31 March, 1 and 2 April

CB1210 The North 2

Track One:  Grimethorpe, Roberts

This Is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is inspired by music of Northern England.  We’ve just heard the world-famous Grimethorpe Brass Band in Grimethorpe, a hymn-tune.

  

The Plain Downright Merry Wooing Between John And Joan  - or The Northern Lovers is a broadsheet ballad from the 17th Century and satirizes Northern hard-headed romance, the sentimental, agricultural duettists wasting no time in listing the material inducements to marriage each represents, as they can’t come every day to woo.  The South, of course, knows no such lovers.  A lolloping antic hay with as--subtle innuendo, this song to be danced to indicates that the church is not John and Joan’s first resort.

Track Two:  The Northern Lovers, Trad

Liverpool was once Britain’s first port on the Western coast; a magnet to labour on board ship, the wharfs and the associated Manchester ship-canal.  Immigrants poured in, even as emigrants poured out, heading for kinder countries and a new life of opportunity.  It was a place - as now - of wealth and startling hardship, toil and squalor.  The Philharmonic Orchestra, the earliest to be formed in this country - in 1840 - attracted famous musicians from far and wide. For example, SS Wesley inaugurated the new Willis organ in Saint George’s Hall in 1855.  For the years 1880-3, the Philharmonic’s performers were directed by Max Bruch.  There were visits from many famous foreign virtuosi and composers.  At the same time, the City’s social divide was a chasm - much as now.  At the late Victorian height of prosperity, great buildings, monuments and other impressive public works commemorated wealth, and within streets of them, one found slums, indigence, work-conditions of near-slavery, the lowest life--expectancy in the country - and a defiant counter-culture!  Liverpool was a melting-pot of the Empire, and distinctive even in its English!  Here is the traditional song, Liverpool Judies. Judies were either the girls who changed the bobbins on textile-factory looms, or difficult winds on approach to the port!

Track Three:  Liverpool Judies, Trad

The Australian international pianist, Percy Grainger was a keen folk--song  collector and experimental composer.  His harmonic sense is relatable to his friends, Grieg and Delius, but is his own, his chromaticism more thorough--going, his taste for dissonance keener, as he seeks out the last nuance in a plain, modal melody. His scoring is often baldly clashing and difficult to balance, but his intention was to bring a tang of the amateur ad-hoc into the professional smoothness of the concert-hall.  He formed counter-melodies by simply connecting up certain notes within a harmonic line and using dynamics or a pungent soloist to highlight the quirky (and often magical) result.  Voice or instrument comes into its own as an individual.  His imagination in what is effective expression was uniquely musical.  Here is an arrangement of the Northern ballad, The Three Ravens.  If its added-note harmonies soften the melody in a manner too romantic for the modern purist, it finds a truly eerie Graingerish climax that ends all doubt as to the music’s aptness in a stroke of unobvious emphasis not to be easily forgotten.

Track Four:  The Three Ravens, Trad, Arr Grainger.

Yorkshire-born, Eric Fenby is known best for his work as an amanuensis to Frederick Delius.  He was a talented composer in his own right, as this humorous piece, the Overture, Rossini On Ilkla Moor from 1938, four years after Delius’ death demonstrates.  It utilizes not so much the sonata form of a typical Rossinian opera-overture as the various tricks of rhythm, thematic--transformation and ornamentation, lyrical quasi-vocal solos and duets (with plentiful forced crescendi), familiar as the quirky but business-like Italian’s stock-in-trade, to maintain momentum and continuity.  The dour subject of variation loses something in translation, but gains undoubtedly in skittishness.

                                                          
Track Five:  Rossini On Ilkla Moor, Fenby

The North has traditionally been a place of aristocratic and popular rebellion against kings.  As a hopeful means of security for the throne, The brothers or second sons of kings traditionally hold York in fee and title.  This shift isn’t invariably successful, and London has feared Lancaster.  The War of The Roses cast a long shadow:  the White Rose of York and Red Rose of Lancaster were uneasily united by marriage on the accession of Henry Tudor, but the frontier between Yorkshire and Lancashire still brings strong men eye to eye, as do County sports-matches.  Here is a Ballet Of The Roses by the Liverpool--born theatre-composer, Alfred Reynolds, taken from the Suite, 1066 And All That.

Track Six:  Ballet of The Roses, Reynolds

Dating back centuries, the words of The Lyke-wake Dirge have been set many times; modernly by composers as various as Bax, Britten and Burgon.  a grim vision of Judgement and the punishments awaiting sinners in the hereafter, it glows with the bleakness and fierce religious fire of the North.  Howard Ferguson was a composer of a slender but effective output.  He began as a pianist and accompanist, and became a close friend and advizer to Gerald Finzi.  His bracing, tonal style altered little during a short career; he was an intensely self-critical artist who fell silent not to repeat himself.

