16th & 17th June

CB  Cooler

Track 1: Sicilienne, Paradis (1.34 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax and think to - a near--hour of apparent idleness!  All you, the listener, require is the Summer, a comfortable chair and ice-cool drink.  Let music do the carrying.  

You have just heard a Sicilienne - a kind of dance in 6/8 rhythm by Maria-Therese Paradis, a woman-composer and keyboard-performer, blind from childhood, for whom Mozart wrote pieces.

The Prelude in D Flat, by Ivor Gurney shows no sign of having been written in the difficult times following his experiences as both private soldier and casualty in the Great War.

If anyone knew of the sufferings of people thought idle by materialists and so-called hard workers, it was Ivor Gurney.  Also, he enjoyed the consolations of music and poetry.  Their influence, however, consumed him.  For a time, he tried to hold down casual employment by day and work on his artistic occupations by night; this, along with depression and malnutrition perhaps cost him his reason.  He articulated suffering humanity but also a glorious idealism beyond bitterness in both music and poetry and prose.  His little-known Preludes for Piano are one of his most beautiful inspirations, in a style of refined but deepening harmony, the melodic line as subtle and true as those of an Elgar or Fauré.  Here is the delicate, greatly touching Prelude in D Flat.

Track 2:  Prelude in D-Flat, Ivor Gurney   (2.45 min)

Next, a waltz from the days of ‘50s Austerity, by the American virtuoso mouth-organist, Larry Adler.  Genevieve, the story of vintage cars and skulduggery between friends on the London To Brighton Run is a good film, well directed and acted, but Adler provided its heart with his music!  It was not an easy score to write.  Yet the eponymous Darracq, and its Spyker-rival, their occupants and an escalating ordeal by British highways, museum-piece-cars and personal pride, are now inseparable from its delightful qualities...  Harmonica was an inspired choice of soloist; Adler’s melodies, his sly modulations and enharmonic shifts - and clever representation of cranking-up - are indelible  Who can think vintage-car--owners idle, if their labours of love and tussles are this happy--making for spectators ...?  Listen and hear!

Track 3:  Genevieve Waltz, Adler (3.00min)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax - and think - to. 

Now, a short piece for voices and viols, in which the Flemish composer, Adrian Willaert arranges the song Lack of Silver:  love has cost a man all his silver, but he doesn’t mind - he has the love of his beloved.  Willaert was a master of counterpoint whose chansons were often built on existing tunes.  The skill in an accompaniment by strict canon (after-echo of the leading-note in an immediate successive part), to take one example, was much the true job of trained composers in the Sixteenth Century.  In six parts, the web spun is fascinating in itself, a reminder that technique is not necessarily meaningless discipline, but the making of music’s expressiveness, and of its liberating hypnotic hold on us.  A banal little verse is shown to be not so banal after all...  If a patron hears and chooses to pay his artist a little more... 

Track 4:  Faulte d’argent, Willaert (2.45 min)

Edvard Grieg had many successors – Norwegian Art-music has proved one of the strongest traditions in all Western music since the mid-Nineteenth Century.  One predecessor was the fiddler, Ole Bull, who became an international celebrity from humble beginnings before Norway was much regarded for more than her scenery. Here is Bull’s most famous piece, an orchestral mood-picture of beauty - The Saeter-girl’s Sunday.  A saeter-girl herded cattle on a saeter or high mountain-meadow.  The life was hard and lonely, with a rough, turf-roofed hut to call one’s home, and frequent fog, rain and rough weather through Spring and  Summer.  Grieg’s later musical vision of Saeter-girls as ignorant, man-eating caricatures of valkyries came via Ibsen and Peer Gynt!  Bull allows his girl latitude for sentiment, and not from sanctimony but from knowledge.  His music is as passionate as any from quiet beginnings, humane and touching.

