Battle of Britain, 27 & 28 September

CB Battle of Britain

Intro:  RAF March-past, Davies/Dyson

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme showcases the colourful Ron Goodwin score for the feature-film, Battle of Britain, made in 1969, directed by Guy Hamilton and produced by Harry Salzman. 

The historical Battle of Britain represents one of the enduring legends of British involvement in the 2^nd World War.  Britain stood alone; the salvation of civilization for the many rested on the actions of the Few.  Spitfires and Hurricanes overcame odds of over four-to-one to defeat the armadas of Heinkel and Junkers bombers and Messerschmitt fighters, day after day flying sorties in which their only advantages were the superior cause – the chain of radar-stations positioned along the South and South-east coasts of the country,and the tightly-disciplined plotting organization behind flight-controllers who ‘vectored them in on’ the enemy.

The brave defence of these islands by an RAF Fighter Command that faced the world’s mightiest airforce at full stretch throughout  the Summer of 1940, was given popular dramatic treatment in this outstanding release.

A large cast of British and German  film-stars and fleet of Spitfires, Hurricanes, CASA bombers  and Hispano Buchon fighters - Spanish licence-built Heinkel He 111s and Messerschmitt Bf109s – did battle in the air.  Action was placed in a strong context of personal stories and a presentation of tactics and strategies on both sides.  A well-recreated mise en scene on the ground gave more meaning to  dogfights  filmed from a converted B25 bomber of wartime vintage.  Owing to vicissitudes of time and history, there were no still-flying examples of Dornier 17 – the Flying Pencil – and Junkers 88s, the other main Luftwaffe twin-engined medium bomber; no Messerschmitt 110 Destroyer escort-fighter – a twin-engined aircraft that, although heavily-armed and faster than a Hurricane, was so unmanoeuvrable and fragile that it, itself, came to need escort...  The infamous Stuka – Ju 87 – dive-bomber was not available in the alloy, so to speak, and proved impossible to fabricate; however, it was shown attacking radar-stations and being hacked down by British fighters, thanks to the skills of a special-effects team, who were also responsible for fibre-glass models of all aircraft that were shot down or bombed on the ground in the course of this latterday campaign...  On the British side, there are no Boulton-Paul Defiants – the Defiant was a vulnerable single-engined fighter with four-gun turret for armament; no Bristol Blenheim bombers either, though the Blenheim raided German general shipping and invasion-barges throughout the Battle, and became the first radar-equipped British nightfighter during the Blitz.  No seaplanes or air-sea rescue craft were shown on either side.  Even with these omissions, the film has considerable claims to authenticity.

Two stunt-pilots were killed during filming the aerial sequences, which emerged as possibly the most thrilling ever achieved  in movie-history, marvels of formation and milling movement, all requiring  split-second timing.  It seemed as though no holds were barred.   More about that anon.

Here’s the official Battle of Britain Theme, which you will hear at many points of the soundtrack, standing for squadrons of the RAF.

Track One:  Battle of Britain Theme

Next, the Luftwaffe March, Aces High. This accompanies an inspection of bombers made by a Luftwaffe Airfleet-commander; a French airfield notable for the immense ranks of Heinkel twin-engined bombers drawn up wing-tip to wing-tip and standing on either side of the runway; guards take the salute as the band plays and  the staff-car moves by.  All the arrogance of spotless Teutonic discipline, knife-edge creases and technical competence are on show, orders barked, the show dominated by inanimate power given life by one shared mind. 

Track Two:  Aces High

Right at the outset of the score, then, we have the music of two national sides.  Also, we have a marvellous evocation of the air, military aggressiveness  and gunfire, manoeuvre in a big, blue white-clouded sky.   In the Theme, The RAF are identifiable with the bowmen of Agincourt – though they fly, and their aircraft carry eight Browning machine-guns in the wings.  In Aces High, the Germans have a pastiche Bavarian-style march that possesses immense, tuba-grounded confidence and verve.  Goodwin was a past-master at blending latino rhythms with timeless, English- sounding melodies, and a dab hand at counterpoint.  His writing for the British showcases  noble trumpets and horn,  the rat-at-tat of snare-drum and high strings imparts a skip or skid of agility as certainly as it represents the bark or crash of machine-guns.    The Luftwaffe Aces High March isn’t merely a matter of solid scoring and two  Bier-kellerish tunes.  You notice the economical piccolo, clarinet and deep brass running accompaniments – very decorative – and appoggiaturas that scrunch; the trio that bellows male fanfares.  A pattern of two against three enlivens the rhythm.  The blend of woodwind and brass is more than able, the harmonies are strong and the percussion, glockenspiel and side-drum, as splendidly confident:  the return after the trio is adroit rather than to the same standard, but the effect remains strong.    The third cue represents the sun-drenched day at dispersal on one of the main airfields of Eleven Group  – where a flight from one squadron sit reading or chatting in deck-chairs, awaiting an alert.

