charles Wilfrid Orr, the Cheltenham composer who recoiled from the artistic life in London to live in Painswick.  He served briefly in the Coldstream Guards during the Great War before being discharged without seeing active service, owing to eczema.  Soldier From The Wars Returning is a heartfelt elegy beginning over a solemn tread of rich progressions that rises swaying into a sturdy dismissal of the kingly sponsors of patriotism and the wars of empire.  Sadly, in these avowedly more democratic days, we have kings and kaisers of our own.  Mourning the dead need not bamboozle us into accepting that they must be sent others for company.

Track 6:  Soldier From The Wars Returning, CW Orr

The prosperous Alexandr Glazunov’s eminence in Pre-Revolutionary Russia began under the tutelage of Rimsky-Korsakov.   He matured early, and his First Symphony was  presented to acclaim when he was  just 16.  His was a first-rate talent, and he lived long after its eclipse; he directed the St Petersburg Conservatoire for many years, and emigrated from Russia to Paris some time after the Revolution.  Since his early days, musical styles had changed greatly, which circumstance only served to confirm him in his articulate conservatism.

However he may have felt out of sympathy with modern tendencies where the new, bold and bewildering at first dominated the Soviet musical world, one wonders if he would have survived the accession to power of Comrade General Secretary Stalin.

Like Rimsky, he was a fine, imaginative harmonist and orchestrator, and blended occasionally Wagnerist harmony with Russian melody as exemplified in folksong and liturgical music.  He learned, also, from Rimsky’s rival, Tchaikovsky.  There is a certain detachment in his address to the listener, which may be put down partly to his controlling intellect and professional prolificness:  he did not have to wait on inspiration.  In his own right, he has been consistently under-rated by musicologists and historians.  Very often, his music, whether for concert-hall or theatre, has irresistible verve.  His most popular work may be The Seasons, a ballet presented first at the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg in 1900.  There is no continuous story, only the character of the seasons in turn; the dancers represent satyrs, fauns, nymphs, bacchantes of the classical world.  The thrill of the tones from the orchestra-pit would have been extraordinary, not to be outdone by the staging, even in metropolitan Tsarist Russia, where ballet- and opera-production  had become the most imaginative and lavish to be found anywhere in the world.  The brass in the music rang out to tiers of gilded boxes , but all eyes would have been on the stage – on hypnotic light and colour, and sublimely choreographed, swift and graceful movement. Of Glazunov’s  Seasons, Autumn is the culminatory group of dances.  In brilliant and affecting succession, we hear:  Bacchanal; Entries of The Seasons; Petit Adagio; Variation:  The Satyr; The Bacchantes; The Satyrs and Fauns; Fall of The Dead Leaves – Apotheosis.

Track 7:  Autumn, from The Seasons, Glazunov

Where were we? 

The Finn, Ilmari Hannikainen came of the generation following that of Sibelius.  He received his training in Helsinki, Vienna and St Petersburg, and became an international pianist as well as composer mainly for the piano.  His style is of its time, elegant, finely-turned, Griegian, Debussyan, often playful, but with an undertow of deep feeling and thinking – as might be expected, given his models.  The occasional melancholy that – thanks, perhaps, to Grieg and Sibelius in particular -  is required of a Scandinavian composer is there, expressed in pauses, ostinati, subdued melody– sometimes owing something to Finnish folksong – and chordal complexities; but somehow it does not prevail with the listener, who feels a kind of contentment in harmonic and sentimental beauty.  Here is his piece, Syysateita, Autumn Rain.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.   Our celebration of Autumn in music was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again, soon.  Goodbye!

Track 8:  Autumn Rain, Hannikainen    

   

Autumn 2 - 3 & 4 October 2015

Classical Break - Autumn 2

This is Classical Break, on SomerValley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and our subject is Autumn in music.
Let’s begin with the folksong, John Barleycorn, an encapsulation of the agrarian farm-year and a link with fertility rites of the past. John Barleycorn is the soul of ale. The brewing of ales and wines is no longer, if ever it was, an activity confined to Autumn, but my dad didn’t know that. For the labourer, barley was for bread as well as for beer, but good ale took one pleasantly beyond a full stomach. Often, water was added after brewing to ensure that it didn’t take anyone too far - small beer felled no-one.
Track One: John Barley-corn, trad

