12 & 13 April

April The 23rd is the anniversary of the birth (and death) of a man regarded internationally as our greatest poet and dramatist.  Wordsworth once let it be known at a dinner-party that he could have written the works of Shakespeare "if he had had the mind."  Shakespeare, Dante and others rejoiced in heaven as they read a new work by their equal, Victor Hugo (admittedly, they chose to inform the world of this in French and at séances held by the Hugo family).   Most writers may be less sure of themselves, or careless of the dignity that goes with being an original artist.  The posthumous fame of Shakespeare (if not his actual style), became unassailable in the 18th Century (Sir Edward Elgar's favourite period in Shakespeare criticism), and later fuelled romanticism, more or less indirectly influencing most major European writers, composers and artists in their outlooks and work.  In many cases, if there had been no Shakespeare, there should have been no leading light, no new illumination.

From the Augustan period, through the cultivation of the picturesque, the instinctive, the gothic, the revolutionary, the nationalist, the Imperial, and later, the Modernist, Marxist and Post-modern, every age has had its idea of Shakespeare as well as the works.   His phrases are found everywhere (many of them came into his works from everywhere), his plots and characters remain what they always were, an international mix of European tales perspicuously Englished, and purely home-grown histories and knockabouts - and invitations to the play of very English verse, worse and prose.  Simplicity breeds humanity and profundity - and a measure of agelessness. 

The scope and depth of Shakespeare's life's work are unparalleled, from the pen of one who was described in his lifetime as having "little Latin and less Greek'.  Perhaps his lack of scholarship has been more than made up for since his death:  generations of First-rate minds have built heights of ivory towers on him.  Not all seem to have been disinterested in their estimate of him.  For seventy years, George Bernard Shaw wasted thousands of pages in telling us how vulgar and incompetent an artist he was - how greatly inferior to Shaw (who was himself once cuttingly described as being 'all intellect and no brain').  Again, there have been many many conspiracy theories - or disputes over who Shakespeare really was.  Obviously, he must have been too brainy not to have gone to college.  A bloke who held horses and acted a bit must simply have put his name to works by a true intellectual, such as the great lawyer and essayist, Sir Francis Bacon, or the foppish but decidedly clever Earl of Southampton...

How to write a programme so much as involving Shakespeare?  This man who finds a place in everyday conversation, even if the speaker has no notion that he is quoting him?  This man whose concocted situations have a way of being played out most affectingly off-stage and in very different circumstances and language?

Composers, the makers of non-verbal magic sounds, can help us out there.  This week and next, enjoy the Shakespeares we come up with, and either reaffirm what it meant to study him at school or college, or try to see and hear him anew.

 

Classical Break Shakespeare (Rpt)

 

Hullo, this is Classical Break, and I’m Mike Burrows.

 

Today on Classical Break we shall be hearing works inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, and we start with the concert overture  Julius Caesar by the German composer, Robert Schumann.  This year, in fact a few days ago, was the bicentenary of Schumann’s birth in Saxony on June the 8th, 1810.  He died at the Endenich Hospital outside Bonn on July the 29th, 1856.  Julius Caesar was written in 1851 and is intended to evoke the splendour of Caesar’s career and the vain masterfulness of his nature, as portrayed by Shakespeare, rather than actual scenes from the play.  The fact of Caesar’s assassination is turned around by a coda in the major.  Some have said that this piece could be about any tragic hero; how does it evoke Caesar or Ancient Rome, Circa 44BC?!

 

Track One:  Julius Caesar (Robert Schumann)

 

Perhaps he should have called it A Hero’s Life, and thus confounded our more literal-minded critics!  This is a very German Caesar - a Rhineland Caesar.  Though never of the extreme Nationalist tendency, Schumann was very conscious of his Germanness and desired to make German music.  For the rest, as in all his character studies, he identified with the figure portrayed. Here, in its monumental but unWagner-like scoring - some tricky parts for valved brass instruments and violins, a warm, glowing woodwind palette softening their effects - a strong bass and stubborn dotted rhythms - Schumann created a kaleidoscopic work of nobility and real determination - well worthy of Shakespeare, or Caesar!

 

Julius Caesar has been described as magnificently aggressive!  Schumann was forty-one when he wrote it, starting out on a new career as Kapellmeister at Dusseldorf.  His first year in his position - from 1850-1 was successful; this piece was written with his work with the orchestra in mind.  In music, he could feel with a conqueror:  in life...it was not to be. 

 

When a patient at Endenich, the Overture may have been the last music that he played with another - the young Brahms visited and they performed it together in its piano-duet-arrangement.  Poignantly, Brahms remarked later that Schumann confessed to being out of practice.         

 

This is Classical Break and Somer Valley Radio, and I’m Mike Burrows.  We’re hearing music inspired by the plays of Shakespeare.