After anxious string chords, the clear sky of leisurely strings swaying above pedal notes, and flecks of woodwind, is blue, the clouds drift:  it is an almost yawning variation on the Theme ; it is as though a bird flies as the flute leaps high and warbles - this glassy effect of crystal fresh air is repeated as part of the aforegoing pattern;  a more purposeful quality enters on cellos, a matter of a few stubborn, near-fanfare- like notes, only to subside in a reprise of dreamy leisureliness.  The Lull Before The Storm

Track 3:  The Lull Before The Storm  

Speed and punch open the next cue:  Work and play begins with a brassy staccato - abrupt, savage machine gun fire.  A lone British pilot is missing:  he has gone up for an instruments or engine-check, but really to encounter the enemy.  A Messerschmitt 109 has accounted for him; it passes over a prone body left floating, still attached to an open parachute, in the channel.  The Jagdflieger joins his friends after landing and taking a bath in the substantial surroundings of his comfortable requisitioned billet.  The gemutlich tune that accompanies his return and hurry to get ready is a soulful, deeply German song without words; there is a slightly maudlin feel to its caressing, intertwining sounds of woodwind and sliding massed violins, the square-cut phrasing softened nigh unto bonelessness.  The victorious pilot and a friend are summoned with trumpets and Aces High-peremptoriness from professional discussion in a local bistro to a briefing .  To get there, they’ll employ the locally-commandeered car in which they were about to go out on the town.   

Track 4:  Work and Play

Death and Destruction – the aftermath of a bombing-raid on an RAF Station:  a very frequent scene during the Battle.  RAF and WAAF personnel on the ground suffered fearfully.  It is a little-known fact that the Aircraftmen – maintenance staff -  at Manston struck, refusing for 15 days to come out of their shelters, when the Luftwaffe onslaught was at its height.  The music here is as is due:  no heroics.  Jagged violins and violas, ostinato scalic figure of low woodwind and possibly a marimba, interspersed with fanfares –a brassy climax of horror – accompanying a rank of WAAF corpses lying under blankets in the film - and more sustained cello-deep emotion of shock and endurance.

Track 5:  Death and Destruction   

Briefing the Luftwaffe.  Preparations for mounting any air-raid are intense:  crews must know the likely weather-conditions, expected wind-speeds at the heights at which they must operate, the areas of most enemy activity on the flight-path, besides the other all-important details of formation, rendez-vous points between bombers and escorts – and target.  Having shrugged off the brazen Aces High motto in short order, this cue is no more than a close-harmonied, narrow-themed ostinato, stiff, stalking, remaining until the louder close at mezzo-forte:  warning brass, mainly horns and harsh trumpets, punctuate it and end it with a crotchet and triplet.  The pit of one’s stomach knots to take that curt blow.

Track 6:  Briefing The Luftwaffe

After a brassy but hollow chord dissonant with what follows, The Prelude to Battle juxtaposes the leading motif of the RAF, dropping or rising scalic figures, the dropping figures with harp, a climbing bass urging excitement higher, a sense of the Briefing music now mounting with bursts of trumpeting aggression from the British.

Track 7:  The Prelude To Battle

Victory Assured.  Based in Norway, which the Allies had lost to the Nazis a few weeks before the collapse of France, the bombers of Luftflotte Links made one confident daylight raid on the North of England.  They ran escortless into the delighted arms of Fighter Command in spite of Luftwaffe Intelligence’s joke that “Even a Spitfire can’t be in two places at once.”  The bombers were met  as they moved in stately formation and high assurance over the North Sea.  Slaughter ensued.  Deutschland uber alles, one feels, is in Goodwin’s themes of gemutlichkeit and Aces High, march and trio; they move in solemn certainty – to meet an upward scale and sudden rat-tat-tat cadence.

