29 and 30 December 2012

Due to holidays and trips abroad, this week's programme is a repeat of the Christmas Classical Break from last week. Hope you don't mind!!


We wish you all the best for 2013 and keep listening.

If you have ideas for items or you'd like to submit a script yourself, we'd love to hear from you. Just send an email to studio@somervalleyfm.co.uk marked 'FAO Classical Break' in the subject, and we'll get back to you.

Rupert, Mike, Jayne and Suvi.

22 December

In this year’s Christmas Number, jet-lag and other matters deprived this programme of our man of great goodwill, Rupert Kirkham’s, voice, at the last link.  His fellow exec-types wish him all the best, a very happy Christmas and more fortunate New Year!    

 CB Christmas 2012

 

Track One: Pastorale, Heinichen

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and is of Christmas music or music with a Christmas air.

 

We’ve just heard a Pastorale per La Notte di Natale by the Leipzig composer, Johann David Heinichen (1683-1729).  A Pastorale was a Shepherds’ Dance, usually in 6/8 time and heard as being in an idealized rustic style.  This one was written for The Night of The Nativity, and would have evoked the joy of Shepherds at the Adoration.  In honour of the occasion and their favoured forebears, in many parts of Europe, Shepherds danced about a crib on Christmas Eve. 

 

Now, let’s hear the first part of Gerald Finzi’s short Christmas cantata for baritone, soprano, semi-chorus, choir and orchestra, In Terra Pax, which sets a poem by Robert Bridges - Forth I Fared Alone, with asides from The Gospel According To Luke (in the King James Version).  It is Christmas Eve, and the poet imagines walking abroad on a snowy night and listening to the sound of church bells, seeing and hearing something of the first Christmas of all.  Thus Finzi’s choice of the accompanying words from scripture  Both Bridges and Finzi were agnostics, powerfully inspired by story and tradition, and the beneficent social effects of Christian ethics and morality.  The orchestral introduction of In Terra Pax is obviously leading up to something; uncertainty - and yet also expectancy - are in the cold night air.  As the movement develops and the baritone-narrator enters, there are moments when the imagination begins to glimpse what the intellect seeks, the vision to sweep away chill complexities of unbelief in divinely-ordained comfort and the faith and hope of another, ancient, more primitive age.  There are hints of The First Nowell in its quiet but, au fond, intent, course.  Something of the mighty solidity of earth stands under the evocation of bells, far-flung stars and dark air, and the musings of the soloist.  The orchestral dress is sombre, brightened by chill glints of harp and high woodwind.  Finzi began the work when young and head-over-heels in love with an aesthetic of polyphony, arioso and Gloucestershire; when he completed it, he knew that he was dying.  To a soul like his, death without afterlife did not come easily. The semi-chorus has the last word:  “And there were in the same country, shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”

 

Track Two In Terra Pax, Pt One, Finzi

 

Finzi was not only a composer and editor of music and connoisseur of British poetry.  He devoted much time to the cultivation of many rare British varieties of apple.  The humble apple-tree was for many years the source of cider and apple-jacks - dried apples - and accompaniment to meat and sauce-flavouring, a foundation, with honey and spices, of many a feast; fertility-rites – the wassail - took place in propitiation of the garth at the height of Winter.  Here is the carol Jesus Christ The Apple-tree, a Christianization of pagan faith, its words taken from an 18th Century American book of Divine Hymns and set by Elizabeth Poston.

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Track Three:  Jesus Christ The Apple-Tree

 

Track Four:  Music under:  Extract from Carol Symphony, 3^rd Movt, Hely-Hutchinson

 

Christmas has inspired man to his best artistic efforts for two thousand years.  It is true that many of what we think of as Christmas traditions are more modern in adoption, or have been toned down; there was a time when the popular celebration of Christmas was viewed with misgivings by the authorities.  Carols have been banned from church, mince-pies from the table; carousings and free love from Twelfth Night.  Rectors have objected to the ringing of church bells on Christmas morning.  The Church’s appropriation of the Winter Solstice from pagans has resulted in many symbols’ and activities’ being carried over into the festival of the Nativity and its forms of worship, as religious fundamentalists and atheists alike delight in telling us.

