Sunday 15th January 2012

Today's Classical Break anticipates the season of Spring and then we tour through the rest of the seasons.
Music from brass bands and orchestras.
The programme was first broadcast last year in the actual Spring.

Twelfth Night, 10/11th January

Our Twelfth Night programme, from January, 2012, is a seasonal blend of merry-making and solemnity - "Or What You Will"!   


CB Twelfth Night

Intro:  A Childhood Memory, John Barry

Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows and is inspired by Twelfth Night.  You’ve just heard A Childhood Memory, by the film-composer, John Barry, from his album, The Beyondness Of Things.  Whatever the childhood memory described, and he himself gives no clue, it seems a confrontation between infant wishes and a hardening of reality in one’s surroundings, tailing off in fragments of Nick-nack Paddywhack...  Six days into a hardening New Year, where are our Christmas hopes?  Money has moved on, we follow.  Who throws whom the bone, how many care?

The Beyondness of Things purports to be music of journeying, of seeking, perhaps finding.  In the Church Calendar, the last day of Christmas is the first day of Epiphany: an epiphany is a glimpse of the holy that was beyond one’s view. The Three Kings, the magi or Wise Men, traditionally Caspar, Melchior and Baltazar, journeyed to meet the Christ-Child, following a star. 

The Italian composer, Ottorino Respighi, a great, late romantic orchestrator, wrote his Trittico Boticelliano for small orchestra - with an important part for piano - in 1927.  He intended these tone-poems to be a rendition in music of masterpieces by the Florentine artist, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510); a triptych is a group of three paintings.  Two of the subjects of the paintings cited are pagan-classical, Spring and The Birth of Venus respectively; they flank a slower, central piece of great beauty and solemn process, The Adoration of The Magi.  Its growth from the pifferaro-, that is, fife- or bagpipe-like, sounds of the opening is extraordinarily patient and smooth.  Amongst the thematic material, you will recognize the tune of the old carol O Come O Come Immanuel in modal form, and chant-like moments whose origin was in Respighi’s love - and intense study - of Roman liturgical music.  

Track Two:  The Adoration of The Magi, Respighi

Amid solemn observances and mental pilgrimage, if not the real thing, this was a time for revelry, spectacle, for courts and kings as for peoples.  Tielman Susato’s Danserye, first printed in 1551, contains many kinds of dance of the time and earlier that might add to the splendid effect of royal or affluent celebrations, masques, fancy-dress dances...  Here are the Fool’s Dance and Morisque - morris-dance – in which we hear quaint fool’s licence, an essential distorting mirror to lordly brashness - and licence of another kind.  Besides good tunes, the essence of a good Danserye was the suitability of the music for either chaste or ‘extreme’ arrangements.

Tracks Three and Four:  Fool’s Dance and La Morisque, Susato

Next, a solemn Padouana - a slow and stately dance that originated in Padua - here performed by a quartet of trombones - from the Musical Banquet (1617) of Johann Hermann Schein.  Trombones - developed from the smaller-bore sackbutt - have been traditionally associated with musicians of the angelic orders - and are often called upon to mimic solemn priestly voices.  Here, the dance and that tendency meet consonantly.

Track Five:  Padouana, Schein   

Anciently, Twelfth Night was not the night of the Twelfth Day, but the night of the eleventh day of Christmas, thanks to a different manner of keeping time that saw sunset as the beginning of the day...  To confuse further, the Twelfth Day was once celebrated as Christmas Day.  Our hard-and-fast customs are perhaps less stable than our faith in their unchangeability...  Christianity appropriated unto itself a group of days and a pagan festival, and even then, the ground shifted.  At one time or another, most of the forms our rejoicing takes have been banned - carols, mincemeat-pies (unless imported), seasonal church services..., dirty dancing...dare one say it, unofficial assembly...even live music - unless licenced  or circumscribed by money-makers.  Like spontaneous eating, relations between the sexes and music, small beer, gin, tobacco and leisure-time have all felt the hot breath of ancient and modern disapproval ...  To this day, how many days of Christmas are there for most?

