9 & 10 November

War in the 20th century

Today's programme is a tribute to those who gave their lives (voluntarily or otherwise) in the global conflicts of the 20th century.

Script (Rupert Kirkham):

 Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Symphony No. 6 in E minor (opening minute)

The opening of Ralph Vaughan-Williams 6th Symphony. We'll hear more from that  work later in the programme.
This is Classical Break and I'm Rupert Kirkham. Now, we've got a bit of a departure from our normal today; as I'm sure you know, it's the time of year when we remember those who died in the great wars of the last century.  Armistice Day is on the 11th and this programme is our contribution to the memories of those terrible times which live on in the literature and music of the twentieth century. In the programme, we'll be hearing music, poetry and prose on the subject of war and reactions to it - specifically, the first and second world conflicts.

All this week on Somer Valley FM, we've been broadcasting an exceptional series of short programmes under the title, "Lest We Forget", drawing together popular music of the time, war and other poems and readings from local author, Chris Howell's book, "No Thankful Village" on the impact of the Great War or Midsomer Norton, Radstock and the surrounding area. These programmes have been put together by Michael Taylor. Today we'll feature 2 of those programmes and we're going to mix it up with classical musical contributions from two of the 20th century's finest  British composers - Ralph Vaughan-Williams and Benjamin Britten.

Let's start with programme three in the 'Lest We Forget' series. We'll begin with Michael Taylor's introduction to the programme as it went out last week.

LEST WE FORGET
Programme 3

segway into

Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Symphony No. 6 in E minor (middle section, 9 minutes 19 secs)

The middle section of Vaughan-Williams' 6th Symphony, played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan-Williams always maintained that this symphony, performed over 100 times in it's opening year of 1948, just 3 years after the end of the second World War, was not about war. He had recently started compsing film music, which, he said, had liberated him to experiment with new styles (for him, at any rate).

However, many people quite logically felt that the 6th was a war piece, despite his protestation, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music!". Later, we'll have the opening movement of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem - that was definitely about war, but first, here's Michael Taylor again with "Lest We Forget".

LEST WE FORGET
Programme 4

Thanks to Michael Taylor for allowing us to use his programmes in Classical Break and to Chris Howell and Mike Plummer for their evocative readings of Chris's material, which came from his book, "No Thankful Village".

Now onto our final piece today, the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. We're not going to play all of it - we don't have time - just the first movement. Requiem Aeternam. It includes a setting of Wilfred Owen's war poem, 'What Passing Bells for Those who Die as Cattle" (transcript below).

It's the hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten this year and the piece we're about to hear sets Britten firmly amongst the pacifists of the 20th century. The War Requiem, written in 1962, was to commemorate those who died in both World Wars and was, in the words of Shostakovitch, "The greatest work of the twentieth century". It was in fact commissioned four years earlier for the consecration of the new modernist cathedral designed by Basil Spence in Coventry, the old one having been seriously hit by German bombers in 1940 and left in ruins.

So here's the first movement of Britten's War Requiem, performed by the LSO under Richard Hickox, with the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the tenor, Philip Langridge on a Chandos recording from 1991.

 Enjoy the rest of the programme and join us again for another edition of Classical Break, next time. Goodbye.

Benjamin Britten
War Requiem (first movement)

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
    Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
    Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
    Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
    And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
    Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
    The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent maids,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen

2 & 3 November

Classical Break “Somme”


This is a repeat from last year, the 24-25th November. 

 

                 Remembrance Sonnet

 

                    (Somme Valley)

 

 Yes - everything - even a girl's rose-musk

 Can haunt the field's wooded edge, whose dark gave
 Clear notes both mystery in a June dusk,
 And reflection; everything, that is, save
 What is not felt. Now, silence sounds Last Post;
 Release comes and free hours in which to think
 Of the owl's cry heard in the close: a ghost
 Of cold brass flared with vibrato, to sink.
 In the camp, some wonder if hope is dead;
 To sink into an acrid clay as man
 Is only a picture to men now led
 By brass, and yet as sure as what began
 Their lives; put off perhaps for days and more,
 Will come the proof of what one has lived for.

 

       (Before Montaubon, July 1^st, 1916,

           The Manchester Pals)

 

A small township, there it is, the future,

A tactical eternal city – near
In the mind’s grasp and, if enough endure,
For fight and wit to bring us to.  So clear
Through the periscope, that slim glimpse of stone
And earthen tiles, of tower part-masked by trees
And calm slopes: lifted by the fields, high-flown
But proffered beyond all casualties.
One man, shot through, whimpering, finds refuge
As explosives strike soul and drape over
Worlds with earth’s mud, yet some feel the deluge
Moves with them.  They help him into cover,
And find ways towards that town on the rise –
Ducking as his shellhole doubles in size.

