America V: 5 & 6 March 2016

For Americans everywhere. Choose your candidate wisely!

CB America V

Track 1:  Fanfare For The New Atlantis, Hovhaness

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme of music from  the United States was researched and written by Michael Burrows.  We’ve just heard Fanfare For The New Atlantis by Alan Hovhaness.  Atlantis, a city fabled retrospectively for its advanced civilization, science and philosophy, is said to have disappeared beneath stormy waves of the Mediterranean, to be Invoked by ancient scholars and neo-Platonists of the 17^th Century alike, a kind of missing link in the chain of human culture, a void on which any imagination could work wonders of Utopia and hopeful searching for solutions to earthly and heavenly mysteries, its true geographical and historical position or circumstances of loss being not the least of those mysteries.

Hovhaness’ music calls forth this State of story in effortless grandeur of broad paragraphs, fluid but unobscure harmony and rich but clear-lined, trumpet--led orchestration, timeless, sombre, pure, with ancient gravity wrought out of chant and responses of deliberate weight, melody forming the rhythmical patterns, adorned by brass tuckets on one note and, latterly, thrilling scalic rushes in the string-section.  Some long-lost marvel rises up before our eyes.  An extraordinary vision, this, from 1975.

The United States has developed an enviable variety in self-expression in All genres of Art-music:   symphonists of the calibre of Hovhaness, Ives, Copland, Schuman, Sowerby,  Harris... and purveyors of morelight-weight music whose productions, though popular, are also to be discussed as an artistic achievement.   In light music, Jazz, though in itself an inexhaustibly creative tradition, surely doesn’t have things all its own way.  What are we to make, for example, of this spry and sage song written in evident heartfeltness by the  immensely vigorous and prolific March-king, John Philip Sousa?

Track 2:  You’ll Miss Lots of Fun When You’re Married, Sousa

You’ll Miss Lots of Fun When You’re Married, by Sousa.

Trained at Reed College and the Eastman School of Music, Jacob Avshalamov was born in China in 1919.  His Siberian father, Aaron, was his first teacher, a composer in his own right and collector of Chinese folk music, which influenced his and, later, certain of his son’s works; Jacob’s other tutors included Ernst Toch and Aaron Copland.   His works include large-scale cantatas and symphonic movements as well as numerous small-scale instrumental pieces and songs.  Let’s hear his song for soprano, accompanied by flute, viola and piano, Taking Leave of A Friend, one of 3 settings of poems by the T’ang poet, Li Po.  Wholetone, euphonious and gentle, there is a Ravellian sensibility in this music, the accompaniment seemingly incised in its sparseness, the line improvisatory-sounding in its imitative entries.  After a long introduction, the voice comes in on its deeply nostalgic atmosphere.  This song was Avshalamov’s first chamber-piece, composed when he was 20, but revised many years later.    

Track 3:  Taking Leave of A Friend, Avshalamov

One name in our list of great symphonists of the United States may not be well-known to even many Americans.  Leo Sowerby, known largely for his church-music and songs, wrote 5 symphonies for orchestra, one for solo-singers, choir and orchestra  and two for organ-solo.  The Second orchestral Symphony was written in 1927-8, when Sowerby was 32 years old, his career as composer and choir--master and teacher well into its stride, with frequent large-scale commissions from  the then conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock to live up to.  In three movements, the Symphony in B Minor is a compact, well-argued piece, elliptical and introspective, in which power is derived from limitation of means.  The first movement, Sonatina, is formed from two subjects with a bridge-passage between them.  The first subject is chant-like, with some jazzy irregularity of rhythm and teasing turns of harmony.  The bridge passage brings one to a less busy but somehow restless, questioning lyricism.  Development follows, with percussively underlined fragments of the chant in canon and imitation, combined with the second  subject, which is as summarily dealt-with.  The First Subject and bridge-passage only are recapitulated, the bridge-passage elaborated and, after further squalls, the close gives almost the last word to the bridge-passage, as fresh in high woodwind as at first, but the dying fall belongs to the first subject, smoothed, but defiantly in the minor.  This is fascinating, teasing music, recognizably of its time and nation, every bit as effective as the symphonies of Copland, and of similar sources in Americana – perhaps of urban jazz and New England, with a soupcon of the Mid-West.

Track 4:  2^nd Symphony in B Minor, Movt 1:  Sonatina, Sowerby

The film-music of Elmer Bernstein increased the stature of movies of all kinds.  Westerns, war-films, thrillers, fantasy-pictures for children.  The BridgeAt Remagen was no masterpiece as either history  or convincing drama unless Bernstein shaped one’s reaction to what one saw or heard.  In the brazen fanfare and loping, syncopated titles-theme – note the violins in unison here   - one crosses the Rhine, whatever the cost.  If you ignore the syncopation you may think that the tune resembles either liturgical chant or a Lutheran hymn; it is certainly an impressively broad and valiant melody.  Syncopation cuts across its accents, and  the harmonies refuse it easy passage.  War’s toll on young lives is hinted-at by a contrasting, slow-swinging, waltz--like theme heard after the repeat:  a tune of pathos and near-musical-box sonority, sweet violins singing in a nursery of the vanity of human wishes and of just war, given tension by regular phrasing, passing-notes and appoggiaturas.  This apparition ripples over one’s ears before one is returned to the theme of duty and endeavour and fanfare to close.  One may wonder if in this piece, one has the opening of a monumental symphonic movement.  How often this is true of music written for films.