Track 8:  Victory Assured

Defeat.  A lone Heinkel bomber labours home, streaming smoke from an engine,  its wounded gunner-bomb-aimer writhing in the fully glazed nose of the plane.  Often, it was possible to get home on one engine, so long as one had plenty of height.  Luftwaffe medium-bomber crews were all grouped, pilot, navigator and gunners, in the front of their aircraft for the sake of morale.  All the armour-plate was concentrated to the rear of the cockpit save for a strip in the undernose gondola from which a gunner, prone, fired the ventral gun (his position was known as the deathbed).  Under frontal attack, four men could be killed or wounded in a single burst of accurate fire through Perspex no thicker than household glass.  One had a magnificent view of what killed one.  In Goodwin’s music, the downward trajectory of the bomber as it crosses the sea is caught with a repeated falling figure and, derived from the Briefing music, checked sequences relentlessly repeated, violins screaming, oboe and clarinet writhing, the onward flight sustained intermittently by the same now menacing phrase of Aces High.  At last, the plane crash-lands behind the defences of Fortress Europe.  The pilot, a shocked bystander, watches as fire-crew try to cut his wounded friend free of the wrecked cockpit of their aircraft – and finally turns away.

Track 9:  Defeat   

Hitler’s Headquarters.  Berlin.  A brief, melodically and colouristically self-explanatory cue.

Track 10:  Hitler’s Headquarters

There follows a qualifiedly romping return for the victorious Few – ending in uncertain strings tremolando .

Track 11:  Return To Base

Life in Berlin goes on – without blackout:  until the first British night-raid – a retaliation for the accidental bombing of London.  From now on, cities, especially Great Britain’s capital will be the target, and wiped-out.

Track 12: Threat

Hitler’s revenge in turn was the beginning of the Blitz.  Evacuations limited the death-toll among civilians only a little.  The film shows that some families stayed unnecessarily, and were killed.  Goodwin depicts the human cost and fire and rubble, the efforts of ARP and Fire-Brigade units to save people and buildings in spare, daunted strings-lyricism, baroque string-runs shaking themselves out over darkness and destruction, a discord tutti, malign harp caresses and a detached whimper from twinned flute and oboe that seems to stand for the eternal last exclamation  one did not hear from one’s child... 

Track 13:  Civilian Tragedy

The Blitz was one of the two great blunders that saved Britain – the repeated bombing of radar-stations and airfields (and as not shown in the film, factories) was increasing the disorganization and demoralization of the RAF:  now the Germans attacked the civilian population instead.  Offensive Build-up is a cue that begins with a brief trumpet-fanfare: at Fighter Command Headquarters:  looking out on the glow of London burning, Air Marshal Dowding, Commanding  Officer, comments, to warm major- and upward-tending sequences coloured by the strings, that the RAF may now regroup and survive:  for the first time, German efforts will be predictable and limited in the main to their assault on London.  The whole remaining weight of Fighter Command numbers can be concentrated on intercepting large but localized formations.

This vision is followed by the aerial mixture as before:  climbing orchestral measures punctuated by RAF fanfares – and the triumphant statement of the Battle of Britain Theme, percussive edge honed.  It ends abruptly.

The other great blunder?  The Messerschmitt 109 had swooped down on climbing attackers, hunting freely in advance of their bombers – the Frei-jagd, the German fighter-pilots  called it.  Now, they were ordered to stick by the bombers – in practice, this meant that their Schwarme – or swarms of four aircraft - kept to a fixed height above their charges until engaged  in the battle below them, zigzagging  in flight as this was the only means of flying at the bombers’ cruise-speed.  Fighter-pilots knew  that acceleration, preferably in a dive, was the key to attacking aircraft of similar sprint-performance.  The Messerschmitt was fast, but not that fast.  The initiative was lost, the vital couple of seconds.  At the heights most combats now took place, the 109 had very slight edge in acceleration or no edge at all, and both the Spitfire and Hurricane could out-turn it:  to pounce had been its pilots’ best hope of destroying RAF interceptors – knocking down perhaps a section of unwary climbers in a single firing pass before zoom-climbing to gain height and attack again...      

Track 14:  Offensive Build-up

Attack!

Track 15:  Attack

Fire killed and injured horribly a great many fliers on both sides.  The science of the treatment of burns and skin-grafting made huge strides – in the terms of the day.  One of the film’s chief  characters, a Canadian pilot, is seen  to bale-out – allright...  But his aircraft was a flamer.  In Personal Tragedy, his Wife, a WAAF-officer is told that “they can do miracles these days.”   There is a shortened reprise of Civilian Tragedy.

