19 and 20 January

Winter. Yes, this week's programme sets the scene for the next 2 months as we shiver, slip and slide into Spring. The programme focuses on various aspects of the season, with contributions from Edmund Rubbra, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Schumann, Delius, Bernard Herrmann, Ivor Gurney, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

CB Winter

A world of snow, glaring.
Distance-darkened, five figures haul; each raises a
                                                          gauntleted hand
That still grasps its ski-pole, but it is a brief wave
As they scarcely glance back: ahead they make the only
                                                                             tracks
And march farther into a world that will not be ours.
They move round-shouldered, trembling with a full-stride -
How soon they sink below sight - over the edge of the
                                                                           known,
Gone in near-silence as we give them three cheers
And stand with only the twin tracks to trace behind the
                                                                       ski-tracks.
To the horizon, the powdery snow diamondless,
The skies bright, the clouds themselves high tracks
Without shadow:
Not a sight, not a sound anymore
Of those who have crossed the curved line we retreat from,
Though they have left their marks, those strong, those
                                                        shaky human marks
Of the trail - of the trail to the Pole, beyond which
Perhaps lies the real glory.
Throughout the globe,
Art follows man into any hidden Winter.

copyright Mike Burrows, 18/01/13

Intro Track: The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes, Gurney

This is Classical Break and I'm Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows and takes winter as its theme.

We have just heard a song by Ivor Gurney, whose benign spirit wanders often into the mind. The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes sets a poem by Ernest Casson. It is a song for contemporary shepherds watching their sheep. This is Winter standing all about one: everywhere one looks, frost bareness is, a merciless beauty that one feelsand breathes with mounting sense of earth-cold that the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul. A miracle when one knows that Winter itself has cold hands, but no warm heart.

The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by Winter: and yet, if unmediated by the Christmas story, what other process of mind does Winter cause?

Now, a setting of a sonnet of Edmund Spenser made by Edmund Rubbra. It comes from his set of Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra, a work of his mid-thirties, first performed in 1935. After the first performance, he amplified the original string quartet accompaniment, very likely because the textures of the string parts are often strongly contrapuntal and when played on only four instruments may not bear the weight. However, to thicken the lines may overpower the soloist’s contribution (it’s rather subjective).

The sonnet’s compact structure of fourteen lines, balanced phrases and poised rhythms, comparatively long lines and an argument developed tautly within strict metre and rhymes, is not easy to set - its form being a single verse, frequently stating abstract propositions in a manner that does not imply any melody other than its own. In the case of New Year Forth Looking Out Of Janus’ Gate, the tenor sings above a fugue; the quiet climax brings voice and instruments together in a broadened statement before the stalky opening subject, a tempo primo, ends the piece abruptly.

Track Two: Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra Rubbra

Tchaikovsky’s twelve piano pieces, The Seasons, were written month by month for the journal Nuvellist. They were intended for readers to play, they were written to deadlines, work on them being often prompted by Tchaikovsky’s valet. It was fortunate for us that Alexei remembered. Small-scale and unambitious as they are in form, The Seasons are anything but ephemeral as music. Each was headed by a quotation from Russian poetry. January (At The Fireside) is headed by words from Pushkin: “A little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire is dying in the fire-place, and the candle has burned out...” There you have It - two of Russia’s more sophisticated 19th Century artists: but the piece is a miniaturization of much that is best in Tchaikovsky, the song, the thought-provoking forays into rhythmical contrast and overall charmingly sensitive affect conveyed with notable melodic and harmonic skill - all this in a form of simple alternation.

Track Three: January (At The Fireside), Tchaikovsky

Schubert’s Winterreise, composed only two years before his death, frightened his friends, who may have imagined that he stared for too long into its icy regions for their comfort: how far their friend could travel by staring into the flame of a candle and thinking... A twenty-four song-cycle setting poems of Muller, it tells the story of a journey into cold and nightmare, snows and madness, undertaken by a disappointed lover. Here are three contrasting songs from the cycle, No 11, Frühlingstraum, No 18, Stürmische Morgen and No 20, Der Wegweiser - Dream of Spring, Stormy Morning and The Signpost. Spring is the hope of salvation; storms and cold are too much to the lover’s mood; the lover has his path; it is shown him by the sign-post; the beloved did not have to make this journey - she has a home. The wanderer’s journey is far from over.

Track Four, Five, Six: Winterreise - Fruhlingstraum and Sturmische Morgen, Der Wegweiser, Schubert

When news broke that Schubert had died, the eighteen year-old Schumann was heard to sob all night long.