Track 5:  The Bridge At Remagen, Bernstein

 

Carl Ruggles, born a year after Charles Ives, died in 1971, having outlived all the great early experimenters of the early 20^th Century United States.  A comrade-in-arms of the immensely prolific Ives and Henry Cowell, he also enjoyed a long retirement, leaving a small corpus of work.  An individualist of dogmatic, arrogant manner, he wasted few words on detractors or supporters.  Such works as Suntreader,an orchestral piece based on Apache ritual, are proof that he had no time for conventional tastes or consonance; to him, discord pursued to the conclusion one wished was the be all and end all of real, individualistic music – of real American music.  On the other hand, one can adduce the day Ives caught him sounding the same simple chord over and over on the piano – Ruggles said that he was giving the chord ‘the test of time’!   Here, in contrast to his friend Cowell’s Grinnell Fanfare, is his piece for muted brass ensemble – four trumpets and two trombones -  Angels.

It should be noted that to score a piece for brass wholly con sordino is a fine way to create almost the dullest sound imaginable; only a real or exceptionally self--important composer would set himself such a challenge.  Then again, mutes ensure that the clashes in the parts are set up without unintentional resonance.   Angels is, as perhaps it should be, a remote, hieratic experience for the listener, immediate and becomingly terse. Angels are not necessarily beings of heat.

 Track 6:  Angels, Ruggles

Aaron Copland was not only one of America’s great modernist composers and teachers, but also a committee-man who represented the interests of composers in a nation of individualists that was and is curiously addicted to  committee-work.  Driving him thoughout his long career was a determination to create a democratic form of art--music that would break the hold of internationalist elitism on the world of American music, and represent more truly and inspire the best aspects of the peculiar nature of the American people.  Personally left-wing and liberal -as such allegiances are understood in the United States – he was inspired by American national symbolism in which a folk-hero – be he Billy The Kid or Abraham Lincoln – expressed something Of hope in the national character.  One of his most famous populist Works is, of course, Lincoln Portrait, an orchestra-accompanied  monologue  based on extracts from Lincoln’s Annual Message to Congress of December 1862, a political debate held before Lincoln became President,  a letter and the famous Gettysburg Address, possibly the greatest, most powerful – and unifying - speech heard during the Civil War.  Interleaved are framing interjections including a physical description of him during his presidency.  The work, written with obvious moral effect in mind, was premiered within a year of the United States’ entry into the Second World War.  It is formed in three parts beginning with an introduction to evoke what Copland called ‘the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s character.  Also,...something of his  gentleness and simplicity of spirit.’  A hymn, is quoted, Springfield Mountain, the tune given to clarinet over simple chords for strings.

A livelier, percussive, section treats Lincoln’s wilder days of youth – Copland utilizing his own gift for ‘American’ Tunes and sonorities - and adding Campdown  Races for good measure.  At the close of this scherzando section, the music broadens as destiny – or mysterious fatality – takes over.

The third section brings the piece to its climax – the spoken word and – at last, the Gettysburg Address capped with Springfield Mountain, most poignantly given to a Taps - or Last Post-like trumpet.  The piece ends in an abiding expression of wonder, love and inspiration.  Is this President Lincoln or another New Atlantis that we hear rise before us?  The symbol is perhaps greater than any man, but a hint of the ideals that we should serve as citizens as well as individuals.  Certainly, no modern politician in his or her right mind should set him- or herself up as speaker in this piece; to do so insults the historic symbol and is bound to let down listeners in their actual hopes; no real politician can be a Lincoln, and no-one should ever clothe him- or herself in words that will certainly dwarf him or her – as kingly robes dwarf Macbeth.  Those politicians who try  (and some have unaccountably done so), sound absurd or flatly disingenuous.

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and  I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme of American music was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.

Goodbye!

Track 7:  Lincoln Portrait, Copland

CB Blake 20 & 21 February 2016

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

Let’s begin with a nocturne of great beauty written for tenor solo, solo viola, semi-chorus and orchestra, by Sir George Dyson,Night Hath No Wings, a conflation of verses by Robert Herrick and Isaac Williams.  

It forms the third movement of a massive “Cycle of Poems” written for performance at the Three Choirs Festival:  Quo Vadis, or in English, Whither goest thou?  The austere timbre of the viola sets the tone for what follows:  an arioso not far removed in melodic or harmonic style from those of the Seventeenth Century of Herrick - incidentally, Isaac Williams was a Victorian and follower of the Oxford Movement.  

Dyson sets the words with modest aptness, but smouldering intensity in which voice, viola and strings vie in pathos, woodwind - flute and clarinet -introducing a kind of sickroom closeness.  Pizzicati punctuate.   

 

Night hath no wings for him that cannot sleep;

And time seems then not to fly, but creep;

Slowly her chariot drives as if that she

Had broke her wheel...

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress...

When God knows I’m tossed about

Either with despair or doubt,

Yet before the glass be out,

Sweet spirit, comfort me...

Consolation comes slowly and unsurely with Isaac Williams’ smoother, longer-lined verse: 

Unto the east we turn with watchful eyes

Where opens the white haze of silvery lawn

And the still trees stand in the streak of dawn...

The sub-chorus sing, first soothingly, then, after further protest from the soloist, with pizzicato tread of strings...

