Intro: The Yellow River
Concerto, Movt 2, Ode To The Yellow River, Yin Chengzong, Chu Wanhua, Sheng Lihong
and Liu Zhuang
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM,
and I’m Rupert Kirkham. We have just
heard the second movement of the Yellow River Concerto, a
collaboration between four Chinese composers, Yin Chengzong, Chu Wanhua, Sheng
Lihong and Liu Zhuang, which represents a condensation of a cantata setting
poems written during the 1939 Japanese invasion of China. The second movement, Ode To The Yellow
River, portrays a mighty river and also expresses patriotic awareness of
the Chinese people’s massive achievement of maintaining millennia of
civilization on its fertile but dangerous banks.
The style of this committee-concerto
intentionally owes much to film-composers’ imitation of Rachmaninoff. Ideology
demanded a Western populist manner that accommodated distinctive
characteristics of Chinese folk-melody whilst at the same time symbolizing
cosmopolitanism and urbanization of Chinese society.
Todays programme consists of music inspired
by rivers. We begin with a short piece
by Claude Debussy, from his Petite Suite for two pianos, which
was colourfully orchestrated by his pupil and assistant, Henri Busser. En Bateau is an evocation of boating
on the Seine in the late Eighteen Eighties.
As was the Thames at about this time, the
Seine was a place where vogues in costume and conveyance presented a colourful
sight. There were regattas and parties
celebrated by painters of the day, even as the less-resorted stretches were
polluted by dye-mills, chemical-works, factories, foundaries, and tons of goods
of all kinds were transported in and out of Paris and other population-centres.
Debussy’s music is an instrumental melodie, lazy and sensuous in
manner, slow-moving in deep Summer greens and browns, with a hint, perhaps of
the pipes of Pan about it. The middle
of the piece rouses itself to some genteel amusement, skylarking or affectionate
banter. The river was a playground those
who knew it were haunted by when older.
The orchestration is faithful to the spirit of the original, flute and
clarinet prominent in imitation of dancing ripples and haunting refrains of
birdsong, the strings sonorous but not heavy.
The river was pushed out on, saw an outing, and carries home the party
at dusk - unless they have the sense - or time - to camp and enjoy a night by
or on the river.
Track One: En Bateau - Debussy
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM,
and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
programme consists of music inspired by rivers.
Next, a song that was made famous by a
bass-baritone who made three thousand recordings and sold twenty-five million
discs in a career that spanned some six decades. Old Father Thames was written in 1933
by Ray Wallace and Betsy O’Hogan, and sung and recorded most famously, perhaps,
by the great Peter Dawson. Such is his
diction that the text is as near-indelible as the music. At a dark time in the memory of a generation
now almost no longer with us, this song did much to maintain a sense of
national identity: it is not
sentimental, any old father who behaved like the Thames might be justifiably
accused of egregious parenting; yet this is an affectionate and likeable song
and good enough to be regarded as a classic.
Track Two: Old Father Thames Keeps Rolling Along,
O’Hogan
Ronald Binge wrote nothing finer than his
short orchestral piece, The Watermill.
Its style has something of Debussy about the use of strings and woodwind,
while the benignant atmosphere of this quiet hymn to a way of life has
something Beethovenian in its generosity of melody and diatonic harmony. This is not the tragic, romantic mill of
Schubert, but a modern reanimation of a vision of nature that belongs to the
18th Century Augustan Enlightenment.
Birdsong is caught by flute and clarinet, the dappled shade of trees and
rich movement of air and water in the middle of the small orchestra. Even the turning of the wheel (it seems a
wheel of time) is suggested, by a slow, creaking ostinato in the depths of the
strings. The oboe has the melody much of
the time, and has uncomplaining warmth and pathos; the melody is finely varied,
flowing; all seems to be moulded by it in its subtle but simple-seeming
development. If this is a piece of light
music, it is also an outstanding miniature.
Track
Three: The Watermill, Binge
Rivers have witnessed scenes of desperation
or recklessness; every riverbank, every bridge of any height has fleetingly
supported its suicide or accident-victim.
Ophelia, teasingly led on and then roundly rejected by Prince Hamlet,
goes mad and slips out into the countryside about Elsinore Castle, gathering
flowers including those of a name that hints at something more than her having
been led on. Trusting the strength of a
branch, she leans too far out over the waters of a brook, the branch gives and she falls in. Singing
vain little songs, she floats with the current until the weight of her clothes
pulls her down.
Frank Bridge (1879-1941) wrote a short
tone-poem on this subject, taking its title from a line in the play: There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook. In it, Ophelia’s reedy singing voice,
distracted breathing and thought-processes are captured by solo oboe, the
branch-shaded, glassy waters depicted in the strings - the moment in which she
falls - is vivid, a soft splash and sunlit eddying in the violins that is
rapidly - delusorily - soothed. The oboe
sings or chatters on, but the pull of the depths is there. Gradually, the ower strings grow in weight;
the music takes on the nature of a funeral procession by night, a solemn lament
- grief held in but to be felt; the voice of the young girl has been
extinguished without a struggle by murky waters that seemed to comfort her in
their lap.