Some things remain hard to ban or unbannable, such as a quiet duet.  Here is The Seven Joys of Mary a Somerset folksong and kind of creed.

Track Six:  Seven Joys of Mary, Trad  

Throughout the British Isles, Twelfth Night was riotous before the Age of Queen Victoria (an Age that was long and seemed longer).  Once, it was surely the great festive binge of the season of Christmas:  a drunken, promiscuous rout, a time for fancy-dress and mumming in at least two senses of the word.  A popular item was the Twelfth Night cake, eithera large sweet pastry with marzipan filling or a  rich plum duff  - that contained in addition two beans - one bean to each half.  Half the cake went to the men, the other half to the women.  Whoever found the bean in his or her slice was crowned King or Queen of the party.  A pleasant way to bring sweethearts together, perhaps, or to enjoy the great amusement of bringing together an eccentric or outright-antagonistic couple.  Queen Victoria disapproved of rowdiness, and so Twelfth Night in Britain was subdued, partly to improve the morals and efficiency of the work-force, and Twelfth Night cake was altered to become that extra instrument of gustatory torture for us on Christmas day, as though anything in this line had ever been needful - Christmas cake.  To soothe us, here is The Gouty Carol, in which a pilgrim suffering from the complaint, “My leg is aching worse,” imagines that meeting Christ in Bethlehem, his gout will be gone in a trice.

Track Seven: Gouty Carol Trad, arr Bowyer

Twelfth Night is also an occasion for Wassailing:  a semi-pagan rite seeking blessing of the orchards, in which cakes and libations are returned to the earth from which they came in tribute to the year ahead; songs are sung and - sometimes - guns loosed off.  Let’s hear Vaughan Williams’ a cappella arrangement of the famous Gloucestershire Wassail Song - Wassail, Wassail, All Over The Town.

Track Eight:  Wassail Song Arr VW

Next, Somerset’s Wassail.

Track Nine:  Somerset Wassail

“Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

Shakespeare’s romantic comedy with asides for philosophical foolery, derision of Puritanism and two fine specimens of elderly roisterer in Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Twelfth Night - Or What You Will, has attracted many settings of its songs, O Mistress Mine, Farewell Dear Heart, Come Away, Death and When That I was.

Here is a collection of these songs, beginning with O Mistress Mine, a setting by Shakespeare’s contemporary, and for a time near-neighbour, the Chapel Royal musician, Thomas Morley.

Track Ten:   O Mistress Mine, Thomas Morley

Now, a setting of Farewell, Dear Heart by another of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Robert Jones.

Track Eleven:  Farewell, Dear Heart, Jones

Roger Quilter, a member of the so-called Frankfurt Gang - students at the Frankfurt Conservatory, who included Percy Grainger in their number – was primarily a song-composer.  His group of Three Shakespeare Songs, Opus Six, opens with a melancholy but beautifully touching Come Away, Death.

Track Twelve:  Come Away, Death, Quilter

When That I was And A Little Tiny Boy forms the transient afterword of Twelfth Night - Or What You Will, sung - or spoken - by Touchstone, the clown. With considerable skill and imagination, the jazz-performer and  composer, Johnny Dankworth, who died recently, set these lines in a clock-like swing-idiom that is both distinctive and effective.  Here is the song, performed by Cleo Laine, the composer - who was a great saxophonist and clarinettist - and associates.  

Track Thirteen:  When That I Was, Johnny Dankworth

Of Jewish blood, the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895--1968) was a friend of most of the foremost composers of Respighi’s generation.  He was forced to  emigrate to the United States by the Fascist regime’s Racial Laws which sought to purge Jews from responsible positions throughout the New Roman Empire after the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany had been signed.

He wrote 11 full--scale Overtures to plays by Shakespeare, including Twelfth Night.  The overture to Twelfth Night was written in 1933, along with another to The Merchant of Venice...