Track 16:  Personal Tragedy

We reach possibly the greatest-ever  evocation of air-combat in all music.  Sir William Walton was the first choice of composer for The Battle of Britain.  At the age of 66, he proved unable to create a viable score, even with the assistance of that great composer for concert-hall and films, Sir Malcolm Arnold.  Sad, this, given his brilliance in providing the music for Lesley Howard’s film, First of The Few, of 19421.  Remember Spitfire Prelude And Fugue?  His music for The Battle of Britain was largely rejected.  You must take on trust from us, that it is too lacking in breadth or real engagement, stuck in a groove of waspish portrayals of aircraft, Façade-like attempts at popular music (surely anachronistic in 1940), and interminable repetitions of Siegfried’s horn-call from Wagner’s Ring.  It is too small-scale, too scherzando-ish.  And yet, how to describe his Battle In The Air?  This cue was used to accompany combat on the Battle’s climactic day – September The Fifteenth, now Battle of Britain Day.  It accompanies a scene that is otherwise almost entirely mute, during which individual fates on both sides are summarily sealed.   All the unfortunate score’s mannerisms save ‘20s giddiness are concentrated in it, this nightmare, stabbingly fearsome, unnervingly complex piece, which, possessed of razor-sharp wit, portrays in full the split-second timing and terror of this form of war.  It begins in hollow deep woodwind and string tremolandos of irresolution, succeeded by oscillation in cello-harmonics – contrails above one? –into which swoop the measures that prove to be a refrain; an accelerando hastes one into the fight; jerking bursts like gunfire bring on more feverish panic.  Flutter-tongued trumpets and horns, rapid Elgarian runs on trombone and stabbing wasplike sounds, strings and brass – and off one goes into the refrain – and so on for four minutes.

Imagery stays in one’s mind – aircraft swooping, rolling, firing, white glycol-vapour or fire streaming from an engine.  Two sprog pilots go down, one drenched in sweat and shaking in terror as he tries to slide back his canopy – it sticks fast, the Spitfire, wreathed in flames, explodes - the other wincingly unable to leave his diving aircraft as he has been shot through the thigh, a WAAF voice from the control-room trying to raise him on the radio till the moment that his Spitfire hits the sands below...  A German pilot peers as his windscreen fills with black oil thrown back from a damaged engine – his Messerschmitt banks and blows up.  Another RAF pilot turns his aircraft upside-down (textbook, this), to bale out – he trails a long, glaring white ribbon of harness and goes on falling...  A Heinkel is hit in both engines; goggles down, the crew hastes to leave it – the last man struggles, straining every sinew as the dive deepens, to reach the escape hatch.  He fails as all is ending in a terrific rising minor scale, a tutto expressing the awfulness of this death, all death in war – it is a climax that loses none of its force from being the single most famous mannerism of Sir Malcolm Arnold in comedy film-music mode.  The Heinkel breaks up on the sea.    

Track 17:  Battle In The Air, Walton

Garlanded gaps at the dinner-table cause weary silence among Luftwaffe fighter-pilots.  The arrangement of Aces High, shorn of trio and played slowly on trombones-dominated brass speaks volumes, becoming something like one of those solemn Aequali for brass-ensemble and cathedral-performance, at which German composers of the 16th and 17^th centuries excelled.

Track  18:  Absent Friends

The Battle of Britain ends for the film as the Luftwaffe fail to show up one bright morning.  There is no rejoicing, only a sense of personal exhaustion.

The Spam, Plum and Raspberry Jam march written for the end-credits by Walton is sometimes used before the end-credits in prints of the movie.  It sounds like the trio of Orb and Sceptre and is undoubtedly rousing as far as it goes, but curiously detached in context, like a book of remembrance that leaves out the Sergeant-pilots.  1960s Welfare State idealism is brought to bear by Goodwin.   After Luftwaffe fanfare and shocked Somewhere-in-England string chords dug in deep, a superb crescendo builds and  his reprise of his Battle of Britain theme in full panoply seems near to bursting with due brazen pride and considerable folk-songish heft – the New Elizabethan expression?  - the woodwind carolling in old-world, bowmen-and-yeomen exultancy, vying whirlingly with rich, sustained brass,  the staccato, latino drive of his Browning machine-gun-music breaking out, and brought to heel before the unstoppable, percussion-based close!

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, based on the soundtrack of the United Artists film, The Battle of Britain, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  “This is Red Leader, I see ‘em!  Tally-ho! -Attacking, now!” 