 

For our second piece I have chosen music by Jean Sibelius, born in Finland in 1865, who again came to Shakespeare surprizingly late in his career, most substantially when he was asked to write incidental music for a prestigious Copenhagen production of The Tempest.  Overall, this music seems to me quite possibly the greatest expression in music of Shakespeare’s magic and romance.  As the entire score lasts just under an hour, it was extremely difficult to choose a number from it; many of them last under two minutes, some only a matter of a few seconds, but all are miracles of economical expression and character.  Others have written striking music to The Tempest, composers as diverse in time and style as Purcell, Tchaikovsky and Frank Martin, but to me, Sibelius simply comes closest to realising the Shakespearian interplay between the magic of elementals and the warmth of human love and anger.  My excerpt comes from Scene Two Act Two, The Oak Tree:  the Spirit of the Air contemplates the punishment of being imprisoned in an oak tree as threatened by his master, Prospero the magician.  Sibelius wrote extensively for symbolist plays by Finnish, Swedish and French dramatists and writes here in a similar, infinitely subtle, terse and uncanny strain.

 

Track Two:  The Oak Tree (Sibelius)

 

My next piece is the song from As you like it:  It was a lover and his lass, and this was the work of Thomas Morley, whose dates are 1557-1602.  He was the organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.  He and Shakespeare were neighbours for a time and his would have been the tune used in contemporary performances of the play. 

 

Track Three:  It was a lover and his lass (Morley)

 

Now we move on to the music of Sir Edward Elgar, who lived from 1857-1934 and was born and died in Worcestershire.  Falstaff, A Symphonic Study, dates from 1913.  This tone poem portrays the famous character from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V as opposed to the Falstaff of the Merry Wives of Windsor.  A complexly comic figure, this man, a Knight, has lived out the end of his life in the stews of London trying to maintain a riotous pace in the company of the young Prince Hal and his more fashionable companion, Poins, and the common folk of the tavern, figures such as Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol. 

 

Like Shakespeare’s prose, Elgar makes the most of his larger-than-life personality.  Latter Spring, All-hallown Summer.  We shall hear the death-bed scene at the very end of a highly eventful score.

 

The old King has died; his son, whom Falstaff thought his friend is now Henry the Fifth, and has banished Falstaff and his Eastcheapers, commanding them sharply never again to come near his person on pain of death.  We are with the old Knight - perhaps we are he - in his last, slowly lapsing moments when, stricken by flux, ‘he babbles o’ green fields’, drifting in and out of consciousness, the thematic material not merely pathetically descriptive of his state but recalling former times. The violin-slide at the start is like a bed-curtain lifted.  We hear him stirring, his deep, unsteady voice rising out of the murk he feels about him.  A soft music seems like echoes of the orchard or childhood.  Mistress Quickly is recognised dimly, he hears her, not so shrilly as during the rest of the tone-poem...  Softly, very fondly, there is a full statement of the Prince’s theme, the strings leading it.  All seems to drift away.    Falstaff tries to respond, but sinks deeper.  At last, listen for the clarinet - beautifully despairing and swooning, a brass C-major cadence - and a leap, brazen and with side-drum - the old man starts up for the King, all Hal’s humanity has been purged away, his title, perhaps, is a last cry - before a still more abrupt, pianissimo, pizzicato chord tells us that he falls back, dead.  A terrible war was about to change Elgar and the world forever.

 

Track Four:  Falstaff (Elgar)

 

And now, we're going to hear Watchman’s Song by Edvard Grieg, who was born in Bergen in Norway in 1843 and died in hospital in Oslo in 1907.  Watchman’s Song comes from the first book of Lyric Pieces for piano.  He wrote ten books of these genre pieces. They were extremely popular in the Nineteenth Century and more than once, Grieg bewailed the popularity of his simple music for amateur performance, on one occasion, writing that it wasn’t his fault that his music was played in third-rate restaurants and by schoolgirls.  It was his misfortune, no-one else’s, it has to be said.  Every time he mailed the later books, his publishers, on receipt, raised a flag on top of their buildings!  This music was written in Copenhagen, not long after he had left the Leipzig Conservatoire.  It owes much to the character pieces of Schumann.  The watchman is the porter in Macbeth.  The central section, comprised chiefly of little scale figures perhaps suggests the man’s superstition and...things that go bump in the night.  For such a short piece, Watchman’s Song is very effective and memorable. 

 

Track Five:  Watchman’s Song (Grieg)

 

That was Watchman’s Song.  At the age of three I listened as my mum played it.  Either you grow up with music like this or it grows up with you. Grieg loved his country’s folk-tunes but was also one of the most exciting harmonists in Nineteenth Century music.  Throughout his career showed that it was possible to use harmony to create a size in music alike to Wagner on a miniature scale.  It may be because of this and because he was extraordinarily gifted at paring back his style that he remains one of the more consistently fresh voices in music. 