Track 5:  The Saeter-girl’s Sunday, Bull (2.59 min)

A Royalist servant to the aristocracy, John Jenkins (1592-1678) is now best known for his pieces for consort of viols and other instruments, dances and fantasias, written for the entertainment of wealthy musical amateurs. He was a master of counterpoint in which a piece is generated by statement and successive entries modified by sequence (repetition of intervals at a higher or lower pitch, inversions - a figure played up-side-down - canons and imitations.  Let’s hear his Fantasia in C Minor, a grave little piece for viols supported by organ.  A piece like this invites the listener to look about one at less-than-severe surroundings unless the ear attends and follows.  There is beauty either way, even in the richest of old rooms.

Track 6 :  Fantasia in C Minor, John Jenkins (4.08 min)

Next, a Song of The Seashell from Japan.  This popular song was  written by  Hideaki Yashima  (1915- ) and is played in an arrangement for flute and stringed instruments, including harp, by James Galway and the Tokyo String Orchestra.

Track 7:  Song of The Seashell, Yashima (2.40 min)

What can we make of ourselves if we have no leisure to dream or remember and take stock of events, ourselves and others?  The Portuguese Canadian composer, John Estacio, wrote a three-movement work for orchestra, Variations On A Memory.  In this, the original theme of the variations is not stated in full until the finale.  The movements are named Era Uma Vez (Portuguese for Once Upon A Time), Red Letter Day and A Memory.  Their topics are his childhood home; Canada Day celebrations in Vancouver, and retrospection on such memories later, at a difficult stage in his life.  A description of public rejoicing and its resonances is flanked by personal reflections, a childhood world of folklore and a warm stove, and a gathering-together of what has made us.  There is an important piano--part in the orchestral textures, and Coplandesque use of strings and woodwind, the brass having their main outing during the more extroverted Red Letter Day.  The lyrical poignancy is Coplandesque, too, of diatonic simplicity and clashes created by the intervals of the basic scale, the space between the parts kept open at more expressive moments.  The Red Letter Day is aptly congested and contrapuntal in comparison with the angular but telling lyricism elsewhere.  Its part in nostalgia and finding integration is found at its central section.  One nice touch in scoring, a microtonal glissando on tubular bell, occurs towards the end of the first movement.     

Tracks 8-10:  Variations On A Memory, Eustacio (17.33 min)

Musicians are losers - they work harder than most, so that someone can say that there’s no money in what they’ve done (or so the speaker hopes, given his exertions to ensure that such is the case), or that anyone could do what they have done, if they had the mind.  Sometimes, however, the artist feels that he wouldn’t be anyone else for the world. 

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his own soul?”  What’s affluence, when you can deal in inspiration?

Pub music recorded 50 years ago, now.  Shave The Donkey, performed on two fiddles and a piano.  If the soul revolts, it is a fact that self-taught musicians keep music alive where those who have been trained are not to be found.  Better self-expression and humour than a machine playing sounds.

Track 11:  Shave The Donkey, Trad (1,41 min) 

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, written when he was attending the Royal College of music. It is called, simply, Sleep, and comes from the famous cycle known by the sobriquet The Elizas - so-named as it consists of settings of Elizabethan poetry:  He was twenty-two when he wrote this masterpiece, his mind weary from overwork but not yet clouded by war and the deadening pattern of life imposed by resettlement in conditions of Post-Great War austerity.  Come, Sleep...   Vocal line and piano accompaniment are reminiscent of Purcell or other masters of the arioso-style; there is an objective transcendence of ordinary suffering that is the source of its infinitely touching pathos, undemonstrative, spare and dignified.  It is a song, a melody, its harmonic implications brought out in simple slow figuration on the piano.  Each verse rises in supplication, and dies away into that figuration.  It seems not only timeless, but a key to escaping sense of time.  Here, Sleep is performed with much feeling and intelligence by local singer, Becky Livesey, and pianist, Gay Pullom.  The performance was recorded at a lunchtime concert at St John’s Church, Midsomer Norton.

