CB-America 5 - January 2017

America V: 5 & 6 March 2016

For Americans everywhere. Ye reap what ye have sown....

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

Alfred Hill 1 14 & 15 January 2017

CB Hill 1: REPEAT FROM 2016

Intro Track:  Waiata Poi (orch version), Hill (3.30m)

100 years ago the ANZAC forces of Australia and New Zealand were smarting from the outcome of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of the Great War. 7,500 New Zealanders and 28,000 Australians died in the campaign. This weekend, the two nations observe ANZAC Day, originally set up to honour members of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps who perished at Gallipoli. As a tribute to those who died in the conflict, we present the music of Alfred Hill, 1869-1960.

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s Programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is another in a series based on the works of the Australian composer, doyen of both the Australian and New Zealand musical establishment of his day, Alfred Hill.


Known to many by Waiata Poi, a popular song based on Maori poetry and music,  Born in 1869, Alfred Hill, the son of an English hatter,  failed gold-prospector and amateur musician, was trained as a violinist, orchestral player and composer at the prestigious Leipzig Conservatoire, where he took
a Helbig Prize and played underconductors of the rank of Brahms and Tchaikovsky…

He remained a Leipziger in compositional style, though not a pedantic one.  His music has many influences besides those of Mendelssohn, Bruch or Brahms.  One finds at different moments, Wagnerian harmony, Dvorakian directness, Tchaikovskian sensibility – but also Debussyan whole tones and Griegish freshness and terseness.  As Hill spent a good deal of his life conducting and playing, he had a very practical sense of what worked and what didn’t, and long experience of
writing opera and operetta taught him to aim for both lyricism and the bold gesture, apparent, easily-apprehended shapeliness and colourful orchestration.  What worked for soloists, a chorus and pit-band might be made to work for a full orchestra or chamber group.  The challenge spurred him to extraordinary lengths in self-discipline and aptness.  Another strength was a lifelong refusal
to regard himself as a genius or indulge in the artistic temperament.  There was little in the way
of ego or self-importance in Alfred Hill.

Here’s a short character-piece for orchestra, a song without words in but name, The Moon’s Golden Horn.

Here, the flute – always a magical presence in his music – the woodwind, upper strings (including harp) and horn are in exquisite mood.  The lower strings and brass are added, pedal notes sounded, to add gravitas to melody that is little more than a projection of harmonies that are smooth and yet a touch uncanny.  Brassy and bass-defined astringency makes itself felt at precisely the right moments, as does refulgency or a pathetic longing that reminds one of the film-music of Bernard Herrmann –
feeling for the moon’s serene shining is, after all, unrequitable.  That this work dates from 1937
does not devalue its distinction.  As Brahms might have said, “One cannot imagine it different.”  The Wagnerian close is no less beautiful than what has led up to it.

Track 2:  The Moon’s Golden Horn, Alfred Hill (5.25min)

A very different work, now.  Hill was an indefatigable writer of chamber music.  In two phases, his early and middle-period, he wrote of which he knew as a player.  There are 17 string quartets alone.
In 1912, he wrote a single piano quintet, entitling it simply, “Life”.

Three movements of this work are rooted in Schumann’s masterpiece, springily rhythmical, imaginative in harmony, making the most of motivic themes in ingenious transformations and
counterpoint.  The slow movement is a slow processional with contrasting section, though not a Schumannesque funeral march.  Another composer one may think of as one listens is Sibelius, whose early chamber music is marvellous for the ease shown in classico-romantic expression.

But then comes the finale.  And the finale is an adapted cantata – now setting the composer’s own poem, Life!

It is also related to a song inspired by Maori folksong, Tarakihi, that is, Cicada…

Eight voices are employed in this Paean For The Joy of Life – two each of sopranos, mezzo-sopranos,
tenors and basses – note the canny choice of registers. Every register remains distinct.

Beginning in a Gloria In Excelsis, this movement is a living reproach to shallow thinkers who upbraid Hill for his supposed conservatism.  Rising and falling in waves and asides, it may remind one of Schumann’s superb final chorus in Scenes From Faust, The Ever-womanly Leads Us On, but
tts matter relates logically to what has gone before and the ebb and flow of subjects and counterpoint is a perfect evocation of the words of the poem, a maritime piece.  Its benign and intelligent uproariousness would have gone down well with Percy Grainger, who was, in fact, to be counted among Hill’s many friends and admirers. It is big stuff.

Track 3:  Piano Quintet, Life, 4th Movt, Hill (13.41min)

 At Leipzig, Hill met many important musicians.  What he thought of Brahms, for example, was that he was a very large man, not at all like a German, who got very excited when he conducted, and shouted and stamped; if the string-sections, whose players included Hill - didn’t use uniform bowing, he stamped and swore; as to his observantness of the band, the great man – who in fact suffered from extreme short sight and peered through owlish lorgnettes - must have had eyes in the back of his head.  Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was simply as nervous as a cat!

Hill himself was a small-built man, virile and peppery, singleminded and direct in manner.  He wasn’t excitable in Brahms’ manner, and he would have found Tchaikovsky’s “nerves” – as distinct from the man’s music – tiresome. Both the masters had been shy;  Hill wasn’t.  As private a man as Brahms
and as sensitive to feeling as Tchaikovsky, he created visions with both skill and self-criticism.  As an artist, he preserved himself in a state of absolute artistic integrity.