 

Our next piece is an overture to The Taming of the Shrew by the Liverpool composer, Alfred Reynolds, who was born in 1884, and died as recently as 1969.  This work is about as far as you can imagine from Kiss Me Kate and belongs to what is known as the British Light Music tradition - which in practice often used to mean warmed-over Sullivan.  This is much much better than that!  It is a lively, brightly-scored piece and has a poignant humour about it that makes me wish it were much better known.  It was composed for a 1927 production at the Lyric Theatre.  Reynolds worked chiefly as a conductor and composer for the theatres of London.

 

Track Six:  Overture, The Taming of the Shrew (Reynolds)

 

Gerald Finzi was born in 1901 and died in 1956.  He was a musician quite different from Reynolds. One of the more self-critical and anxious of composers, he wrote in the traditions of the folksong/pastoral school of British music.   Like all the best of such composers he was not over-indebted to existing melodies. Like many driven artists, he had other interests to fall back on. Besides building a wonderful library of contemporary poetry - he was a superb song-writer - he planted an orchard of rare strains of British apple in the garden of his farmhouse at Ashmansworth in Berkshire.  He refused to make his living from professional music-making or, for most of his career, from teaching.  He did not solicit commissions, either, believing that inspired music was the only music worth writing.  Inspiration was fitful and it was only towards the end of his life that he produced works on a large scale.  Here is a song from the cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, which was written between 1929 and 1942, the year in which he wrote O Mistress Mine, from Twelth Night. 

 

Track Seven:  O Mistress Mine (Finzi)

 

Back to Sibelius:  a setting of Come Away, Death (from Cymbeline) in Swedish translation.  It is one of two settings of songs from Shakespeare, the other being When that I was and a little tiny boy.  Sibelius wrote these two songs at the age of forty-four and living with the threat of throat cancer.  On this recording the soloist is the great and versatile soprano, Kirsten Flagstad.  Her performances of Sibelius songs with orchestral accompaniment date from near the close of her long career.  The music looks forward to the mysteriousness, rich technique and emotional appeal of the music for The Tempest. 

 

We return to The Tempest for a part-song by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), whose gift for ‘magic’ ranks with that of Sibelius.  Of the Three Shakespeare Songs we are going to hear Full Fathom Five.  This was written to a commission associated with the Festival of Britain in 1951.  Vaughan Williams - it was always Vaughan Williams, not Williams - refused the commission, then changed his mind.  He sent them these songs with the words “Here are the three Shakespeare settings, do what you like with them.”  This wasn’t the spleen of a famous composer put on the spot but his habitual attitude of modesty towards his own productions.  You may remember that he said of his devastating Fourth Symphony that he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it was what he had meant at the time! 

 

Track Eight:  Full Fathom Five (Vaughan Williams)

 

Vaughan Williams wrote a piece for brass band descriptive of the Battle of Agincourt.  In it he employed two of the tunes that were used also by Sir William Walton in his soundtrack for Sir Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V.  This music, written in the middle of a war whose outcome was becoming more certain and on which far more depended than it had on Henry V and his band of brothers, is one of the finest achievements in not only patriotic British music but also art-music as a whole.  I choose to end this programme, then, with two pieces from the later stages of the film, the Battle of Agincourt and the Agincourt Song.  The means of describing battle are little different from those of say, Prokofiev’s portrayal of Alexander Nevsky’s defeat of the  Teutonic knights in the Battle on the Ice (also written for a film), but the music remains terse.

 

Track Nine:  The Battle of Agincourt (Walton)

 

The Agincourt Song rises in full glory of choir, brass and strings in-filling.  It is grandeur on the greatest scale, though within short duration.  It has much to do with who we might be and nothing to do with football! 

 

You have been listening to Classical Break from Somer Valley Radio, and this is Mike Burrows.  Hope to have your company again, soon.

 

Track Ten:  The Agincourt Song (Walton)

 

© Mike Burrows 2010

5 & 6 April Musicke In The Ayre 2

CB Musicke In The Ayre 2

CB Musicke In The Ayre 2

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  This week, our programme is built around a concert given at St Stephen’s Church, Bristol on the 17^th of March by the Early Music Group, Musicke In The Ayre, entitled, Songs From The Shows. 

First, a word about the performers and the organization to which they belong.  Paula Downes is a Trinity College-trained soprano, who has sung with The Sixteen and Philharmonia Voices, and is also a soloist with several choral societies.  Din Ghani is a lutenist and violist who became prominent on the Tyneside Early Music-scene during the 1980s.  On moving to Wiltshire, he began to make his own instruments, and in 2011, founded Musicke In The Ayre.  This ‘evolving’ group of singers and instrumentalists has given many concerts in England, France and Spain, and is active also in the educational sphere.  It specializes in music of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, and its flexible ensemble means that it can perform a wide range of genres of music of the period, from lute-solos through consort dance and choral works secular and profane, to court masque and opera. 