 

The very story of the Nativity is bedevilled by apparent inconsistencies in those scriptures that purport to tell us about the birth of our Lord - only two of the four Gospels speak of it, and in them - Matthew and Luke - events and their circumstances and significance require reading between the lines - a synthetic cast of mind - to create a single narrative.  Every aspect of Christmas appears a moveable feast, its details telescoped or omitted at will, except that we have the warm symbols of evergreen, spiced, fire-lit life, feasting and riches in spite of material poverty, greatness in spite of secular power, strange magic and licence in spite of Wintry puritanism and rationalistic utilitarianism, generosity in spite of everyday distrust and enmity.  It is a time when - thanks to St Paul, rather than the Gospel-writers - true love casts out all fear.  At its best, it may bear out Christ’s injunctions to love God with all our hearts and minds and love our neighbours as we do ourselves, and be a time of mutual seeking, peace and happiness.

 

Track 4 Fades Out

 

Here is the five-part Hodie Christus Natus Est of the Flemish polyphonist, Jan-Pieterzoon Sweelinck (1562-1621).

 

Track 5:  Hodie Christus Natus Est, Sweelinck

 

 

Really, what matters is that God’s son, the King of Kings, was conceived by an unmarried mother and born in a cattle shed:  the only shelter available to her.  If that doesn’t give us pause in these days of humbug, nothing will.  Add to that that Mary was very likely a teenager and Joseph considerably older, and to some, the brew should become toxic, if they are not hypocrites.  To whom was the conception announced?  Joseph (Matthew) or Mary (Luke)?  Why not both?  One can admire Joseph’s faith and tact (Matthew), and love the woman-centred meaning of Luke’s poetry.  The world needs its centuries of Ave Marias and Magnificats.

 

Track 6:  Ave Maria, Gregorian Chant 

 

That was a Gregorian Plain-Chant setting of Ave Maria.

 

Track 7:  Magnificat,

 

A Magnificat by Thomas Tallis, the great polyphonist and recusant survivor, whose life and professional career extended through the contradictory religious creeds and persecutions of much of the Sixteenth Century.  A recusant, he died in his bed aged 85, having served the church and four tyrannical Tudor monarchs to his utmost.  

 

 

Was there a Roman census in Palestine (Luke)?  Was the Babe laid in a manger, because there was no room for them in the Inn, or was Mary visiting Elizabeth, a kinswoman blessed by late pregnancy, and her husband, Zacharias (as in Matthew)?  After the birth of Jesus, was there a forewarned flight to Egypt and massacre of first-born sons, when the Romans’ cat’s-paw, Herod, heard that a rival King descended from David (Matthew and Luke) had been born to a carpenter and his young wife?

 

The shepherds on the night, according to Luke’s tale, or the wise men - or magicians - somewhat later, according to Matthew - were convinced.  They saw freedom, a gift greater than material riches or fear of the boss - or even the shepherd’s care for his flock, which is his pride and ever-called-on proof of his compassion:  a love to tear down the authority of a king, an occupying power and rotten priesthood:  a child whose face, glowing in the light of a lamp, held them with focusing eyes:  eyes that spoke of a love and understanding, a capacity for compassion and logic that needed no speech to awe with a sermon.  They were eyes of commonwealth, peace, liberty, equality and altruism:  the King was one of us; the King, unelected, told us why we had no need to elect him to be represented - God had come down to live amongst us not in the cool of a mighty palace rich in gold, ivory, silver, precious and semi-precious tones, ebony, high-coloured  faience, peacock feathers, but as the son of a Nazarene carpenter.

 

Track 8:  Nowell Tydynges Trew Be Cum New (Instrumental)

 

Track 9:  Coventry Carol (instrumental)

 

Tyrants and good authorities were left for dead.  Simeon, Bethlehem’s old priest saw Jesus when he was brought to the temple for circumcision and sang, “Lord, now letteth thy servant depart in peace.”  Here is Geoffrey Burgon's setting of the Nunc Dimittis, for voice, trumpet and strings.

