CB  English Music

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme consists of English music, an orchestral march, a song-cycle, a slow movement for the organ and War Elegy for orchestra.

 

We begin with the Funeral March from Edward Elgar’s incidental music for WB Yeats’ and George Moore’s verse-play, Diamuid and Grania, a Tristram-and-Iseult-style love-story based on Irish legend, and staged in 19O1.  The work appears under Elgar’s title, Grania and Diamid. 

 

Where the rest of the score is almost bardic in slenderness, in the March, its leading-motives are built up into a symphonic work of grandeur and deliberate austerity.  Yeats described it as “Wonderful in its heroic melancholy.”  “Elgar,” Moore said, “must have seen the primeval forest as he wrote, and the tribe moving among the falling leaves.”

 

In this march in the aeolian mode, economy of means, including sequences, creates an impression of gravity and control that are hard to fault in any detail.

The hero, Diamuid has been killed during a boar-hunt.  The horns and trumpets above reedy oboe and plodding strings and tympani make a dry tread of the march in which soft or edged violins and violas suggest both mist and the keening that accompanied Irish funerary rites.  The trio comes not a moment too soon at an expression of heavy, brass-laden grief.  Calling for muted brass, this trio is like a sung answer to the march but gradually, the tension increases; a broader set of sequences bring in another climax in which clarinet adds a warmer and more pathetic touch of its own.  The march returns to meet the pre-ordained climax of the piece - an impasse in which the brass are at full strength; the trio-repeat is curtailed, the dying fall comes in open fifths in a bare string texture:  and it seems that the scene - and grief itself - has dissolved into the air in futility.

 

Track One:  Funeral March from Grania and Diarmid, Elgar

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of British orchestral and vocal music. 

 

“A fine strong piece of work,” Ivor Gurney said of Vaughan Williams’ Song-cycle, Wenlock Edge, possibly the best-known settings of poems from the collection, A Shropshire Lad, by AE Housman. 

 

 

Wenlock Edge (1909) was one of the first fruits of VaughanWilliams studies with Ravel: this can be heard in pointilliste scoring of the accompaniment by piano and string quartet.  His activity in folksong collecting, arranging and digesting, and tastes in Tudor and 17th Century music are also clearly to be heard.     

 

Here, we have something of a find:  the first recording of Wenlock Edge, from 1917, sung by the singer who had given the cycle’s first performance:  the tenor, Gervaise Elwes (1866-921).  The pianist on the records,

 

FB Kiddle, had accompanied Elwes on that occasion.  The string quartet, here, is the London String Quartet, whose members included the great Albert Sammons on first violin.  In the accompaniment, one hears heavy pedalling and free rhythmical touches in the piano and strings, use of the long--drawn bow and portamento - slides between one note and the next.

 

From the onomatopoeic outset on strings and piano, the first song, On Wenlock Edge, grips the imagination.  Some actors are said to sing when they speak.  The central solidity of Elwes’ tone is impressive - his diction absolutely clear as though he speaks when he sings, his vowels correct, consonants crisp, even dutifully rolling Rs. Notice the abrupt, held-in phrasing, absolutely taut and yet magical.  Where strong feeling is called-for, he pounces with absolute security and intense specificness.  One should not doubt that this is the wind on the wooded Edge, that this is the lad’s voice, and that the thoughts that hurt though brought to the Edge and contending with the wind are thousands of years old.  The tree of man was never quiet.  Vaughan Williams sets these words with outstanding care and truth to their meaning.  The song is a development of both the initial material and an idea, a conceit or extended metaphor.  The detailing under the singer’s line - sighs, flourishes, semitonal swaying, pedal--notes is minute, tremblingly vivid and essential, the piano and strings subsidiary but telling.