Packed into an hour – how easy it is for an hour around about lunchtime to seem immortal! – one hears insightful commentary amid structured programmes epitomizing, so far as is possible, the music of an epoch very different from our own in its culture, if not in the fundamentals of human nature and worldly fortunes.  Din and his group are capable of recapturing an essence of the alchemy in musical expression of those times.  They are trained in such contemporary techniques of singing and of instrumental playing as have come down to us. 

In these extracts of the concert, we have four introductions spoken by Din and songs from the shows of the day, performed by Paula Downes and him.  It Was a Lover and His Lass, by Thomas Morley (1557—1602), The Willow Song, Anon, Have You Seen But a White Lily, by Robert Johnson (1560-1610),  Nel Pur Ardor, by Jacopo Peri (1561-1633), and The Plaint, O Let Me Weep, by Henry Purcell.  The music employed by dramatists of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries was, like that found in our own ‘shows’ – musicals, plays and films of all kinds – a mixture of popular songs – in this case, from the street or chamber  - and specially-written numbers whose composers were very mindful of international developments in Art-music.  Something of the range of styles to be found during  the period is captured in this sequence of pieces.

Over to Musicke in The Ayre. 

Track 1:  It Was A Lover And His Lass, Morley

Track 2:  Intro, Din Ghani

Track 3:  The Willow Song, Anon

Track 4:  Intro, Din Ghani (0.36min)

Track 5:  Have you seen but a white lily Robert Johnson

Track 6: Intro, Din Ghani

Track 7: Nel Pur Ardor, Peri

Track 8:  Intro, Din Ghani

Track 9:  The Plaint, O Let me Weep, Purcell 

That was a series of extracts from Musicke In The Ayre’s concert, Songs From The Shows, given at St Stephen’s Church, Bristol, on the 17^th of March.  The singer was the soprano, Paula Downes and the  lutenist, Din Ghani.  Our thanks for the recording and our best wishes go to them both!

And now for something completely different, as they say.  We present a set of improvisations for piano by our contributor, Mike Burrows.  Some allowances have to be made for recording-quality, as these tracks were laid down on a Dictaphone eleven years ago. 

Mike has taught himself to play by ear.  He makes his music up as he goes along, and the results may go to prove that there is ‘music in the air’ for all to find.  The present pieces were addressed to his – at the time unborn – daughter, Miss Suvi Burrows, who is now 10, and as bonny and serious-minded a lass as you are likely to meet. The overall title is Letters To Suvi.

Track 10:  letters To Suvi, Four Improvizations, Burrows

 

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  The first half of today’s programme was formed from Early Music performances by Paula Downes and Din Ghani of Musicke In The Ayre, and the second, of improvisations for piano by Mike Burrows.  Join us again, next week.  Goodbye!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

29 & 30 March 2014

The Agony and The Ecstasy  (Repeat)

Signature Tune:  The Path of The Beloved from the Suite Rakastava (Op14), Sibelius

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM. Today’s programme consists of music from the 1965 feature film, The Agony and The Ecstasy. This Hollywood epic, Directed by Carol Reed and starring Charlton Heston, and Rex Harrison, Diane Cilento and Aldofo Celi, may seem an odd place in which to find music for a classical music-slot, but in fact the score of the main part of the picture, by Alex North and Alexander Courage, is a fascinating attempt to meld music of the renaissance with a Respighi-like pictorialism that suits fully a cinemascope keeping, the vivid colours and vibrant imagery of a film from the mid-‘60s. 

Alex North was the second most nominated film composer In Hollywood and received an honorary award In recognition of his brilliant artistry.  He provided music for films As various as Spartacus, Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dragonslayer and Good Morning Vietnam. 

He was nominated for an Oscar for The Agony and The Ecstasy in 1966.  In this film, location-work and studio-shot scenes are beautifully lit, a world of rich vestures and palaces, glinting armour and weaponry, bright banners and desolate, smoking scenes of military defeat, all captured in their gentility and horror. In dark interior scenes of chapel and tavern or in front of the vibrant, living frescoes of art and theocratic politics, there glowers the gaunt, paint-spattered figure of Michelangelo Buonarotti – the driven artist forced by Papal commission to break the habit of a lifetime and paint a ceiling with ‘appropriate designs’. The warrior-Pope, Julius the 2nd suffers, too: “Michelangelo, when will you make an end!” - “When I am finished!” and there is a danger that between showing that the Pope is driven also, in his case, to hold together the Catholic Church in a country of duchies and Europe beyond, and that Michelangelo has to suffer and be impossible with authority to paint like one inspired, the film earns another title, “The Mahogany and The Hickory - Or How The Sistine Chapel Gained A Ceiling (In The End)”.

