2 & 3 February

This is a repeat from last February:  a programme of reveries that is intended as a tribute to those who foster imagination as a path to human understanding, and to those who value their dreams of what might be as they do what is and may be:  those who value the dreams of others as they do their own, and so value (and not only dream but work for) their happiness.

CB Where The Rainbow Ends

Intro, Track One: Quilter - Where The Rainbow Ends Suite: 1. Rainbow Land

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

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

Track Two: Allan Gray: A Matter of Life and Death

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

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

Track Three: John Tavener - To A Child Dancing In The Wind              

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

Track Four: Farnon - Pictures In The Fire.

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

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

Track Five: Edward Elgar - Fairy Pipers

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

Track Six: Cyril Scott - Lotus-land

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

                      Come away, O human child,

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

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

Track Seven: Rootham: The Stolen Child

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

Track Eight: Elgar – Owls, An Epitaph

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

Track Nine: Percy Grainger - Free Music

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

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

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

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

Track Ten: Ireland - Legend For Piano and Orchestra

© Mike Burrows 2/12

26 & 27 January

Intro: In Freezing Winter Night, Britten

 

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is of winter music and was researched and written by Mike Burrows We have just heard In Freezing Winter Night from A Ceremony of Carols for three--part treble voices and harp by Benjamin Britten. This is Winter standing all about one: everywhere one looks, the frost bareness, a merciless beauty. Our earth is cold; yet the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul; we need never lose it. Wonder is in the frost whiteness as in the white fire of remote stars. Is this one’s everyday world? In awe, two boys’ voices move in canon, a third moving with the frost-feeling accompaniment. This music was written in a cabin on a neutral Swedish freighter crossing the Atlantic, as Britten returned tardily to Britain from the United States in 1942. Minus its generator-hum, a nearby refrigeration compartment perhaps aided his imagination... The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by winter: and yet, we have the Christmas story; this time of seeming frozen stasis is the illusion. If much sleeps or shivers, Spring is gathering its force under it all, merely in wait. From John Playford’s English Dancing Master of 1651, and words written later for broadsheet-sale, here’s All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away).

 

Track Two: All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away) Trad

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows. Its theme is Winter.

 

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was a lonely figure among the Generation of The Eighties - 1880s, that is. His style was personal: he was capable of close musical reasoning, a brilliant sense of instrumental colour in combination, but held to no one system of any aspect of music, save instinct. His music harks back to pastoral and courtly Italy, and forward into regions that are not for nostalgia or the musically faint-hearted.

 

It can be frankly illustrative of early music, birdsong, bells - or harsh, terse and distorted, and working progressions of thought through regardless of who can follow. Here is the fourth partita of his Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, which begins in chant and strict, four-part canon! It is in three movements, for this Sinfonia is in twelve subdivisions - one each for the zodiacal signs - and divided equally into four ‘Partite’ - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... The composer denied us the crutch of a detailed programme: what programme there was was, he said, not to be told. The Sinfonia was written in 1951. For its social context, the postwar period in Italy was a time of great bitterness, of the settlings of scores arising from the Fascist regime and its ruinous involvement in the Axis cause, an era of poverty, unemployment and the Marshall Plan. American aid in funds and food-parcels had as much to do with support for the Left in Italy as with the privations and sufferings of a defeated nation. In the 69 year-old Malipiero’s complex vision of Winter, there appears to be no place for hope, though there are moments of fleeting beauty and consonance. It The Partita and Sinfonia end in cruel, growling discord. Perhaps, as Thomas Hardy put it,

 

“If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’

 

Tracks Three to Five: Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, Winter, Malipiero

 

A near-contemporary of Caplet and Ravel, and taught by Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, Deodat De Severac was a composer of the Languedoc in Southern France. His output was largely of character--pieces descriptive of everyday life in this distinct region named after 1the language of its people, Oc. Here is a movement from his Georgic Suite, Le Chant De La Terre, or The Song of The Land. Les Semailles, The Sowings - of seed. In Winter, we think of - and look forward to - Spring.

 

Track Six: Le Chant De La Terre. Les Semailles, de Severac

 

To see a light moving on the ground in winter darkness is to wonder who carries it, where And why. It is one of the memorable images from long winter nights, when wits are sharpened and curiosity excited that much more strongly, or when we are tired and reflective, the cold slowing our minds so that we take time to watch and think. There can be thoughts of threat; who would be walking abroad on a night like this?

For the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lantern that moves along the night and that interests our eyes is the light of soul. In his late choral and orchestral work based on Hopkins’ poetry, Inscape,

 

Edmund Rubbra set this idiosyncratic sonnet in a nocturne of some gravity.

“Men go by me whom either beauty bright

In mould or mind or whatnot else makes rare.
They rain against our much -thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite...”

Hopkins cannot help them, ultimately as out of sight is out of mind; but Christ minds,

 

“Their ransom, their rescue, and first, last, fast friend.”

 

Rubbra’s setting seems, aptly, to grow out of chant; the harp has an important, though sparely speaking role, heard bell-like and intermittently against other sombre colours of accompaniment.

 

Track Seven: Inscape, 2nd Movt, Rubbra

 

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, I will Go With My Father A-Ploughing. The words are by the Irish poet, Joseph Campbell. There is a wild quality to melody and harmonies - in Gurney’s musical vocabulary, they could be Celtic or Northern: a similar quality informs his songs On Black Stitchel (a poem with Northumbrian setting), and The Fiddler of Dooney (setting Yeats). This song has a tragic significance. Gurney’s Father, a Gloucester tailor, was his hero, and had lately died; Dad, of all his relatives, had understood and admired his musical talent and ambition: he had died during Gurney’s troubles after discharge from the Army, before he had so much as seen his son’s music in print...