Track 12:  Sleep, Gurney (2.45 min)

A pre-war fit of anxiety that had necessitated a short spell of rest in a village on the Severn was adduced by the military authorities as proof that Gurney’s mental state before joining up pre-disposed him to become unhinged. That for years they had entrusted him variously with a rifle, bayonet, grenades and Vickers-gun, and he had made good use of them in others’ eyes, was meaningless  to the entirely objective adjudicators.   The same shift was no doubt used with many sufferers from shell-shock and related physical problems, to reduce costs at the War Office.  He was awarded a half-pension and  left largely to support himself.  He was the son of a tailor and not of independent means.  Such  pieces as the Prelude we heard earlier or Sleep...: are they products of wool-gathering, of inutility to society?  Hardly.  But they earned their author next to nothing, and an artist was driven to madness by the necessity to find and keep employment.  A Socialist, Gurney wrote of the ‘Unemployment Shame’ that destroyed countless post-war lives, yet he found time to create thousands of poems, hundreds of songs, mood--pieces and larger works, some still to be deciphered for publication...  When inspired, his handwriting could be appalling! 

Would he now be working part-time in Tesco’s, to seem hard-working?  People like to think that they now give Gurney his due, but he died in 1937.  His due has to have been more than our being good chaps towards him, eighty or ninety years too late... 

The tremendous efforts of the composer and performer are such that music may prompt great thoughts in good people, people who doubt themselves, perhaps, in what they say and do. A local politician has pronounced that we cannot live our lives in cotton-wool, presumably because he has no idea what cotton-wool costs - and let’s not give the Coalition ideas.  But we can wrap ourselves in music as dreamers of dreams:  to imagine a better future for one-another.  Our artists and we, if we choose, are music-makers - and movers and shakers.  We may develop empathy for our fellow human--beings, sympathies, sincere wishes to share - as say, Gurney shared - for the health and happiness of others: -  how else can we hope for health and happiness ourselves? – and a logical egalitarianism with which truly to build a Big Society.  Insight makes contact with like minds, and like minds reciprocate to bring change!

Now, a dance by the Spanish pianist-composer, Enrique Granados, and orchestrated by the founder of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, De Grignon.  This piece, Andalucia, comes from the collection Danzas Espagnolas. It  displays engaging characteristics fashionable in a certain strain of nationalist music popularized in the late Nineteenth Century by composers as various as Tarrega, Breton, Chapi, a sultry, slightly Arabic-sounding dance with a nostalgic song-like theme as its pendant.  Music for a lazy but thoughtful moment.  And with it, we shall leave you.  This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye! 

Track 14:  Andalucia, Granados (4.00 min)

©  Mike Burrows 06/12

9th and 10th June

This weekend's Classical Break features music inspired by myths and legends. The programme was originally transmitted in April 2009 - three months after Somer Valley FM went on air.

We start with Wagner, then there's music from Ravel, Tchaikowski, Mussourski, Offenbach, Handel, Howells and Lord Berners.

Enjoy!

2 & 3 June

CB Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in D Minor, Op13

Cue:  Extract from 2nd Movt, Piano Trio in D Minor

(Link 1a):           “If there were a conservatory in    Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a          programme symphony on “The Seven Plagues           of Egypt”, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr Rachmaninov’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell.  But for the time being we are still living on earth, and this music has a depressing effect on us, with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, the meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the intense crash of brass, and above all the sickly, perverse hamonization and quasi-melodic outlines, and the complete lack of simplicity and naturalness, the complete lack of themes.”

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

(Link 1b)  Rachmaninoff himself tore up the score and later described it to a close friend as strained, childish and bombastic, but not wholly weak, its worse fault being bad orchestration; furthermore, he could not understand how a musician like Glazunov - one of Russia’s foremost composers and teachers, a great figure among the staff at the St Petersburg Conservatoire - could have conducted  so badly.  Rachmaninoff’s cousin, later his wife, claimed Glazunov had been drunk. 