 

Copyright, Mike Burrows, 20/11/12

 

 

Track One:  I Love only You, Grieg (arranged for orchestra)

 

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a continuation of our remembrance broadcasts and was researched and written by Mike Burrows. 

 

Of partly Danish blood and born in 1892, the son of an interior decorator from South Shields, the Mancunian, Herbert Ingoe, was a typical recruit to the British Army in 1914.  Ninety-eight years have passed since his medical.  He joined the Eighteenth City Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, on the Fourth of September, Nineteen Fourteen.  He was described in the report as a clerk, aged twenty-two, dark-haired, of a sallow complexion, with hazel grey eyes.  He was five feet three-and-a-half inches in height, with a girth, at full expansion, of thirty-one-and-a-half inches, capable of an expansion of two inches, and weighed in at one hundred-and-six pounds, that is, seven stone-eight pounds.  He was passed as being in good or normal health apart from low weight, which could be soon increased.  His eyesight was categorized as D-Six, which one takes to mean poor.  In other documents, 1810411, Private Ingoe, Herbert was described variously as a Congregationalist and Wesleyan by faith.  He was teetotal - no impediment to his becoming a Pal.  Here is a patriotic song:  The Deathless Army.

 

Track Two:  The Deathless Army

 

Basic training in drill, physical fitness, care of equipment, musketry, use of the bayonet on straw, trench-digging and combat in attack and defence were got through.  The only records are of innoculations and postings; Herbert left no trail of fines, fatigues and CBs - Confinements to Barracks.  He would have had a few days of leave during this time, and stayed with his parents - he had a sweetheart who lived not far away from them.  A song by Grieg, now, one of his Melodies Of The Heart, setting a poem by Hans Christian Andersen: I love But Thee.

 

Track Three:  I Love But Thee, Grieg

 

A popular song that sent many men to France and the Battle of The Somme was Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kitbag - it was much satirized even at the time...  Here, it can be heard – sung amid a medley as played by HM Coldstream Guards at the Wembley Military Tattoo of 1925.  The other tunes need no introduction.

 

Track Four:  March Medley

The Eighteenths, now the Eighteenth (Service) Battalion, arrived in France on the Sixth of November, Nineteen Fifteen. They marched ten miles to Folkestone on route-march-hardened feet for a rough channel-crossing to Boulogne.  During his time in the Army, poor Herbert was guilty of one minor infraction of King’s Regulations:  he was reported by Corporal Beattie and had up on a charge of losing an oil-cloth through neglect, on the Twenty-first of November.  He was directed by the court to pay for a replacement.

 

A march and train-journey brought the unit to Amiens.  As for Herbert’s service in France, between drill, route-marches, training in trench-warfare and labour on a British Army railway-system to expedite the moving of men and materials to the front, there were short stints in the lines, and further preparations for an up-coming push.  There were periods of rest, though nothing to compare with the Manchester Pals’ celebration of Christmas.

 

Easter would have been celebrated most richly in men’s hearts. 

 

Unattrib. Track:  Rejoice, the Lord is King, Wesley

 

For a man like Herbert Ingoe, the Easter of 1916 may have seemed all-important, the season of resurrection amid the Spring of the French countryside and blasted landscapes of War, where somehow, Nature lived on in battening corvines and giant rats  but also as larks nested and flowers and grasses sprang somehow from contaminated mud and the dead bodies of men and horses.

The expectations of those at home weighed heavily.  Here’s a patriotic arrangement of a song by the Irish composer, Balfe:  The Trumpeter.

 

Track Five:  The Trumpeter, Balfe

(The Trumpeter was actually by Dix.  Apologies to the shades of both for this misattribution!)

 

One asks oneself what hi-jinks the smart soldier would have come to expect by the Spring of Nineteen Sixteen.  Victory, owing to overwhelming numbers and superior equipment, perhaps!

 

At last, the momentum of preparations reached their height.  The Eighteenths left greatcoats and other unnecessary equipment in constituted warehouses:  on the eve of the push, they paraded and were addressed by their Commanding Officer via a megaphone.

 

Track Six:  Moto Perpetuo, Variations on A Theme Of Frank Bridge, Britten

 

That was the Moto Perpetuo from the Variations On A Theme of Frank Bridge by his pupil, Benjamin Britten.

 

As a component of the Thirtieth Division, they moved up through an expanded trench-system to the front line. Their task was to assist in the rolling back of the local German defences and capture of the fortified town of Montaubon beyond.  To reach Montaubon, they would have to advance some three thousand yards, almost two miles, over rising ground, in the face of strong opposition.  The Germans had been bombarded by heavy artillery for a week; in spite of big, concrete dugouts, they had not coped well.  Yet how well-protected they were would cause some surprize to the British Tommy.  It was believed that most of those manning the German forward defences had been killed or that concussion had reduced them to confusion or numb incapacity, and that special shells filled with metal balls and fused to burst in the air had cut the barbed wire defences ahead of them to shreds.