His setting of The Lyke-wake Dirge for baritone and orchestra glowers, a processional notable for the low pizzicato tread of harp and basses.  A swaying rhythm above this, in at-times muted brass, woodwind, other strings - the violas astringent - is led by the soloist and adds an impression of slow, grim jauntiness, well this side of irony.  Isn’t dryness, a laconic sense of humour, common in the North?  The music less, however, the harmonies and interweaved scoring building to tragedy and a dying fall.  On into silence goes the angrily mournful procession.  This setting was a student-work and first performed in 1928.

 
Track Seven:  Lyke Wake Dirge, Ferguson

Now, an old traditional song with origins in dance, The Oak and The Ash, in which  a northern lass who has moved to the south  pours out her longing for home.

Track Eight:  The Oak and The Ash, Trad 

The novel, A Month In The Country, by JL Carr, tells of the events of one Summer in the lives of two Great War veterans, an art-restorer and an archaeologist, as they try to return to civilian life from a twilight of nightmares and shell--shock, the one commissioned to reveal a fresco of Judgement, the other to excavate a field for Anglo-Saxon artefacts, but really to find the grave of a disgraced crusader.  The setting is the Yorkshire Dales and the company that of curious but friendly villagers.  The novel was filmed in the Eighties and Howard Blake wrote a soundtrack of poignant pastoralism, akin to Delius, Warlock and Vaughan Williams, with touches of Brittenesque.  This lovely, in some places ethereal and in others, troubled and troubling, music is heard here in the form of a suite and arrangement for string quartet, made by the composer.  The titles are, Idyll, March, Elegy, Scherzo, Finale.

Track Nine:  A Month In The Country - Suite, Blake

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

Goodbye!

Join us for our next programme, a celebration of Easter! 

24 & 25 March

CB Ireland 2

Intro:  Haste To The Wedding/Trip To The Forest, trad, arr Burgess (3.22 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written and researched by Mike Burrows and is a second celebration of Irish music, for St Patrick’s Day.

We’ve just heard the traditional jigs, Haste To The Wedding and Trip To The Forest.  Now, let’s hear the Irish Rhapsody Number One of the Ulsterman and bedrock of Anglo-Irish dominance in British life, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.  In the early 20th Century, he wrote six Rhapsodies based on folk-tunes and in the manner of European nationalism, often descriptive of events and characters from Irish legend.  In the Rhapsody Number One in D Minor, a narrative of an episode in the story of the warlike hero Cuchullan and his wife, Emer, Stanford employs the drolly aggressive battle-song, Leather-bags Donnell and the lament, Emer’s Farewell To Cuchullan, otherwise known as Londonderry Air.  The treatment of the themes - sonata-form development - does not preclude powerful and affecting writing, splendidly scored.  The First Rhapsody was first heard at the Norwich Festival in 1902, the year in which Stanford gained his knighthood.

Track Two:  Irish Rhapsody No 1, Stanford (13.39 min)

Born in Norfolk, the son of a parson, EJ Moeran’s life was broken by the Great War, in which he was badly injured.  Of partly Irish blood, in time, he moved permanently to Ireland.  His Violin Concerto is a work of great, fine-spun but tough beauty, whose glamour or magic is conjured up out of Irish fiddling, human warmth and story and a wild, dark-shadowed and light-shot landscape.  Here is the finale, Lento, full of nostalgic, colourfully scored feeling and echoes of birdsong, folksong, Delius and Sibelius. 

Track Three:  Violin Concerto, Moeran (10 min)

Here’s a song sung by the Australian baritone, Peter Dawson:  The Kerry Dance, by Molloy.  This piece stands out from many written in a spirit of wistful thoughts of home, and is sung with deep understanding by Dawson.  

Track Four:  The Kerry Dance, Molloy (3.46 min)

Now, another traditional march, often played at the funerals of expatriate Irishmen, Let Erin Remember The Days of Old.

Track Five:  Let Erin Remember The Days of Old, Trad (2.00 approx)

Now, let’s hear The Star of The County Down, an Ulster song sung by John MacCormack and accompanied by Edwin Schneider, in broadcast from 1936. You will notice that the tune is virtually identical to the English Dives and Lazarus, the words those of a love-song. The recording comes complete with a farewell from MacCormack, whose easy manner with any audience added to the charm of his singing.