The First Symphony in D Minor is scored for large orchestra.  From double-basses and (superb) tuba up to piccolo, the instrumentation is extremely well judged.  The form is cyclical with a short, snarling motto that colours or generates all the matter of its four movements.  Autocratically expressive,   this is possibly the first Russian symphony to take its chapter and verse from knowledge of znameniy or Orthodox liturgical chants as well as folk-music, and it echoes also the bells of Mousorgsky’s Boris Gudonov.  Moreover, the Catholic chant, Dies Irae, an idée-fixe of that other pianist composer, Franz Liszt, Is never far from the shape of things. Rachmaninoff was to make this fate-motif his own - it occurs in almost all his large-scale works! 

Cue:  Extract from Piano Trio in D Minor, Rachmaninoff

(Link 1c) The first four notes of the motto-theme and an element of the second subject may have been carried over deliberately from the massive slow movement of the elegaic second Piano Trio in D Minor - written in memory of Tchaikovsky, who had mostly been very encouraging of Rachmaninoff’s efforts; assisted as an examiner in his graduation and died tragically two years before the Symphony was begun. The score is headed with the words, “Vengeance is mine (saith the Lord) I will repay.”  This quotation from the Scriptures occurs in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, of which more later..

The brass motto with which the symphony opens is reminiscent of the beginning of Borodin’s Second Symphony.

Cue:  Opening of Second Symphony In B Minor, Borodin

Cue: Motto and 1st Subject, Rachmaninoff

(1d)   Besides a hint of the Dies Irae, there’s a woody coolness and purpose to the first subject, a continuation of the motto-theme - clarinet and then oboe prominent -  the first subject is built up of phrases from liturgical chants, a process his listeners would have been aware of on first hearing.  The subject has kinship  with the allegros of Rimsky-Korsakov, athletic, loose-limbed only because relying on sequence, the self-repetition of Jchoice narrow intervals, and contrapuntal entries.  Descending scalic figures - the clarinet’s being most noticeable - are built into the material.  A curious, overshadowed quality comes with changes in dynamics and scoring.   Tension rises to the hard-hitting first brassy climax, with its repeated-note tattoo - powerful in the lower brass and with an edge of hysteria added by the trumpet; it  falls away in murmurs - and in twirls the sinuous, feminine second subject on violins, astringent appoggiatura not permitting sinuousness to be relaxed.  The oboe, flutes and clarinet add plangency, the swell of the theme given the Tchaikovskian treatment - passionate first violins in unison, the horns glowing.

 Cue:  Second Subject, Rachmaninoff

(Link 1e) A kind of gipsy-music or orientalism is found in it, not unlike the orientalism of Balakirev, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov - composers venerated by the St Petersburg Conservatoire.  Rachmaninoff had written a stipulated one-act opera for his graduation exercise - Aleko, a story of gipsy life.  After a close - the motto murmuring - the development begins as does that of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, The Pathetique:  with a loud crash on brass and percussion. Here is the Tchaikovsky.

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of 1st Movt Development of Sixth Symphony in B Minor, Tchaikovsky.

(Link 1f)  And, for the last of these brief cues, here is the Rachmaninoff:

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of Development, Rachmaninoff  

(Link 1g)  A trumpet-shriek - the motto theme in an instant!  The divided strings launch into a fugato based on it.  Their lack of support elsewhere makes keeping their pitch tricky. 

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

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

Track One:  First Symphony, l Grave, Allegro Ma Non Troppo, Rachmaninoff (13.45 min)

(Link 2a) This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is devoted to one piece, the Symphony in D Minor by Rachmaninoff.  What hectored critics missed at the premiere was that the ‘perversity’ they perceived is a source of great expressive power.  They reacted against the music’s commandingness, its organization, its aesthetic consistency and yet originality.  The orchestral parts survived, mostly complete, and were exhumed from the Leningrad Conservatoire archives in 1944.  The Symphony was performed in a typical Soviet volte-face the following year:  the performance of Rachmaninoff’s works in the Soviet Union had been banned a while after his escape from Revolutionary Russia.  A celebrity world--wide, he had made no secret, everywhere he went, of his hatred of the crimes of Bolshevism.  He had died in Beverly Hills the previous year, and the discovery proved that he belonged to Soviet Russia after all...  Rachmaninoff, who’d suffered from crippling nostalgia for his country, would not have liked the irony.