 

The rapt, arpeggiated opening of From Far From Eve is matched by his staunch tone - every accent is firm, but poignant - urgency is there; this is not a song for somnambulism.  There are no wide interval drops or rises in the melody, which is almost a chant.  This throws attention onto the harmony and from this standpoint, common chords will seldom sound so strange as in this short song, a real thought of the clef of the universes, to hear the voice of 1917 in 2011!  As a fellow human being in a vastly changed world, one almost wishes to take that proffered hand.   

 

Is My Team Ploughing is a ballad dialogue in alternate verses divided between a dead man and his friend.  The dead man has his fourline melos, to which the friend’s is a rejoinder.  Elwes fines away his voice for the ghost and sounds increasingly harried - and convicted - as the worldly but now troubled friend.  The mounting tension between questioner and guilty party is breathless long before the living has indirectly to confess that he is sleeping with the dead man’s sweetheart.  “I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart.  Never ask me whose!”

 

Often, this song is criticized for a melodramatic ending at odds with the style of the rest, but here, not only is Elwes more operatic than is customary now, but his performance has been planned and built up so intelligently that the extra intensity is justified, almost unbearable, the outcry of life to the unbiddable dead.  Is pity or anger uppermost?  Note the violence of emotion here.  The phrase  ‘Never ask me whose’ is broken and purged of all but guilt, yet the strings are hawklike, gripping with a taloned repeat of the introductory bars-refrain, tension dying only as the exhausted body relaxes and sleeps.  Here, a man is caught between desire and loyalty, unable, out of pity and fear, to word outright his actions in life to a ghost.  Has he found a better bed, lying ‘as lads would choose’, than his dead friend?

When he heard this powerful setting, all Housman noted was the omission of two of his verses near the beginning - Vaughan Williams had left them out as not poetry.  Enraged, the poet sat bolt upright in his chair, red-faced, his eyebrows and moustache bristling.  

 

The third song of the cycle, “Oh, When I Was In Love With You” receives a good performance here - a short strophic song of eight lines, mocking and not unsmiling.  The carelessness of tone is to be regarded as ironical.  No-one ever gets over being in love...

 

“In Summertime On Bredon” is beautiful  in tissues of chiming piano and see-sawing strings:  the lovers on the hill hear churchbells from far and wide and dally where they are - they’ll come to church in time.   Comes the fatal verse:  the frosty sounds of the accompaniment, violins and piano, bring the verse of the girl’s rising up early and going to church alone.  Where before, it dallied, Elwes’s voice is slow, pausing, shocked, pitying, blanched, the tolling of deep cello and piano, the passing bell, the high strings the intense glare of snow as the girl goes to her grave.  The lad does not attend the funeral.  The final verse reaches the pitch of On Wenlock Edge and Is My Team Ploughing but is not overplayed - hearing the bells from the hillside - as they rise to an intolerable clamour - the lad exclaims that he will come to church himself. 

 

The return to the peace of the opening for the repetition “I will come” is pitiable indeed.  To be leaving such a beautiful world!

 

“Clun” is more leisurely than nowadays, with pronounced portamento and more rubato in the vocal line than we are perhaps used to:  the voice is carried along by the “waterwheel” motion of the music, but the placid harmonic richness underneath it will not permit total passivity - and yet the peace promised is such that we are happy to go to “the quieter place than Clun.”  The postlude rises warmly into distance of a magnificent breadth and depth - a far horizon to comfort all the hurts and ironies of what we call fate or the human condition.  Between us and it is another horizon - that which stands between us and the performance--practices of ninety-four years ago, between us and another world...    

We apologize for the sound quality of this item.  Elwes and his accompanists stood or sat in front of a large horn in a small studio - Elwes the closest - as wax was styled with the soundwaves they produced.  There were no patches, only retakes of complete sides of records; music had to be timed to fit neatly these sides. 

 

Track Two:  Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams

 

Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-76) was the grandson of Charles Wesley.  Trained up as a chorister from an early age, he grew into a fine executant on the organ and impatient choir-master.  Fortunate to coincide with the rapid development of organ-design - in which he had a hand - he was unfortunate in becoming a church-musician and coinciding with a repressive period in Cathedral administration.  His career ended in a lack-lustre eleven-year tenure of the post of organist and choir-master at Gloucester Cathedral, and he died in harness.  