 

Track 9:  Nunc Dimittis, Burgon

 

Isn’t that preferable to wood magic of evergreens, holly and mistletoe, tinsel and fairy lights, turkey, mince pies, Christmas cake, wines, liqueurs and innumerable hazarded gifts torn from pretty paper to be pristine for a day before they leave a jealously guarded heap and before they join our other possessions?  Here is John Gardner’s setting of Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.

 

Track 10:  Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, Gardner

 

You could tell even a child that your love makes presents under the tree utter trumpery:  that your love is unreserved and will last not for 24 hours but a life long; that you will serve and - if called-upon - die for him or her, comfort and soothe at all hours; encourage it and praise every wonderful development; never feel envy - and more, scold and punish only what is wrong and never take out a bad day on one who has neither the wit nor the desire to fight back.   A child will play happily with that thought - to be loved like that by a fallible adult!  Isn’t it as magical a thought of physical objects that are brought out of nothingness?          

 

            “How the star shines!  Who am I and where am I?”

            - “You are a King in a world filled with kings -

            You live simply to die -

            And were born in a stable.”

 

            “How should I know of love, save that you devise?”

            - “I love you now and for your whole life long,

            And the love in our eyes

            Beyond death shall be well as one.”

 

                        (Poem Copyright, Mike Burrows, 21/12/12)

 

This was Classical; Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was by researched and written by Mike Burrows, and he joins me in wishing you a very happy Christmas and the best of New Years.

 

We leave you with the second part of Finzi’s In Terra Pax:  the second part, truly a revelation from the angels.  In a sense, the agnostic found what he sought after all.  He corrected ages of bad Latin to point out that the correct translation of the angels’ song was:  On earth peace to all men of goodwill!  The entry of the soprano - with the words, “Fear not!” – is unforgettable.  At the hushed close of the piece, one is left with the narrator’s awe and after-echoes of the wonder, Winter darkness, stars and chill.  A memory of hearing bell-ringing on Christmas Eve gave us this beautiful work. However we feel towards at best bogus Coalitions and complex Austerity, let’s make this Christmas a joy for all who are of goodwill!

 

Goodbye. 

 

Track Eleven:  In Terra Pax, Part Two, Finzi

The Production Team at Classical Break – Somer Valley’s outing into the world of classical music – wishes you a Happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year.  Listen to our programme on Saturdays at 9am and Sundays at 8am and 3pm.

 

 

15 & 16 December

Here is a repeat from the March 3rd-4th of this year.  It ends with the trailer for our Easter Programme, but don't be fooled by this:  we know where we are, and a Christmas Programme is in preparation!


The North of England

Track One: The Path Across The Moors, Arthur Butterworth

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

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 
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

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

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

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

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

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 

8 & 9 December

          CB 89  JEAN SIBELIUS

   

                   

               

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                (Sibelius

                     To Michael Mullen)

 

            That, after all, is the significance

            Of the swan:  he sits on his Father’s knee;
            With a power of lifelong resonance,
            A short-lived man will stay with him only
            In showing him the picture of a swan.
            Just this recollection will soon be there,
            With the music of strange isolation
            Candidature’s cries excite forever.
            The swan of the underworld swims and sings
            On Tuoni’s river as on the lake, seen
            By him, or soars between two worlds, its wings
            Spreading and working on air, and its keen,
            Weak-toned call is made hope in art’s reply
            To loneliness and the child’s unheard cry.

                           Copyright, M Burrows, 5/11

 

This programme was first Broadcast in 2010 and is repeated in celebration of the composer’s birthday (December The Eighth), and of his country’s Independence Day (December the 6th).  Here is the script - slightly fuller than in its broadcast form.  Rupert will be listening in from across The Pond.  His three deputies send their best wishes! 

Mike, Jayne and Suvi     

 

Signature Tune:  The Birch, Five Pieces (Trees), Op75, No 4. 

 

 

Hullo, this is Classical Break, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today’s programme is a tribute to the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), whose birthday falls on December The Eighth.

We have just heard his piano-piece, The Birch from a set of Five Pieces, Opus 75, written in the Autumn of 1914.  The trees stood in the grounds of his house.  He enjoyed rural seclusion; about his home, the artists’ colony of Järvenpää afforded contact with like minds, but the trees were a great source of inspiration; he would get to know them as they and he grew to age:  they possessed very different qualities and their company inspired clearly distinct emotions in him.  All his life, he had loved birdsong, the trees helped support the birds, but were beautiful personalities in themselves; trees, like all living things, had souls and could speak.