(Link 2b) That quotation, Vengeance is mine (saith the Lord) I will repay.  Rachmaninoff meant it to be a reference to Anna Karenina - the verse is quoted in the novel, apparently - but also to a lately-concluded affair with a married lady of gipsy blood!  The piece was dedicated to her - A.L. - Anna Alexandrovna Lodizhenskaya. 

(Link 2c)  Beginning with the motto-theme made douce, a simple, telling transformation in context, The second movement is an intermezzo rather than scherzo, mostly lightly scored.  It seems like woodland music, darting, as if breeze-blown among birch-trees - delicate with woodland flowers, the viola at times wry in solos less airy than the flute’s.  It is a hypersensitive mood-piece, a fantasy of alternate tensions on derivatives of first movement material.  There are harsh, driven moments on brass and lower strings, the first movement’s snarl and motto-theme never distant.  Where the music is brightest, most fine--spun, where it suggests sweetness or the slightest shade or fragrance, is perhaps where Anna is found and dwelt on.  Glazunov made a cut in this movement for the premiere.

After the viola’s nervy solo, the dark elements rise - only to be partly soothed and brought back to the mercurial mood and music of the opening.  Contrarities die out at last in the motto and semitonal oscillation.

Track Two:  ll Allegro Animato.

(Link 3)  Another movement of kaleidoscopic orchestration, the third movement is a beautifully-scored love song with lyrical woodwind solos and delicate touches of appoggiatura from the violins and violas.  It begins with the fate-motif and develops the Symphony’s first and second subjects.  Beauty is interrupted by a passage  of savage foreboding in the bass of the orchestra, symbolizing jealousy with the Dies Irae, perhaps.  The viola picks up the song where it left off, and real passion - and hypersensitivity - return to the music, building through repetition and counterpointing of the two tunes of the first movement, the masculine first subject smearing the outline of the feminine second.  These  processes are the structure of this music.  Appoggiatura in lower strings and horn-tone seem either to soothe or to increase pain.  The music dies away overshadowed by a rocking alternation of tones on clarinet.  Dies Irae tells us that the day of judgement is near.

 Track Three:  lll Larghetto

(Link 4a)  The last movement is lashed by brass and percussion into beginning proudly, with dotted-note fanfares.  The first subject of the symphony returns, triumphant and sinister.  It is continued by a zigeuner-like insistence on rhythm in the cellos and double-basses in particular - the horn adds foreboding.  This music was written years before Stravinsky’s percussive, motoric but rhythmically disruptive style became fashionable.  The feminine second subject sweeps one on, now, with Tchaikovskian swelling horns in canon, and castanets imitated by tambourine.  Hectoring brass breaks in with the motto fanfares; a diminuendo brings in the oboe in Anna’s theme.  It is taken up with an accompaniment of nervous quivering in the strings - time is running out.  The deep strings add a swell to the yearning - the horn still doesn’t achieve more than pathos - the gipsy-dance moments drop in exhaustion.  A lulling episode is followed by a bass-led revivification of the gaunt fate-music, with its odd rhythms and ruthlessness more marked, the violas characteristically dry and wiry in tone.

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

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

 Track Four:  lV Allegro Con Fuoco

 (Link 4b)  Glazunov’s fluent, ingratiating First Symphony had been premiered when he had been sixteen.  It had been a triumph.  At the premiere of his First Symphony, the twenty-four year-old Rachmaninoff left the hall to pace outside, wringing his hands at the terrible discords he heard.  Had he truly written these sounds? Of course, he most probably had written many of them - calculated them ruthlessly,  as contapuntal clashes and as-logical harmonic progressions.

