CB 107 Gaos

CB107 The First Symphony of Andres Gaos


Andres Gaos (b A Coruna, Galicia, 1874-d at Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 1959)

A virtuoso-violinist, protege of Sarasate and pupil of Ysaye, Gaos was educated in Madrid, Paris and Brussels, and sought his fortune - and adventure - in the Caribbean and South America.  This programme presents his first large-scale composition to survive, the First Symphony, begun on his recovery from nervous illness in 1899.  Never published, perhaps never so much as played-through in his lifetime, this extraordinary piece, in three movements (modified sonata, andante and rondo), is now an almost unknown masterpiece.  The influences on its style - Galician folksong and Franckist and Russian Nationalist traits of form, harmony and orchestration - are integrated with inspiration and unusual skill.  Gaos himself kept back the score and seems to have wanted to forget it - its personal associations perhaps too disturbing for him to acknowledge its existence: it was a young man's music, associated with his ultimately unhappy first marriage; so, it was suppressed, snatches of it appearing in other works of his.   On the other hand, he preserved the score; one hopes that at some level, he knew how good a work his First Symphony was.   Its discovery by his son led eventually to performance and a recording supported by the Galician Cultural Council.  It may be that its broadcast last year on Somer Valley FM was the first by a British radio-station!    If you love the music of Franck, Borodin or early Sibelius, and have never heard this Symphony before, our advice is, don't miss it!

Spring

Today's programme is a repeat from last year: music of Spring, including works by Julius Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, Edvard Grieg, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a Chinese folksong, etc, and is dedicated to Rupert Kirkham, who reads. 

Easter 2012 (7, 8 & 9 April)

Classical Break:  Easter 2012

Is it wrong, Lord, to ask you to spare all

Such a night as this, in Gethsemane,

Or let them never taste the cup of gall?

Lost in despair, they pass from company

And earn judgement of even their last hours

By those whom they leave, or worse in our eyes,

Perish alone and unremarked, though flowers

Or brief-blooming innocence fall or rise.

In our hearts we know more than we admit

Of how we have travelled to where we are;

And yet, still less than yours can our spirit

Bear what comes of all thought familiar.

Our journey leads to a shrine raised to chance

Outgloried by true cures in acceptance.

(Copyright Mike Burrows 3/4/2012)

Classical Break:  104:  Easter

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today’s programme is a celebration of Easter.  We had hoped to bring you a new anthology, but sadly, Rupert Kirkham, who usually presents Classical Break, is unable to be here in the studio.  Our thoughts and best wishes are with him. Spring Pilgrimage culminates in the observance of Easter:  something of the feelings on setting out is evoked in Allan Gray’s music for the Powell and Pressburger film, A Canterbury Tale, the story of a latterday pilgrimage to Canterbury made at the height of the Second World War by two soldiers, one British, one from Oregon, and a land-girl, all seeking some rite of spiritual healing.  Here, one has the Canterbury peal, the traditional pilgrim’s hymn, Angelus ad Virginem, and a reading from the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, read by Esmonde Knight. 

A Canterbury Tale, Prelude, Gray

As for me, it is one thing to write for Classical Break, but quite another to voice it; so here is an edited version of last year’s Easter programme, spoken by Rupert.  

CB104 Easter (Rev)

Track One:  Kod Bethlehema, Trad

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a celebration of Easter.  You have just heard Kod Bethlehema, a song of pilgrims to Bethlehem, a Christmas song, but not the less apt for that.  Easter is a time of rebirth after a time of fasting and other observances of atonement, including pilgrimage.  Spring is here:  the very derivation of the word Easter has to do with Spring, rather than Christ - Eostre or Eastre was the Saxon or German goddess of fertility.  At Easter, we give chocolate eggs and hares and perhaps rich, spicy fruit-cakes when we do because the Christian Church seized unto itself symbols of procreation and an important religious festival,thus superimposing the sufferings and death of Christ, and His rising again from the dead on the tremendous mood-swing of renewal represented by this season of the year.  Those who fasted and sought forgiveness for their sins through Lenten self-punishment and the turning away of the mind from distractions of the flesh, found Easter Day at last.    

Easter is a time of rebirth after fasting and other observances of atonement, including pilgrimage.  Spring is here:  the very derivation of the word Easter has to do with Spring, rather than Christ - Eostre or Eastre was the Saxon or German goddess of fertility.  At Easter, we give chocolate eggs and hares and perhaps rich, spicy fruit-cakes when we do because the Christian Church seized unto itself symbols of procreation and an important religious festival, thus superimposing the sufferings and death of Christ, and His rising again from the dead on the tremendous mood-swing of renewal represented by this season of the year.  Those who fasted and sought forgiveness for their sins through Lenten self-punishment and the turning away of the mind from distractions of the flesh, found Easter Day at last.  