 

This was one occasion when the barrage was heard in England:  the poet Thomas Hardy wrote a poem, Channel-firing.  Here is Gerald Finzi’s setting of that poem, from another defining year in our country’s recent history, 1940.

 

Track Seven:  Channel-firing, Finzi

 

In fact, thanks only partly to the concrete dug-outs, the weight of artillery had not come close to doing all that had been asked of it - even of the shells fired, many had been duds, and the fusing of the shells meant to break the wires had been left far too much to chance. 

 

Now, overnight, Stokes mortars - an invention of the previous year - were employed from the front trench, many  their spherical projectiles aimed at barbed--wire to make assurance doubly sure.  Soldiers who took part in the assault spoke later of seeing numbers of football-like objects lying amid and around the unbroken wires - mortar--shells that had failed to explode.  On the sector that Private Ingoe and his comrades were due to go over, occurred one of ten preparatory acts of man well-diguised as God that erupted at fortified points on the Somme front that day.  To add to the destruction and terror caused by bombardment, at three minutes to zero-hour - Seven twenty-seven A M - miners detonated a large explosive charge under the German position known as Kasino Point.  Some elements nearby had gone over the top prematurely, only to be injured by debris from the huge spout of earth and stones.  What goes up must come down.

 

Track Eight:  Climax from the first movement of Sinfonia Da Requiem, Britten

 

A moment from the Sinfonia Da Requiem, by Benjamin Britten. 

 

At Seven-Thirty, the whistles were blown along a wide Front; bayonets fixed, the British, Commonwealth and French troops involved in the attack scaled ladders.  They emerged in three mighty waves, one hundred yards apart.  Try to imagine going over the top while carrying a back-pack, rifle with bayonet fixed, ammunition pouches - one hundred-and-twenty rounds had been issued to each man – iron rations, admittedly of the barest, a full canteen, gasmask and trenching-tool, two grenades for the use of trained grenadiers and two empty sand-bags, a burden in total of about seventy pounds...      

 

Selected sections were given extra duties - carrying large rolls of barbed-wire, further trenching-tools, wire-cutters, duckboards, machine-guns and ammunition-boxes, or other equipment, over and above their own - men would be marked out by white shoulder-flashes, or yellow triangles in addition to the standard--issue metal discs worn on the back so as not to draw friendly fire on oneself.  The duckboards were to be placed across the trench-walls to enable men following up to advance quickly over them, and the rolls of barbed-wire would be set up on the far side of the captured positions.  During the advance at a walk -in order to keep everyone, including artillerymen, machine-gunners and mortar--firers in supportive rather than unwittingly lethal phase - casualties were heavy, but a German Redoubt, Glatz, was taken, the enemy trenches were overrun  and then, Montaubon beyond, fell.  German counter--attacks were repulsed over the next few days.  On the First of July through, the spirits of troops facing heavy resistance had risen with the taking of prisoners and, ultimately, the chief objective.  This in spite of no-man’s-land being torn up by shellfire.  As they overran comparatively light resistance in the German front-line, an enfilading machine-gun post caused many casualties, but could not halt the British attack.  A Battalion was normally divided into Four Companies; one imagines that C--Company was in the second wave.  The second wave of the Eighteenths had a relatively easy advance; the German lines were neutralized and crossed with less wastage of shock troops than in other Sectors.  Junior Officers kept their companies in strict formation, armed with Webley revolver and whistle only.  Soldiers had been ordered not to halt to assist wounded comrades.  The remaining in close order was intended to ensure that the men were defensive of one-another but, more particularly, offensive in weight of numbers, an effective force in hand-to--hand combat.

 

Military policemen followed-up in the British trenches, encouraging ‘stragglers’ to face the front and do their duty...  Courts-martial cost time and money.  The story is told of a wounded man - walking wounded’s - seeing two young soldiers cornered by Red Caps where they were hiding - as he stumbled on down, he heard two revolver--shots.  In another touch of thrift, it had been laid down as a point of honour for the walking wounded to return to Field-dressing stations carrying rifle and as much as possible of their other equipment.  Furthermore, at the outset, soldiers had been repeatedly warned to be frugal with their personal canteen of water...  The combination of the rum-ration and shock must have left soldiers with a deadly thirst. 

 

Track Nine:  Funeral March from Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Britten

 

Day One of the Battle of The Somme cost the British Army its greatest-ever number of casualties:  57,750, of whom 19,240 were killed.