Nevertheless, there is the score, in whose brilliance and half-tones the story of transcendent Art is most truly told through the use of Romantic organ and bells, brash handling of brass and side-drums, bucolic, courtly and agonized use of woodwind in weak register, moments of veil-like expectancy or surge at height and plod de profundis of strings. Snatches from mediaeval pipe-music, a martial galliard here, pastiche of consort- or choral music there, a Shostakovich-like angularity and lacerating implacability of line, chantlike melody and chromaticism that both hark back to Cesar Franck through the Gregorian Respighi; leading motives to represent characters or states of mind are also heard, a common thing in film-scores: with an incredibly wide range of musical influences, Alex North and his assistant, Alexander Courage, wrote a masterpiece expressive of the suffering and isolation of the true artist.  Here is the first cue: a scene in a precipitous marble quarry, The Mountains of Carrara.

Track One: The Mountains of Carrara

The second cue accompanies pastoral scenes (two piping oboes – oboes d’amour – and cor anglais in imitational piffero style) suddenly broken in on by skirmish:  relentlessly rhythmical cavalry pursue infantry into a maize-crop – slaughter ensues; by far the most of the music occurs to denote victory - the leader of the cavalry is soon revealed to be Julius the 2nd as he takes off his helmet and assumes his calot and white mantle.  Here occurs the in fact anachronistic reference to a galliard, ‘La Bataille’, from the Danserye of Tielman Susato.

The Warrior-Pope.

Track Two: The Warrior Pope

The Florentine family, the Medici, have been Buonarotti’s longest-serving patrons. Cardinal Giovanni de Medici and the Contessina De Medici, his sister, have won Buonarotti a commission to build Julius’s tomb; now, the Pope wishes the artist to paint images of the twelve apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Buonarotti is a sculptor, and has scruples... So the adventure begins. The Medicis – a pastiche consort flute-and-strings number written by Alexander Courage - the flute closely attended by imitational figures.

Track Three: The Medici

In deep, brooding music, combining the Gregorian influence with that of what sounds like the Fifth Symphony slow movement of Shostakovich, work begins on scaffolding high in the vaults of the roof of the decayed chapel:  The Sketch of The Apostles.  New plaster is smoothed on. Outlines are laid.  Paint is applied...

Track Four: The Sketch of The Apostles

The Artist is dissatisfied with his commission. The faces of ordinary persons make the best faces for Apostles; nothing formal will do. Sketch Destroyed accompanies strokes of an adze and a flung bucket of red paint...

Track Five: Sketch Destroyed

Having fled and been pursued into the mountains of Carrara, Buonarotti has a vision of God and Adam in the clouds at dawn... There is a growling sonority to the quiet grandeur that, mollified, becomes alternately ethereal and more full-throated and ends terse, staggering, brazen and percussive...

Genesis!

Track Six: Genesis

Having successfully presented plans to the literally embattled pope... there follows The Return to The Sistine Chapel. Now, more than 300 figures must be painted, including seven OT prophets, five sybils, nine stories from Genesis, portraits of the great figures in Christ’s lineage and four scenes from the OT.

Track Seven: The Sistine Chapel

All begins with the quietly anxious cue, Painting!

Track Eight: Painting

Hours of working to all hours with toxic paint inches from his face, lack of rest and forgetting meals, and the necessity of shouting or sighing, “When I am finished,” or disputing  aesthetics and morals with cardinals brought in to witness progress, lead to The Agony, as Buonarotti working on alone at night by the light of a candle-stub suffers loss of sight, attempts to move down the scaffolding, falls clutching onto a rope and is swiftly let down onto the floor of the chapel, unconscious and in a fever. The music follows this quickly growing disaster with highly effective use of instrumentation, the growling bassoon particularly sinister.

Track Nine: The Agony

Michelangelo recovers in the care of the Contessina de Medici. This is another of Alexander Courage’s contribution, another consort-piece, like a pavane. Michelangelo’s Recovery.

Track Ten: Michelangelo’s Recovery

Again, haunted by the Susato Galliard, the Pope returns to Rome in brassy triumph. Festivity In St Peter’s Square.

Track Eleven: Festivity In St Peter’s Square

In the evening, Julius visits the recuperating Michelangelo to release him from his contract... Raphael may complete the ceiling...

Julius In The Garden.

Track Twelve: Julius In The Garden

Back at work... This time, progress is suddenly suspended as Michelangelo arrives in the chapel to discover workmen are dismantling the scaffolding...