Track 19:  Battle of Britain Theme – End Title

Of history in the making.  The pastiche element isn’t Wagner:  it’s Nazi and Bavarian popular music or “Robin Hood”, ye olde English bowmen on

 Walton – buzzing, small scale, mannered, intellectual, oddly introverted, more hackneyed than Goodwin. to anyone who knows British art-music of a certain age, and British cinema of the 40s and 50s.  Offcuts from other Walton works, perhaps.

Goodwin – harmonically more diatonic, simpler on the surface, broad strokes, elemental and monumental:  to scale.  His evocation of the human element is not as “post modern” or obviously referential as Walton’s:  it is of anxiety, horror or strange peace, nobility, endeavour and achievement.  It is a marvellous evocation of the air, fire and gunfire, manoeuvre in a big, blue white-clouded sky.  Of history in the making.  The pastiche element isn’t Wagner:  it’s Nazi and Bavarian popular music or “Robin Hood”, ye olde English bowmen on speed and staccato with abrupt, savage machine gun fire.  Perhaps a blend half-Walton/half-Goodwin would have been interesting, two very separate styles getting nearer universality – appealing to both the senses and a witty brain.  Technicolour vs The Queen’s Hall in black and white.

Goodwin’s fanfares, brief tuckets and Latino rhythms are in interesting contrast to Walton’s oddly Facade-like attempts to capture popular music of the ‘30s, the Latino there being the authentic inauthentic article, being too  practisedly neat to gain entry into the 1960s mind as music of the 1940s; too short-breathed in effect to do justice to world-movements or - save in Battle in The Air - the awfulness of air-combat.

20 & 21 September

CB Organ/Piano

No script, this week. The programme consists of two sequences of improvizations by our contributor, Mike Burrows, who introduces them:  they come from about 2005-6.  One sequence is for organ, recorded at the Methodist Chapel in Peasedown St John, the other, for piano.  Hear all this at 9am (our time), on Saturday, 8am on Sunday, or from 10am on our Listen Again Service, all @ Somer Valley FM. Though not recorded professionally, the music itself may be of interest. Usually, Mike writes scripts from his lifelong love of music and musicians, but here, he gets to dispense with words and make plain how strongly he feels about the Art, and how it is lived.

 

 

13 & 14 September

Musicke In The Ayre:  Crafted Consonances

A timely repeat for our programme show-casing the talents of the early-music group, Musicke in the Ayre, in advance of their up-coming concert at Saint Stephen's Church, Bristol at 1.00pm on Wed 17th September, 2014.

 

Today’s Classical Break consists mostly of a sequence of recordings from a concert – Crafted Consonances - held in the Augustan gallery of the Holburne Museum.  This very enjoyable concert of early music was given on Sunday, February the 24^th, as part of a series, Painted Pomp’,  by Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, of the group, Musicke In The Ayre.  The music consisted mostly of lute- or viol-accompanied song by Elizabethan-born Jacobean composers.

In the deepened, almost animated presence of paintings by artists such as Gainsborough, Kauffmann, Zoffany, Ramsay  and others, one heard something of the readily communicable soul of music of a time earlier than the Age of Reason and balance.  One stepped further back still, to  a legendary time of heroic warriors, courtiers, poets and musicians; of circles of influence, conspiracy and patronage, when religion, conscience and philosophy ran in complex strata best kept hidden from spies and enemies; a time of fate and pastoral dreams written by urban politicians, personal fortunes worthy of Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s tragedies, comedies and romances,  inward and outward exploration, the passing of Gloriana and accession of the Stuart King James The First.

Music and poetry (unlike in the 18^th Century) fell into in the most natural and expressive relationship of moods of the moment.  Ancient voices sang of love and grief, declarations and mortality, in thrall to harmony; applause might have come from Bath’s Georgian and Regency heyday:  but at an historical hour, both voices – one voice, Helen Atkinson’s, that is – and applause were actually of our 21^st Century.  Music has always been in the air – and the soul of man and of his forebears and descendants will always be most potently expressed by it.  Its tremulous vibrations, in songs of life and the collective yet refined spirit, awake and converse with the world – the catgut and vocal cords are frail with distance and yet not only speak but reply to our silence;  there are no questions for us to answer.  Here are 40 minutes of this illumination:  Musick In The Ayre’s concert, Crafted Consonances.  Our thanks go to the performers, Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, whose talents are here properly enshrined, but are also aired frequently and to the same effect in York, Oxford and London.