Grieg’s music struck a lasting chord at Leipzig.  Significantly, students regarded it highly for its unusual form.  In Hill’s eyes, such music perhaps an abiding example of a composer’s using form only as it served his expressive goals.  Then, Grieg’s fresh rhythms, themes and harmonies trumped
“form” as they do to this day.  And what are Hill’s scores notable for?  Trumped form, the hallmark
of a true master.  Like Grieg, Hill was an inspired miniaturist; again, like Grieg, his so-called miniatures wereof a significance not to be called little…

Hill’s Third Symphony has as its epigraph verses by George Essex Evans:
Her song is silence, unto her
Its mystery clings
      Silence is the interpreter
Of deeper things.

O for sonorous voice and strong
To change that silence into song!
         To give that melody release
          Which sleeps in the deep heart of peace
With folded wings.

Three of the movements of a String Quartet (Number 14 in B Minor), were scored for orchestra as
they stood.  Replacing a short “Menuet” intermezzo, a tone poem was recycled to form an effective scherzo – its origins were in music for a film about Aborigines of Arnheim Land.  This new work was done in 1951 and subtitled simply, Australia.

The composer gave us these clues to the poetic meaning of this music and also the piece’s key within a tonal plan.
1 Introduction – The lonely, silent land 
(home-tonality B minor-major)
Allegro (a) The Workers   (b)  The Thinkers
The heart of Australia is lonely and silent.  On the fringe of the great island continent, men crowd like ants into the cities they have made.  Some seek quieter places.

Hill’s orchestration adds to what was to be heard in his quartet.  Woodwind, brass, a full string section and colour and sweep to this movement.  The ritornello-theme is now  trumpet-capped, weak woodwind adding plangency.  The strings’ restatement of the introduction-theme is almost Tchaikovskian in its pathos.  All is yet economy and beauty of lively but fastidious blends of instrumentation.

Track 4 Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 1 Adagio-Allegro Molto (9.08m)

The composer’s programme here is,
2 Australia, mysterious and beautiful (B minor-major)  Australia with its vast plains, forest ranges, and subterranean caves is an eerie place and very beautiful.

There’s no denying that again, here, the Adagio gains in breadth and blend of sound.  Hill is immune
to mawkishness, but the moments of passion and sadness are there, formal but somehow unstereotypical and unsanctimonious in effect.  This is one Leipzig-shaped movement that won’t cloy, that leaves the Max Bruchs of this world far behind.

Track 5  Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 2, Adagio (5.56m)

We come to the movement that replaces the Fourteenth Quartet’s Menuet.  This is one of Alfred Hill’s most impressive inspirations, binding the Two Australias – colonial Australia and Aboriginal Australia – together.  One of the marvels of Hill was that he was able to create consistency within a work while using Leipzigerische idiom, Wagnerian, folk-song modal,  impressionist whole-tone and other stylistic elements.  Here, a bold repeated-note  horn theme is positively heroic in its bluff humour and defiance.  It is unique in symphonic literature – worse luck!  Percy Grainger’s ballet, The Warriors, is made to seem overwrought, overwritten and bombastic in comparison.  The material of the movement as a whole came from music for a film, Arnheim Land, and a tone-poem of that name.

Exotic percussion – woodblocks? - win a place in a mostly modestly-scored symphony.  The movement is an excellent one of plan and contrasting incidents.

3 The Aborigines (G major) In the deep recesses of the Australia they once owned, a few aboriginal tribes still go walk-about.  They have their food, sing their songs and dance their tribal rituals.

Track 6 Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 3, Allegro (6.42m)

The finale is a summation of the symphony, but short and without any evident pictorial element. From the brass-led upward scale (going teasingly wrong), it moves through its moods of determination and ideals with occasional resemblances to Edward German – without the blandness or sententiousness – and to a young Sibelius in use of strings and warbling woodwind.  The coda is curt and without magniloquence, yet very satisfying.

4 The Challenge (B minor-major)

There is a challenge to Australians to build a world worthy of their race and country.

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

Track 7   Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 4 (part), Maestoso-Allegro

New Year 2017

Classical Break - New Year

This is a repeat from 2011.  A happy new year 2017 to all our listeners!

Here is a new poem by Mike Burrows:

A Sonnet On New Year’s Eve

(A Dream)

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

Copyright, Mike Burrows, 01/01/15

Track One:       Out In The Dark, Burgon,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track Three:  Calennig

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

Track Four:  Ring Out Wild Bells, Percy Fletcher

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

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

Here is a poem by Mike Burrows, New Year

The Gatekeeper’s faces are calm with fate

Gazing both back and through the dark

                                              archway,

And on earth, bronze swings and sounds in

                                               tons-weight

Choirs of ancient peals.  Coming to day,

A stranger will show his face as new

And old and still unknowable; as yet,

He moves in clear concealment where 

                                              he grew -

His span drawn to us from the stars’

                                         bright mesh.

Morning will show him and deliverance

As what we earn, and as the bells clang

                                                      trust

That calms as notes soften to resonance

One’s fear is only that in truth he must

Contract from Eve to a day like others -

To the soul of his least humane brothers.

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

Track Eight:  Adam Zero, The Birth of Adam

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

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

Track Nine:  The Clock of The Years, Finzi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track Twelve: New Year Medley, Trad