 

From his Mother, Mike heard the unsubstantiated family-story that a young soldier, distressed and badly wounded, was left to sit in a crater; when his mates sought him, later, they found only a crater doubled in size. 

 

There it is.  As a member of C-Company, the Eighteenth (Service) Battalion, 180411 Private Herbert Ingoe was killed on the first day of the Battle of The Somme.  Of how he had met his death there are no details.  He was noted on a form as having been “Killed in the field”, the words scribbled and signed at Headquarters.  His last effects, signed-for, were sent home in two groups:  first, a notebook, photo and ribbon; second, one disc with chain, two letters, one postcard, one diary, two notebooks, one French and English dictionary, one New Testament, three visiting cards, two newspaper-cuttings,  Herbert’s Father, George William Ingoe, signed for these and also later accepted his son’s scroll and Victory Medal.  Herbert’s body went uninterred, but his name is inscribed on the Thiepval monument for those with no known graves,  Pier and Face 13A and Fourteen C.  He is remembered elsewhere, too, on the War Memorial at Boggart Hole Clough and on the Blackley Wesleyan Sunday Schools Roll of Honour.    

 

In spite of his age, he had been little more than a fairly puny boy on joining up, weighing only seven stone-eight pounds and being possibly of impaired vision - yet he had volunteered and been catapulted into the armed forces.  What had he had to offer but willingness to serve, and his life? 

One unfamiliar term in the military records haunts the reader:  ‘embodied’, obviously means ‘attached to a body of men’, but it seems almost as though the recruits were given their physical persons by the Army. 

 

Perhaps Herbert lost his through neglect, one thinks bitterly.  There are two photos of him in uniform:  he looks tall and well-built, his features rather noble, if curiously inexpressive about the mouth.  There may be signs of strabismus, a lazy right eye.  He seems defiant.  His physical stature was increased by apparent inner strength, no doubt to do with Faith as a devout Wesleyan.  Like his signature on forms, his appearance is confident.  His autodidactic bent is hinted at by that dictionary returned to his family!  Also, his sentiment - witness New Testament, photograph, letters and ribbon.  One wonders what was in the notebooks and diary?  The real Herbert emerges as a physical entity, even as a mind, but what of his voice, his opinions? 

 

How sturdy and weighty a citizen was Herbert when expected to hurl himself and seventy or more pounds of equipment up that ladder and over the parapet?  To add to that burden, what a weight of years and decades of international hatreds and expectations he had to carry, as an ex-City clerk of twenty-three or -four!  You have to ask yourself how much taller this Private had been than a Lee Enfield rifle with bayonet fixed.

 

Track Ten:  Lament for String Orchestra, Frank Bridge

           

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script, the story of a Manchester Pal, was researched and written by his Great-nephew, Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon. 

 

Goodbye!

 

Track Eleven:  I love Only You, Grieg (arranged for orchestra)

 

The Ingoe children:  At left, Alfred (a stretcher-bearer during the Great War - he survived postings to the Dardanelles and Belgium, and was discharged to the Army Reserve at Charleloi in 1919); Centre-back, Herbert; Centre-front, sister Edith, (who lived until 1983); At right, Harry (who died aged 11, in 1910). 

26 & 27 October

CB Blake

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  Let’s begin with a nocturne of great beauty written for tenor solo, solo viola, semi-chorus and orchestra, by Sir George Dyson, Night Hath No Wings, a conflation of verses by Robert Herrick and Isaac Williams.  It forms the third movement of a massive “Cycle of Poems” written for performance at the Three Choirs Festival:  Quo Vadis, or in English, Whither goest thou?  The austere timbre of the viola sets the tone for what follows:  an arioso not far removed in melodic or harmonic style from those of the Seventeenth Century of Herrick - incidentally, Isaac Williams was a Victorian and follower of the Oxford Movement.  Dyson sets the words with modest aptness, but smouldering intensity in which voice, viola and strings vie in pathos, woodwind - flute and clarinet - introducing a kind of sickroom closeness.  Pizzicati punctuate.    

 

Night hath no wings for him that cannot sleep;

And time seems then not to fly, but creep;

Slowly her chariot drives as if that she

Had broke her wheel...

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress...

When God knows I’m tossed about

Either with despair or doubt,

Yet before the glass be out,

Sweet spirit, comfort me...

 

Consolation comes slowly and unsurely with Isaac Williams’ smoother, longer-lined verse:

Unto the east we turn with watchful eyes

Where opens the white haze of silvery lawn

And the still trees stand in the streak of dawn...

 

The sub-chorus sing, first soothingly, then, after further protest from the soloist, with pizzicato tread of strings...With a restatement of Herrick’s verse beginning, In The hour of my distress, comfort is perhaps felt at the close, with its repetitions of the words comfort me, and a dying fall.  Written for the cancelled Three Choirs Festival of 1939, Quo Vadis was performed in full only in 1949.

