19 & 20 July 2014

Classical Break - The Dulcimer Man

This week, Classical Break goes on location all the way to Frome to meet one of the country's only makers of Hammered Dulcimers.

Tim Manning produces at least one instrument every week at his tiny workshop in The Hub at Frome's Welshmill, for individuals, teachers, retailers, record producers and even opera companies. 

In the programme, Tim explains what dulcimers are - the different types around the globe, their history and how he makes them. In addition, of course, there's music from some of the world's most renowned hammered dulcimer players, listed below, in order of performance. Tim also demonstrates the instrument and plays some music that he has written for this unique forerunner of the modern-day piano.

Thanks to Tim Manning for giving us his time. Click the link to go to his website.

We hope to run a series of programmes about local instrument makers and local instruments of note. In the works - a man who builds pianoforte instruments, the newly refurbished and repositioned organ at St John's Midsomer Norton, and the Rachmaninov piano at the Holburne Museum in Bath.  

Track one:  Theme from "The Ipcress File", John Barry, 1965
The distinctive theme is played on a Hungarian Concert Grand Cimbalom which is the Hungarian version of a Hammer Dulcimer. The instrument is bigger than a Hammered Dulcimer, the size of a small piano. Barry was very ford of the instrument and used it for a number of theme tunes.
 
Track two: Paul Haslem, The Fordwich Jig. trad
Track three: Ted Yoder, "Praise to the Lord" trad. hymn
Track four: Howie Mitchell, "Matty Groves" American trad.
Track five: Karen Ashbrook,"Prelude, Cello Suite #1" J.S.Bach

Track six: Jim Couza, "Los Ejes De Mi Carretta". 1983 by American born british resident Jim Couza from the album Music for Hammered Dulcimer. Probably the most well known Hammered Dulcimer player the UK has ever known.!

Other tracks by Tim Manning

Below is a video of Tim playing us out of the programme with a composition of his own.

If you know any instrument makers in the area, give us a call on 07913 742401 or email rupertkirkham@gmail.com and we'll try and include them.

 

CB Gloucestershire 5 & 6 July

CB Gloucestershire  (Repeat)


After the BBC Composer of the Week, here's one we made earlier...   Gurney's star is rising in London and the West Country.

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

The trees talked it, and horses, went trampling by.

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

And we that are Gloucester’s own, since She has gracious grown

Will take a day of April as it is meant in mind.

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

She heard in twenty centuries of change, and strange people.

March with Her wind, which might be great, is kept friend;

For one day man is allowed equality, and/of/godlike mind

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

All love from all memory called out – Beethoven, Belloc,

The Lament Song – and watching the scarred hills, “Puck

Of Pooks Hill” – and my own music surging up and up.

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  Today’s programme presents two orchestral works by two composers from Gloucestershire:  Gustav Holst’s early work, the Cotswolds Symphony – later disowned by him – and The Gloucestershire Rhapsody.   Neither of these works represented a landmark in British music at the time of their reception, and only one of them was publically performed. 

 The Symphony in F Major, ‘The Cotswolds’,  dates from the end of the 19^th Century, the years 1899-1900; the then Gustav von Holst began it the year after leaving the Royal College of Music, at about

the time that he was writing the Wagnerish Walt Whitman Overture and Winter Idyll, filled with plans, though mainly vocal and operatic, and ruefully aware of the three influences on him, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Wagner.  He was also studying Sanskrit and Indian mythology; his theosophist step-mother being influential.  The transformation from Holst the student into Holst the artist was under way. He was born and brought-up  in Cheltenham, educated at Pate’s Grammar School for Boys, and loved the Gloucestershire Cotswolds-area, with its complex-curved hills and oddly secretive valleys; the bluffs of the hills rise above Cheltenham, sheep and agrarian country with added woods, rocky limestone outcrops, such as the Devil’s Chimney at Leckhampton, tiny local stone-built villages and hamlets, and wildness.  Country fairs take place in larger towns, and yet are a part of the lonely lives and cameraderie on one farm – and wider friendships in pubs – of the local people.  In his late teens, he had served as church organist and choir-master at Wyck Rissington and Bourton-on-the-Water, respectively.