The largely timber house was named Ainola, The Domain of Aino, his Wife, and had been built on loans raised by his admirers. 

A famous Finnish composer?  It is not so strange an idea now as it was in 1890s Europe...  In a long, eventful life well-embroidered by a man who longed to be seen as a great man as well as a great composer, and succeeded well in the ambition, no matter how the outside world disillusioned him with its mass cruelties and changes for the sake of change, Jean Sibelius’ life began in financial and personal uncertainty as the son of a doctor with a taste for high living who died bankrupt when Janne was two.

It is possible that Janne never knew precisely who he was, if not a musician.  Like many children who have not had the time to get to know a parent or other close relative he has lost, he threw himself into not so much a hobby as a way of life, which for him had to be music, playing and later composing for, the violin, and dreams of personal heroism.

 

Now, let’s move onto a short cantata, Tylen Synty, or The Origin of Fire.  Written for the opening of a new National Theatre in Helsinki, in 1902, and revised in 1910, this is based on words from the Finnish Epic Poem, Kalevala - The Land of Kaleva, in which a land of archetypal heroes, the magician, the smith, the lover, the dispossessed sufferer, et cetera, vie with one-another or join forces against the rivalry of the Land of The North, Pohjola, the land of Pohja, which is ruled over by the witch, Louhi, and contains the Underworld, Tuonela or Manala.  The primeval world of Kalevala exerted a great spell on Sibelius; an unnumbered Choral Symphony and many of his tone poems and shorter orchestral and small instrumental pieces were generated by it or refer to it.

In Runo 47, the land of Kaleva is in utter darkness - sun, moon and all hearth-fires have been stolen by the Witch of the North and hidden in a far mountain to spite the magician-hero, Vainamoinen.  The music of the opening is sad, growingly plangent - the brass, deep woodwind and strings at the outset succeeded by violins and violas and then oboe:  interestingly, the oboe was often used almost vocally by Sibelius - a famous solo coming in the trio of the Scherzo of his Second Symphony, and the related cor anglais having a wonderful solo in the tone-poem, The Swan of Tuonela, for two examples.  In the music for Viborg University’s Karelia tableaux, the oboe and cor anglais have a prominent part, made to mimic the female voice, that, perhaps, of the suffering Motherland.

A baritone solo narrates the state of things with bassoon prominent, flecks of oboe and deep-toned string and subdued horn coloration.  Higher-toned strings and oboe come in, a birdlike call on oboe and flute is followed by a sturdy homophonic entry by the choir, sonorously accompanied, telling of how Ukko, the chief god of the Finns recreates fire, a new sun and moon, with his sword and body - flute and and triangle sound the striking of sparks; Ukko puts these treasures  in a double container - gold and silver - and gives this into the keeping of the Daughter of The Air, Ilmatar, who after nursing it, drops it, thus illuminating the world! 

The sense of making is ever-stronger in the choir and surging orchestra, climaxing in a chant to cause the hair to stand on end, as the clouds of darkness are rent by light and the fire falls through nine heavens, through six spangled vaults of heaven.  There, the music ends abruptly with one disjunct, crashing chord like a swung hammer landing on anvil.

Sibelius’ music is full-throated with his instinctive identification with the independence movement of a proudly unique country that is today still splendidly confident, sympathetic and stunningly imaginative in its popular culture.

Track Two:  Tylen Synty, Op 32.  

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today, the programme is about the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.

He liked to say that the Sibelius Family had been well-connected but fallen on hard times; that his musical style had formed without a study of folk music; that he was a Finn through and through.

In fact, there were no wealthy antecedents, he had studied folk music at source, and he was a Swedish Finn who learned Finnish as a second language, in his teens. 

He became one of life’s aristocrats, dissolute, craving, absent-minded and generous, spending others’ money and managing always to repay his debts, contriving always to live the high life of a cosmopolitan that he chose, with wife and children or not, though a loving husband and father when present and not working; also, he became the supreme nationalist Finnish artist, and, in time, spoke Finnish unless excited, agitated - or counting!