 

Track One:  Quo Vadis, Night Hath No Wings,  Dyson   

 

Next, an improvization by the clarinettist, Richard Stolzmann and the percussion-group, Nexus.  Eternal Triangle Beckons. 

 

Track Two:  Eternal Triangle Beckons, Stolzmann/Nexus  

 

Now, a group of orchestral songs by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, all performed by Kirsten Flagstad, and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Oivin Fjelstad.  These are marvellously idiomatic renderings.  

 

First off, Since Then I have Questioned No Further, a setting of a poem by Runeberg, dates from early in its composer’s career, and was praised for its folkishly lyrical quality by no less a figure than Johannes Brahms, when performed at a soiree in Vienna.  In his maturity, Sibelius orchestrated the song in customary neutral tones of effectiveness. 

 

Why is Spring so fleeting,

Why does Summer never last

Thus did I used to wonder

And ask many a person in vain...

 

Track Three:  Since Then I have Questioned No Further, Sibelius

 

But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen is a song from Sibelius’ maturity, around the time of his Second Symphony, and instinct with pity and sadness that gnaws at the heart of mankind whatever the season.  The poem is again by Runeberg.  A girl longs for her lover, who does not return with Spring, the swan, the lark, the curlew...

 

Track Four:  But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen, Sibelius

 

The last of our Sibelius songs today is To The Night, a setting of AV Forsman-Koskiemies from the period of Since Then I have Questioned No Further.  The spirit of the singer hastens to meet comforting night.

 

Track Five:  To The Night, Sibelius

 

Now, a work for trumpet solo and string orchestra by the Armenian-Scottish American composer, Alan Hovhaness.  The great crisis in his career - rejection by his teachers at Tanglewood Music School after the award of a scholarship - was two years behind him when he set to work on this piece.   It portrays a heroic priest, the eponymous Khrimian Hairig, who led his people through many persecutions.  The trumpet intones as the voice of this man, the strings’ block-chordal responses growing in fervour and canonic contrapuntal independence.  Armenian semitones spice modal forms of chant.  There are moments of holy calm as at the beginning.  The fullest statement of the melodic material is reserved until the close, and broadens in typical idealistic statement, the trumpet like a golden crown.  The piece is subdivided into three sections:  The Chalice of Holiness; Wings of Compassion and The Triumph of Faith.  Khrimian Hairig, by Alan Hovhaness. 

 

Track 6:  Khrimian Hairig, Alan Hovhaness

 

Our last work today is the Clarinet Concerto by Howard Blake.  Blake, a Londoner born in 1938, studied as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music, his lessons in composition given by the Belfast-born pianist-composer, Howard Ferguson.  His catalogue of works is massive, running into over nine hundred opus numbers:  but he has worked intensively as an accompanist and conductor, this secondary hectic career involving much travel and exposure to many styles of music ranging from pop, through jazz, to modern art-music.  A brilliant pasticheur, he has written much music in a tonal idiom recognizably influenced by that of his own teacher, Ferguson, Gerald Finzi, Hindemith, Delius and Peter Warlock.  You will know him by his music for the film, The Snowman. 

 

It is fair to say that this much-commissioned composer has an ability to create music that is sometimes described as ‘accessible’.  The idiom is approachable and recognizably of a tradition.  

 

It’s not revolutionary in style, and for many decades, this was to say that music was dull or fake: in the days when a culture of ‘lightning war’ seems to have been the anti-aesthetic believed on by all fashionable terrible infants and BBC Controllers. . 

 

Blake’s Concerto is structurally akin to that by Gerald Finzi (who was himself under-appreciated by movers and shakers in his life-time), and covers much the same emotional range, beginning with a flourish - though one provided by the soloist rather than strings.  The first movement, Invocation: Recitativo-Moderato, Molto Deciso,  opens in near-blues, which are supplanted by a mediaeval chant-sounding first subject coloured by the clarinet. Brusque onward movement is held back by the tug of doubt or sadness, complex canonic or imitational textures or semitonal sighs.  The scoring is harsh, with many misalliances in instruments’ weaker registers; the sense of driven-ness not to be put away as the flourish and chant are developed against an ever-changing background of counterpoint.  The semitonal sighs are heard most affectingly in a moment notable for high violin harmonics and held notes in the horns.  The inexhaustible energy and variety in the music builds to baroque or Finzi-like use of high strings with bass accompaniment, leading to a stalking climax, jabbing Dies Irae unisons punctuating the chant-theme.  The opening flourish - and clarinet - enter, and a slow fading chord coloured by horns ends the movement. 

 

Track Five:  Invocation:  Recitativo-Allegro Deciso       .