The score is headed by quotations from speeches of the chief male interest, Duke Orsino:  “If music be the food of love, play on...”  and “Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,/That old and Antique song we heard last night...”  The page Cesario is in fact Viola, the chief female interest, though the Duke is in love with melancholy, music and another lady as the play opens.

The overture begins with a long tune on cor anglais, associated with Orsino.  The household’s affected puritan major domo is Malvolio, whose theme is marked vivo burlesco - bassoons crabbily underscore this marking.  There is a percussive, trumpet--theme to represent Sir Toby Belch,  the soused nemesis of Malvolio.  The Belch-theme sounds Bavarian as imagined By an Italian...  The working-out is colourful, and concludes with the Orsino theme played in the major now, and involved with Malvolio’s.  In the play Malvolio - bad-will - is forced to accept his humiliation at the hands of his mistress’ maid, Belch and the Duke’s clown:  he has been made to believe that his mistress is in love with him, then locked up as a madman, the Clown posing as a doctor...  His last words however are, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you...”  The play’s one puritan is - of course - a hypocrite.  A galliard-element represents the song When I was, and the coda suggests an ironic pay-off.

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 Fourteen:  Twelfth Night, Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Owing to time, the Fool's Dance from Susato's Danserye and the Padouana of Schein had sadly to be omitted from the broadcast.

 

Christmas Weekend - Music from a war zone

This weekend’s Christmas Edition of Classical Break features an extended interview with a local musician and composer turned aid-worker. Bath-based Roger Bolton gave up a lucrative career writing music for film and tv to start a community-based organisation in one of the world’s most dangerous places.

In the interview, we explore the background to the production of ‘Xmas Has Come’ an album of 18 songs, produced in the war-torn region of Gulu in Northern Uganda, where children as young as eight are routinely snatched from their villages and homes to be brainwashed and inducted into the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA.

The programme features tracks from this extraordinary musical achievement and also from Roger’s extensive portfolio of music written for film and tv productions in the UK and USA.

Don’t miss this unique insight into the music of  war. The programme airs this weekend on Somer Valley 97.5FM and online at http://www.somervalleyfm.co.uk/ at the following (GMT) times:

Saturday, December 24^th – 0900

Sunday, December 25^th – 0800 and 1500

Monday, December 26^th - 0200
Thursday, December 29th  - 1200

LINKS:  If you would like to download and buy any or all of the tracks from ‘Xmas Has Come’, go to

http://rogerbolton.bandcamp.com/

To find out more about Roger’s project - the Dwongpaco Farm Development, go to http://www.dwongpacofarmdevelopment.350.com/

Classical Break wishes all our listeners in the Somer Valley area, the UK, USA, Uganda and around the world, a Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year.

Rupert, Mike, Jayne and Suvi  

[Producers, Classical Break]

17th and 18th December

This week's Classical Break (repeated from 2011) is a celebration of the music of Sibelius - particularly that which was influenced by his love of traditional Finnish folk music. Read the script - it's all there! Rupert and Mike.

Classical Break - Sibelius

Intro:  Runic Song Interrupted By War-music  

Hullo, this is Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a tribute to the nationalist Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), whose birthday falls on December The Eighth (two days after Finnish Independence Day).  We’ll be playing music inspired by Finnish national folk-poetry, primarily by the epic, Kalevala.  Inspired is the word.  Sibelius dedicated his life to what he saw as the heritage of a proud people denied nationhood for some six hundred years.  His own life was relentlessly mythologized by the Finns and Western world until it came to seem as potent a symbol of determination by self and environment as anything to be found in Kalevala, enchanting in its stories of endeavour, legend and magic. 