 (Link 4c)  The critique that headed our programme - was by Cesar Cui, the least talented of the Mogoyucha Kuchka or ‘Mighty Handful’ of great St Petersburg composers - Balakirev, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov having been the others.  Regarding themselves as the Pan-Slavist torch-bearers for Russian music, they had been rivals to the ‘westernizing’ Nicolai Rubenstein/Tchaikovsky axis in Moscow.  Years previously, Rimsky--Korsakov had groomed Glazunov for stardom...Rachmaninoff had been groomed by Zverev, Arensky and Taneiev, the first two figures Tchaikovskians, the last an expert in Flemish polyphony whose counterpoint-classes had taught Rachmaninoff a great deal. In Rachmaninoff’s last major work, the Symphonic Dances, there is a moment where the first subject of his First Symphony rises almost as if from the grave, shining and beautiful: and the late work - from nearly fifty years on - builds on the quotation of an Easter chant in its later stages. 

Cue from Symphonic Dances, l Non Allegro, Rachmaninoff

Resurrection came, beyond the imagining of the critics of that first performance - or the conscious hopes of Rachmaninoff, himself, who had the misfortune to be a young man caught between old factions fighting for influence over the future of Russian music, the death of Tchaikovsky having left everything to play for! Pace Mister Cui, it is possible not to be an inhabitant of Hell and yet see the critic as a brilliantly perceptive bigot:  his descriptions of the symphony apt so long as one discounts his aesthetic, which leads him to enumerate strengths as weaknesses!  You’ve been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

26th and 27th May

This week's Classical Break takes as its theme, Dance and Drama. It's a repeat (slightly re-edited) of a programme that was transmitted back in May 2010 - so we hope you will have forgotten what it was like and look forward to your texts and messages! It was written and presented by Rupert Kirkham.

Mike Burrows is working on the next 2 scripts for Classical Break - an analysis of Rachmaninov's First Symphony and another special he won't tell me about....

From next week, we are offering a 'listen again' service to Somer Valley listeners. This means that you won't have to wait up till 0100 on a Monday morning to catch the  repeat of Classical Break - you will be able to listen to it at your convenience for up to 3 weeks after the programme has gone out on Somer Valley FM.

This means that in the future, whilst there will be fewer repeats on air - to make room for more original programmes - if you miss a show, ou have up to 3 weeks to listen to it at your convenience.

It's all part of 2012's new and improved Somer Valley FM that you have helped to create!

PS Please let us know what you think about this new service - and anything else about Classical Break or any of the shows that go out on Somer Valley FM. Sometimes it's hard to know if we are doing what you want!

CB Where The Rainbow Ends

Intro, Track One: Quilter - Where The Rainbow Ends Suite: 1. Rainbow Land (3.24 min)

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. You’ve just heard Rainbow Land, the first movement of a suite Where The Rainbow Ends, written for a play of this name by Roger Quilter. It introduces a programme of largely British music of dreams and otherworld fantasy, some of it what Edward German would have called ‘good light music’. Where The Rainbow Ends was a Christmas fairy-tale, produced at the Savoy Theatre - famous for the D’Oyly Carte Company and the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, first performed in 1911. For many in those days, the fairy world was no faraway Shangri La, as was to be shown when, a decade later and after the Great War, Conan Doyle revealed The Coming of The Fairies to an astonished public. Where The Rainbow Ends tells of children who travel on a magic carpet to save their ship-wrecked parents from a dragon, and are protected in their adventures by Saint George...