With a restatement of Herrick’s verse beginning, In The hour of my distress, comfort is perhaps felt at the close, with its repetitions of the words comfort me, and a dying fall.  Written for the cancelled Three Choirs Festival of 1939, Quo Vadis was performed in full only in 1949.

Track One:  Quo Vadis, Night Hath No Wings,  Dyson (10.30 min) 

Next, an improvization by the clarinettist, Richard Stolzmann and the percussion-group, Nexus. Eternal Triangle Beckons. 

Track Two:  Eternal Triangle Beckons, Stolzmann/Nexus (6.23 min)

Now, a group of orchestral songs by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, all performed by Kirsten Flagstad, and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Oivin Fjelstad.  These are marvellously idiomatic renderings.   First off,Since Then I have Questioned No Further, a setting of a poem by Runeberg, dates from early in its composer’s career, and was praised for its folkishly lyrical quality by no less a figure than Johannes Brahms, when performed at a soiree in Vienna.  In his maturity, Sibelius orchestrated the song in customary neutral tones of effectiveness. 

Why is Spring so fleeting,

Why does Summer never last

Thus did I used to wonde

And ask many a person in vain...

Track Three:  Since Then I have Questioned No Further, Sibelius (2.22 min)

But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen is a song from Sibelius’ maturity, around the time of his Second Symphony, and instinct with pity and sadness that gnaws at the heart of mankind whatever the season.  The poem is again by Runeberg.  A girl longs for her lover, who does not return with Spring, the swan, the lark, the curlew...

Track Four:  But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen, Sibelius (2.43 min)

The last of our Sibelius songs today is To The Night, a setting of AV Forsman-Koskiemies from the period of Since Then I have Questioned No Further.  The spirit of the singer hastens to meet comforting night.

Track Five:  To The Night, Sibelius (1.36 min)

Now, a work for trumpet solo and string orchestra by the Armenian--Scottish American composer, Alan Hovhaness.  The great crisis in his career - rejection by his teachers at Tanglewood Music School after the award of a scholarship - was two years behind him when he set to work on this piece.   It portrays a heroic priest, the eponymous Khrimian Hairig, who led his people through many persecutions.  The trumpet intones as the voice of this man, the strings’ block--chordal responses growing in fervour and canonic contrapuntal independence.  Armenian semitones spice modal forms of chant.  There are moments of holy calm as at the beginning.  The fullest statement of the melodic material is reserved until the close, and broadens in typical idealistic statement, the trumpet like a golden crown.  The piece is subdivided into three sections: The Chalice of Holiness; Wings of Compassion and The Triumph of Faith.  Khrimian Hairig, by Alan Hovhaness. 

Track 6:  Khrimian Hairig, Alan Hovhaness (7.39 min)

Our last work today is the Clarinet Concerto by Howard Blake.  Blake, a Londoner born in 1938, studied as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music, his lessons in composition given by the Belfast-born pianist-composer, Howard Ferguson.  His catalogue of works is massive, running into over nine hundred opus numbers:  but he has worked intensively as an accompanist and conductor, this secondary hectic career involving much travel and exposure to many styles of music ranging from pop, through jazz, to modern art-music.  A brilliant pasticheur, he has written much music in a tonal idiom recognizably influenced by that of his own teacher, Ferguson, Gerald Finzi, Hindemith, Delius and Peter Warlock.  You will know him by his music for the film, The Snowman. 

It is fair to say that this much-commissioned composer has an ability to create music that is sometimes described as ‘accessible’.  The idiom is approachable and recognizably of a tradition. 

It’s not revolutionary in style, and for many decades, this was to say that music was dull or fake: in the days when a culture of ‘lightning war’ seems to have been the anti-aesthetic believed on by all fashionable terrible infants and BBC Controllers.

Blake’s Concerto is structurally akin to that by Gerald Finzi (who was himself under-appreciated by movers and shakers in his life-time), and covers much the same emotional range, beginning with a flourish - though one provided by the soloist rather than strings. The first movement, Invocation: Recitativo-Moderato, Molto Deciso,  opens in near-blues, which are supplanted by a mediaeval chant-sounding first subject coloured by the clarinet. Brusque onward movement is held back by the tug of doubt or sadness, complex canonic or imitational textures or semitonal sighs.  The scoring is harsh, with many misalliances in instruments’ weaker registers; the sense of driven-ness not to be put away as the flourish and chant are developed against an ever-changing background of counterpoint.  The semitonal sighs are heard most affectingly in a moment notable for high violin harmonics and held notes in the horn.  The inexhaustible energy and variety in the music builds to baroque or Finzi-like use of high strings with bass accompaniment, leading to a stalking climax, jabbing Dies Irae unisons punctuating the chant-theme. The opening flourish - and clarinet - enter, and a slow fading chord coloured by the horn ends the movement. 

Track Five:  Invocation: Recitativo-Allegro Deciso (7.51 min)       .

The Second Movement, Recitativo - Lento Serioso, is possibly haunted by Ravel’s piano-piece,Le Ghibet, another emotionally complex inspiration.  It begins with the flourish that began the first, but soon, the matter is proved to be a development of the high violin harmonics figure in amongst the imaginative thematic transformations later on.  Again, the horns are involved.  The clarinet and violins with cautionary matter from other parts of the orchestra build to a brief climax - underpinned by an upward scale - and a lowish consolatory sound is made by horn and warbling clarinet and other woodwind in exchanges of the melodic line. Tension comes in on the high strings, stridency bringing back the swaying semitones on misallied woodwind - oboe noticeable - and brass.  Again, the music seeks to expand, and the oboe has its moment, answered by the clarinet.  The upward scale is heard from underneath.  Again, there is consolation, and the strings lead the warmer but quietly peremptory winding-down. 