Track Thirteen: Back To St Peter’s

The Pope and Michelangelo have come to a parting of the ways over the Pope’s desire to show the ceiling half-finished. Julius must go to war again – his enemies in Italy regrouping and victorious – without knowing if he will live to return or be able to see the ceiling completed. Brazenness is moderate in the music, the imploring strings bringing a feeling of pathos above side-drums and intermittent low brass.

Woodwind and low brass prefigure the next cue.

The War.

Track Fourteen: The War

Michelangelo seeks reconciliation with Julius on the battlefield... Julius’ military defeat inspires some of the best moments of the entire score – jagged, hollow horn, trombone and muted trumpet fanfares of desolation; the imploring tone returns in strings, answered by the implacability of deep-toned brass and woodwind.

Track Fifteen: The Battlefield

To brief, bright fanfares, the grievously-wounded Julius creates a new cardinal for a fee sufficient to permit Michelangelo to complete the ceiling... Michelangelo returns to work, and the tattered remnants of the pontiff’s army are portrayed on their blood and dust-stained horse and cart-borne journey to Rome. New Cardinal.

Track Sixteen: New Cardinal

Back in Rome, Julius, though reacquainted with the wonderful ceiling, soon lies close to death: only to be angered into rising from his bed by Michelangelo, who proposes to return to Florence with the ceiling incomplete! 

The Pope’s allies in Europe have gathered and defeated his enemies. The official soundtrack CD takes up the story with a mass celebrating victory and the completion of the ceiling... The finish has been hard-earned.

Track Seventeen: Michelangelo’s Magnificent Achievement – and Finale

In an affecting final scene, after the congregation and church staff have left, Julius tells Michelangelo what the ceiling means to him.  Commissioning it may be what he is remembered for; before the Seat of Judgement, he will present it as something to be placed in the balance; it may shorten his time in Purgatory.  Asked what he has learned, the artist says, “That I am not alone.” He refuses a further commission for an altar-piece fresco of The Judgement:  he was promised that he could go back to his interrupted work on the tomb; Julius admits that there is need of the tomb.  They part: Michelangelo is left to watch the Pope’s faltering progress from the body of the chapel. To Work My Son.

This was 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 that you will join us again soon. Goodbye!

Track Eighteen: To Work, My Son

22 & 23 March 2014

Spring (Repeat)

 

Intro:  Blackbird song

 

Hullo, this is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme goes in Pursuit of Spring,

 

Let’s hear Song of Spring from Troubadour Suite, an orchestral work by the Worcestershire composer, Julius Harrison, (1885-1963), who studied at the Birmingham and Midland Musical Institute and became an influential critic as well as composer.  Spring has none of the opulence of Summer, but freshness; it has chill like Winter to remind us that Summer is coming, and raw beauty gathered in with much of the security of Autumn Harvest-home - this harvest is too green and sour to eat, but sustains the spirit on sensing.  Troubadour Suite was written during the Second World War and dedicated to the composer’s friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley - a friend in turn of a greater poet, Edward Thomas, one of whose books furnished us with the title of our programme.  The movements are based on courtly songs by King Thibault the Fourth of Navarre, Song of Spring on a song about the re-greening of the wood:  the opening, with its dusky, austere coloration - of violas, blossoms into a beautifully tended song drawn-out in graceful nods - and passing notes - from section of string orchestra to section, and warmth enters sparingly on French horns:  the harp is intended to portray the playing of the troubadour himself; his voice is full of heart, his heart full of song.    

 

Track One:  Song of Spring, Julius Harrison

 

Now, a song from a cycle for voices and orchestra, Fantasticks, by the American composer, Bernard Herrmann - famous for his scores for Hitchcock thrillers and other films such as The Day The Earth Stood Still.   A song-cycle based on pithy prose-works descriptive of the seasons, by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton, The Fantasticks is one of Hermann’s anglophile works; he felt a real affinity with England and its literature.

 

In March, his style is between the Mahler of Das Lied Von Der Erde and Holst: brusque woodwind opening, rasping brass - it is blustery, damp - celesta or glockenspiel providing cold brightness - the phrases short and nervous -  intermittently giving fanfaring brass its head, the climax more aggressive yet.  This is like the mood of the Housman poem On Wenlock Edge: The tree of Man is never quiet.  The baritone voice rings out declaiming operatically the challenge to Winter’s spirit, the coming of Spring.

 

Track Two:  March from The Fantasticks, Hermann

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s subject is a journey in pursuit of Spring.

 

Track Three:  Song of Nightingale

 

A setting of a poem, Fruhlingsnacht, Spring Night, by Eichendorff, next - a tiny nocturne so slight that it seems the picture of an instant in time in a young man’s mind.  Robert Schumann was an inspired song-writer whose songs were mainly written in two creative bursts in his thirty-first year and his forties.  Both a poet and composer, he himself had had no high opinion of songs right up until he read Schubert’s unpublished manuscripts on a visit to Vienna.