Track Six:  The Star of The County Down, Trad (2.28)

Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty hailed from County Down.  His tone-poem, With The Wild Geese was first performed at the Cardiff Music Festival in 1910.  It is in four movements run into one with much use of thematic development - transformation and combination - as in sonata-form.  It tells the story of Irish mercenaries who fought for the French against the English at the battle of Fontenoy in 1715.  The piece is strongly enough worked up together to seem a Symphony.  With at least three contrasting main themes,  it begins with a heroic fanfare, a chirpy song of farewell, the march abroad - with backward looks.  Proceeding through night in camp and dreams of home; a call to arms and battle, it closes with dead mercenaries transformed into the wild geese of the title, flying home to County Clare. The end of the piece builds from strange, vibrancy to a fitting apotheosis, rich in pathos and pride, and final development of the opening material.  Throughout, one meets uncanny touches in orchestration.  The music is richly scored in woodwind, three flutes (one doubling on piccolo, 2 oboes, a cor anglais, 2 clarinets, one in A, the other in B--flat, Bass Clarinet in B Flat, 2 bassoons:  Harty’s Irish idiom demands Scotch-snappy lyrical solos - typically on flute or oboe, and doublings - allying treble and alto, or alto and bass.  He is fond of misalliances between lower woodwind and brass or strings, particularly violas or cellos - here, this trait comes to conjure up both Ancient Ireland and the plangent cries of geese.  The trumpets in C have been chosen for their keen, bugle-like tone - if muted, calls sound dusky or nocturnal.  A quartet of horns and three trombones are ready to back them up.  The strings are another choir, with violin solo, outright unison on first violins, or in tissues of layered, nostalgic sound evoking darkness on the camp, or move at blistering speed in accompaniment.  In style, the battle-music anticipates The Battle of Shrewsbury in Elgar’s Symphonic Study, Falstaff of three years later,  Tchaikovsky being the forebear in common.  The Tone--poem was inspired by the Irish nationalist poetess, Emily Lawless’ collection of the same name.  We were with the Wild geese from beginning to the strange and triumphant end - that is no end.

                        “Men of Corca Bascinn, men of Clare’s Brigade,

                        Hearken stony hills of Clare. hear the charge we made;

                        See us come together, singing from the fight,

                        Home to Corca Bascinn in the morning light.”         

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

Track Seven: With The Wild Geese, Harty (18 min)

    

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

Track Ten:  With The Wild Geese, Harty (18 min)

    

17th and 18th March

CB IRISH MUSIC

Intro Track:  Padraig The Fiddler (3.15 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is in celebration of Irish music, in time for St Patrick’s Day.  We’ve just heard the song, Padraig The Fiddler, by Gregory and Larchet, performed by John MacCormack, the violinist, Fritz Kreisler, and pianist, Ludwig Schwab.  Music has always been important to the Irish, as a demonstration of national identity.  There are now, as for many centuries two Irish music-traditions; loyalist Protestant, sponsored by English and Anglo-Irish rulers of a conquered Ireland, and separatist catholic, actuated by a far older sense of nationhood.  Both sides have their patriotic songs, and their champions in the world of music at large.  For many centuries, Irish composing-talent found that the mountain would not come to Mahomet:  to find fame, artists emigrated for recognition.  For the catholic it was a harder longer road to success than for a Protestant; in London, the nearest nerve-centre for international Art-music, it was a matter of incredulity that Irish people wrote music fully as accomplished as the music of the international models, and to hold position in Ireland or be successful in England, one had either to be of the Protestant Ascendency or find liberal patrons.

At the turn of the 19th Century, the poet Tom Moore was an example of an Irishman with liberal patrons - he numbered Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt among his friends.  His various books of national airs played fast and loose with the modal nature of folk-tunes, as did all educated editions for the rest of the century.  Moreover, the words that the tunes were made to fit set the tone of ‘Irish’ songs and ballads for even longer, wistful, sentimental, nostalgic, or infectiously cheerful, in some sense articulating a distinct national character.  To the English of the day, there were two possible Irish characters, the truculent maudlin drunkard or the charming, rumbustious but childishly sentimental rascal, the ‘spalpeen’ when he has drink taken - both feckless idlers.  In some quarters, this view has perhaps never changed, and Tom Moore did nothing to counteract it; yet nationalism itself took him up.  Here is The The Last Rose of Summer, from The Groves of Blarney, arranged by Sir John Stevenson, an older contemporary of the poet.  