Track Six:  Ceremony:  Recitativo-Lento Serioso (7.12 min)

The Finale is a Round Dance, marked Vivace.  An impish variation on the solo flourish leads to a jog-trot similar to the chant of the first movement.  Woodwind have a counter-melody that is flat in curve, more blues-like or jazzy and so modern in sound. 

It may remind one of the spikier inspirations of Malcolm Arnold. The clarinet soon dominates it, as does the opening matter.  The semitonal swaying from the first two movements is heard with pizzicato accompaniment and what become roulades in the solo-part.  The chant-like theme is still there.  A crescendo grows with chuckling outbursts from woodwind and a more haunting air in the clarinet’s restricted figures. The opening music of the rondo returns - barer, more gaunt.  Time is passing, even the clarinet is audibly flagging - or a final effort is inspired by the counter-melody, scotched at last by horn and rounded off by woodwind, strings and brass - the clarinet in at the very last.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM , and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s Programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!       

Track Seven:  Round Dance: Vivace (6.28 min)

CB Night: 13 & 14 February 2016

Classical Break: Night

(This is a repeat from 2010)



Intro Track: Milford, Slow Minuet and Trio. Fade out.




Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. All the pieces on today’s programme were inspired by night, a time for reflection, for exploration, for insomnia or sleep, a time when day recedes and there is respite, with an access of heightened consciousness of life, self and environment - or loneliness in the space opened; when memories and dreams are self-sufficient or look to the future, though there may be doubts, fears and nightmares waking or sleeping, and with them, a sense that the sun may not return. Lucretius, the Roman Poet, wrote that it was not possible that earliest man wandered the earth wailing in his dread that the sun had gone down forever, but others have remarked on Man’s inability to learn from remission of personal existential anguish! We shall begin at the beginning, at nightfall. Our first piece is by the French composer, teacher of many eminent composers and musicians and biographer of his own revered master, César Franck, Vincent D’Indy, who was born in 1851 and died in 1931. It forms the last movement of his roughly half-an-hour-long triptych for orchestra, Jour D’Éte À La Montagne. The mountain was visible from his estate at Faugs in the Ardêche Region.In this tone-poem, he describes a Summer day spent on the wooded slopes - Aurora, Daytime Beneath The Pine-trees and Evening. Opening brightly and practically, Evening is yet well-headed by a superscription from a contemporary poet, Roger de Pamplonne:
  “O Night! - eternal harmony subsists under your veil!”




Fiercely dogmatic in all matters, especially music and religion, D’Indy’s evocation of nightfall includes a quotation of plainsong associated with the Feast of The Assumption, sounded on the horn and mused on unhesitatingly by the orchestra, but it is the masterly, veiled, velvet tones of earth-deep mystery by which he puts the day to bed that will remain in the memory of most listeners. The ‘thick’ Wagnerian scoring permits subtleties of colour that register more resonantly every time this work is heard. Listen for slow, deep octaves in the strings and a last bird-call - an owl - before the close. This is dusk turning to night. No instrument sounds without being contingent on another for the full truth in this hauntingly mysterious process; the oboe adds its own peculiar plangency. The music is developed symphonically, that is, by organic, exclusively musical procedures, and yet remains vividly pictorial. What Debussy did for Eastborne in La Mer, D’Indy did for Faugs in his Summer Day On The Mountain. Let’s hear this finale to a labour of love if ever there was one: Evening.




Track One: D’Indy: Jour D’Éte À La Montagne Movt lll




Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), taught by Martucci and Rimsky-Korsakov, lived almost only for music. He was a tireless editor and arranger of other men’s work, a teacher and prolific composer in his own right. For him, unusually for an Italian of his day, operas were almost a sideline - though as a prolific artist he wrote several - his main compositional interests being in the realm of orchestral and instrumental music and songs. He is best-known for three tone--poems portraying Rome Ancient and modern - The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals. Here is a movement from The Pines of Rome, a depiction of the pines of a hill sacred to the Roman Kings, Ianiculum, or the Ianicolo, by night.




The rich beauty of his scoring is pellucid, cool, mild, woodwind, piano, celesta and strings having the sheen of blue night air, a restfulness in which as dreamers turn in their sleep, one feels a sense of blessedness in being awake. At one time, there was much nonsense talked about a particular unprecedented feature of the music, but this feature came as a surprize to me when I first heard it, and if you’ve never heard it yourself, it may seem all the more beautiful and imaginative.




You can’t miss what takes over from trilling woodwind and violins to make explicit what the movement has taken almost as its text.




Track Two: Respighi: Pines of Rome, The Pines of The Ianicolo




That was The Pines of The Ianicolo by Respighi, written in 1924, played by the Orchestre de la
Suisse Romande, conducted by their founder, Ernest Ansermet. They accompanied the recording of an amateur singer of real promise. In the old days, a stone gramophone, presumably one with a good acoustic box for amplification, had to be set up in front of the orchestra for the true voice of a nightingale to steal out over the audience from a shellac record.