The song, Høstkvall - Autumn Evening - by Jean Sibelius, invokes falling night and the entrancing unrest of coastal Autumn as felt by the traveller. It is thrilled by the powerful grimness of Autumnal images: sunset, the screams of gulls and birds of prey, rain, forest and surging wind and sea, screams of pain heard in the forest, gathering darkness. The poem ends in the question, Does our traveller’s soul feel in harmony with the song raised by starless night? Does grief die like a soft note beneath Autumn’s mighty threnody? The orchestration by the composer lacks a part for flute, or indeed any instrument that would detract from a glowing sombreness of sound that favours deep--toned bassoon, trombones, tuba and double--basses; and utilizes oboe and clarinet and higher strings as additional inhuman voices. A feature of the percussion section is the dry rattle of side-drum - rain, or the sea on shingle? The very key of the music is dark and rich - D-Flat Minor. This dramatic scenadates from 1904, coming between the heroic Second Symphony and ‘classical’ Third. Its style is quintessential Sibelius, not Wagner, a massive, lyricalclimax building from motifs but suggesting vast dimensions beyond mere duration, an absolute, tragic force of suffering and dignity, opening with what sounds like a cry of anguish. Knife-edge suspensions resolved with the slowness of the cries of birds or the conflicting power of hypersensitive hysteria and stoicism recurred ever more strongly in the Finn’s imagistic music, long pedal notes an earth-deep foundation to whatever takes place above them. The beauty is uncanny, the after-echoes are strange butright. On another occasion, Sibelius wrote of learning assiduously from the cries of migrating cranes. Autumn Evening is sung here by Kirsten Flagstad, accompanied by the L-SO, conducted by Øivin Fjelstad.

Track Two: Høstkvall, Sibelius

Autumn is a time for reflection; every harvest has its aftermath and tares, and the leaves fly like so many billets or lost souls. Here is a song by Benjamin Britten, a setting of Paul Verlaine - Chanson D’Automne - for tenor and small orchestra. It was written as the concluding number of a cycle of four by a fourteen year-old who had just begun to study music-composition with that modernist and majority of one, Frank Bridge. The cycle was edited by Colin Matthews, the composer entrusted with the task of preparing a number of Britten’s juvenilia for posthumous publication. A French, specifically Debussyan quality to the harmony - and spare but not austere scoring - and moreover the elegance of the word-setting, owe much to Bridge’s exacting standards, but impress more with every hearing as the achievement of a young boy. The pre-echoes of the Serenade For Tenor, Horn and Strings, are as striking as the influence of Debussy - or Chausson - and of a highly-regarded teacher. This warmly romantic piece on the fall of the leaf, a French Melodie in all but name, had to wait eighty years for performance. 

Track Three: Chanson D’Autonne, Britten

Now, one of Finzi’s Five Bagatelles, for clarinet and piano. Opus Twenty--three: Forlana. The forlana is a Sixteenth Century dance-form in triple or compound-duple time, characterized by dotted rhythms, and this one strolls with a certain dry wistfulness.
Track Four: Forlana, Finzi

Hallowe’en, a night of witches, ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night: we once had more cause to fear this than now that it is a commercial fancy-dress function and opportunity for flat tricks and sticky treats. Hallowe’en has outlasted plagues, broken hearts, magic and superstition, gibbets, witch-burnings and inaccessible places of suicide and murder - the burial of sacrifices to consecrate graveyards, or pinning-down of dead evil under the cross-roads.
Robert Burns’ satirical poem, Tam O’Shanter tells of a drunken man forced to flee witches in the dead of night - he escapes over a stream, but his mare loses her tail. A humorous overture by Sir Malcolm Arnoldportrays the story in delightful orchestral detail and considerable dour Scotch-snappiness. Arnold, whose career began as a trumpeter in the LSO, brought the impishness of his comic film-scores into the concert-hall. Tipsy flute and strings and then low woodwind invoke bagpipes-music, the brass threatening, a passage of some eeriness on tremolo strings as woodwind startledly rub their eyes. A tam-tam clash - and reprise of the opening theme leads to another clash, an upward scale on the brass...: yes, it is a witches’ sabbath taking place in the churchyard, during which the drunken trombone has plenty of opportunity to make a fool of itself with the witches - one attracts Tam, her cutty-sark being too small for her... The pursuit is as unclear and calls for intermittent piccolo and a whip as well as the mixture as before - much marking time on the surface - an effect like running in a nightmare - a series of typical upward-scale brass crescendos and reprise of bagpipes dissonant with brass snarls, a bell, string ostinati, the irrepressible piccolo all stirred in before the farce ends in brief hymn-like sounds on flute and clarinet, the melting away of the causes of panic and a pay-off chord. Trick or treat? You decide.
Track Five: Tam O Shanter, Arnold

On Bonfire Night we see - if we choose - the momentary rushes, spurtles and reports of fireworks - rockets, air-bombs, catherine wheels, roman candles, fountains, bangers, crackers against the slow-motion real Autumn pyrotechnics of billions of light-years of universe. In continuity, good and evil remain real on our planet, but politics seem flippant in the life of the universe. The guy sags silhouetted in flames of a religious fire lit centuries ago. There are actually still those who, for a sense of their Englishness, depend on this barbaric tradition of burning in effigy a failed Seventeenth Century terrorist - if that was what the original Guy, Guido Fawkes, was. For the rest of us, sculptures of light that fade to after-image in the cold sky, and the thick reek of gunpowder have nothing to do with celebration of religious persecution, a weak king and scotched Plot, if we can help it.