“This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” The Archers film, A Matter of Life and Death, drawn from a Robert Nathan novel by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell. It tells the story of a Lancaster pilot who jumps from his burning aircraft without a parachute; survives to fall in love with a WAAC from Boston, Mass, and is visited by a heavenly messenger who wants to conduct him up a celestial stairway to the training-centre for another world. Terrestrial scenes were shot in colour, scenes in Heaven in black and white. The fantasy may be the result of a thought-unimportant head-injury, or it may be real. In any event, the film culminates in emergency brain surgery and an Appeal heard in the Highest of Courts. Intended to promote Anglo-American relations, and invoking every species of idealism of outlook, it owes some of its glamour to the score composed by the Polish émigré, Allan Gray. Here are elements of the score - a fanfare, piano-music connected with sensory disturbance and the escalator, and romantically swooping but distinguished love-theme of its time (used for end-credits).


Track Two: Allan Gray: A Matter of Life and Death (4.09 min)

The first film of one of the stars of A Matter of Life and Death, Roger Livesey, was a silent adaptation of Where The Rainbow Ends. released in 1921 - the year Conan Doyle’s The Coming of The Fairies was published...


Now, a song from a cycle of Yeats-settings, To A Child Dancing In The Wind, by John Tavener (B 1944). A soprano is accompanied by flute, viola and harp. In its tessitura of wide intervals, the vocal part calls for sublime breath control - and the lightest of touches from the instrumentalists. The vision of the unself-consciously graceful and sensuous young girl in a world of her own exists in a harsh world on a Western shore, where work and widowhood await, but the melisma is of the self-hypnotized unmarried girl... A world within the world...

Track Three: John Tavener - To A Child Dancing In The Wind (2.13 min)


There are as many worlds within the world as there are people and products of the artistic imagination. One may need only a fire to sit by to find one’s dreams. The Canadian, Robert Farnon was for many years composer and conductor in light music. He specialized in mood-music and miniatures as did many romantics and late-romantics. His best is good indeed, vivid, natural and skilfully written - the orchestration fits the melody and harmony like a soft glove, a blending of the sections that favours the woodwind, horns and strings, often including harp - his pieces bloom from simple, but affecting elements developed with great care and distinction. Here is Pictures In The Fire, a kind of canzona for violin and orchestra with notable asides from flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon - and fleeting piccolo.

Track Four: Farnon - Pictures In The Fire. (4.57 min)

Edward Elgar, self-taught, composed from the age of about ten. His father gave him the run of his music-shop and his mother did all that she could to foster the child’s interest in literature with the result that the young Edward and siblings wrote a play, The Wand of Youth for which he composed the music. Grown-ups were lured across a stream into the world of childhood imagination, with the result that they developed an understanding of children and so scolded them less severely in future. The miracle was achieved by moths and butterflies, little bells, fairy pipers, fairies and giants, tame and wild bears, a sundance and other such cues. Household music was transformed forty years later in 1907 when, his mother and father now dead, Elgar took up the score and developed and arranged its numbers for full orchestra with unself-conscious, magical results.

The beautiful variety in style, mood and scoring of the finished pieces is proof that the excitement of having the run of a music shop had never left him, and that his mother’s literary dreams and the ambition to express philosophical constructs in poetic imagery and music had been passed on. The titles and ‘little tunes’ are inseparable. Here, the grown-up couple are lulled to sleep by Fairy Pipers.

Track Five: Edward Elgar - Fairy Pipers (4.08 min)

The pianist, philosopher and mystic, Cyril Scott, was a composer of great ambition and talent for symphonic music, admired by Vauaghan Williams and Bax, and Elgar, who credited him with inspiring the more daring harmonies of his late period! Scott worked as well in small forms, often orchestrating his own piano-music. Here is his orchestral miniature, Lotus-Land: the heavy, sweet blossom of the lotus was reputed by the Greeks to induce dreaming lethargy, a narcosis forgetful of home or a life of action, as Odysseus found to his cost during his travels.

Track Six: Cyril Scott - Lotus-land (4.28 min)

The composer Cyril Rootham wrote at least one fine choral-orchestral song in The Stolen Child... Setting Yeats, it is an enticement to the life of faery, of an escape from the human world:

Come away, O human child,
To the waters and the wild,
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand...