 

The Andante in F is his most famous instrumental work of his prime.  Something of his genius for improvization is found here.  Nothing of the age in which he lived can be heard, save the Romantic imagination and, possibly, the simple phrase and counter-phrase that serves as a refrain.  The movement as a whole resembles a hymn with side-lights - the imagination of the organist as he dreams up the figurations, decorations and contrapuntal transformations that would do justice to church-music in a no-time between verses!  So far from being cocked a snook at, the hymn undergoes attentions and stages of transfiguration that any hymn would give its eye-teeth to experience, culminating in a transformation worthy of Bach, whereat, the sober but passionate dreaming ends.  Pace his initials, S S Wesley was not one of many and didn’t sink in vain.    

 

Track Three:  Andante in F, SS Wesley

 

The Gloucestershire composer Ivor Gurney’s orchestral music is thought to consist of three works - a coronation march, a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and a symphonic movement...

Not long ago, what may be the symphonic movement mentioned in letters after the War, and is later described as an Elegy, was edited and recorded - a kind of march and trio For the Fallen.  It lasts for about ten minutes - a tragic marche funebre with a trio as long-drawn out as it is intensely moving. 

 

The piece is Elgarian in style, but not Elgar.  It is worthy of Elgar, but Gurney’s detachment from his material is less cool and unlike Elgar, he served as a soldier.  It is a sad testament to war-service; brave, halting, bearing the strokes of fate and willing itself on.  The amazed heart cries out on God, as Gurney himself wrote in one of his poems.  This is an Elegy from the ranks. The symphonic movement is mentioned in his letters in June of 1919.  “Symphonic movement sketched up to the return, and as I think, in its final form.”  In November, 1920,  five days before the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, he mentions the Elegy: “There is a hard and futile grind there...”   Had he come to intend it for use at that ceremony? God knows, one wishes that it might have been so used – or that it might have accompanied later services of Remembrance.  With Gurney’s memories, it was impossible to write another Grania and Diamuid.  The Elegy mimicks the overall structure of this masterpiece, but something less objective, something more terrible, haunts it.  It is full of strange harmonies and insistencies, a rhythmic kick and stubborn triplet fanfares halting all along, and ends in total exhaustion and defeat. 

 

Straightforward martial measures were not to be expected; the determination to stick it out takes over.  The climax that one fears seems turned away-from at last, too painful - as if Gurney’s mind could not bear the sheer physical strain of his miseries and grief for his fallen comrades, which is where the exhaustion truly came in.  It might be seen as a kind of expressionism.

 

Yes, it begins in Elgar.  The theme of the march is like a rhythmically displaced version of that of Grania and Diarmid, scored similarly, but climbing to the near-hysterical foreboding of real terror and heartbreak.  It remains controlled, almost laconic.

 

The trio is true heartbreak.  It seems a memory of the Wesley Andante in F that we have heard.  On clarinet and violins, like remembered, not to be returned-to, happiness, perhaps the very soul of the organ-pupil at Gloucester as he marched towards or away from the front lines, blooms with all the fragility of ideas of home in the mind of a doomed man...  Spiritually, the influence is transcended, but irresistible to recognize...  It is the difference between immeasurable inspiration and an already powerful sentiment.  Here, the reminiscence of a ghost of Gloucester Cathedral’s organ-loft and choir is made the more beautiful for its context.  In the army, Gurney had been looked on by even the regimental sergeant-major with awe and friendly, kidding amusement for his musicality and untidiness.  “That man, Sergeant...”- “He’s a musician, sir.”  “He backed me up once, I shall never forget it.” 