Very conscious of profile, the composer who in his middle-age dreamed wistfully that he was twelve and a virtuoso violinist, arrived almost comically at his professional name. As a young man, Janne Sibelius - in full, Johan Julius Christian Sibelius - adopted a seafaring Uncle’s first name, “Jean”  - thus gaining a ready supply of calling-cards!

Between 1926 and 1957, the year of his death at the age of almost ninety-two, many stories were told of the composition of a four-movement Symphony, one lasting thirty or forty minutes; new music was sent to be bound in fascicles building to a major new score; there were contradictory rumours of bonfires at Ainola.

In the ‘long silence’ of retirement, he revized, re-arranged or banned earlier works, tried his utmost to leave his chaotic opus-list in properly baffling order and issued a few small pieces through his publishers.  The Symphony remained a ‘work in progress’, tantalizing his many admirers and piquing and making curious detractors.

When speaking to a young composer who enquired, Aino Sibelius did not rule out the possibility of the organ-piece Surusoitto - that is, Funeral Music - ’s, being based on material from the Eighth Symphony.  It was ostensibly written for the funeral of the great Finnish artist, Akseli Gallen-Kalela in 1931, at which Sibelius, as an old friend,  was a pall-bearer.  It is weighty, concentrated music, strong in fourths, and sounds bardic, an entirely appropriate quality, seeing that Gallen-Kalela’s work was an attempt comparable to Sibelius’ at creating Truly Finnish Art, inspired by folklore.

I hear nothing incommensurate with symphonic writing in this impressive piece.  That it is not in conventional sonata-form in the Nineteen Twenties, is not a disqualification.  Sibelius had been moving towards a form of his own, generated not so much by established structure, but by a logic generated from the motifs and fragments of harmony as they occurred to him.  It is a scrupulous system based on both intuition, a strong imagination and fine ear, on a kind of deductive lateral thinking, but also on training and intense self-criticism.   Surusoitto is harmonically searching, its turns opening up doors on what in an opening movement, would afford glimpses of a new world -  all of Sibelius Symphonies seem to be distinct world-views in themselves, and this Eighth Symphony-world is a step further on from the Seventh and his Tone Poem, Tapiola.  It is strongly controlled in its thematic material, a superb introduction to...either a longer movement of a more conclusive nature, in which allegro-material provides contrast, possibly by thematic transformation, or to a more active second movement, possibly a brief scherzo. 

 

Surusoitto (Funeral Music)   

Track 3:  Surusoitto Op111 (Funeral Music)  

In the present day, composers have used computer-programmes to create pitched synthesizer- or ensemble-music out of everyday and elemental sounds.  My bet is that Sibelius’ peculiar gift was in capturing just this kind of music from his suroundings and doing so moreover within the constraints of the techniques of art-music tradition ever-more originally and intelligently applied. 

The ‘rightness’ of the notes on the page was this - the ‘internal logic’ of his symphonism the sounds of nature, of the weather and all living things about him.   The reconciliation of European Classicism and Romanticism and national folk-music was complicated by this more peculiar compulsion.  It caused him endless pains while composing - “Can’t be alone.  Whisky.  Going downhill, not strong enough for this...”, but also, moments of “glorious ego”, when he must have felt like the great magician that he had become. 

Nonetheless, to hear the cries of flying swans - of sixteen of them once - of cranes as they migrated or returned, their note of pathos the note of life’s suffering and nobility, or the moods of the wind in the birch or solitary fir, a note keenly attended-to for many reasons through the Arctic year, as to hear a pair of folk-singers sing runos from Kalevala to the accompaniment of the kantele - or Finnish zither - bewitched and enthralled, but one must always get closer - closer whatever one has achieved; there must be art-music to express both the occasion and the sensitive human reaction.  To hear even the contraction of house-timbers or groan of them under snow or their creaks of expansion in the sunshine of the thaw...  To know the light gone or returning: to see the shifting colours of Aurora Borealis or feel the exaltation of ‘white nights’ - after all, light has a frequency and therefore, sound... 

To hear the dripping of rain or drops of thaw...