The first movement of the Symphony is all too brief, Allegro Con Brio, more like a voluntary for orchestra than a first movement as taught by Professors Stanford or Parry (Holst was one of Stanford’s boys).  F Major is a bright key, held to be evocative of nature:  Holst proves that other keys are bright and evocative by unusual tonal vagrancy, though the harmonies are quite clear and pleasant.  Beginning with a brazen fanfare, this piece is fresh and highly attractive in its mixed scoring, which is effective in all sections, favouring trumpets, higher woodwind and violins; its brief, Parryesque, therefore mildly 18^th Century first subject is robust and a little (attractively), crabbed and stubborn, but active and purposeful; the second is melting, sweet in the style of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov, airy and with nagging pendants that heighten its happy pathos.  The development is brief-to-unnoticeable, but neat, and refuses to become bogged-down in the hectoring scrabble that often passed for symphonic argument at the time. 

One guesses that Stanford, a hard task-master as Professor of Composition, had left, and had not left, his mark on the frail but innovative and determined Holst, just as he was to do on Ivor Gurney (who referred to his teacher as “that python!”).  Contemporary critical opinion was that the First Movement was the work’s weakest.

 Track 1:  Symphony in F Major, “The Cotswolds”: Allegro con brio, Holst

The mournful slow movement, Elegy (InMemoriam William Morris): Molto Adagio, may explain the Classical brevity and liveliness of the first.  In B Minor, it is in Stanford’s commemorative or symphonic vein, a slow march with pauses and asides that allow for llittle relief.  The brass and lower woodwind are heroic, the violins sighing and sliding in ornamentation.  All is as tightly packed and shaped as in a Brahms symphony, not over-repetitive, but its 8.35 minutes do impose; possibly the movement is too grave and powerful in its place in the scheme of this Symphony.  Holst, a lifelong Socialist, had had deep feelings for the head of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had heard Morris speak.  The Molto Adagio has led an independent life in the concert-hall.   With a different title, it might do duty as a superb War Elegy.  Cheltenham is a military town – officers of the Indian Army and civil servants of the Raj-administration settled there for the waters of the spa, and the Gloucestershire Regiment had had a long and fine career in the service of the Empire, losing many good men in the course of its expansion.  The War in South Africa was a nightmare to Imperialist and Socialist alike, the loss of volunteer soldiers to death, serious injury and, overwhelmingly, disease, sharpened people’s concern at the international disgust with which this cruel and foolish war caused the world’s other powers to regard Great Britain.  The movement ends smoulderingly, as it began. 

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

The Scherzo  in D and B-flat, returns us to the bluff bucolic style of the first movement.  As at least one commentator has written, it is like a fairground-scene.  Actually, for once, one can accept this kind of idea.   It teems with detail, syncopations, changes of emphasis; the trio adds a tone of intimacy or transcendence to the presence almost everywhere of barkers and murmurous or clamorous  crowds dawdling, riding or playing, and music courtesy of musicians or steam  - the eye is on a pair of eyes, or the cloudy-blue sky above bunting, tents and gaudy roundabouts.  Holst met his wife at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, but it’s tempting to read the couple into any picture of fairs and easy enjoyment of life, particularly after a tortured Adagio Molto.   The movement nips back to D by the close.

Track 3: lll Scherzo

The finale, in the Symphony’s home-key, is marked Allegro Moderato.  It is happy-go-lucky, Holst’s manner brassy,  suggesting assurance and rightful expectancy of the future – of an infinity of hope and joy in life.  His counterpoint and scoring are British Symphonism of the 1880s and 90s, striding out a little coloured by Wagner, but new in practical terseness and spare contrasts.  There is strenuousness, the rhythms are a little square, the brass insistent, but optimism prevails without too much forcing of the issue.  Rationed cymbals add a requisite touch of high-spiritedness.  The music is strong but has its feet firmly on the ground. 

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

During Holst’s lifetime, the Cotswolds Symphony was performed once in full, by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, conducted by the redoubtable Dan Godfrey, in 1902. 

The period from 1918-1922 was, in the life of the composer-poet, Ivor Gurney – who, pace his latest champions, did not love the War - one of the most exciting to be read about for its record of artistic achievements  against the odds and in the face of fairly arrogant and obtuse middle-class appreciation of our own “Schubert” – as Parry – squire of Highnam, just outside Gloucester - called him...  In March, 1919, he wrote to a friend that what with sketches of a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and other musical tasks (including the writing of a symphony), his  life wasn’t worth living!  There was nothing else on hand, save songs, a mass and string quartet, and a piece for violin and piano...