After unease has entered and pervaded the dream, and the brass have come to be party to a, swelling, noble protest, bell-like over the heads of dreamers, the ineluctable march returns; reaches its point of not going on and implodes, struggling to the last.  As in the Elgar, the trio simply dissolves from what it was to what might have been and then to nothingness..  It is as if Gurney, a keen attender of regimental reunions, is seen standing alone by the Memorial after dignitaries, guard of honour with flags, military band and a crowd of onlookers have left the Sunday street, their wreath-tributes placed.  He stands bareheaded in the rain.   He’d escaped; having ‘wangled’ a ‘blighty one’ he had missed the worst of Paschendaele and lived.  Haunted, all ends in bare fifths and drum-taps, coldly shining woodwind; the timbres of flute and clarinet capturing the ghost-voice of a bugle.

 

After the war, the advocacy of a Gervase Elwes might have made some difference to his career as composer and poet but one swallow would not have made a summer for an artist as (rightly) ambitious  as Gurney.  In any case, Elwes was killed under a train in 1921, the year before Gurney’s patience and the thread of his reason finally snapped under the strain of what he thought his obscurity.

 

Elgar, Vaughan Williams performed by Gervase Elwes, in his time a famous Gerontius, and SS Wesley:  our programme culminates in Gurney, who was inspired by all of them.

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and this is 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 Four:  War Elegy, Ivor Gurney

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11 & 12 May

Classical Break :  The Sea

Hullo, welcome to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  I’m Mike Burrows.

 

Today, we are going to hear music inspired by the sea, and we’ll begin with a justly very famous song.

 

John Ireland, who was born in 1879 and died in 1962, was fated to compose many works that have not found acceptance on terms other than cold admiration of his technique, which was considerable, and irritation at his inability to meld the various influences on his style and so speak consistently for himself, which was more considerable still.

 

Though successful as a musician’s musician and teacher, he felt bitterly his lack of public success.  Yet   in this perfect setting of a poem by John Masefield, Sea-fever, he achieved that most elusive thing, a popular masterpiece. 

 

Track 1 John Ireland:  Sea Fever

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM.  And next in our programme of works inspired by the sea, we turn to Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953).  From the outset of his career, Bax wrote ambitious orchestral and chamber works characterized by a brilliant talent for instrumentation in addition to an as-enviable talent in cultivation of a late romantic symphonic style.  Descended from English Quakers, he was  fascinated by Celtic folklore, and, sympathetic with the cause of Irish Independence, even wrote poems and short stories under an Irish pseudonym!  His life-long, he was inspired also by the Atlantic in its many moods.  Tintagel was written in 1917 in Cornwall where its thirty-four year-old composer was spending six weeks holiday with his lover, the young pianist Harriet Cohen, for whom he would leave his  wife and children.  He had returned from Dublin only because War had broken out and since then, a number of his Dublin friends had been shot for their part in the 1916 Easter Uprising.

 

Quotation of the Sick Tristan motif  from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde relates the piece to Arthurian legend and the conflicts caused by a passionate affair, but is placed within a score that, beginning in an evocation of sea-birds wheeling and calling above the gaunt ruined castle and brilliant, high-running sea in Summer, draws one into a drama of the elements, nature and a man’s restless but uncompromizing spirit.  A drama, too, of love.  Bax once claimed to be ‘a brazen romantic’ and to have no time for ‘isms’ in music, but even if you have never seen or felt Tintagel, the place, hearing his Tintagel, the word that comes to mind as you listen may be idealism.    

 

Track 2 Arnold Bax:  Tintagel

 

That was Tintagel, a tone-poem by Sir Arnold Bax and not the last work that he would  dedicate to Harriet Cohen, his beloved Tania.

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The Australian, Percy Grainger, 1882-1961, was at first primarily a pianist.  Frankfurt-trained, he was inspired by the example and friendship of the Norwegian, Edvard Grieg.