You have just heard Runic Song Interrupted By War-music, a movement from the Karelia Music, written near the outset of Sibelius’ career, in 1893:  it was composed for a festival of folk-poetry and music held by Viborg University, specifically to accompany tableaux vivants of significant events in Finnish history.  The province of Karelia, most of which now lies within the Russian Federation, is held by Finns to be the cradle of Finnish culture and nationalism.   The chant heard here is a representation of the peculiar, pentatonic melodic patterns of Kalevala-singing, in which two performers tell a story by statement and reply.  Kalevala is written in lines of a trochaic rhythm familiar from Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha, which was written in imitation of it. Sibelius was educated at a Finnish Duchy Grammar School, where he learned Finnish - his first language was Swedish - and first read folk-poetry.

Now, here is Laulu Lemminkaiselle, Song To Lemminkainen.  This is a Spring poem, dedicated to a journey made by Lemminkainen, an important character in Kalevala, and often compared to Don Juan!  This choral and orchestral work was an offshoot of a vivid group of tone-poems, The Four Legends, completed in 1896 a colouring in musical terms of stories about this character.  Originally, it formed a purely orchestral passage found towards the close of the last legend, Lemminkainnen’s Homecoming.  Sibelius excised the passage and modified it to create the new work, completed in the same year.  By this time, Sibelius had become a master of homophonic Kalevalan singing wedded to techniques of Late Romantic Classical music.

Track Two:  Laulu Lemminkaiselle

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and this is Rupert Kirkham.  We are presenting a tribute to the Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius, whose birthday falls on December The Eighth.

The Kullervo Symphony was Sibelius’ first large-scale orchestral and choral work, for baritone and soprano soloists as well as choir and orchestra.  Massively and powerfully scored, it was completed and performed in 1892.  In every sense, it is an extraordinary achievement.  In five complex movements, the third and fifth of which are choral, and lasting about 70 minutes, it was later withdrawn  by its composer, but never revized.  Its style was unique in 1892.  The Symphony was written  the year after he first heard Kalevalan folk-singing by a mistress of the art, Larin Paraske.  It is a work of instinctive inspiration and imagination as well as study, a unique synthesis of late Romanticgrandeur and pictorialism and ancient music usually played on a five-string zither.

Kullervo was the dispossessed hero, his inheritance seized and Parents murdered in his childhood.  The Symphony tells his story, culminating in the overwhelming finale,  where Kullervo commits suicide:  the baritone asks his sword if, now that he has revenged his parents, he can use it to kill himself!). 

Sibelius’ elemental imagination is fully displayed in depicting the wooded scene of Kullervo’s Death - where he unknowingly committed incest with his sister.  The sister, discovering afterwards that he was her brother, despaired and threw herself into a nearby cataract.  Incidentally, their act of love in the third movement is represented with amazing verism for the time.  The symphony’s end is dominated by a blazing motif of fate first heard in the first movement.

Track Three, Kullervo’s Death

Lemminkainen’s Homecoming was composed in 1896.  In the definitive form found four years later it is a locus classicus of Sibelius orchestral style, particularly his mastery of pacing, economic thematic consequence and judicious scoring.  After many adventures concluding in his being torn to pieces and thrown into the river of hell and his reanimation by his mother, he returns exultantly to Kalevala - the domain of the national patriarch, Kaleva - from the land of the North, Pohjola.  Sibelius never wrote anything with more élan, humour and understated but true nobility.  It has real sweep.  As he himself observed, as Finns should, it wears its cap on the side of its head.

Track Four:  Lemminkainen’s Homecoming

Tiera was a male companion of Lemminkainen.  Here is a short piece named for him and written for

brass septet and percussion in l898.  

Track Five:  Tiera

The tone-poem, Pohjola’s Daughter is a work of Sibelius’ maturity, written in 1906, as he was venturing into a new region in his musical thinking.  It tells of how the Maiden of the North, who spins sitting above the rainbow, is wooed by the elderly musician-wizard, Vainomoinen.  In mockery, she sets him various impossible tasks to prove his suitability as a husband, which he accomplishes easily by his magic:  until she challenges him to make a boat from the fragments of her spinning-wheel (a spinning-wheel gloriously portrayed in one of the themes of the tone-poem).  He strikes his shin with his axe and departs, unable to stanch the bleeding!  There is a Wagnerian quality to the harmony at this point, but physical pain is most effectively expressed!  Incredibly, Sibelius originally intended this piece of organic musical argument and seeming pictorial exactness to tell the story of the Daughter of The Air - Luonnotar - who gave birth to creation. 