Track Two:  The Last Rose of Summer  (3.36 min)

The two real Irish stars in international music in the first half of the 19th Century were the pianist-composer John Field and singer and composer Michael William Balfe.  Both did well in London and went further abroad; Field settled in St Petersburg; after much time spent in Rome, Milan and Paris, Balfe returned to conquer London where he had begun as a professional musician, his operas being performed in the very same theatre in which he had worked as a violinist in the pit. Any distinctive, let alone Irish qualities in their music was smothered by a pallid Italian lyricism and polish, whose models included Clementi, Rossini and Bellini, all fashionable names.  Field was famous for his legato singing-tone and invented the ternary-form Nocturne taken over by Chopin.  Balfe is remembered for a song from his greatest hit, The Bohemian Girl - I dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls (mentioned in Joyce’s Dubliners).  Of his many songs, some recall Come Into The Garden Maud and Excelsior.  Irishry, thanks to the fictitious works of Ossian, had become a metropolitan phenomenon in the mid-to-late 18th and early 19th Centuries, composers of international reputation, such as Joseph Haydn and Beethoven arranged ‘Irish’ melodies as a favour or in acknowledgement of lucrative temporary demand.  For Beethoven, ‘picturesqueness’ was meat and drink to a Romantic, but if Irishry seemed ‘picturesque’, wild and exotic, his indifferent ‘Irish’ arrangements were done for money.   To remind ourselves of the Irishness of this programme, one must go back or forward in time.   Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738) was an itinerant harpist and poet, and has been considered Ireland’s greatest bard. Blinded by smallpox in his teens, he learned the harp, and set out with it, horse and guide, to make his fortune - or living.  An Irish Catholic who could read and write, he spoke Irish, but could also speak English.  He found patrons among the Protestant Anglo--Irish and his own people, and sang and played attractively for both communities.  He wrote in song- and dance-forms from France and Italy, with what would now be taken to be an Irish accent.  His style was modal and founded on incomplete scales, faults that 19th Century professors would have pronounced bad and cured with a few strokes of the ink-pen.  Let’s hear two of his pieces:  Jigg - To Mr James Betagh, and Carolan’s Devotion. Devotion typically admires a girl on the way to church.

Track Three and Four:  Jigg - To Mr James Betagh, and Carolan’s Devotion, Carolan  (3.41 & 2.30min)

There is little trace of the history of 19th Century Ireland in Irish music, save perhaps references to crossed love, homesickness for the countryside or town, a departed Irish glory, bereavement, emigration, potatoes and drink.  But it is a fact that during this period, poverty, famine, evictions, cholera, emigration and transportation for felony halved the population, as Punch, The London Charivari, delighted in the wonderfully ignorant, illogical ‘Paddy’.  Paddy was a tricky, hot-tempered and drunkenly self--pitying character, known by his apish figure, prognathous jaw and dark nose, his garb of moleskins and gaiters, collapsed soft hat and shillelagh or club.  His wife was more fearsome.  English visitors were made fools of at horse-fairs but could read and write and didn’t believe in the little people.  Behind the facade of Paddy’s quaint outlook and rhetoric - and, indeed, of publication of editions of Ireland’s ancient folk-music - a holocaust occurred.  During the Great Famine of 1848, Poor Law Commissioners were advized that a rising tide of theft and poaching - and social unrest - in country districts, was due to the peasant’s urge to survive.  Paddy loved his potatoes; - the potatoes had rotted from blight; Paddy had to poach game and loot food-stores.  Few of the ordinary Irish owned land.  Their hereditary landlords, Irish and English, and the Viceroy in Dublin enforced export of saleable food even as refugees from the country to the towns dropped in the streets from hunger, and cholera broke out owing to lack of adequate sanitation. England, utilitarian, corrupt and hopelessly disorganized, needed much of what remained of Ireland’s food-yield to feed its own urban poor.  Widespread murder of officials and landlords and cannibalism among tenants were rumoured.  In England, it was an imprisonable crime to roam without visible means and not to be in work, of course.  As English magazines carried etchings of skeletal famine-victims and their living-conditions, repression went on.  To support dirt-poor refugees without work or homes was an idle expense.  All told, in the first half of the century, the hell came mostly Ireland’s way; in the second, Paddy organized, England and Anglo-Irish landlords came to fear not only the mob, but also the ‘Fenians’, a league of protest and violence, led by educated professionals and seeking independence from London. Landlords had much to fear; there’s an old joke that runs:  “I hear Himself is to be buried on Tuesday.” – “Buried is it?  Didn’t I hear they’re after sending him to be smelted?”     It must have seemed that if St Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland, at least Ireland was spared some poison.  But St Patrick’s Day came to be celebrated over an increasing extent of the globe because of a diaspora of a nation - unskilled labour, respectability and brilliance alike, all proudly Irish.  Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, gained a grim reputation that it was not to lose until after the Civil War confirmed the Irish Free State in 1922.  