 

The Second Movement, Recitativo - Lento Serioso, is possibly haunted by Ravel’s piano-piece, Le Ghibet, another emotionally complex inspiration.  It begins with the flourish that began the first, but soon, the matter is proved to be a development of the high violin harmonics figure in amongst the imaginative thematic transformations later on.  Again, the horns are involved.  The clarinet and violins with cautionary matter from other parts of the orchestra build to a brief climax - underpinned by an upward scale - and a lowish consolatory sound is made by horn and warbling clarinet and other woodwind in exchanges of the melodic line.  Tension comes in on the high strings, stridency bringing back the swaying semitones on misallied woodwind - oboe noticeable - and brass.  Again, the music seeks to expand, and the oboe has its moment, answered by the clarinet.  The upward scale is heard from underneath.  Again, there is consolation, and the strings lead the warmer but quietly peremptory winding-down. 

 

 

Track Six:  Ceremony:  Recitativo-Lento Serioso

 

The Finale is a Round Dance, marked Vivace.  An impish variation on the solo flourish leads to a jog-trot similar to the chant of the first movement.  Woodwind have a counter-melody that is flat in curve, more blues-like or jazzy and so modern in sound.  It may remind one of the spikier inspirations of Malcolm Arnold.  The clarinet soon dominates it, as does the opening matter.  The semitonal swaying from the first two movements is heard with pizzicato accompaniment and what become roulades in the solo-part.  The chant-like theme is still there.  A crescendo grows with chuckling outbursts from woodwind and a more haunting air in the clarinet’s restricted figures.  The opening music of the rondo returns - barer, more gaunt.  Time is passing, even the clarinet is audibly flagging - or a final effort is inspired by the counter-melody, scotched at last by horn and rounded off by woodwind, strings and brass - the clarinet in at the very last.

 

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 Seven:  Round Dance:  Vivace

 

19 & 20 October

CB  Autumn 3

Track One:  The Too-Short Time, Finzi  

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme is of music that depicts or suggests Autumn.  We’ve just heard Gerald Finzi’s song The Too-Short Time – Nine leaves a minute/Swim down shakily”, a setting for baritone and piano of a Hardy poem that laments the passing of Dame Summer; the last lines run:

 

“Saw you how Dame Summer drest?

Of all God taght her she bethought her!

Alas, not much!  And yet the best

She could, within the too-short time

Granted her prime.”

 

From the prelude, an angular, Britten-like impression of the falling of the leaves – the ever-scrupulous Finzi timed his onomatopoeia to match those nine leaves a minute – a halting processional gropes for hymn-like certainty and diatonic harmony, the piano providing strong chords and a building spinning motion as though weaving the vision of Dame Summer’s clothes before the qualifiedly affirmative close.  From 1949, this song predated Finzi’s discovery that he had leukaemia by less than two years.  It joined other Hardy-settings uncollected at his early death to form the Cycle, Before And After Summer.

Let’s stay with Finzi and Hardy, two inspired Autumnists.  Seeing the Winter in Autumn, Shortening Days – The first fire since the Summer is lit – is a song, the sixth, from another posthumous Hardy-cycle, A Young Man’s Exhortation.  Finzi toiled long and hard on his works, assembling them number by number, gathering groups of songs from many stages in his career.  Shortening Days was actually written in 1928, considerable number of years before The Too-Short Time.  The two songs are yet recognizably related in verbally-generated melody, harmonies and procedures. 

At its outset, spare in accompaniment and melodic line, Shortening Days seems an almost mystical treatment of prosaic observation heightened by its place in a poem :  until, at the window, the eye finds “Like shockheaded urchins, spiny-haired,

Stand pollard willows, their leaves just bared.”

 

Then,  “coming with pondering pace”, peasant sturdiness appears to rescue one from brown study with the sight of the cider-maker –

 

“And behind him on wheels, in readiness,

His mill, and tubs, and vat and press.”

 

Autumn has seen harvests of cereals and fruits, and so is, in addition, a time of brewing!

Track Two:  Shortening Days, Finzi

Harvest-home.  Autumn bares the trees and countryside of much colour, and birds have no time for leisurely song,  but with luck, Summer has left us with the means to over-Winter where we are, and we gather and prepare food for hoard.  Originating in a number – The Heavens Are Telling -  from Haydn’s Oratorio, The Creation, here is the harvest-home hymn from the Norwich Tune-book of 1844, The Last Full Wain Has Come, sung and played by The West Gallery Music Association of Hampshire, who specialize in the performance of Georgian church music, their choir accompanied by stringed and wind instruments that would have been familiar in Thomas Hardy’s  childhood and in his father’s heyday, before the organ replaced gallery-musicians in country churches.