Track Four: There Is A Willow Grows Aslant A Brook, Frank
Bridge
Like life, good stories and music, rivers
have a beginning, middle and end. From
spring to estuary, from hill-stream freshet to lazy breadth purling between
silted banks on the alluvial plain, the river maintains distinct districts of
life in symbiosis with vegetation and air - and with us. It is no coincidence that most people readily
see the life of the river as an image of time and stages in human life. Our sense of flow and development might not
be as it is were man not so closely attuned to the nature and apparent moods of
moving water. We use a phrase like I’m
reflecting on to mean I am thinking about, and in similarly banal
manner, we talk of things coming on-stream. Music, movement and language have fluency! Now, the sound of gospel-singers, the London
Adventist Chorale in the spiritual, Deep River.
Track Five: Deep River, Trad
Now for a haunting song by John Jeffreys,
who was born in 1927. It is a setting of
a Great War poem by the underrated poet, Wilfred Gibson, now
best-known as a friend and legatee of Rupert Brooke, but, in his youth, highly
regarded as an author. The Otterburn is
a river in Northumberland - Gibson’s home country - and Otterburn is an
elegy to a nameless Northumbrian soldier killed in Flanders. It is written for tenor and piano, in an
idiom strongly influenced by the folk-song-like, faintly bluesy,
modal-chromatic manner popular among composers between the Wars. The slow tread of the verses is decorated
here and there with ripples in the piano part, but presses on, the
undemonstrative vocal part syllable-by-syllable with natural stresses, matching
the terseness of the poem. That folk are
formed as well as sustained by the rivers they live by seems to be the words’
philosophy; one is reminded of Elgar’s deathbed request that his ashes be
scattered on the bank of the Severn.
Here, the Otterburn in flood, in Summer and in spate fills the dreams of
the dead soldier who lies in Flanders mud and will not return.
Otterburn
had to be reconstructed along with ninety-nine other of Jeffreys’ songs when he
destroyed much of his work in a fit of despair.
It was published in 1983.
Track Six: Otterburn, John Jeffreys
The Housatonic
At Stockbridge is
an orchestral piece, one of the triptych, First Orchestral Set - Three
Places in New England by Charles Ives. It grew out of a song setting a
rural poem that is filled with detail of an Autumn morning and apostrophizes
the river as ‘Contented river! In thy
dreamy realm...’ but asks later if the river is discontented still... Ives himself remembered the genesis of the
piece as a misty morning walk that he had taken by the
Housatonic with his wife the Summer after they had got married. From across the water, they had heard a
church choir singing. The sight of the
river, elmtrees and countryside about had been as memorable.
Ives’ style is unique. He believed that a composer should stretch
the muscles of the listener’s ears.
Quickly, the strangely detached sounds of a hymn in strings and
woodwind, then brass - wisps of violin tremolos denoting mist - are
joined by broad discords of a detached piano’s own key. Interestingly, one hears the oboe with some
distinctness - as in There Is A Willow Grows Aslant a Brook! The celesta sounds later, still more
detachedly; the climax is reached seemingly arbitrarily as if, on impulse, the
morning sought to reach over the stolidly kept-to verses of the hymn, whose
response is to sing more loudly and try to climb higher. At the height of this, there is sudden
hush. Where the music was in this scene
was Ives’ question: the river, the
elm-trees, the wind, the mist or the choir.
The answer may be in all or none of them. In this world, it is not only poetry that
seeks the condition of music. He
returned to this piece more than once to add to both the orchestra and the degree of dissonance worked in throughout.
Track
Seven: The Housatonic At Stockbridge,
Charles Ives
Now two works from nearly the beginning and
nearly end of a composer’s career. First
is an arrangement for piano of a Japanese folksong, Fukagawa or Deep
River. A very different deep river
from the one that we heard earlier, it is played here on the harp.
Track
Eight: Fukagawa, Japanese folksong, arranged
by Edmund Rubbra
The second piece by our composer is a short
song for soprano and harp. It comes from
a group of five, The Jade Mountain, setting poems from the T’ang Period
and translated by an American. It is
called A Song of The Southern River:
“Since I married
the merchant of Ch’u’t’ang
He has failed
each day to keep his word...
Had I thought
how regular the tide is,
I might rather
have chosen a river-boy.”
Our composer is Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986),
whose musical and philosophical interests took him far and wide. Here, his style is admirably terse and
attractive.
Given constant motion by the harp, A
Song Of The Southern River is a fluid, lively piece, ironical under
the accompaniment’s surface darting impulsiveness, until a slowing for the
words a river-boy. The brief close is the harp’s, and returns to the
former briskness.
The soprano part is difficult to bring off
with the deftness and sustained tone necessary.
Track Nine: A Song Of The Southern River, Edmund Rubbra
Lastly, the song that ends Vaughan
Williams’ cycle of settings of A.E Housman, Wenlock Edge, for tenor,
piano and string quartet. Clun. Here, Housman’s words, famous for their
bitter irony, generate a heart-easing generosity and warmth in Vaughan
Williams’ response that resound long after the song’s hushed end. This is where the rivers of the country for
easy livers bear one:
“‘Tis a long way
further than Knighton,
A quieter place
than Clun,
Where doomsday
may thunder and lighten
And little
t’will matter to one...”
Peace, perfect peace! There exists an orchestrated version, but
let’s hear the original, accompanied by piano and string quartet.
This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM
and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script
was researched and written by Mike Burrows.
We hope that you have enjoyed our river journey and that we shall have
your company again soon. Cheers!
Track Ten: Clun, from Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams
