16 & 17 November

Classical Break – America 3

 We'd like to thank Judy Kirkham for the reading of two quotations in the course of this programme.

Track 1:  Introit, The Peace, Let not your heart be troubled, Suite for Trumpet and Piano, Stephen Shewan                     

 

This is Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is an anthology of music from the United States.

 

We have just heard The Peace, Let not your heart be troubled, the second movement of  the Suite For Trumpet and Piano, by Stephen Shewan.  The Suite was written for the New York composer’s life, in 1995.  A New Testament verse provided the melody for The Peace, which first saw the light of day as a hymn for soprano and piano. Taught composition by Samuel Adler, Shewan has a tonal though often dissonant idiom inflected by jazz, religious chant and the hymnal.

 

Actually, there in one sentence may lie the astonishing power of American Music:  its culturally rich and creative mix.  It achieves frequently what other countries’ musicians have struggled to do, squaring the circle of musical theory and self-expression with an appeal for others.  In American music today, there are tonalists, pantonalists, serialists, jazz-composers, minimalists, folk-lorists, populists, all of whom, on their day, have the ability to bring the listener into intense communion.

 

Imagine how exciting it must be to belong to the evolution of a music in a country that has thriving academic departments and outreach in every major city, supported by a school and municipal system that values music as a communal expression...  Choirs, orchestras, operatic and chamber ensembles, combos, bands:  record companies whose interest is drawn by the music of every stripe and colour of Art-music...  The frontier spreads, the possible ethnic and aesthetic syntheses of music

continue to be made.  The philosophical achievement is great and healing for one of the world’s more inequitable and divided of societies.

 

Shewan is regarded as America’s John Rutter.  This is not held against him by a nation that values the accessible and whose cognoscenti do not necessarily seek to prevent the lower orders from trespassing on the preserves of the affluent and privately-educated.

 

Vijay Singh is director of the Vocal Jazz Program at Portland State University.  Here is his song of Winter for mixed choir, A Glimpse of Snow and Evergreen.  This piece, faithfully reflecting the sentiments of its little verse,  is set not a million miles from the Shakerish simplicity of quieter moments from Appalachian Spring -  its harmonies, movement with passing notes, and even melodic shape from the days when United States art-music strove to escape the influences of German academe.

 

“So free, pristinely at peace,

So free, and free for all,

So peaceful, tranquil, beauty fair,

The cool white hush of snow.”

 

Track 2:  A Glimpse of Snow and Evergreen, Vijay Singh

 

A New Yorker, Joseph Fennimore was trained at the Eastman and Julliard, and won a Fullbright Scholarship to study further in London.  He has written in most genres.  He made his name as a pianist and was director of the annual Hear America First concert series for five years before turning to full-time composition of music and libretti.  His style is eclectic and often introspective, akin to that of Shostakovich – unexpected dissonant melodic turns or progressions causing one to question romantic expectation.   Here is the opening movement from his  Cello Sonata no 2, Fast, anguished. 

This piece dates from 1984. 

 

The restlessness of the music acts on the surface of music that owes much to romanticism – Brahms, for example - and Impressionism as well as social realism.  There are clear contrasts in  harried attempts at repose in cello, agitation and flightiness in the piano.      

 

For an idea of the stylistic mix to be found in American music, the second movement of this Sonata, for which we sadly don’t have time, is in the tempo of a Mariachi (Mexican band-style) waltz, and sounds like Brahms or Dohnanyi gone wrong.

 

Track 3:  Cello Sonata No 2, Fast, anguished, Fennimore

 

Joseph Lucasik’s Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Electronic Sounds was first performed at the World Saxophone Congress at Pesaro (the birth-place of Rossini!), in 1992.  It is an intriguing piece, the accompaniment of the flighting soloist unearthly in shiny tingling timbres, long pedal-notes, unresonant harmonies and rhythmical crispness.  Jazz – specifically the improvisatory music of John Coltrane – is clearly the idiom of the piece, the saxophone’s often rapid, high--pitched riffs in the outer movements requiring skill of a high order to perform.  The middle, slow, movement is a night-piece, haunting, possibly influenced in its subtlety by the night-music of Bela Bartok, who succumbed to poverty and Leukaemia in the United States.  The music moves meditatively through various consistent  shifts in mood and style – the accompaniment consisting of sudden percussive knocks, oscillations, held harmonies and at times, a slow tread, under the gathering, rising and relapsing song of the saxophone.  Loneliness in the city, a favourite subject with American composers since the days of Charles Ives and later, Aaron Copland?  All ends inconclusively.  The composer is a staff-member at the music theory and jazz faculties at the University of Colorado.  Here is the Nocturne from his Concertino.   

 

Track 4:  Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Electronic Sounds, Lukasik

 

A song for children, now, by Bill Crofut.  The Chipmunk’s Day.  The poem was written by Randall Jarrell.  The melody and style of accompaniment  shows that traditional manners of folksong remain hardy in music of the United States.

 

 Track 5:  The Chipmunk’s Day, Bill Crofut     

 

“There came to me in this case, a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood; that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale.”

 

This quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden heads the score of Brian Banks’ tone poem for small ensemble, Forest Echoes.  This transcendental evocation of the wilderness began as a piece for bass clarinet solo; the composer added other parts that act as ‘albeit abstract accompaniment’.  String quartet, flute and percussion encircle the bass clarinet with fine-drawn or menacing Ravelian

pointillisme of harmonics and held notes, bird-calls, strokes of the wood-blocks and clash of gong, echoes perhaps of the Great (and deep) Spirit at centre:  all reaches a level of intensity and fades out again... 