Track Six:  Pohjola’s Daughter

Luonnotar is a nine-minute scena for soprano and orchestra written for Aino Acté, and was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1913.  The Daughter of The Air becomes pregnant and gives birth to the world.  This may have a claim to be Sibelius’ most uncanny evocation of the elements and also, of the spirit of Finland.  It is like an apotheosis of womanhood and childbirth, its moods strangely and beautifully conveyed by a vast range of vocal and orchestral touches.  It has been said that the greatest beauty is always strange.  Sibelius is often portrayed as a granitic-faced nordic hero, almost a statue in himself.  He was probably the warmest and most sensitive of men, with a strong streak of the feminine in his nature.  As an artist, he would have seen obvious parallels between the mother of creation and the creator of music.  Certainly, he suffered dreadfully in writing the majority of the pieces in which he sought to do real, lasting justice to his art and country, not to mention himself.  The pain drove him to drink, caused a cancer-scare in his forties and silenced him as a major composer for the last 30 years of his life.  “You must not join in any race,” he wrote; his artistic ideals must be his own and right for the work in hand.  On the other hand, he could describe in music of unforced greatness a unique myth of the creation of the universe.  Here is Luonnotar.

Track Seven:  Luonnotar

Kalevala was a collection of some one hundred and more sequenced (and resequenced) fragments of the poetry of the ancient Finnish people.  Its compiler, Elias Lönnrot, also gathered folk-lyrics in a book, Kanteletar, The Daughter of The Kantele. 

The kantele is the Finnish national instrument, a form of zither; it is the instrument of the wizard Vainomoinen, and accompanies most forms of songs.  In 1894, Sibelius wrote a set of part-songs based on poems from Kanteletar:  Rakastava - The Lover.  One likes to think of the work as being associated with his wife of fifty-five-odd years, Aino Järnefelt, whom he had married in the Summer of 1892, not long after completing Kullervo.   Here is the delightful The Path Of The Beloved.

Track Eight:  The Path of The Beloved (choir)

To end this programme celebrating Sibelius’ inspiration by Finnish folk-poetry, let’s hear his setting of verses from Kalevala, Venematka, The Boat Journey of Vainomoinen.  This was written in 1893 and re-arranged in 1914.  The rearrangement is for mixed choir, Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.

 

This was Classical Break and I'm Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme on the music of Jean Sibelius, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon!  Goodbye!

Track Nine:  Venematka

                   

3rd and 4th December

Classical Break this week is presented by the Vicar of St. John's Church, Midsomer Norton. Christopher Chiplin takes us through a journey of organ music from Bach to Elgar, played on some of the most interesting church organs in Europe by some of the most well-known organists. Christopher knows his organs, so stand by for a fascinating talk first presented as a lunchtime concert at St. John's this Autumn.
Classical Break can be heard at 0900 Saturday, 0800 and 1500 Sunday and at 0200 Monday for you insomniacs.

26th and 27th November

This week's Classical Break is a re-run of the first of our programmes dedicated to American music, first broadcast earlier this year, in recognition of the fact that it was Thanksgiving in America this week.


Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday in November. It has officially been an annual tradition since 1863, when during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26.^[1] As a federal and popular holiday in the U.S., Thanksgiving is one of the major holidays of the year. [Wikipedia].

The programme contains works by  Aaron Copeland, John Williams, John Antes, Charles Ives, Charles Griffes, Henry Cowell, Scott Joplin and Bernard Herrmann.

Swing your partners and enjoy!