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




The Lyke-Wake Dirge, a North Country verse of uncertain date grimly treating mortality and the everlasting torment that awaits sinners has been set by a surprizing number of composers in the past ninety years - Bax and Britten being two of the more eminent of them. Geoffrey Burgon, born in Hampshire in 1941 perhaps wrote the most striking example for a radio-play, The Cold Country, about the end of an ill-fated Arctic expedition, broadcast in 1972. The setting is also the barest that I have heard, sung unaccompanied by two counter-tenors moving in canon, as though advancing a pace apart. There is an icy fire of fanaticism or implacable grace about this music. That people who speak of love can also speak of Hell, and have the most disturbingly cruel visions of it. If ever you have been left out in the cold, with no notion of how to gain shelter, or no opportunity, you will feel it.This Ean Night.




Track Three: Burgon: This Ean Night




Next, a song by the Gloucestershire poet and composer, Ivor Gurney, (1890-l937). As a Private soldier of the Second/Fifth Gloucesters, he served bravely in the Ypres Salient and suffered a breakdown in consequence. Seen by the War Office as being employable, he was discharged on a half-pension, about ten-and-six weekly, and tried to resume his interrupted studies at the Royal College of Music, and claim a position in peace-time society as a composer and ‘First War-Poet’. His songs - mainly for voice and piano, were occasionally published - one cycle won him a Carnegie Award - but whereas two books of his early poems had been published, those in his more personal manner disconcerted most editors. He could not find settled employment or a lasting home, and four years passed by in the furious writing of songs, chamber-music, at least one orchestral piece, and collection after collection of poems, the symptoms of shell-shock and breakdown steadily growing on him as he laboured on farms, in food-storage depots and as a cinema-pianist and civil service clerk to support himself and work on his songs and poems with a clear mind and conscience.




He had always been capable of concentration - writing poems and even music at the Front, for example, but self-control suddenly collapsed, disappointed in its hopes of recognition, though he had no shortage of literary and musical friends who tried to look out for him in a society that was inimical to artistic productivity. He was certified and hospitalized at Barnwood and then Dartford Asylum for the rest of his life, where, amazingly, such were his strength of mind and character, that he continued to work, recasting and composing.




I imagine the night-walker finding a place to lay his head in the Cotswold hills above Cheltenham when I hear Most Holy Night, a song for voice and piano setting words by his hero, Hillaire Belloc, whom he had much enjoyed reading in spare moments during army service.
“Most holy night, that dost keep
The keys of all the doors of sleep,
To me when my eyelids close,
Grant me repose...

Let them that guard the horned moon
By my bedside their memories croon,
So shall I have new dreams and blest
In my brief rest...”




Track Four: Ivor Gurney: Most Holy Night




Traditionally, for poets and some others, the night is a time to feel separation from one’s beloved. Next, a song from the Red Army Chorus and Band: by Mokrousov, You Are Always Beautiful - a soldier thinks of his beloved; while the Northern Lights are chill, with her, happy or sad, it is warm. Soon, their wedding-day will dawn.




Track Five: Mokrousov: You Are Always Beautiful.




Our next piece is by the modernist French composer, Maurice Ohana, an older contemporary of Messaien. It is the first movement of a group of pieces for small ensemble - flute/piccolo, two zithers – one tuned chromatically, the other in third-note microtone intervals - piano and percussion - Signes - L’Arbre, symbolic representations of a tree; this movement is entitled L’Arbre Dans La Nuit, The Tree At Night. The sound is intended to evoke not only the night of a tree but also the style of Japanese ritual-music.




Track Six: Maurice Ohana: Signes - L’Arbre. L’Arbre Dans La Nuit.




Now, a song by EJ Moeran, Far In A Western Brookland.




Born in 1894, he was another student at the RCM who came to grief in the Great War. In his case, service meant being a dispatch--rider and ended when he was badly injured about head and neck by shrapnel. Like Gurney, who was first shot through the arm and then won a blighty by being lightly gassed, there was no escape from the injuries Moeran suffered. After the War, he composed in spite of his wounds and bouts of drinking that dulled severe headache and depression.




He could not be as prolific as Gurney, but wrote songs, choral pieces, chamber music, orchestral works - small tone-poems and rhapsodies – and from the ‘Thirties on, a Symphony and Concertos for Violin and Cello. Brought up in Norfolk, he was inspired by folksong and his Irish ancestry. Making friends with the composer Peter Warlock, and living with him for a time began an interest in Early Music.




Another enthusiasm produced the song Far In A Western Brookland in 1925, nearly ten years after a dry run. The poems of AE Housman attracted many composers by their neat form, countryside imagery and romantic longing, the Shropshire Lad who settled to work in London, leaving behind his home, his past, everything that had made him, had real resonance with the poets and composers who sought to make their names in the metropolis in the first years of the Last Century. Perhaps of the composers, Gurney, as the son of a tailor, came nearest to being what one might think of as a lad, but Moeran here writes one of the best songs about longing for home by night that can be imagined. It has a breath-taking stillness and pathos.




Track Seven: EJ Moeran: Far In A Western Brookland




The American composer, Charles Ives, was music’s only significant composer to make a fortune from selling life-insurance as a partner in a firm founded by him and a friend, and life-insurance’s rarest of types, an honest man, but then, he was a New Englander. He was a hard worker, composing by night after the day’s work, often at his firm’s office; his safe became a repository for scores and fragments of scores that are still being deciphered to this day. He published his own songs and was discovered by the musical world after a retirement brought upon him by the loss of his health. Some time before this, in one of those sad episodes where people wonder what might have been, Gustav Mahler had obtained the score of one of his symphonies whilst in New York, but died before he could present it in Austria.