  

In the years of Jesus’ ministry in Palestine, Jerusalem was the gig for any travelling preacher.  Christ prepared himself for it just as any pilgrim was to do.  Then, what happened was going to happen.  His arrival in the City on a donkey was greeted by a greater or lesser showing of popular support, but by the time of his arrest, he must have seemed a danger to smooth governance by King, Priests, merchants, the financial services-sector, if not the occupying power.

Ride On Ride On In Majesty is a favoured Victorian hymn for Palm Sunday, with words by HH Milman and a tune, Winchester New, adapted from a chorale from a Lutheran Handbuch of 1690.

Track Two:  Ride On Ride On In Majesty

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is one of music that evokes Easter. It is not always the case that a nationalist-supported figure who stirs up trouble in an unhappy province is unpopular with Empire, if he divides satisfactorily the religious, cultural and political forces that pose a threat to the continued, lucrative occupation of his country.  By the time of his condemnation, the crowd, given a choice of pardoning Christ or a known bandit and murderer preferred to see released the bandit and murderer.  This must have been a defining moment in itself.  Perhaps Barabbas was simply someone who - in the eyes of ordinary people - would make life the more interesting for the Romans and ruling classes of Judah.  Wielding argument - and once, a whip - Christ had offended the rich, powerful and corrupt of his own land, but not defeated neither them - nor the Romans.

Let’s remind ourselves of the nature of God, The Son.  If Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd - often associated with Christ and Easter - has been set by many composers.  John Blow (1649-1708), was one of the first intake of choir boys at the Chapel Royal after the Restoration.  So began a largely successful career that culminated in the position of organist at Westminster Abbey, at St Pauls and again at Westminster Abbey after the death of the younger man who had replaced him there, Purcell.  After a brief introductory passage, a theme in triple time that Blow re-employed in chamber music is played through repeatedly on the accompanying instruments, two violins, viola, bass violin, theorbo (a kind of lute) and organ.  Alto, Tenor, Bass and Bass voices sing the first verse, Soprano, alto, tenor, Bass and the second, the full choir entering for the latter stages:  the piece has the feel of a passacaglia or chacony, the ‘spirit’ of the chief melodic idea always present, variations taking place in voice and instrumentation, involving the opening idea in addition.  It is a lovely piece, courtly in sound, but full of clever touches in layout, to ensure that even the organ, functioning as a supernumery bass, is noticed for its own sake as much for its sustaining tone.  Apparently, Charles The Second approved of the minuet-rhythm in this and other anthems of the time:  not only for its lively associations, but because he could beat time to it.  To my ears, it harks back to the days of La Folia, a one-time favourite for instrumental treatments in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.  The spare counterpoint is undoubtedly due to a fashion for block chord harmonizing in contrast to the older polyphonic tendency in church music - perhaps Charles the Second preferred this simpler approach, too.       

Track Three:  23rd Psalm, John Blow

Easter is a time when man craves forgiveness and seeks to express gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice.  To be brought face to face with the sufferings and death of the Shepherd and appointer of Fishers of Men is a personal thing; to be worthy is an impossibility; to be a doubter is to suffer in turn, and all men have done enough evil in their lives to be a doubter of both self and God’s capacity for forgiveness.

A piece that seems to go to the heart of spiritual boldness and helpless suffering is The Dream of Gerontius, which sets passages from a poem by Cardinal Newman. It tells of a soul’s passage from deathbed to purgatory.  The word Gerontius is from Latinized Ancient Greek and means literally, Old Man.  No end of a sinner brought to book, was Elgar’s own view.  As in no previous British Oratorio, the orchestra sings, prays, agonises, praises along with the choir and a sub-chorus - another innovation.  The style is operatic, the melodic lines, harmonies and tonal relations would in 1900 have seemed those of a Wagner or Verdi.  Arias, conversations in recitative, leading motives standing for Sickness, Death, Judgement and various aspects of doubt, love, fear and forgiveness, grip the listener and compel him to suspend his disbelief.   The sheer force of a vision, of every thought, musical or poetic, strikes home in a manner that grips one from beginning to end, on a journey into eternity.

Let’s hear the prayer of the dying man, a mixed firm credo and appeal for strength to face death and judgement that are certain.  Sanctus Fortis: “Strong Spirit, Spirit of God, from the depths I pray to You, pity me, my Judge, spare me, Lord!”