Howard Ferguson, born in Belfast in 1908, wrote a Partita for two pianos or orchestra in 1935-6, that seems to breathe this dangerous atmosphere.  Here is the initially Brahmsian courante, Allegro un poco agitato second movement, restless, clouded, eerie.

Track Five:  Partita, 2nd Movt, Ferguson      (4.16 min)  

At the turn of the 19th Century and into the early 2Oth, many names resounded in Irish literature, none more so than those of William Butler Yeats, esoteric poet, playwright and essayist and aristocrat-loving nationalist.  Here is a setting of his early symbolist poem, The Withering of The Boughs, the third number in the cycle The Curlew, for tenor, flute, cor anglais and string quartet, by the English composer, Philip Heseltine, alias Peter Warlock.  The myth and magic of the old Ireland is invoked with breathtaking intensity in an improvisatory-seeming aria of bird-calls, Winter wind and the dark imaginings of a broken heart.    The work dates from the time leading up to the formation of the Irish Republic - 1920-2.  Song runs out during the last, ghostly refrain - the singer speaks the last line. 

Track Six: The Withering Of The Boughs, The Curlew, Warlock (9.08 min) 

In 1855 appeared a tune that is often taken to be a folksong, but may not be, after all.  Londonderry Air.  It may have been written for a competition by an anonymous lady.  Described by one irreverent author as “a song with capital bottom”, it has a claim to be the best--known theme in all Irish music.  Its melancholy has suited various sets of verses, usually of renunciation.   It has been arranged by many composers, including Stanford, Harty and Percy Grainger.  The great tenor, John MacCormack, a nationalist, but, like Carolan, capable of appealing to Irish and Anglo--Irish alike, was one of Ireland’s and Eire’s greater musical ambassadors of the 20th Century.  He set down his own account of the origins of ‘the most lovely folksong in the world’, as a preface to a broadcast performance in Edwin Schneider’s arrangement.  Londonderry Air.

Track Seven:  Londonderry Air, Anon  (3.53 min)                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

In 1866, the first Irish Symphony was performed.  It was written by a young man, twenty-three years old, part-Irish and part-Italian, the son of a bandsman, a former chorister at the Chapel Royal and Mendelssohn Scholar at the Royal Academy, and the possessor of both exquisite manners and a dashing, emotive style.  It was the non-partisan product of a holiday in Northern Ireland made a couple of years before.  Here is the Scherzo - as captivating in its first subject’s hopping from major to minor, and in its earnest but idealistic trio now as then.  After a little bardic tuning-up, what a sprightly foreground and what a landscape in perspective in the alternating Allegretto oboe tune and deep-breathed moderato scalic theme; everywhere, cheeky or heartfelt harmonies!  The young composer?  Arthur, later Sir Arthur, Sullivan.

Track Eight:  Irish Symphony, Sullivan (6.18 min)

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was a middle-class Ulsterman.  His Irish brogue was strong, but he was a typical artistic product of the Ascendancy, erudite, clear-minded and hard-working; music took over his life.  He loved folksong, Loyalist or Nationalist, and became both a talented composer and superbly negative teacher, one, furthermore, who drew foremost European composers to Cambridge for doctorates.  He was proof against Brahms’ sarcasm and got on well with Dvorak, Verdi and Boito, who actually turned up; coped with Tchaikovsky; knew how to handle Saint-Saens, Bruch or Grieg.  He wrote voluminously; symphonic works, chamber-music, songs, large-scale choral pieces.  His Irish Symphony (at least once conducted by Mahler) and six Irish Rhapsodies were influenced by the example of Dvorak, rather than Liszt.  Much that he composed for the concert-hall went unpublished and achieved only one or a few performances.  In spite of his caustic self-confidence, the coming of Elgar embittered him.  All the same, he could write something like this - the Andante con moto, ma piu tranquillo of his Clarinet Concerto.  Not one of his more self-conscious ‘Irish’ pieces, it owes something to Brahms’ late clarinet chamber works, but Brahms’ melodic style is not far removed from that of Irish Art--music’s idea of Irish folk-music, anyway.          