Waten droppar, “Water drops”, was Sibelius’ earliest piece.  It is a simple pizzicato for violin and cello, a real achievement in spite of its simplicity and onomatopeia, when one thinks that he was only ten when he composed it.

Track 4:  Waten droppar, Water Drops

Now, three very spare compositions of Sibelius’ maturity.  All were written for theatre productions.  The discipline of writing incidental music undoubtedly helped sharpen Sibelius’ symphonic skills of focused meaning and sense of proportion.

Written for an overheated Bible-based melodrama by Procopé, Belshazzar’s Feast exists as an original score of several numbers and a concert-hall sequence of four pieces.  Let’s hear the slow meditation Nocturne, for flute and strings.  It is one of the most evocative, poignant and beautifully-shaped pieces in Sibelius’ entire oeuvre.  In Sibelius’ music lifelong, there is a glorious sense of ‘world’, of time and nature and our place in them; its expression is universal, directly humane or with an element of bystanding pity in all its moods and its intended evocations are pin-sharp in aptness.  There could not be better company than its spirit.

At the time of the run of the play, a cartoon depicted Sibelius carrying Procopé on his shoulders, a clear perception of the evident disparity in the talents of dramatist and composer.  If Sibelius remarked famously on another occasion that “No statue was was ever raised to a critic,” there is still no arguing with the cartoonist’s judgement in this matter. 

Track 5: Incidental Music for Belshazzar’s Feast, Op 51, Nocturne    

First, Listen! - The Robin Sings, written for Strindberg’s fairy-tale play, Swan White.  This is a beautiful, if stylized, evocation of birdsong - more accurately perhaps, the feelings on hearing birdsong.  The orchestration favours cool woodwind and strings, of course, and is as fascinating as the subject.  Listen for how cleverly Sibelius captures the suddenness of the bird’s awareness of a human presence, the hesitancy in his voice and his flight at the end, and with the listener’s sadness that the moment has passed.

Track 6:  Music for “Swan White”, Op 54, “Listen! - The Robin Sings.”  

A typical work in one of Sibelius’ most congenial veins, is the music for the play Everyman by Von Hoffsmanthal.  Everyman tells of how Death is instructed to bring sinful Everyman to judgement.  Everyman and his mistress, Paramour, are holding a banquet tonight.  The fourth number of the incidental music is the dance-song Tanssilaulu:  Me Kutsun Saimme, sung by guests in homage to Everyman, A Friend Has Invited Us Here.

“Everyman” contains music much of which is elliptical and elusive away from the stage, but it is enjoyable to create for oneself a drama consonant with its dramatic contrasts.  Folksong-like in nature, “A Friend Has Invited Us Here” is a simple song and pleasant listening in its own right, but its warmth is ironical in context. 

Track 7:  Incidental music for “Everyman”, Op83:  “A Friend Has Invited Us Here.”

The Sixth Symphony in D Minor is the nearest that Sibelius came to writing a ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.  It is mainly in the Dorian mode and its structure is both free-flowing through four movements and astonishingly bound together by the organic growth of its themes.  It was of this piece that he himself said that while other composers gave the public multi-hued cocktails, he gave them pure cold water.  The work can be seen as an Arctic Spring Symphony looking forward to Summer.  The nearest it comes to a slow movement is in the second movement, Allegretto Moderato.Opening with tympany taps, flute and other woodwind and harp, then strings, it grows out of what sound like the dripping of thawed snow, made strange by there being the antithetical notes of tritones.  The rest of the orchestra is slowly drawn in, the strings, woodwind and brass in uneasy scalic melding in contrary motion; the opening figure comes in altered with the addition of repeated notes on the second note of the interval, and is succeeded by curious mixed-scored scalic triplet-shifting, like a fitful breeze in trees, the brass entering briefly, the strings and woodwind developing the material with a more baroque-seeming resolution.  The scalic figure returns and flute sounds like birdcalls in this uneasiness - finer, higher string-writing cross-hatches and into a forest glade, flute, oboe and clarinet form antiphonal birdcalls in which other woodwind join; this leads to further development of the scalic figure heard near the beginning, the birdcalls drawn more agitatedly together, and the close comes on the glow of a warm, major cadence.  How this all makes musical sense is by its masterly - and almost painterly - sense of mood, its beautiful suggestion of musical narrative.  The Allegretto Moderato.