Track Four:  Sanctus Fortis from The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar 

Elgar’s next Oratorio, The Apostles, is one of two that he completed on the theme of Christ’s ministry and the Acts of The Apostles.  The second was called The Kingdom.  He intended a third, The Judgement, but first, the strain of completing the first two and later, the First World War and death of his wife supervened.  A few fragments survive of the third oratorio, some worked into the 3rd Symphony, lately completed by Anthony Payne.  The first two are thus, a torso, but in themselves are glories of literary syncretism bringing together texts from both the new testament and apochrypha, Wagnerian leading-motives, diatonic and chromatic harmony that melds Franck and Strauss and a peculiar English quality perhaps owed to the much put-upon cathedral composer SS Wesley.  There are crowd-scenes, arias, recitatives.  Solo voices, large choirs and huge, Late Romantic orchestra - including a Hebrew shofar or ramshorn provide colours unique to Elgar and perhaps a little owing to a holiday-cruise in the Aegean.  The Apostles and the Kingdom rank with his symphonies and concerti in imagination, resource and inspiration.  Were they the work of a German other continental composer, It’s hard not to believe that they would be known to many abroad.  As a tour de force, they are irresistible, but they contain some of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring and touching music penned by even Elgar.

In the  Scene of the Oratorio, Christ has been arrested and tried and the zealot who betrayed him, Judas Iscariot, has returned his payment for Christ’s betrayal, and been ejected from the Temple.  Let’s hear his powerful bass-register soliloquy ending in suicide.  Judas is a basso profundo part unusual in British oratorio.  This is dark music, lost deep in night.  It was a passage that terrified Elgar as he was writing it, and with good cause.  His faith was uncertain and he had had to play down his Catholicism to gain national acceptance; there’s evidence that he identified greatly with Judas, and subscribed to the theological view, daring at the time, that Judas had betrayed Christ in order to compel his Master to make a show of His Divine Power.  Certainly, Lady Alice had to ban the subject of suicide from the Elgar dining-table at this time; visitors were tactfully warned, conversation as tactfully steered away from it...

Track Five:  The Apostles, Without the Temple,  Elgar

We should not forget the proliferation of another Easter symbol - of the cross, woven from thatch-reeds or osier-twigs.  The cross of four arms is almost latterday to two thousand years ago, when the Romans didn’t waste wood, but simply crossed the Tee.  Then again, the cross is ‘The Tree’,and trees have always been objects of worship - many springing to green life and blossom at Eastertime, as crops were sown, troths plighted and babies made.

Now the movement, Golgotha, Scene 5 from Elgar’s The Apostles.  One draws near the cross to muted strings:  the image of the crucified Lord strikes the onlooker - Christ cries out, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthami’, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’  The chorus sings, Truly, He was the Son of God; Mary and St John - contralto and tenor, sing brokenly of their pain and despair at Christ’s suffering at the hands of His people.  As in the Judas soliloquy, there is a Moussorgskian pungency to this music, in this case admitting some warmth in the love of Jesus’ Mother and favourite disciple, traditionally placed beside the cross in many examples of church-statuary - in Wells Cathedral for one prominent example - and paintings.    

Track Six:  Golgotha, from The Apostles, Elgar

The Ave Verum Corpus is a hymn dating back to Pope Innocent Vl, and has been set by thousands of composers, many of them unknown.  It apostrophizes the body of Christ after the ordeal of the cross, and begs that the sight of it can console us in our last hour.  We hear it in a setting for male voice choir by Gerald Hendrie (1936- ), for 21 years Professor of Music at the Open University.  This was written for the Gentlemen of Ely Cathedral and employs bare fifths and fourths harmony and appoggiatura in an unaccompanied chant; its slow-moving or stilly uncanniness heightened by the tritone - diminished fifth or augmented fourth, a divisive interval known to the Mediaeval church as Diabolus in Musica, the Devil in Music, and later much-employed in all forms of Western music as a harmonic or tonal intensifier; its use here is perhaps the more disturbing for being quiet.  Instead of expressing terror and pity in high-coloured tragedy, this piece might perhaps be compared with Shakespeare’s use in his later tragedies of a blank verse freed by monosyllables and enjambment at moments of great intensity: apparent simplicity conceals art and enshrines humankind’s truest, loneliest responses to life and death.    

Track Seven:  Ave Verum Corpus, Gerald Hendrie

We come to the end of our programme with...what?  The Ascension is a month away.  Christ rose again after three days to share life again with those who followed Him.  SS Wesley’s grandfather Charles, brother of John, wrote some of the greatest hymns bequeathed us, often adapted from the works of first rate composers; Rejoice, The Lord Is King was sung every Easter at School assemblies as in church and never failed to move, thanks to its fine words, strong melody, striking fourth line to every quatrain, and earnest refrain.  The tune, known now as Gopsal, was adapted from Handel.  It was first published in Hymns for Our Lord’s Resurection in 1746.  This is a hymn of joy and renewal and so ends this programme.  Here it is performed in an arrangement complete with baroque descant and trumpet obbligato, by Paul Leddington Wright.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  We hope you enjoyed our programme and will join us for further journeys in music.  A happy Easter to you from all of us here!

Track Eight:  Rejoice, The Lord Is King, Handel/Charles Wesley

©  Mike Burrows 3/4/12

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.