 

Track Eight: I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing

 

The poor are always with us, as the scriptures have it. For some, there is a simple explanation. However unwelcome their attentions, however greedy and cruel they become in pursuit of other people’s fair shares; however many lives are broken or ended to provide that last refinement of power and luxury - the rich, too, are always with us. A folksong now, a carol: Cold Winter is Come. Let’s not tolerate its message. ‘A time to remember the poor’ is an institution in default of refusing at any time to regard poverty as social justice. The person or persons who composed it have earned no posthumous fame, owing to his or their class. An enlightened professional recorded it in 1891, before it, too, could die.

 

Track Nine: Cold Winter Is Come, Trad

 

Here’s a sonnet on Winter, written and read by Mike Burrows:

 

 

Winter

 

What comes down on the world is not held back

By words, and protests remind of others –
Others when mankind was less far off-track,
That were demeaning enough. Earth mothers
The dead as well as she does the living –
If anything, hugs the dead with more ease,
The uncomplaining dead to whom giving
And taking go deep beneath clay and freeze.
Below the living root they have to lie:
The poor man lies below the conduit
Of available wealth, and his sad sigh
Or rage is a matter of unspirit
To the soulless for whom those sacrificed
Are dwarfed by wealth as by the tree of Christ.

 

©  Mike Burrows, February 2012

 

That last sprinkle of gold dust on a one-k-snifter as the world goes bust is a particular pleasure and acquired taste. Local charity replaces the Welfare State,the poor have no cultural ambitions nor skills, no worthy hopes in life, only the dignity of work that they don’t choose. Off waltz public amenities and common humanity and the rich do rather well - 60 Billion last year alone added to the assets of a thousand people now ‘worth’ between them nearly £400 Billion... Those who cut, close and sell off our inheritance at will, and those who cost the country over £100 Billion pounds in lost tax-revenues each year, and Billions more in expropriation-contracts, evidently think winter smiles on local charity and ‘austerity’... The relevance to music in this is who writes, performs, criticizes and broadcasts the art-music of tomorrow? Who grows up sufficiently in this atmosphere of falsehood and denial to create or assist creation in a rich tradition of a thousand years, the phenomenon of mankind’s musical communicativeness? As music-charities scrabble for a scatter of pennies, children from less well-off backgrounds, it seems, have no entree and need not apply, as most outlets and institutions concerned in musical development close or raise their fees and we return to the days of the common man’s carol we have just heard - of two nations, two musics. A composer once watched people as they took their seats in one of our opera-houses and said, “Music starves, but the wealthy could live for months on the fat between their ears.” Let’s hear Winter Wakeneth All My Care from John Rutter’s choral song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment, When Icicles Hang.

 

Track Ten: Winter Wakeneth All My Care, Rutter

 

Here’s another song by Gurney. It sets a poem by Edward Thomas. Snow is a brief portrayal of a little girl’s thoughts as she plays in the snow. The little girl in question was the poet’s younger daughter, Mywanwy. A strange, dream-like epiphany of universal suffering is treated with fugitive strokes as in a sketch. The after-impression is of sensitivity and kindness: the human warmth that snow cannot pretermit. Gurney loved children and shared their games, preoccupations and humour with genuine enjoyment. Edward Thomas was a less certain companion, oversensitive, afraid of derision and often simply impatient; there is a stressed unease in his words: you might say that in his anxiety to be truthful and avoid sentimentality, he could not find the way back to being young. He would have been surprized and made sadder to know how his children loved and looked up to him...

 

Track Eleven: Snow, Gurney

 

From snow to The Snowdrop, a song for female choir and orchestra from 1909-10, by the late romantic Russian composer, Alexander Grechaninov.

 

Track Twelve: Snow-drop, Grechaninov

 

Born into a highly musical family in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Edward German began as a composer mainly of symphonic and orchestral works and incidental music for the theatre, but in middle life became a successful tunesmith in light opera, regarded as a successor to Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre. Rather dead-headed criticism by George Bernard Shaw and other commentators had deterred him from more ambitious work, suggesting that his style was too theatrical! The tragedy of German is very English. ‘Successful’, he wound up confessing, “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...” A scrap of paper found among his last effects stated, “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...” To put his real talents into perspective, it’s believed that Elgar enjoyed his music more than that of any other contemporary. The trick is to listen to what German composed: it is obvious that he was a progenitor of most of our tradition of ‘British Light Music’ in the 20th Century, but if the imitations are discounted, he can be heard as Elgar heard him, as a fresh, cosmopolitan voice influenced by French and Russian rather than Teutonic models. His sound owes something to his Welsh blood (and the Welsh hymn-tradition), and the Marchlands in which he grew up, but nothing to the music of British academicians. Written for the Leeds Festival in 1899, The Suite, The Seasons, is a Symphony in all but name. The finale, Winter, is written in sonata--form, and is a stirring juxtaposition of a solemn hymn and brilliant tarantella, developed and combined at the close with Tchaikovskian fervour; the movement’s qualities are not a million miles from those of early Sibelius.

 

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM. I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon. Thanks go to associate producer, Miss Suvi Burrows, aged eight, who requested the Edward German! Goodbye!

 

Track Twelve: Winter from The Seasons, German

 

This script was edited and two pieces – Snow by Ivor Gurney and Snow-drop by Alexander Grechaninov – left out owing to lack of time! The sonnet was written while the programme was being put together and was retained.

 

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