Track Nine:   Clarinet Concerto, Slow Movement, Stanford  (7.49 min)

A Catholic Irishman, Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty wrote a number of works based on folksongs or given folksong character.  Born in the 1870s, he made his name as a pianist-accompanist in Ireland and England,  His Irish Symphony is a beautiful piece.  Back in the 1970s, a critic, writing in The Listener, opined that in it, “Poor Paddy thinks he's Mahler...”, thus demonstrating how far England had come in overcoming its prejudices about Irish culture seventy years on from when the Symphony was performed to acclamation at the Feis Ceoil Festival, having carried off first prize in the category of a Symphony built Dvorakishly on Irish airs.  “The place of honour in the prize compositions must go to Mr Hamilton Harty’s symphony - a work of very great ability and one that displays a very remarkable knowledge of orchestration,” wrote the London-based Musical Times, in 1904.  Using tunes such as The Croppy Boy; Avenging And Bright;The Blackberry Blossom; Jimin Mho Mhile Stor; The Girl I Left Behind Me and Boyne Water, this is Home Rule music.  In the finale, The Boyne Water of Ulster collides with and falls away from an awe-inspiring reprise vision of Jimin Mho Mhile Stor.  For the sake of the wearing of the green, and the sake of St Patrick, it’s tempting to play The Twelfth of July, but here is a treat of an Irish fife band playing in traditional parallel fifths, fiddlers, a good reel and some lovely touches of humour (and xylophone), the Symphony’s second movement:   The Fair Day (a time of horse-trading, games and customary public order offences of many kinds).  Moreover, the composer conducts in this recording of 1929.  Here, Manchester’s Halle Orchestra play out of their skins, not only faster but also more vibrantly and characterfully than anyone has done since! 

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

Here’s to Ireland, herself!

Track Ten:  Irish Symphony, The Fair Day, Harty (2.55 min)

Sadly, we were forced to omit Jigg - To Mr James Betagh and The Star of The County Down, owing to length.  A second programme on Irish music has been recorded, including The Star of The County Down!  The bulk of the line-up of this second programme is of Irish folk-music, Stanford's 1st Irish Rhapsody, and the finale of Moeran's Violin Concerto; all culminates in Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty's vividly heroic and beautiful tone-poem based on the poetry of the nationalist poet, Emily Lawless, With The Wild Geese.    

10th and 11th March

In this week's Classical Break, Michael Taylor talks to local author Chris Howell from Chilcompton, about his 30 years as a local teacher, his famous and challenging book (and Community Play) 'No Thankful Village', about the area and its people during the first world war and his commitment to the art of quilting.

Chris plays us some of his favourite music - from (Glenn) Miller to Mendlessohn and Ellington to Satie.

Classical Break : 0900 Saturday, 0800 and 1500 Sunday, 0200 Monday.

3rd & 4th March

CB  The North of England

Track One:  The Path Across The Moors, Arthur Butterworth (6.42 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, celebrates Northern England in music - with two Mediterranean asides!  We have just heard The Path Across The Moors, an orchestral piece by the veteran symphonist, Arthur Butterworth; a Northerner like George, but no relation, he played the trumpet in the Halle orchestra for many years, but has produced a large number of works of scope, often inspired by Northern landscapes. 

He is now nearing his nineties and still writing and conducting new pieces. The Path Across The Moors was composed in October 1958, when he was in his mid-thirties.  The subdued tones of the scoring, favouring the alto- and bass-register, are dark but various owing to the use of many blendings-together of woodwind and strings, reinforced more or less recessedly by brass - particularly horns and trombones - and timpani.  The quirky theme passes through shiftings of tonal light and shade like a walker who has much on his mind but is not oblivious to nature about him. 

The music for the 1937 film, South Riding was provided by Richard Addinsell.  Based on a novel by Winifred Holtby, South Riding is typical of its time, and its derivative plot has been replayed hundreds of times since in the world of the Twentieth Century subliterary Northern Novel.  Rich versus poor, education versus blind wealth and poverty. In the early years of the last century, social attitudes are changing.  Go--ahead, newly-appointed headmistress enlightens preoccupied landowner whose wife has been certified and must be kept in an expensive private asylum; evil machinations of housing money-grubbers who oppress the workers are frustrated, the mad wife dies, and landowner and headmistress fall in love, presumably to the future advantage of the poor.  There is no South Riding, the true setting of the novel is in fact the East Riding, taking in the coast.  The Prelude billows Irishry, brass, sweeping violin unisons, airy woodwind, scintilating harp and piano; the deeper tones of the orchestra contributing the swell.  Moments of tension are lyrical or of an order of abrupt, more arbitrary sinisterness usually reserved for thirties--to-mid-century film-evocations of madness or panic.