Ivor Gurney's colourful Gloucestershire Rhapsody was  a work of love, following on from his despairing last days as a number in Kitchener’s army.  In it surges the tidal  Severn, as the superfine nervous (and chromatic) system of Scriabin's strings and woodwind and Straussian harmony, soaring violins and burnished brass – a three-note trumpet call seems to have come straight straight from Also Sprach Zarathustra  - mesh with a further weave of British influences.  A recurring grand passage in full orchestra begins in the world of Parry’s Jerusalem, joins with an evocation of Elgar’s

Coronation March, to meet an upward leap that seems to suggest that Gurney may have known Herbert Hamilton Harty’s fine vocal and orchestral setting of Ode To A Nightingale, the climactic spirit of Holst's early Cotswold Symphony (and oompah-bass processionals of later), and Stanford's Brahms-influenced rhapsodic manner... 

The result is yet 100% Gurney, the Gurney of withdrawal from the world into contemplation perhaps of a clay shard or coin found amid the red-brown clods of a ploughed field, or of Sirius during a nightwalk in the hills, but also the Gurney of county fairs, football matches, the Gloucester Regiment in which, even as the convinced Socialist that he became, he was proud to serve, and the society of farm-  and dock-labourers, river- and fisher-folk - a Gloucestershire of the British Empire.  The sudden, mysterious hushes of the Severn plain or Cotswolds are there - moments when one stands on the hills above Cheltenham or by the Severn at Framilode, Saul or Frampton - where willows waft grey-green locks of glaring-backed leaves,and the weighty river feels its own length surprisingly little:  Gurney’s ghost may be with one.  Alto woodwind have a magical descending snatch that seems wood-magic in itself – the sighing response has what may be Straussian sixths and doubling of violins.  Possibly the ‘Moglio’ episode in Elgar’s Concert Overture: In The South – Alassio influenced Gurney.  Later on, there's a little, plodding tune on alto woodwind, to strummed accompaniment that may remind one (very slightly) of an old French Carol or song!  It seems mediaeval, and of course Gurney’s sense of history was profound.  As a Gloucester chorister and apprentice organist, he must have performed much church-music of long tradition.  The development of the tune is predictably lovely in all aspects.  

On the other hand, the Rhapsody has a more extroverted side that seems almost to invoke Georgian bandstand-music.  One trumpets-and-drums passage may seem like a march of adolescence in Summer or Autumn:  Gurney and his friend, the poet,  Will Harvey, arm-in-arm and singing preposterously on a country lane.  The finale of the Cotswolds Symphony seems evoked at the grand close, but the Cotswolds Symphony isn't in it!  The Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare is almost like a glorified  bugle-call - Lights Out – here (significant, that).  The final chords are quite definite, yet peculiarly unbrassy and austere, almost classical in weight of tone. 

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

That was the Gloucestershire Rhapsody by Ivor Gurney:  a lovely, consequential, yet fantastic piece,  beautifully-scored, with all the light and shade and sense of history that one finds in the embowering Cotswolds and on the lonelier, bleaker Severn Plain... Not Elgar, not Delius, not Vaughan Williams, nor Howells. The Elgarian phrase nags at one - Coronation March? The Young Olaf motif from Scenes From The Life of King Olaf seems closer...  Or possibly a moment from the partly Gloucestershire-based Falstaff .   One hardly expected to hear a rhapsody on the scale of, and written with as much skill as, a Bax tone-poem, from the pen of a composer once thought to be only a miniaturist of the piano and a songwriter. ... And no, it's not remotely like Bax, either.  But Gurney knew from where the word rhapsody was derived: in the ancient Greek, a rhapsode is an epic poet or bard.  A speaker for a nation – or county!  In his vocabulary, a rhapsody was not a japed-up orchestral medley of popular songs!  Gurney hoped for far more than fame; he wanted to live to see Socialism flourish in Britain.  He died in an asylum.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1937, a parcel of recognitions – including a number of the magazine, Music and Letters, that contained an appreciative article on his work – arrived for him.  It was handed over, he struggled to open it; in moments, let it slip, and relapsed on the pillow:  “It’s too late,” he said. 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you enjoyed our programme of music by Gloucestershire composers, scripted by Mike Burrows.  We leave you with the War Elegy by Ivor Gurney.  Goodbye.

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney

28 & 29 June

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue:  Extract from Piano Trio in D Minor, Rachmaninoff

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

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

Cue:  Opening of Second Symphony In B Minor, Borodin

Cue: Motto and 1st Subject, Rachmaninoff

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

 Cue:  Second Subject, Rachmaninoff

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

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

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

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of Development, Rachmaninoff  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track Two:  ll Allegro Animato.

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

 Track Three:  lll Larghetto

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

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

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

 Track Four:  lV Allegro Con Fuoco

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

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

Cue from Symphonic Dances, l Non Allegro, Rachmaninoff

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