Over the remaining years of Ives’ life, interest in his music grew and there were performances in Europe and North America, Ives himself viewing the process with alternate impatience and scorn. To his home--town, Danbury, he was a hero, his father’s son - his father had been bandmaster there, and a respected citizen. Ives believed that his Father had made him and his style, that his Father should have had recognition for anticipating many of modern music’s ‘isms. As it was, poly--rhythms, polytonality, atonality, the admixture of popular tunes with original material in collages of sound had maddened or fascinated those around Charles for many decades before music could catch up. One of Ives’ pet projects was a Universe Symphony in which he would render the music of the spheres as he heard it. He had done much to render New England and New York into music, and as a transcendentalist, was unafraid of big projects - if he did them, he did them!


Let’s hear his short piece, entitled simply Hallowe’en. The flames of a bonfire leap, creating crazy shadows in the darkness, as a clumsy seasonal buggaboo limps towards us.




Track Eight: Ives: Hallowe’en




Things that go bump in the night as imagined by the semi-serious child in Charles Ives. For our last piece today, we turn to Camille Saint-Saens, 1835-1921. He wrote a series of tone-poems when the form was yet quite young.



Danse Macabre was based on a short song of the same name and setting a poem by Henri Cazalis. It describes a centuries-old conceit, the Dance of Death: as midnight strikes in the churchyard, Death tunes his fiddle; he taps on the tomb-tops to raise the dead, who answer the call - and night-through, they dance - only the cock-crow stills them and at that, Death himself smiles his rictus and fades from sight. This dance-set of the dead is more energetic and touching than frightening, in spite of all manipulation of the mediaeval chant, the Dies Irae, as a compulsive waltz with affectionate asides takes hold and the wind in the trees is to be imagined as growing higher as excited movement becomes more furious.




Four instances of scoring are noticeable and celebrated, the use of horn and harp to portray the church clock’s striking midnight, the flattening of the solo violinist’s E-string by a semi-tone for the instrument to sound rougher and more sour to the ear, imitating the timbres of a country fiddler, the xylophone representing the rattle of bones and the oboe’s voice sounding cock-crow, but the piece, finding space for fugal writing, is perfectly formed - as are most of Saint-Saens’ multitudinous works, and paced and developed as well as it is orchestrated.




Let’s finish, then, with Danse Macabre, and meet dawn that comes courtesy of Saint-Saens. This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. Hope to have your company again soon!




Track Nine: Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre




Tail Track: Milford, Slow Minuet and Trio. Fade out.

CB Rachmaninov 1st Symphony 6 & 7 February

CLASSICAL BREAK
Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in D Minor, Op13
NOTE:  This script is the original version, but due to it overrunning our time slot, the final programme omits some of the introductory analysis. I have left it in here for interest. 

 “If there were a conservatory in Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a  programme symphony on “The Seven Plagues of Egypt”, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr Rachmaninov’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell.  But for the time being we are still living on earth, and this music has a depressing effect on us, with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, the meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the intense crash of brass, and above all the sickly, perverse hamonization and quasi-melodic outlines, and the complete lack of simplicity and naturalness, the complete lack of themes.”

With these words were dismissed the ambitions of a twenty-four year-old graduate pianist and composer; not just any graduate either, but the Gold Medal-holding Sergei Vasileyevitch Rachmaninoff, lately of the Moscow Conservatoire.  This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is given over to Rachmaninoff’s extraordinary First Symphony, a work repudiated by him after a disastrous premiere at St Petersburg, given by the Russian Orchestral Society and conducted by Alexandr Glazunov.

Rachmaninoff himself tore up the score and later described it to a close friend as strained, childish and bombastic, but not wholly weak, its worse fault being bad orchestration; furthermore, he could not understand how a musician like Glazunov - one of Russia’s foremost composers and teachers, a great figure among the staff at the St Petersburg Conservatoire - could have conducted  so badly.  Rachmaninoff’s cousin, later his wife, claimed Glazunov had been drunk. 
The First Symphony in D Minor is scored for large orchestra.  From double-basses and (superb) tuba up to piccolo, the instrumentation is extremely well judged.  The form is cyclical with a short, snarling motto that colours or generates all the matter of its four movements.  Autocratically expressive,   this is possibly the first Russian symphony to take its chapter and verse from knowledge of znameniy or Orthodox liturgical chants as well as folk-music, and it echoes also the bells of Mousorgsky’s Boris Gudonov.  Moreover, the Catholic chant, Dies Irae, an idée-fixe of that other pianist composer, Franz Liszt, Is never far from the shape of things. Rachmaninoff was to make this fate-motif his own - it occurs in almost all his large-scale works! 

Cue:  Extract from Piano Trio in D Minor, Rachmaninoff

The first four notes of the motto-theme and an element of the second subject may have been carried over deliberately from the massive slow movement of the elegaic second Piano Trio in D Minor - written in memory of Tchaikovsky, who had mostly been very encouraging of Rachmaninoff’s efforts; assisted as an examiner in his graduation and died tragically two years before the Symphony was begun. The score is headed with the words, “Vengeance is mine (saith the Lord) I will repay.”  This quotation from the Scriptures occurs in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, of which more later..
The brass motto with which the symphony opens is reminiscent of the beginning of Borodin’s Second Symphony.