The song is beautiful, the scoring and variations in accompaniment well-suited to the imagery, but this refrain, with its flute flourish on the second and clever scansion of the long, subtlely rhythmical last line, more than anything else, stays with one. It is, after all, such a hard journey to that otherworld, one made (or expressed) by any serious artist. Childhood is the origin of so many of our fantasies of beauty and truth, even enlightenment...

Track Seven: Rootham: The Stolen Child (6.39 min)

Not all dreams are welcome: not all fantasies are an escape from the anguish of living. Here is a short partsong by Elgar, dating from a couple of years after the Wand of Youth Suites, and written whilst on holiday in Rome. It is an evocation of dread, of the thing that dies in the night, and of Owls. Here, the composer - according to his own story - sets verses written by his daughter Carice’s pet white rabbit, Pietro D’Alba, in reality, self-penned. The deliberately uncertain tonality is wedded to a hushed funereal processional, intensely ghostly, the owls’ antiphonal voices caught to peculiarly unsettling effect....

Track Eight: Elgar – Owls, An Epitaph (3.18 min)

One of the Australian composer Percy Grainger’s least-known professional interests was the search for a machine to play ‘free music’ - music that truly sounded to the pitches and pulses of the elements. The idea first came to him as a youngster as he watched sunshine on waves and currents. Here is a short piece of Free Music, arranged for string quartet. Another world within this world and the literally hypnotic, fantastical world of music...

Track Nine: Percy Grainger - Free Music (1.57 min)

Lastly, a long piece for piano-soloist and orchestra by John Ireland. The Legend, opening with a modal horn signal, evokes the Sussex downs: it concerns the atmosphere of a particular spot, a district of stone--age civilization, near where there was a post-Crusades leper-colony - the lepers worshipped through a small slit in the wall of a local church. Out for a solitary walk in this hilly, windblown landscape, Ireland stopped for a picnic. He told later of how as he ate he became aware of a group of children dancing and playing in a circle close to him as though oblivious of him. He was annoyed, but then it was borne in on him suddenly that they played quietly and that their clothes were ‘archaic’. He looked away, looked back and found that they were gone, leaving him alone on the hillside... A friend, the psychical researcher, mystic and ghost--story--writer, Arthur Machen, heard of this experience and wrote a postcard to him, saying simply: “So you’ve seen them, too!” Legend is fittingly large-scale, an awkward gear-change from the opening horn--theme to quicker music got over better in some performances than in others. By the middle of the piece, it is as if the mind clears of gong-clash, bluster and dramatic outlines, pianistic gestures, woodwind fragments, an obsessively menacing liturgical element threatened by chromaticism, a feeling of rising damp and decay. There comes another, clearer, fresher vision, as hallucinatory, in which the orchestral sounds stream hypnotically in light-footed movement - a thinner orchestration of sunshine and swift cloud-shade - and children of another, ancient time dance and play, and the piano-part moves between freedom and thematic matter of earlier... The piano is induced to accompany the dream. It’s not so much that these children are innocent or aesthetically charming, though they are, it’s that life and time have not overcome their natural zest for life, the faith and hope they find in living.

 

Adults have fantasies of what they are and what life truly is, but perhaps wouldn’t be happy here even if they could be! Because there are always new generations of children, happiness and hope spring eternal. The episode reminds one that the word maze has many meanings, including dance and trance; that mazes can be an adjunct to religious ritual, often of initiation, preparation and purification, and, like the best in musical expression can represent acceptance, enlightenment and progress.

The horn-signal recurs affirmatively, harmonized in the major. A long dying fall reprises nightmare elements amid calm, the piano introducing the chromatic sounds, dwindling away to nothing - perhaps into the depths or distance.

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 you enjoyed it and will join us again soon. Goodbye!

Track Ten: Ireland - Legend For Piano and Orchestra (11.38 min)

 

© Mike Burrows 2/12