Here is the Slow Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor. This arioso is possibly Schumann’s most beautiful concertante creation. The entire concerto was written and scored within a few days in the October of 1853 and during a spate of inspiration. It was his last major work and was composed for the young Hungarian violinist, Josef Joachim, who with the twenty-year-old Brahms had done much to brighten what was a difficult time in his professional career. In the event, the concerto was suppressed by Schumann’s musical executors, his pianist-wife, Clara, Joachim and Brahms after a private run-through with an orchestra, two years after the composer’s death. Nearly eighty years later, Joachim's Great-niece, another virtuoso violinist, Jelly D’Aranyi, claimed to have been contacted by the spirits of her Great-uncle and Schumann; the objections of Schumann’s last remaining daughter, Eugenie, merely delayed performance and publication of the concerto a short time - Both took place after Eugenie’s death, in 1938. We hope to devote space to the entire work and the fascinating story surrounding it, in a future programme. Marked Langsam -Slow - and beginning on cellos, the slow movement treats an introduction and violin solo melody to ornamentation and development in ternary form; near the close, the violin sings its melody a third lower and in the minor. Filled with baroque touches, canons, imitations, appogiatura and trills, this is music instinct with the skills of old music made anew, and with all the dignity of the old. The movement as a whole expresses a depth of sadness unusual in Schumann, and yet the sheer, full-hearted purity of means and ends and beautiful sense of form one finds in it, confers on it an air of wisdom innocent of self-pity. It seems to sing over the cradle of the vanity of human wishes. Schumann loved his children, six of whom he watched grow: here, it is as if we watch a dear child at the window, its dark eyes hypnotized by the twisting fall of snow-flakes, the fall that seems to rise. We feel the sadness of how much young promise must learn by suffering through a too-short life. This is not to sentimentalize either Schumann’s fascination by the baroque, or his own winter thoughts. “Work,” he had written to himself some time earlier, “while there is still light...” .

Track Seven: Violin Concerto, 11 Langsam, Schumann

The Slow Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor.

The four North Country Sketches were the Bradford-born Frederick Delius’ tribute to his home county, Yorkshire. Most of his life was spent in France with periods when he was resident in Florida, Germany and Norway, but in 1913-14, he wrote an orchestral suite depicting the Yorkshire countryside that he had loved and explored as a boy. Frederick or Fred Delius came of German stock, and was named Fritz. As a man he had a curious accent, but at the bottom of a weakness for French idioms and beyond fencing of slightly German gutterals softened by the Norwegian of his wife, one encountered the tell-tale flat vowels of his county of origin. His view of the moors in Winter, Winter Landscape, has the characteristic breadth and light and shade of all his pictures in music, but the violins, violas and woodwind bring an edge, the higher-pitched instruments chiming in coldness, the horns subdued, flute and oboe and then clarinet the hope of warmth. The chromaticism of the harmony and rocking ostinati beloved of this composer are restricted and in the end unresolved, as though keen perceptions of Winter have no contrivable end in themselves, and simply fade out as the focus of one’s gaze is claimed elsewhere...

Track Eight: North Country Sketches, Winter Landscape, Delius

Now, a Branles de la Torche from Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore or book of dances, of 1612. Torch--dances were a favourite courtly spectacle at this time, torches borne aloft throughout. What a symbol for defiance of harsher winters than we know now!

(A bit of 17th century trivia here - the winter of 1684 was one of the harshest - certainly coldest on record. The Thames in London froze over for 2 months and on a local note, the coldest county was Somerset, where the ground froze to a depth of 4 feet!).

Track Nine: Bransles de la Torche, Praetorius

The American composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote many fine film-scores: but also a number of equally striking concert--works, where his colouristic imagination was given full play. Here is his glistening evocation of February, from the song-cycle, Fantasticks, to words by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton.

Track Ten: February, Fantasticks, Herrmann

A traditional song: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, otherwise known As Dives and Lazarus. In this, The miserly contempt of the rich man for the presumably undeserving poor man brings its own reward...

Track Eleven: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, Trad

To Bernard Herrmann the film composer. Let’s hear his Sleigh-Ride, written for the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which a Midford farmer sells his soul to the devil (Scratch) for Hessian gold. The Scots song on which the cue is based is one thing; the prominence of the tritone - the devil’s interval in music - in the harmonies quite another, seeming to be telling us where the enriched Jabez Stone is ultimately headed...

Track Twelve: Sleigh-Ride, Herrmann

“Great God, this is an awful place!”

If one wants to take on Winter and win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other men, all of whom are starving.

To end, here’s a suite of cues from Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in 1911-12. Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished from cold and scurvy on the return journey.

Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, or the photography - the artistry - of Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five extraordinary men. Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment - strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness, of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...

The cues are entitled: Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched and

written by Mike Burrows. We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon. Goodbye!

Tracks Thirteen to Nineteen: Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams

12 and 13 January

This week's programme is a bit of a personal indulgence. No particular theme, just a lot of 20th century music, Debussy, Stravinsky, some modern 'classical' music for brass band, some organ and choral classics and a Debussy piece played on a synthesiser by Tomita.
Apologies to you if you saw a previous blog which indicated that the programme was about Winter. That's next week!

5 & 6 January

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




CB Twelfth Night

Intro: A Childhood Memory, John Barry

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

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

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

Track Two: The Adoration of The Magi, Respighi

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

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

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

Track Five: Padouana, Schein

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

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

Track Six: Seven Joys of Mary, Trad

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

Track Seven: Gouty Carol Trad, arr Bowyer

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

Track Eight: Wassail Song Arr VW

Next, Somerset’s Wassail.

Track Nine: Somerset Wassail

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

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

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

Track Ten: O Mistress Mine, Thomas Morley

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

Track Eleven: Farewell, Dear Heart, Jones

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

Track Twelve: Come Away, Death, Quilter

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

Track Thirteen: When That I Was, Johnny Dankworth

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

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

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

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

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

Track Fourteen: Twelfth Night, Castelnuovo-Tedesco

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

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.

.

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