Track 8:  Sixth Symphony in D Minor, Op 104.            

Sibelius’ last conducting engagement was in 1939, for the New York Fair:  the piece was a short movement for strings and drums. Andante Festivo was originally a commission for music for the opening of a factory and based on a piano-piece, The Village Church, Op 103, no 1, but now his choice for performance at an international event as the world neared another total war.

This is a work in Sibelius’ later style, classical in purity.  It is in a lighter than symphonic style, but its themes, like those of Surisoitto, might have been susceptible of symphonic development: a more elborate string-music opens the Sixth and Seventh symphonies, in the Sixth to just this luminous effect.  Was it ever intended for Symphonic use? Sibelius’ interpretation of the piece in 1939 was  far more long-breathed than is customary nowadays, though the music does take deliberate treatment well; it is very dignified and memorable for its gravely melodic style.  It is a genre-piece that invokes images of ceremonious dignity without pomposity, and divorced from the context of an official ceremony, it may come across as a hymn of thanksgiving and valediction:  perhaps Sibelius chose to conduct it because in it, the craftsman plies his unaffected trade with skill and creates a pleasant impression; one fittingly humble and straightforward in tone for all its solemnity.   As a violinist himself, his career-long, Sibelius’ writing for strings was superb in every respect, often innovative-seeming, but here, it is pared back with all other aspects of his craft to create a hymn quietly inspiring, easy to follow and possessing considerable eloquence.  Andante Festivo is in every way an improvement on the piano-piece that gave it much of its material... 

That unfinished Eighth Symphony...

At one time, during and just after the First World War, Sibelius had had three great symphonies on the go, the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh, piecing them together from a wealth of motifs and progressions: he once said that the Almighty threw down the pieces of a mosaic, and the artist’s occupation was to fit them together.  Somehow, all those Symphonies had been completed, revized, published.  Then, his last tone poem, Tapiola - the domain of Tapio - god of the forests in the Kalevala - and the incidental music to The Tempest had been his last profound achievements, Tapiola almost destroyed by him in a fit of despair after it had taken its final shape.  How haunted by the the Eighth Symphony, promised to the musical world for thirty years, Sibelius’ admirers remain.

He was honoured internationally to an unprecedented degree, showered with invitations to festivals and with presents, flowers and cigars - from the Forties onwards, he was regarded as joint-most famous cigar-smoker with Winston Churchill.  He was consulted on occasions other than musical, but was seen as a kind of oracle.  He was famous for being totally bald.    An intensely nervous individual, hypochondiacal in his youth, seriously ill with growths in his throat and troubled by arthritis caused by alcoholism in his mid-forties, he was living long enough to be a grand old man.  Of his apparently still proceeding Eighth Symphony, he let it be known that."One does not sell the bearskin till one has shot the bear’.

His craggy image appeared on U--S postal stamps during Russia’s attempt to retake Finland, the Winter War, beginning on the Thirtieth of November, 1939 and ending on March the Twelfth-Thirteenth, 1940,with onerous territorial demands  in the South and South-east, the lands and places of strategic importance to be occupied by Soviet forces.  Then, on the Nazi invasion of Russia in June of 1941, Finland joined the Axis and attacked Russia.  It was put about that Der Führer enjoyed Sibelius as well as Wagner and Bruckner.  As a nationalist Finn, Sibelius was undoubtedly flattered by the new ally’s regard for him, unaware of Nazi atrocities, but well-aware of the evils of the Soviet Union.

He was an intensely fellow-feeling man; the Second World War - so much more horrific than even the First - very possibly proved that the logical or expressive parameters of his new Symphony could have no currency in a world capable of such madness as genocide or area- and atomic--bombing, in the face of which ego or civilization came to fathomless grief.

Very late in his life, Aino, his Wife of over sixty years may have been prompting his conscience. “Tell the truth, Janne,” she advized  him in front of one visitor to Ainola, “there is no Eighth Symphony.”

Let’s hear the Andante Festivo.

You have been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  This  Is Mike Burrows.  I hope that you’ve enjoyed this programme and that I’ll have your company again soon.  Cheers!

Track 9:  Andante Festivo