Debussy’s Preludes, Book Two, contain music of the utmost refinement under adventurously poetic titles. Like most other serious musicians, he distanced himself from the provision of onamatopeia alone; music was always a matter more of feeling than of painting. All the same, in the mysterious resonance of lulls in the bass and sudden, florid bursts and flourishes in the treble, a similitude between music and intensities of light on a dark sky defies absolute music, that is, music written without a programme or the intention of bringing images to mind. The point is that the resources of music are handled with exquisitely fluent harmonic and pianistic skill and taste. Feux D’Artifice, Fireworks.
Track Six: Feux D’Artifice, Debussy

As a contrast in treatment of the falling of leaves, let’s hear a piece by the Belgian harpist, Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912), Feuilles D’Automne. This modest, expressive little work has an almost balletic quality in the gentle hispanified style so popular in the second half of the 19th Century.

Track Seven: Feuilles D’Automne, Hasselmans


If only Autumn were simply a matter of gathering or of sweeping away. It is the time for another kind of reckoning as it passes in mists, rain and bonfires and first frosts. It is a time of ghosts in the leaf-strewn shadows, Halloween, All Hallows and All Souls. Autumn brings, too, remembrance of those on all sides killed in War since 1914. Every November, the poppies of Summer bedew the many cold monuments that were dedicated to them long ago with the dark red of blood-sacrifice, a peculiar image of peace. Once, sacrifices to deities of fertility thanked and propitiated the earth before crops were again planted, and Rome communed with the spirits of dead warriors by pouring blood into a trench.

Cyril Rootham (1875-1938), a well-regarded academic musician and composer, is now famous, if at all, for being first to set the Great War poem, For The Fallen, by Laurence Binyon. As he was writing his work, Elgar was drawn by the poet’s friends into setting what have become immortal verses. Elgar hesitated, knowing that if he did so, it would squash Rootham’s best efforts, but permitted himself to be persuaded to go ahead. His version is overwhelming, a miniature cantata in itself within the cycle, Spirit Of England, and as he feared, it did outdo Rootham, whose version fell by the wayside. However, Rootham is not to be despised; his lesser conception of what is in the words still achieves all that one looks for in a setting: a sombre, forceful orchestral accompaniment, a sonorous choir, no vocal soloists; smouldering Vaughan Williams-style chant and fanfaring from the brass, like the strings almost a choir in their own right; some imaginative detailing in the woodwind, and percussion including a snare-drum to go with fife-noises: plus something less looked-for, a sudden eruption of songs - including the Garryowen - that had been popular in the BEF on the outbreak of war, which last occurs during the second section of a tripartite structure. Here is this second section of Rootham’s For The Fallen: They Went With Songs To The Battle.
Track Eight: For The Fallen, They Went With Songs, Rootham

Something slightly less daunting in prospect than going off to war is to be young and starting the school-year, or, to be less partisan - to be older and a teacher who feels personal responsibility for the welfare and education of the eternal foe. For those on both sides who have not already fallen during the Autumn campaign, we programme a school song. It was written by Richard Adinsell (1904-1977) for the fictitious Brookfield School for Boys, and the 1930s film adaptation of James Hilton’s idealistic bestsellerGoodbye Mister Chips, which starred Robert Donat and Greer Garson. An institution that passed most schools by but that still afflicts some in the private sector, the school song, usually composed by Old Boys, is given its apotheosis complete with effulgent orchestration in addition to choir. Unmediated by modish cynicism, it may just work on the hardened child as on the nostalgic adult... As for Mister Chipping - the teacher who learned to be lovable and teach from experience and by example, in defiance of the exam-standards of snobs - may now be too exotic a figure to be believed in...
Track Nine: School Song from Goodbye Mister Chips, Richard Adinsell



Lastly, a piece for piano, by an amateur who wishes to remain anonymous. It wasn’t me, sir,it was Mike Burrows... Some apologies have to be made for the sound-quality, as it was recorded in the performer’s front room and with a dictaphone. It is calledLeckhampton after the hill just outside Cheltenham, and is intended to evoke a brisk walk with brisk thoughts on a bright Autumn afternoon, in leafmeal-scented air, to stand by the famous rock-formation The Devil’s Chimney and look out on his home-town. Autumn is a time for home and deep feelings for all that is and all that has passed - all we have gathered against Winter. Leckhampton was made up as it was played and as the mood took ten fingers. It was considered for as long as it took to play. There is some of the appearance of a fugue, but Mike has no classical training; his piece has spontaneity, love of Autumn, the Cotswolds and music.
Everyone has moments like this; everyone has a harvest each year, everyone drinks Autumn air as though it were new wine or beer, stands on the sea-shore at some stormy time as it grows dark and there is darkness within as black as any stormy night. Everyone watches falling leaves with a sense of transience and mortality. Everyone has ghosts that people the mist out of the corner of an eye; there are always witches and terrorists (perhaps politicians see these most clearly, but are happy to apprise us of their presence).
One goes to school to believe one’s teachers, even go to war as well as live long and at peace. There are intimations ripe for music. Thing is, to act on them!

This was Classical Break on Somer Vallwy FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. We hope you have enjoyed our Autumn miscellany, researched and written by Mike Burrows, and will join us again, soon.

Track Ten: Leckhampton, Mike Burrows