November 19th and 20th - Remembrance 2

Further to last week's edition of Classical Break Music for Remembrance Day, here is another selection of music of remembrance, with works by Bernard Herrmann, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Copland, Delius, Finzi, Gurney, Bliss and Walton, two hymns - Eternal Father, Strong To Save and Crimond and the Last Post.  It opens with an orchestral piece, For The Fallen, which evokes the atmosphere of the large Allied war-cemeteries in France and the Low Countries. 

Other highlights are a Letter From Home, a Spring Offensive (an orchestrally-accompanied reading of the poem by Wilfred Owen) and a Battle In The Air.

There's also a new poem about the return from war, by Mike Burrows, Classical Break writer and producer.

SCRIPT

Classical Break -  Remembrance Plus

Intro:  For The Fallen, Herrmann (6.19 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert

Kirkham.  This programme was researched and written by

Mike Burrows. There’s so much music based around the horrendous effects of war,

that we've decided to do an additional Classical Break

of English and American remembrance-music this week –

a sort of Remembrance Plus. 

We have just heard For The

Fallen, by Bernard Herrmann, an evocation

of the sunlit spaces of Western

Europe’s War Cemeteries.

Let’s hear the Prelude to the

1940 film The Forty-ninth

Parallel, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Track Two:  The Forty-ninth Parallel, Vaughan Williams (2.33 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM.  Today we're playing more Remembrance music.

Sir William Walton wrote music for

the film The Battle of Britain

(1968); much of it

was discarded by the director, but

not the eidetic cue, Battle In

The Air.

Track Three:  Battle In The Air, Walton (4.50 min)

And now, Letter From Home, a

short orchestral idyll written for Paul

Whiteman in 1943 by Aaron Copland.

Track Four:  Letter From Home, Copland (7.20 min)

Now here's a new poem from Mike Burrows.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote a secular Requiem

during the First World War, which,

as an expatriate Englishman with German

blood and resident in France, was

a time of great bitterness for him. 

Here is the fourth movement,

I Honour The Man Who Can

Love Life.

Track Five:  Requiem, 4th move, Delius (4.16 min)

Next, a setting of Thomas Hardy’s

First World War poem, In The

Time of The Breaking Of Nations,

made by Gerald Finzi in his

Requiem Da Camera of 1924.

Track Six:  Requiem Da Camera, 111, Con Dignita  Finzi (3.57 min)

Here is a brief song by

the soldier-musician and poet Ivor

Gurney (1890-1937),

The Cherry Trees:  it is a

tiny elegy founded on a poem

by  Edward Thomas, who died at

Arras at Easter on the first

day of the Third Battle of

Ypres, in 1917.

Track Seven:  The Cherry Trees, Gurney (1.07 min)

A melodrama from Sir Arthur Bliss’

Symphony, Morning Heroes of 1928: 

Spring Offensive - illustrating the poem

by Wilfred Owen.  Bliss was wounded

but survived the Great War, his

brother Kennard did not.  The symphony

was dedicated to him and to

those of Bliss’ comrades who had

died.  It was written after a

series of worsening nightmares, and proved

cathartic.

Track Eight:  Morning Heroes, Spring Offensive, Bliss (5.59 min)

A hymn for the Senior Service now:  Eternal Father Strong To Save.

Track Nine:  Eternal Father Strong To Save (1.07 min).

Now, a work for choral and

orchestral forces, Ode To Death, a

tribute to fallen musicians by Gustav  Holst

(1874-1934), dating from 1919 and

setting Walt Whitman's “When lilacs last

in the door-yard bloomed.”

Track Ten:  Ode To Death, Holst (12.27 min)

You've been listening to Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM with Rupert Kirkham.

Thanks go to Mike Burrows for

researching and scripting this programme.  We hope you

will join us again soon.  Our last

piece today is Crimond and Last Post.  Goodbye!

Track Eleven:  Crimond and Last Post.(2.44)

Homes For Heroes (read by Mike Burrows)
They march towards me, in fours of all hope
To now, crumpled and muddy, their helmets
Dipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.