 

Spring Night sings of birds returning, spring scents returning soon, blossoms returning; with both joy and tears the lover thinks absurdly that it could be a dream, but the old miracles come back in the moonlight;  the stars and moon say, the woods whisper and the nightingale sings to the listener that his beloved is his.

 

It is certainly startling to hear Schumann’s casual yet urgent mastery of the song-form, given the fewness of the songs that he had written before, but this was to be the pattern in his every new venture in composition in years to come.  The song resounds long after its duration of just over a minute - just as might Spring birdsong.  Winter is over!

Track Four:  Fruhlingsnacht, Liederkreis, Op 39, Schumann.  

 

Another take on Spring and Love, It Was A Lover.  Cleo Laine sings a swung version of Shakespeare’s song from As You Like It, music by Arthur Young, accompaniment by Johnny Dankworth Quartet.

 

Track Five:  It Was A Lover And His Lass, Young

 

Track Six, Song of Cuckoo

 

The Norwegian, Edvard Grieg, 1843-1907, wrote perhaps his greatest piano pieces towards the end of his life, in two sets of arrangements of folk-tunes, 19 Norske Folkviser, Opus 66 and Slaater, Opus 72. Just four foot ten inches tall, a keen hill-walker, with only one lung, he loved the mountains and valleys of the Hardanger region and poor health did not prevent this last-gasp burst of creativity in homage to Norway’s music and people, though it had certainly prevented composition on a large scale throughout most of his life. Taking the raw material from folk-collections or from folk-musicians, he sought to capture the harmonic compexity implied in even simple melodies.  His friend, the violinist and composer, Johan Halvorsen assisted with notation in the case of the Slaater or dances.  From the folksongs, I have chosen Ola Dal, as it was used by Delius in his orchestral piece, On Hearing The First Cuckoo in Spring; the Delius is beautiful, but, here,the vernal-sounding folksong is treated increasingly to some of Grieg’s richest and most poignant chromatic harmonies over three verses.  The cuckoo is there to be heard in the stillness of a personal moment to be looked back on and recaptured only in memory.  He said himself that he was endlessly fascinated by the magic of harmony and that he wanted to build a house in which man could be happy and at home, and frequently he succeeds.  Certainly, here, the transitoriness of Spring comes to be banished, the life and freshness retained.  Spring was a time of release for Grieg, whose Winters were frequently spent like a migrant bird, anywhere but in the cold, foggy North:  Spring and Summer in Norway truly revived him..

 

Track Seven: Ola Dal, from 19 Folksongs, Op 66, Grieg

 

Now, a Chinese folksong arranged by the guitarist, Gerald Garcia and performed by him and the Japanese violinist, Takako Nishizaki.  About three-quarters of the way through, the violin is given a short cadenza akin to sudden birdsong before this longing piece ends as quietly and, at heart, peaceably as it began.  

 

Track Eight:  Spring Breeze - Chinese Folksong arranged by Gerald Garcia

 

            “Praise to the eternal spring of life,

            That has created everything!

            The tiniest things have a beginning...”

The Norweigian, Arne Eggen (1881-1955) sets these words in our next piece, the song, Aere Det Evige Foraar I Livet by the romantic poet and secularist, Bjoernsjerne Bjoernson, and is a glorious response to the new season, seeing life in constant evolution and rebirth.

            “The tiniest insect

            can build a mountain.

            A speck of dust

            Or a grain of sand

            May have founded a kingdom!”

The stirring tune expresses this feeling perfectly, and comes clothed in rich, Griegian harmony and even richer orchestration.  Here, it is sung, chin-up, by the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad:

the recording was made when she was in her sixties.

 

Track Nine:  Praise To The Eternal Spring of Life, Eggen

 

To The Ring of Kerry Suite by Peter Hope born in 1930.  This is a vividly colourful orchestral portrayal of a famous road in County Kerry, South West Eire.  The first movement describes travel by a jaunting-car, a horse-and-trap; the middle, slow movement views a placid lake and the finale portrays a lively country fair, Killorglin Fair.  Spring is a time for fairs:  all seasons of the year have them, but this one is so cheerful that it would have to be celebrating Spring.

 

One thing is certain, it stays with one some way along the road. 

 

A busy jig displays the sections of the orchestra in turn and together; a lyrical tune shows sentiment, oboe, warbling clarinet and flute evocative of fresh air and bright, dark countryside as woodwind lead; the jig returns the stronger for having been subdued for a space and above it, the brass and strings crown the song-theme - it sounds like love - for the fair’s boistrous dealing and side-shows to take over and bring the movement to a drily brusque close. The Ring Of Kerry Suite won the Ivor Novello Award in 1969.