 

Track 6:  Forest Echoes, Brian Banks

 

In the Winter of 1942-3, almost a third of a million men of the German 6^th Army were trapped  by multiple forces of the Red Army at the city that they had been sent to take - Stalingrad.  Efforts were made in freezing blizzard-weather to supply them with food and equipment by air, but failed with huge losses in men and transports.  From Berlin, the Leader gave the Commander in the field the order to fight to the death. 

 

Shortly before the surrender, a final mail-run was afforded the troops, so that they could send home

their last thoughts to loved ones or friends (in fact so that the state of morale, ie, loyalty, at Stalingrad and at home could be gauged).  These letters were not passed on, but preserved on file,

names and addresses excised, by the Nazi Authorities.  

 

Elias Tanenbaum, a modernist and jazz-musician from Brooklyn, was  taught composition by a number of fine composers, including Wallingford Riegger and the Czech, Bohuslav Martinu.

 

In 1981, at a time of extreme international  tension, he took twelve of the hoarded letters and created a powerful statement against War.  Last Letters From Stalingrad – for Baritone, Guitar, Viola and Percussion.

 

The cycle has the immediacy and strange authenticity (not to mention expressionistic procedures) of Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw.  A kind of speech-song is employed, with unnerving occasional use of a high falsetto register.  The instrumentation is harsh, the violist required to play frequent harmonics and microtonal slides, the guitar oddly like a reminder of home, the percussion – various drums, bells, marimba  - inimical, cold or funereal.  The Winter chill, wreckage and threat of violence of these men’s last environment are palpable.  The listener is entrapped.

 

The Gregorian funeral  chant, Libera nos is referred to at every fourth song; during the last, the viola

plays the German folksong, How Glorious Is Youth.

 

Let’s hear one of the songs - During The Last Two Nights.  At its close, one hears a fragment of the Libera nos, to strokes of a passing--bell.

 

Track 7: No 4 of Last Letters From Stalingrad, No 4, Elias Tanenbaum

 

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914, Robert Ward studied at the Eastman and Julliard Schools of Music and the Berkshire Music Center – latterly with Aaron Copland.  Another of his tutors was Howard Hanson.  Here is a duet from Act 2 of his opera of 1964, LadyKate.  Kate emigrated to England with her English husband, but the couple have now returned to their farm, disappointed in their hopes of wealth and social success; she is comforted by her friend, Eve, who is given a theme of certain faith

and hope and some beauty.

 

The idiom of this piece is romantic, tonal, lyrical; less searching than that of Bernard Herrmann, and inhabiting, some might say, a zone that stretches between opera and musical theatre.  In the US, later than in most other parts of the world, there was a vein of lyrical, period opera, mimicking the gold of European Late Romanticism,  misnamed Grand and mined into the ‘Sixties and even ‘Seventies by many composers besides Virgil Thomson, whose opera, Byron, was perhaps the last gasp of the genre.

 

Eve, I can’t lie to an old friend, by Robert Ward.

 

Track 8:  Lady Kate, Eve, I can’t lie to an old friend, Robert Ward

 

Four years older than Robert Ward, Read Gardner, from Illinois, studied at Northwestern University and the National Music  Camp at Interlochen, Michigan.  A symphonist at his most ambitious, his strongest gift in composition was for writing art-songs.  His choice of verse was wide, ranging from American and English poets of various epochs to Chinese poets in translation and Rabindrath Tagore.  His painstaking style ranges from impressionistic modal and whole-tone work to a more abrasive expressionism.  Here’s his ‘Lullaby For A Man-Child’, a setting for soprano, flute, harp and string quartet of a poem by Jean Starr Untermeyer, from his collection, Songs To Children, Opus 76, of 1947-9.   

 

Track 9:  Lullaby For A Man-child, Read Gardner

 

Another song for children by Bill Crofut, now,  again, setting Randall Jarrell, The Bird of Night.

Track 10:  The Bird of Night, Crofut

 

Leo Sowerby is remembered as “the Handel of Michigan”.  It was the city in which he lived for most of his life.  He was prolific, producing 550 works in all the art-genres save ballet or opera.  Like many composers of his generation – he was born in 1899 – he learned to use modern techniques as they came along, and relied on a grounding in traditional styles that helped him to evolve with consistency, rather than this or that mark of fashion.  His songs evolved as he did, from the idiom of Macdowall or Cadman through impressionism to astringent chromaticism.  He was descended from English North Country people, and always felt an affinity with English music.  This can be heard at every turn.

 

Here is his gaunt but determined Lyric of Spring, from 1944-6, a setting of Jeanne DeLamarter.

 

Track 11:  Lyric of Spring, Sowerby

 

Our latest journey in the United States ends with the second movement of a diptych for wind orchestra, from 1979, After A Gentle Rain,  by Anthony Iannacone.  Iannacone was born in 1943, another alumnus of the Manhattan and Eastman Schools of Music. 

                                                                        

The movement is entitled The Dark Green Reflects with Old Reflections.   “The light reflecting off moist green foliage as a metaphor for ‘reflections’ (thoughts) on old memories” is, according to the composer, the subject of this music of vivid colours, in which impressionistic musical ideas seem indissolubly one with instrumental scoring.  The composer believes that the music of Debussy – to be specific, the Prelude for piano, Les Collines d’Anacapri - was an unconscious influence on his methods in this work.  Certainly, there is a use of short phrases, motifs and sequences and unsparing progressions through modal or whole-tone dissonance that might just be the work of the later Debussy.            

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme on music from the United States was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

 

 

Track 12:  The Dark Green Reflects with Old Reflections, Iannacone  

 

 

 

     

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