 

His compositions were mined from his own peculiar temperament and energy in addition to his deep study of folk-music in England, America, the South Seas and elsewhere - like Bartok, he recorded singers and players in order to notate their tunes with becoming accuracy, and delighted in scoring and rescoring his folk-based work to

recreate not only the music but also the ‘atmosphere’, the unique, idiosyncratic nature of realistic performance and make-up of choirs and instrumental groups!

 

He pioneered the use of poly--rhythms and ‘elastic scoring’ to this end. 

 

This arrangement of Scottish folk-tunes -Strathspey and Reel  - What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor counterpointed - is art-music that expresses uniquely something of music-making in context - in the bar of a dockside pub or confines of the foc’sle.  Grieg would have been fascinated by it. 

 

Track 3 Grainger:  Strathspey and Reel 

 

Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) was for many years a pianist-accompanist and conductor of the front rank in British music.

 

He was also a fine composer and wrote amongst other things two extraordinary Tone poems on Irish Legend, With The Wild Geese, and The Children of Lir.

 

We are going to hear an extract from The Children of Lir, an unaccountably neglected masterpiece by a great musician.

 

Towards the end of his life, suffering from terminal cancer and on holiday in Ireland, he saw a tapestry treatment of this strange story, in which the children of a king are ransformed by a curse into swans and doomed to rest for three hundred years on a lake near their old home, three hundred years in the stormy wastes of the Sea of Moyle and three hundred years off a group of islands.

 

The piece is as much of legend, coast and sea as isTintagel.  It requires a large orchestra and, in one place, soprano-vocalise, for performance, and lasts for about half-an-hour in one continuous movement carefully divided into chapters of the story.

 

The idiom is less fluent or modern than Bax’s, more openly influenced by the previous generation, composers such as Tchaikovsky, and of the generation before that, particularly Berlioz - Harty’s speciality as a conductor was music of this stamp.  The scoring is coarser and bolder, instruments are more obviously confined to customary roles.  The Irish accent of Harty’s music, a matter of speech-rhythms and familiar turns of synthetic folk-melody, is surprizingly well-reconciled with the idiom of these models.

 

Let’s hear Calm Seas and Blue Skies.   

 

Track 4 Hamilton Harty:  The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra:  Calm Seas and Blue Skies

 

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was born in 1852 and died in 1924.  He wrote prolifically in every genre of Art-music and was also the foremost teacher of composition and an important festival-administrator in the England of his day.

 

His music was often performed abroad - his Third Symphony, the Irish, was presented by Mahler, amongst others.  He  wrote seven symphonies, several concertos, six Irish Rhapsodies, chamber music, many operas, cantatas, much liturgical music, including Anglican Services, songs and other pieces, including parodies of ‘modern’ music, which he regarded as ‘damned ugly, me bhoy’.

 

We will hear the opening song from Songs of The Fleet.  This cycle, his second dealing with the patriotic British nautical tradition, was once highly popular, like its predecessor, Songs of The Sea, a staple work for choral festivals, concert-recitals, and in piano-reduction, home-performance and early recording.  In its original form, it is a demonstration in full of his choral, orchestral technique, in which vivid melody, rich harmony, dovetailing and scoring all play their part.  In its inspired and inspirational tone, it is simply the expression of sailors’ feelings on leaving port, as the latest representatives of the breed of sailors who ‘Lead the line’ and face both the sea and battle, today.  As such, it could express the pride to be taken in any courageous endeavour - in life itself.  Here it is:  Sailing at Dawn. 

 

5 Stanford:  Sailing at Dawn from Songs of the Fleet

 

The American, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) wrote for many films. His best score before Hitchcock called by was written for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, the story of a young widow who goes to live by the sea and takes a cottage once owned by an old sea-captain, whose ghost haunts her and who becomes the love of her life.  As the author of Blood and Swash, the tale of her captain’s life at sea, she meets and falls in love with a philanderer.  In the film, the ghost effaces himself with a powerful speech made to her as she lies sleeping.