Track 3:  The Last Full Wain Has Come, Tune by Joseph Haydn

(The following number was sadly  omitted on grounds of time

Let’s hear a partsong by Sibelius.  Autumn Evening is a strophic setting for mixed voices of a poem by the Swedish poet, Rydberg.  One of a group of partsongs that date from student-days, Autumn Evening begins in a world that lies in its bleak grave of Autumn, harried, withered, dead,  the blossoms of Summer passed and the forest silent - but looks up into the stars, from whence eternal home smiles upon the soul.

 

“Thus dream I in the Autumn evening, and see

How the leaves fall down from the birch,

A naked shore stands reflected in the deep bay,

And over the moon a silver cloud is sailing.”    

 

Autumn has its bleak side, matched here in the severity of chorale-like strains, dotted rhythms and some awkward rather than adventurous writing in the parts, but the twenty-three year-old composer has the measure of the poem’s sentiments.  If the setting is less flexible and imaginative than Sibelius’ later treatments of Finnish  verse, this may partly be due to the Germanic nature of the Swedish language, its totally different system of stresses – Finnish stresses first syllables – its  heavy consonants and less rich store of vowel-sounds, all of which lend themselves naturally to a Germanic  melody with little irregularity of metre, in which rhythmical variety is introduced with dotted notes.    

Track 4:  Autumn Evening, Sibelius

).

The Autumn and Winter are seasons for hunting.  Here is The Royal Hunt At Windsor, a Grand Sonata for solo harpsichord, by HB Schroeder, from the late 18^th Century.

Track 5:  The Royal Hunt At Windsor, Schroeder

A more characteristic work of Sibelius, now, the tone-poem, The Bard.  This extraordinary piece was written in the shadow of a possible throat cancer, in 1913, and at a time of international unrest and anxiety.  To contrast it with the early tone-poems is certainly to hear the change that had crept over his music.  Like his Fourth Symphony of 1911, drama is developed from the most slender of material, so that climaxes are reached with a startling edge and are representative of a  personal symbolism rather  than more conventional gestures.  In this instance, beginning with an evocation of a poet who accompanies himself on the Finnish zither (Kantele) in simple, rippled chords over an accompaniment by bare orchestral textures, mostly held notes on bassoon and oboe and imitations and promptings of the harp in the strings, a second section within the one-movement piece evokes wind in trees (the harp and lower strings have the power to do this owing to the former expressive compression) and the trombone provides a climax with a harmonically unresolving fanfare of three notes drawn from the rippled chords (and akin to the bassoon’s notes of  introduction at the very opening), to be followed by a warmer, placid close of quietness and stoical fulfilment.  An example of extreme concision  sombrely scored, The Bard, it should be remembered, was produced in the year of the riot-greeted Rite of Spring.  There was, as Sibelius himself said of his Fourth Symphony, “Nothing of the circus about it.”  His Autumnal bard has all the power of the natural world at his finger-tips, and the ability to cause the least modernistic processes to appear ahead of their time.  A mysterious musical wisdom  permeates a work that seems static, easily followed on the surface, yet economically strange at its height, and straightforwardly (but somehow rightly) conventional at the close.  The work is associated with lines about an old poet who dies after performing his last verses.

Track 6:  The Bard, Sibelius 

From a bard to a bird.  A drinking-song, Of All The Birds, from a collection of popular music made in the early 17^th Century by Thomas Ravenscroft.  Of all the birds, the owl ‘is the fairest in her degree,               

                 For all day long she sits in a tree,

                And when the night comes, away flies she.”

A song for drinkers, mocking drinkers.  It ends,          

                “Synament, and ginger, nutmeg and cloves

              And that gave thee thy jolly red nose.”

Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves are all febrifuges, tonics, warmers; like cider, wines and spirits, in hot punches of the same, much in demand to this day, when temperatures cool and the nights draw in.

Track 7:  Of All The Birds, Ravenscroft

From the composer Armstrong Gibbs’s LivelySuite for string orchestra and piano, Peacock Pie (in tribute to the book of children’s verse by Walter de la Mare,  here is the drily Brahmsian finale, The Fly-by-nights. 

The Fly-by-nights are, of course, witches!     

Track 8:  The Fly-by-nights, Armstrong Gibbs

In Night-scene, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, returned to Norway from adventures that took him around the world and made and lost him his fortune, confronts the emptiness of his achievements  on the fire-blackened heath near  his home.  Harsh chill is in the alternation of woodwind and brass chords and tiredly eddying strings.  He speaks defiantly – if he can.   In grim insistence, the voices of threadballs, withered leaves flying before the wind, sighs of air, dewdrops and broken straws in turn taunt him with all he might have been – he has stepped on the throat of his own song.  Wind-effects on flute and high violins, drumrolls, brass snarls:  organ-tones add uncanniness to the chants of inanimate things that, with significance to Peer’s state, have become the sternest of critics.  Near the close, he hears the voice of his mother, Aase, whom he comforted as she lay dying by describing how he drove her in a sledge to Soria Moria – a castle in Spain, or heaven:  now she shrieks that he tipped her into the snow.  Our ghosts, come old age and the heath of Autumn, may be found harder to bear.  Have we truly lived at all?