   

Track Ten:  Killorglin Fair from Ring Of Kerry Suite, Hope

 

To ancient Russia.  Rimsky-Korsakov was the star-operatic, symphonic and orchestral technician of the famous St Petersburg group, Mogyucha Kuchka, The Mighty Handful or The Five.  He was fascinated by fairy-tale, Russian paganism and folk-music and found a congenial subject in Snegorochka, Snow Maiden, the tragedy of the daughter of Frost and Spring, a cold being who longs to feel the warmth of love.  This opera culminates in the death of herself and her suitor and yet contains the essence of Rimsky’s superb orchestral and choral technique, creating another world of myth and legend and the cruel beauty of nature and its seasons, and ends in Russia’s continuance:  the Tsar leading his people in a hymn to the sun-god, Yarilo.  Here is that hymn.

 

Track Eleven:  Snegorochka, Hymn To The Sun-god Yarilo, Rimsky Korsakov           

 

The Spring, for many religions, is a time of rebirth:  pilgrimages are taken in a spirit of purgation and renewal in life and soul, worked by rituals of fasting, cleansing, praise and self-abnegation.  One seeks yet again harmony between oneself and the infinite that supports one:  in whose goodness one wishes to confirm one’s faith.  For Christians, the sacrifice and continuing love of Christ bring hope of forgiveness and the means to face the future in grace and gratitude, with God.  Here are two pieces that represent Easter for me:  the first is Angelus Ad Virginem, a hymn popular with the Canterbury Pilgrims.  The refrain is one of our nation-memories.  The beauty of Chaucer’s floweres brightens it, the freshness of Aprile showeres is on it.

 

Track Twelve:  Angelus Ad Virginem

 

Edmund Rubbra (1901-86) was probably Britain’s greatest symphonist of the generation that followed Vaughan Williams, but he was also a fine setter of poetry in both Latin and English.  His influences were mainly of the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Tudor periods in music, and Bach, with something of

the organic control of material of Sibelius.  His magnum opus is his Ninth Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, The Resurrection’ This sombrely beautiful work calls for solo voices, choir and orchestra: Bach’s Passions were a model for the form of the work, a wonderfully concentrated form in Rubbra’s hands, of purely orchestral passages and sung chorales - Catholic as well as Lutheran.

 

The Prelude to the Symphony is a via dolorosa to the foot of the cross, and from there, all flows.  But let’s hear the last, choral and orchestral section, where, after the ascension, the Catholic text Viri Galilaei is followed without pause by Hasler’s Lutheran chorale Thy blessing be upon us.  Throughout the section, bell-like peals and alleluyas are hinted at or sounded in the voices and matched by orchestral accompaniment as sustained, and including tuned bells at one point - a valedictory sweetness in the violins and woodwind in particular.  Amens turn us to the stronger melodic outline of the Hasler - it is a wonderful, oddly dreamlike jump-cut from one style to another:  the second of two tunes sounding, like the first, as if in a dream-vision, a vision that many Catholics and Protestants still find it hard to share, and ending in sublime affirmation, unity and renewal, an Easter vision, in God.   

 

Track Thirteen:  Symphony No 9, The Resurrection, Rubbra

 

As an undergraduate in the post-war period, the composer Kenneth Leighton, who was born in 1929 and died recently, wrote an orchestral suite for oboe, cello and orchestra, Veris Gratia,  His inspiration came from mediaeval poems on Spring and love.  Let’s hear the last movement, Epilogue, Sostenuto

ma con moto, sustainedly but moving along.  Here, oboe and cello muse on the previous sections, the cello more passionately, the oboe with a more feminine, questioning air.  From the opening, the melodic and harmonic influence of Vaughan Williams (his Suite for Viola and Orchestra, Flos Campi) is clear, the strings divided later in overlapping phrases, amens, perhaps...  The oboe has the last floated word.  The epigraph for this music is:  “praise together this earth...  And God have pity on the sadder folk...”  words with real resonance at this time.    

 

Track Fourteen:  Veris Gratia,  Epilogue, Leighton

 

Our last piece is a song by Ivor Gurney, setting a lyric by Thomas Nashe, and one of the five songs for baritone or contralto voice and piano that make up his cycle, The Elizas, so-called from the provenance of the poetry.  The cycle was completed in 1912, when its composer was still a student.  Its jauntiness and imitations of birdsong, particularly a droll cuckoo, appear both traditional and entirely characteristic of this composer, who suffered greatly in his life but was remembered affectionately for his high spirits and sense of humour as well as genius by those who knew him, and

dailly makes new friends through his music, poetry and published letters.

 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, hosted this time by Mike Burrows.  I hope you have enjoyed our pursuit of Spring, and will join me for another journey.

 

Track Fifteen:  Spring From The Elizas, Gurney