 

The cue that we shall hear accompanies this: in the course of Farewell, we hear many of the leading-motives of the soundtrack.  The mixture is much as before:  light - but not easy - textures involve the high woodwind or violins, and dark and impassioned or less certain moments are conjured up by deeper strings, bassoon and brass.  The brass is usually reserved for expressing storm and stress or - utilising the French horn - romantic warmth.  Above all, the music is touching because impressionistic, harmonically complex, notes constantly qualifying straightwardness; it remains music independent of the images it accompanies, but almost feels its way in life as must even ghosts. 

 

Captain Gregg talks of her situation,  the wonderful places of his travels,  which they will now never experience together - she will forget him or think of their association as a dream.  The passion in the speech at last appears to gust - but be cut off by the futility of talking of all they have both missed:  she has made her choice - life.  The ebb and flow of the tide is ever-present, the swell and undertow of the sea are as powerful a force as the pull of human attraction is irresistible - whether reciprocated or not - and as merciless.  

 

6 Bernard Herrmann:  The Ghost and Mrs Muir:  Farewell

 

We return to Hamilton Harty, to hear the last section of The Children of  Lir, which describes how the bewitched are rescued by an island hermit after their nine centuries of wandering, only to age and die on being christened.  The stillness at that point is that which one feels on coming indoors out of the stormy sea-air, still feeling a humming of the wind in one’s ears, hardened coldness of face and dry brightness of vision.  A bardic peroration of varied scoring builds and subsides stoically with the lonely, resolving sound of a holy bell. The brusque fanfare with which the piece ends rings out much as in the beginning, but with finality.       

 

7 Hamilton Harty:  The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra:  Transformation, Baptism and Death

 

So we reach our final work for today.  The Finn, Uuno Klami, was born in 1900.  Over-shadowed as all contemporary Finnish musicians were by the international reputation of Sibelius, it was perhaps out of an instinct for artistic self-preservation that Klami looked to the France of Ravel and Les Six, and to Stravinsky for his influences, though the undertow of folksong and Sibelius meant that he did not entirely avoid imitation of the great man, or at least found no means of his own of creating a new national style or content in his brittle, less consistently inventive music.  Written for the most part between 1930-31, in the conducive surroundings of his coastal birthplace, the six numbers of the orchestral Suite, Sea Pictures were originally intended for a Sea Symphony.  As a skilled sailor, he intended the last movement Force Three, to convey not the appearances of the open sea, but  the feelings of sailing with a Force Three wind behind one!  The result, one might say, culminates in something akin to Bolero In The Finnish Gulf, but even Ravel’s Bolero a work first heard by Klami not long before, was a little--known modern work once, and reminiscences of it would not have seemed so obvious in the 1930s.

 

Really, the resemblance does Force Three no great harm, being carried off almost as well as Bax’s slighter though perhaps more appropriate quotation from Tristan und Isolde in his Tintagel, which we heard earlier!

 

You have been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, We hope that you have enjoyed our programme and that we’ll have your company again soon.  This is Mike Burrows casting off with ForceThree, by Uuno Klami.  

 

Track 8 Uuno Klami, Sea Pictures, Last Movt, Force Three

4 & 5 May

CLASSICAL BREAK
Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in D Minor, Op13

NOTE:  This script is the original version, but due to it overrunning our time slot, the final programme omits some of the introductory analysis. I have left it in here for interest. 
This programme was fiirst broadcast in June 2012. RK

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

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

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

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

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

Cue:  Extract from Piano Trio in D Minor, Rachmaninoff

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

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

Cue:  Opening of Second Symphony In B Minor, Borodin

Cue: Motto and 1st Subject, Rachmaninoff

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

 Cue:  Second Subject, Rachmaninoff

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

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

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

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of Development, Rachmaninoff  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track Two:  ll Allegro Animato.

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

 Track Three:  lll Larghetto

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

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

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

 Track Four:  lV Allegro Con Fuoco

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

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

Cue from Symphonic Dances, l Non Allegro, Rachmaninoff

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