Track 9:  Night Scene, Grieg

Now, if the cold has seeped into your bones, sit by a fire and warm yourself.  Here is a lighthearted treatment of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,  the story of Ichabod Crane, schoolmaster, and his ghostly nemesis.  The Headless Horseman was written by Edgar Stillman Kelley, a little-known pianist and composer from New England – his ancestors were among the early settlers of America, arriving in about 1630, and founded his home town, Sparta, in Wisconsin. He could trace descent back to the governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, a voyager on the Mayflower!  A little older than Edward Macdowall, and also primarily a pianist, Kelley was trained in Germany, as were most American composers of national reputation in his day. 

His piece describes the dead Hessian’s pursuit of the would-be ladies’-man-schoolmaster one eerie Hallowe’en ...   Schumann is turned to semi-comic account, the first theme imitating the gait of Crane’s lolloping nag.  Crane’s amorous feelings are gradually swallowed alive as he rides home alone after having been told the legend in vivid terms by one of his boys.  In the pursuit, the poor nag does her best to flee! 

All ends in the dutifully frowning minor!

Track 10:  The Headless Horseman, Stillman Kelley

(The Following section was left out on grounds of space and time:

“Remember, remember the 5^th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot!”

Here is a poem commemorating a Bonfire-night party, written by Mike Burrows.

 

                     (Guy Fawkes Party At Tanybwlch Hall)

            Fireworks were never the same again.  There

            In the wood, standing in groups, the chill night

            Warmed by thick clothes, friendships - and embers

                                                                                bright

            And smoking in the incinerator -

            Some played with sparklers; all watched for the

                                                                               glare

            Of first banged colours to print threads on sight

            From volcano, or a rocket’s whooshed white

            Popped in stars.  This galaxy made me stare.

 

            For forms - wool hats, scarves, coats - the

                                                                   warden’s hand

            And ‘tached smile touched off such spells, or

                                                                checked spuds

            In glowing ash.  And the girl at my side

            Deepened, lit little, kissing.  Sombre land

            Lay silent, its true stars high-spaced - no duds -

            In bursts of aeons:  a lover’s thrilled pride.    

 

            Never the same, that powder-reek rejoiced

            In.  So it is my memory.  Rainbow-fire,

            Spittering glints, thick smoke billowing from pyre

            Of a tiny soul whose burnt body, hoist

            With its reason for being, I found by moist

            Autumn garlic next day, charred where, entire,

            I shook my head and went on:  the lost spire

            Of a roman candle scorched, lit, still voiced.

 

            To the beach and town - or college - simply

            A student in love.  Or a ghost years off,

            Picturing the next year as on each year,

            Self hoist by what I did not want to be.

            Sparks brilliant for others - smoke’s sharp cough

            Makes them smile, and aeons will shine them clear. 

  

Copyright, Mike Burrows, October 16^th, 2013

              

(FX Sounds of fireworks, bonfire and murmurs of spectators under).

).

As our time of Remembrance of the World Wars draws near, and in memory of all the fallen – in particular of Thomas Newby Singleton, a Leading Stoker killed on the destroyer HMS Shark when it was sunk during the Battle of Jutland – here is the powerful song that ends Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s set of sea-songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra, Songs of The Fleet,of 1910.  Farewell is surely a powerful homage to “the dead who died for me,” - those who “themselves they could not save”, the men who have perished in service of the world’s navies.  The brass fanfaring at the close quotes fittingly a phrase of the refrain of Sailing At Dawn, an earlier song in the set – “Lead the line!”    

Track 11:  Farewell, Stanford

For our last piece today, Grieg’s Lyric Piece, one of the Opus 43 set, Solitary Traveller.  Grieg was a major traveller in music in the second half of the 19^th Century, touring Europe  as pianist and conductor, and spreading the word for Norwegian art-music; if anyone knew the burden of resigned

as necessary travel, it was he.  If not at home, he missed it; if at home, there was the call of the South!  He often Wintered away from his country.

Between him and his piano there existed an enviable closeness in which he confided as Schumann had confided before him.  In Solitary Traveller, something of the sincerity and affection of the relationship is revealed.  It is a quiet pianism of unadorned expressiveness and memorability.

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

Track 12: Solitary Traveller