Cue:  Opening of Second Symphony In B Minor, Borodin

Cue: Motto and 1st Subject, Rachmaninoff

Besides a hint of the Dies Irae, there’s a woody coolness and purpose to the first subject, a continuation of the motto-theme - clarinet and then oboe prominent -  the first subject is built up of phrases from liturgical chants, a process his listeners would have been aware of on first hearing.  The subject has kinship  with the allegros of Rimsky-Korsakov, athletic, loose-limbed only because relying on sequence, the self-repetition of Jchoice narrow intervals, and contrapuntal entries.  Descending scalic figures - the clarinet’s being most noticeable - are built into the material.  A curious, overshadowed quality comes with changes in dynamics and scoring.   Tension rises to the hard-hitting first brassy climax, with its repeated-note tattoo - powerful in the lower brass and with an edge of hysteria added by the trumpet; it  falls away in murmurs - and in twirls the sinuous, feminine second subject on violins, astringent appoggiatura not permitting sinuousness to be relaxed.  The oboe, flutes and clarinet add plangency, the swell of the theme given the Tchaikovskian treatment - passionate first violins in unison, the horns glowing.

 Cue:  Second Subject, Rachmaninoff

A kind of gipsy-music or orientalism is found in it, not unlike the orientalism of Balakirev, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov - composers venerated by the St Petersburg Conservatoire.  Rachmaninoff had written a stipulated one-act opera for his graduation exercise - Aleko, a story of gipsy life.  After a close - the motto murmuring - the development begins as does that of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, The Pathetique:  with a loud crash on brass and percussion. Here is the Tchaikovsky.

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of 1st Movt Development of Sixth Symphony in B Minor, Tchaikovsky.
And, for the last of these brief cues, here is the Rachmaninoff:
Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of Development, Rachmaninoff  

A trumpet-shriek - the motto theme in an instant!  The divided strings launch into a fugato based on it.  Their lack of support elsewhere makes keeping their pitch tricky. 

More is brewing, with vindictive fanfare- and plainchant-like brass twitted by high woodwind, even as the motto sounds underneath on horns.  The strings reassert themselves:  in crashes a variant of the motto, with new, perhaps ‘perverse’ brass chords of real keenness - piccolo - and in some performances, glockenspiel -tingling atop what seem like deepbells.  The trumpets answer trombones and horns in antiphon.  Sublimity!  Yet  the effect of an upward pressure narrows the harmonic scope of the fanfare, if not the melodic.. It is  an intensely personal, memorable transformation, terse and ringing, swaying between feelings of major and minor. The music moves on as the strings take the theme over, returning it to its striving first subject shape.

A diminuendo.  All seems indistinct, misty - and clears as the second-subject comes in on flute.  It is now possible to hear this theme as a feminized development of the first subject; its deeply appoggiatura-ed hesitancy and ultimate fervour, and, at last, rich scoring remain moving in this reprise.  The episode of misty indistinctness heard earlier is altered to be like the swing of the tide, rocking.  The brass - gapped chords moving up the scale - presage the close of the movement.  Building up to a savage end derived from what went before it, dovetailing, canons and imitations between the sections of the orchestra now rend reticence to bits.  Derived from the first and second subject and the upward scale that accompanies the first subject, the final cadence, several lashing blows of Fate or impatience, is masterful.  

Track One:  First Symphony, l Grave, Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Rachmaninoff (13.45 min)
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is devoted to one piece, the Symphony in D Minor by Rachmaninoff.  What hectored critics missed at the premiere was that the ‘perversity’ they perceived is a source of great expressive power.  They reacted against the music’s commandingness, its organization, its aesthetic consistency and yet originality.  The orchestral parts survived, mostly complete, and were exhumed from the Leningrad Conservatoire archives in 1944.  The Symphony was performed in a typical Soviet volte-face the following year:  the performance of Rachmaninoff’s works in the Soviet Union had been banned a while after his escape from Revolutionary Russia.  A celebrity world--wide, he had made no secret, everywhere he went, of his hatred of the crimes of Bolshevism.  He had died in Beverly Hills the previous year, and the discovery proved that he belonged to Soviet Russia after all...  Rachmaninoff, who’d suffered from crippling nostalgia for his country, would not have liked the irony.
That quotation, Vengeance is mine (saith the Lord) I will repay.  Rachmaninoff meant it to be a reference to Anna Karenina - the verse is quoted in the novel, apparently - but also to a lately-concluded affair with a married lady of gipsy blood!  The piece was dedicated to her - A.L. - Anna Alexandrovna Lodizhenskaya. 
Beginning with the motto-theme made douce, a simple, telling transformation in context, The second movement is an intermezzo rather than scherzo, mostly lightly scored.  It seems like woodland music, darting, as if breeze-blown among birch-trees - delicate with woodland flowers, the viola at times wry in solos less airy than the flute’s.  It is a hypersensitive mood-piece, a fantasy of alternate tensions on derivatives of first movement material.  There are harsh, driven moments on brass and lower strings, the first movement’s snarl and motto-theme never distant.  Where the music is brightest, most fine--spun, where it suggests sweetness or the slightest shade or fragrance, is perhaps where Anna is found and dwelt on.  Glazunov made a cut in this movement for the premiere.
After the viola’s nervy solo, the dark elements rise - only to be partly soothed and brought back to the mercurial mood and music of the opening.  Contrarities die out at last in the motto and semitonal oscillation.
Track Two:  ll Allegro Animato.
Another movement of kaleidoscopic orchestration, the third movement is a beautifully-scored love song with lyrical woodwind solos and delicate touches of appoggiatura from the violins and violas.  It begins with the fate-motif and develops the Symphony’s first and second subjects.  Beauty is interrupted by a passage  of savage foreboding in the bass of the orchestra, symbolizing jealousy with the Dies Irae, perhaps.  The viola picks up the song where it left off, and real passion - and hypersensitivity - return to the music, building through repetition and counterpointing of the two tunes of the first movement, the masculine first subject smearing the outline of the feminine second.  These  processes are the structure of this music.  Appoggiatura in lower strings and horn-tone seem either to soothe or to increase pain.  The music dies away overshadowed by a rocking alternation of tones on clarinet.  Dies Irae tells us that the day of judgement is near.