Track Two:  South Riding - Prelude, Addinsell (5.44 min)

Now, Hanley Male Voice Choir and the Sellers Engineering Band, conducted by the cornettist, Philip McCann, its founder, perform Song of Yorkshire, written by Gordon Langford to words by Agnes Wright.  Langford has composed a great deal of commissioned work, including arrangements of folktunes for brass band.  One thing that may be said for his music in general is its effective brass-writing:  here, he seeks to evoke the various moods of Yorkshire as described in Agnes Wright’s verse.  With customary flourish at the opening, more thoughtful moments build to an ending strongly accompanied by brass and bells.  The idiom is post-Waltonian, with little of that composer’s corrective astringency! The Sellars Engineering Band came into being at Huddersfield Technical College in 1986.  The British brass--band tradition has always flourished where bands were supported by employers; the outgoings on instruments being high; who else can find the money or grant sufficient rehearsal-time?  Nowhere was this truer than in the North of England.  The tradition, along with the formation of choirs by local churches and working-men’s clubs, enabled the proletariat to be artistic in any sense whatever, the professional and cathedral musical world being closed--off to it. For many, the brass band is the music of ‘oop North’.  The snob finds this proof of the earthbound collective soul of Northern people, the listener enjoys good music and musicianship wherever they happen.

Track Three:  Song of Yorkshire, Langford (6.00 min)

The Hanley Choir is a 19^th Century institution hailing from North Staffordshire in the Midlands.  Under Swinnerton Heap, its forebear, and other forces of the North Staffordshire Festival, premiered Elgar’s Scenes From The Saga of King Olaf, as his fame spread through the Midlands and the North.  The Festival Committee at Leeds commissioned another cantata in 1898, Caractacus, on the strength of both this work and a short oratorio, Lux Christi, as Elgar’s Jubilee works, Imperial March and The Banner of St George made little headway elsewhere.. Like a pretender to the throne, Elgar mustered support in the provinces of the North and Midlands and in time, marched on London...!  He always had the highest respect for the professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs of the Northern and Midlands choral and orchestral societies, believing the musical heart of Britain was to be found somewhere to the North of London!

Every major city or town had its philharmonic societies, its choirs and orchestras, its bands and glee clubs, its festivals and competitions; these rarely shied away from performing new works, as well as Handel, Mendelssohn, Stainer, Sullivan and other staple repertoire.  Let’s hear the incongruous but hair-raisingly fervent closing chorus of Caractacus, The Clang of Arms Is O’er, in which the triumphant Romans, having pardoned the titular ‘king’ and his family for resisting conquest of their country by the Imperial legions, salute the ever--increasing extent of British Empire of the future!  The cantata was written in the seclusion of a cottage in woods on a Malvern hillside.  Elgar worked by day in an Indian Army bell-tent - running up a flag when he wished not to be disturbed.  A friend wrote him just before the premiere. 

After ‘advertising’ a new line in  Elgar Musical Cooking-Stoves, which “plays airs out of the celebrated composer’s works while the kettle boils,” he said, “Aren’t you fearfully excited about Caractacus, supposing it doesn’t sound right or you have made a mistake somewhere.”  Critics were not entirely sold on Caractacus, but for the rest, it hit most listeners between wind and water.

Track Four:  The Clang of Arms is O’er, Caractacus, Elgar (4.25 min)

A song of Northumberland, now, Black Stitchel, for tenor and piano, by John Jeffreys.  The words are by the Northumbrian poet, Wilfred Gibson.  The Black Stitchel is a high hill:  on it, when the wind is coming from the South, the man thinks of his love’s laughter; when the wind is from the West, he thinks of the quiet of her breast; when it is from the North, he thinks of countries black with wrath; when it is from the east, he thinks no more for pity of man and beast...  The poem is taken from Whin, a collection published in 1918.

 Born in 1927, Jeffreys’ style is pitched somewhere between those of Peter Warlock and Benjamin Britten, lyrical, richly harmonic and respectful of the sense and rhythmic flow of verses.  Black Stitchel in particular achieves a natural folkish quality.  The hardening of tone in the penultimate verse is spare and telling; the climax of the poem and song can be thus made hushed and spectral... 

Tracks Five:  Black Stitchel, John Jeffreys (3.18 and 2.45 min)

In the traditional song, Blow The Wind Southerly, a Northern lass sings  a Northumbrian folksong:  she sings for the wind to bring her lover home.  Her voice, like the clarinet, rich in under- rather than overtones, may tell you that this lass is none other than Klever Kath, from Higher Walton, Lancs.  Kathleen Ferrier.