Track Three:  lll Larghetto
The last movement is lashed by brass and percussion into beginning proudly, with dotted-note fanfares.  The first subject of the symphony returns, triumphant and sinister.  It is continued by a zigeuner-like insistence on rhythm in the cellos and double-basses in particular - the horn adds foreboding.  This music was written years before Stravinsky’s percussive, motoric but rhythmically disruptive style became fashionable.  The feminine second subject sweeps one on, now, with Tchaikovskian swelling horns in canon, and castanets imitated by tambourine.  Hectoring brass breaks in with the motto fanfares; a diminuendo brings in the oboe in Anna’s theme.  It is taken up with an accompaniment of nervous quivering in the strings - time is running out.  The deep strings add a swell to the yearning - the horn still doesn’t achieve more than pathos - the gipsy-dance moments drop in exhaustion.  A lulling episode is followed by a bass-led revivification of the gaunt fate-music, with its odd rhythms and ruthlessness more marked, the violas characteristically dry and wiry in tone.

The sweep of the movement continues -down, the obsessive motto brushing aside gipsy tambourine, growing ever more frenetic yet apt to its context, and now, we’re at the ferocious climax of the entire Symphony, repeated whiplash phrases of the first subject or motto-theme continuation more and more short, sharp and frantic, reaching the listener’s breaking point, which comes soon enough, with the finality of drums and tam-tam, the motto-theme sombre in slow deep waves that return us to an image of the tide, one bleak stretch of coast; then, like a tidal wave that one has not seen in its rising, but turns to as it topples - or the wave that one has waited for and now throws oneself into - that last terrifying conflict, a downward chromatic scale pitted against, and out of step with, an upward, and broken thematic phrases in addition, the violins divided, sounding their own semitonal clash, screaming their way down on and through those upward, harmonized sequences of chromatic brass and other interjections until the alto and deeper instruments harmonizes in the downward scale, the violins still out of step - bearing down on everything.  The scale ends in a two-fold downward sequence derived from a four-note element of the second - feminine - subject, semitone-minor-third-semitone; in fact, the whole climax is an immense development of the feminine subject against first subject upward scale and Dies Irae. Curiously there is an echo of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman in there. 

We are left with reiteration of the opening of the motto-theme - altered subtlely from its other appearances - and at first with a response-phrase reminiscent of Dies Irae.  The procession is accompanied by regularly spaced drum-beats and crashes from the tam-tam, until, after five repetitions in the major, the movement is brought to a dead stop, by two identical, thudded chords.  Anna Karenina dies by suicide - throwing herself under the wheels of a railway-engine.  Here, antedating musique mechanique by about thirty years, Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony ends by appearing to evoke just such a death - one is left with the blind, remorseless force  of steam driving tons of steel.  

Track Four:  lV Allegro Con Fuoco
Glazunov’s fluent, ingratiating First Symphony had been premiered when he had been sixteen.  It had been a triumph.  At the premiere of his First Symphony, the twenty-four year-old Rachmaninoff left the hall to pace outside, wringing his hands at the terrible discords he heard.  Had he truly written these sounds? Of course, he most probably had written many of them - calculated them ruthlessly,  as contrapuntal clashes and as-logical harmonic progressions.
The critique that headed our programme - was by Cesar Cui, the least talented of the Moguchaya Kuchka or ‘Mighty Handful’ of great St Petersburg composers - Balakirev, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov having been the others.  Regarding themselves as the Pan-Slavist torch-bearers for Russian music, they had been rivals to the ‘westernizing’ Nicolai Rubenstein/Tchaikovsky axis in Moscow.  Years previously, Rimsky--Korsakov had groomed Glazunov for stardom...Rachmaninoff had been groomed by Zverev, Arensky and Taneiev, the first two figures Tchaikovskians, the last an expert in Flemish polyphony whose counterpoint-classes had taught Rachmaninoff a great deal. In Rachmaninoff’s last major work, the Symphonic Dances, there is a moment where the first subject of his First Symphony rises almost as if from the grave, shining and beautiful: and the late work - from nearly fifty years on - builds on the quotation of an Easter chant in its later stages. 
Cue from Symphonic Dances, l Non Allegro, Rachmaninoff
Resurrection came, beyond the imagining of the critics of that first performance - or the conscious hopes of Rachmaninoff, himself, who had the misfortune to be a young man caught between old factions fighting for influence over the future of Russian music, the death of Tchaikovsky having left everything to play for! Pace Mister Cui, it is possible not to be an inhabitant of Hell and yet see the critic as a brilliantly perceptive bigot:  his descriptions of the symphony apt so long as one discounts his aesthetic, which leads him to enumerate strengths as weaknesses!  You’ve been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!