Track Six:  Blow The Wind Southerly, Trad (2.21 min)

The Lancashire composer and socialist, Alan Rawsthorne, born in Haslingden in 1905, was a student of the Royal Manchester College of Music.  He wrote symphonic works, concerti and chamber music - including three fine string quartets, and scores for classic British film-dramas, such as The Cruel Sea and Uncle Silas.  Here is the andante finale of his Second Symphony, A Pastoral Symphony, of 1959.  A kind of epilogue, it sets a poem to Spring by the Earl of Surrey. There are important solos from oboe, trumpet and violin; the introduction is derived from the opening of the symphony, the trumpet haunting, severely mystical.  The movement develops around the soprano, with folksong-like motifs in woodwind and the graver sound of trumpet and hushed, close strings, and ends in peace, on the strings and horns and then strings alone: it may be the closest that Rawsthorne came to writing a pastoral idyll!  The work was written after a move to rural Essex; it was intended to celebrate country over town!  It is tempting nonetheless to hear the Northern accent!  Dark and true and tender is the North, but its light is never forgotten!

Track Seven:  Andante from the Second Symphony, Alan Rawsthorne (4.44 min)

From Oldham, Sir William Walton acquired fame early at Oxford and in London - he spent much of his life in the south, and farther south still, on the isle of Ischia!  From the age of sixteen, he was a known composer, and was soon befriended by Peter Warlock, Ernest Moeran and Constant Lambert, and taken up by the smart Sitwell set in the Twenties.  It is hard to hear Lancashire in his music, but in a series of brilliant scores, he created a legacy in all forms to rival that of any contemporary.  Moving from a serious twelve-tone and parodic, jazz-inflected tunefulness - think Facade -  to a less brittle synthesis of Hindemith, Elgar and Sibelius, he hit his stride in choral, concertante and symphonic works, and film-music.  His origins were in singing as a chorister, and melody remained important to him.  Let’s hear an early work for orchestra from 1925, Siesta.  A curious rather than affected display of Walton’s musical moods, it begins in open-hearted, lazy lyricism, and moves through slyness and outright grotesquery - a kind of pantomime slapstick with woodblocks - to a quiet close.  The transitions are, to say the least, elliptical.  The scoring is adept and happy, whether honeyed or sour.  

Track Eight:  Siesta, Walton (4.47 min)         

The Yorkshire of the Brontes is found around Haworth, near Halifax:  an isolated region of North Yorkshire.  The clever but agoraphobic children of Haworth’s rector, Patrick Bronte or Brunty, proved incapable of leaving home and maintaining their health.  They had lost their mother and two sisters in childhood; in all, tuberculosis lay dormant.  Branwell, the son, became a failed artist and powerful poet whose continued neglect remains as it was in his lifetime,  tragic and shameful; he died from a combination of that neglect, love, drink, laudanum and, latterly, tubercular exhaustion.  He died shortly after a measure of success - carefully excluding him and his own literary efforts - came to his sisters.  Charlotte, Emily and Anne, became poets and novelists under assumed names that in two of three cases, went to the grave with their owner.  All died young.  Emily, the middle daughter, had had no intention of seeking publication for her poems; her subsequent first novel brought her only disillusionment in a bad publishing-deal and savage reviews:  She caught a cold at Branwell’s funeral and died from consumption within months of him. Wuthering Heights is possibly the greatest Bronte literary production.  Its tale of crossed love, death from love and love to eternity is set amid superb natural descriptions - the Brontes were keen walkers - and darkly claustrophobic interiors in which much evil is done and two generations rise only to fall.  Bleak loveliness is in the weather and landscape whose light and shade shape the spirits of those who live and grow more or less inhibitedly in it.  Human nature and society in Yorkshire as Emily saw it, is redeemed by true love.  The ghost of the unhappily-married Catherine Earnshaw haunts her Healthcliff’s farm at Top Withens, as he ages, bereft...and at length, childhood sweethearts - farmer’s daughter and Liverpool foundling - are reunited in death.  The American, Bernard Herrmann wrote an opera on Wuthering Heights, having composed music for a film--adaptation of Charlotte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, some years before.  He loved the novel and the region that had inspired it, and all his love went into a magnificent work in four acts.  The idiom is late-romantic, expressionistic in places, emphatically not to be characterized as shaped by folk-song.  Yet it seems for the most part characteristic of its book, reconcilable to both an English novel and its setting.  Let’s hear the scene On The Moors, between the two young lovers.  Interestingly, it utilizes thematic material from his score for the film The Ghost and Mrs Muir, another story of love unrequited in this life...

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope that you’ve enjoyed our journey to the North, researched and scripted by Mike Burrows, and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!    

Track Nine:  Wuthering Heights, On The Moors, Herrmann (5.42 min)