 

CONCERT

 

A poem written by Mike Burrows from several rows back, on the day! -

 

At Music In The Ayre – A Crafted Consonance

          To Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani

 

The voice and lutes! – and let their sober song
Be of an unkindness and barren sorrow
Of my durance in this most cruel wrong
That will not hear unless I do borrow
Such voices of harmony that have sprung
From the hearts of her preferred men:  but still,
Delights freed from throats and frets made true strung
ke In The Ayre - Crafted ConsonaProve, man or instrument, we bear goodwill.
Such love as this let her so hear and find
Aright our truth of sincere expression –
And let us not languish, as to her mind
And heart our tones reach, and supercession
Comes not late, indeed, but when that it should,
As, moved, she meets our lowered state with all good.

(The Musician’s, or My Lord Essex’s, Fond Complaint -  The voice and lutes! and let their sober songBe of an unkindness and barren so wW    owWritten at the Holburne Museum, Sunday 24^th of FebruaryOf my durance in this most cruel wrong  That will not hear unless I do borrow2013)

That was Crafted Consonances - a concert given as part of the Season devoted to Jacobean music, Painted Pomp, held at the Holburne Museum, Bath,  earlier this year.  The performers were Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani, two members of the early music group, Musicke In The Ayre.

Now, here are Edmund Rubbra’s Improvizations On Virginal Pieces By Giles Farnaby, For Orchestra, Op50.  These were written to offset costs of publishing Rubbra’s First Symphony!  They form a work that is, in fact, far from being a pot-boiler.  Farnaby (1560-1640), was born in Truro and died in London.  He composed, to a large extent, pieces for keyboard instruments – for performance in the stately home or town-house! – and, in contrast to this preoccupation - madrigals.  Much of his output is now held in the US.  Rubbra, a symphonist of the highest seriousness, and greatly inspired by the liturgical music  and polyphony of the Mediaeval and Renaissance Ages,  expanded Farnaby’s miniatures concinnately – that is, in a style appropriate to the originals – and orchestrated them with great care; his technique creating a palette of great beauty; these affectionate part-recompositions are deeply expressive, their moods ranging from the playful and capricious, to the wistful and grave.The scoring favours high to alto woodwind and the middle register of the string section (the violas lend dignity and an austere quality to more solemn measures).  The brass are light and mildly riotous or more sombre.

Rubbra permitted himself the greatest freedom in treating the penultimate and last pieces, Loth to Depart and Tell me, Daphne, as these were popular songs arranged by Farnaby, rather than original works.  The names of the  movements are:  Farnaby’s Conceit,His Dreame, His Humour, Loth To depart, Tell me, Daphne.

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s number was researched by Mike Burrows, and we wish to thank Helen Atkinson and Din Ghani of Musicke In The Ayre for the beautiful performance-material from their concert at the Holburne Museum earlier this year, which formed the major part of our programme.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

 

Improvisations On Virginal Pieces by Giles Farnaby, Op 50, Rubbra    

The Sea 6 & 7 September

This programme is a repeat from June 2010
Classical Break :  The Sea

Hullo, welcome to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  I’m Mike Burrows.

Today, we are going to hear music inspired by the sea, and we’ll begin with a justly very famous song.

 John Ireland, who was born in 1879 and died in 1962, was fated to compose many works that have not found acceptance on terms other than cold admiration of his technique, which was considerable, and irritation at his inability to meld the various influences on his style and so speak consistently for himself, which was more considerable still.

Though successful as a musician’s musician and teacher, he felt bitterly his lack of public success.  Yet   in this perfect setting of a poem by John Masefield, Sea-fever, he achieved that most elusive thing, a popular masterpiece. 

Track 1 John Ireland:  Sea Fever

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM.  And next in our programme of works inspired by the sea, we turn to Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953).  From the outset of his career, Bax wrote ambitious orchestral and chamber works characterized by a brilliant talent for instrumentation in addition to an as-enviable talent in cultivation of a late romantic symphonic style.  Descended from English Quakers, he was  fascinated by Celtic folklore, and, sympathetic with the cause of Irish Independence, even wrote poems and short stories under an Irish pseudonym!  His life-long, he was inspired also by the Atlantic in its many moods.  Tintagel was written in 1917 in Cornwall where its thirty-four year-old composer was spending six weeks holiday with his lover, the young pianist Harriet Cohen, for whom he would leave his  wife and children.  He had returned from Dublin only because War had broken out and since then, a number of his Dublin friends had been shot for their part in the 1916 Easter Uprising.

Quotation of the Sick Tristan motif  from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde relates the piece to Arthurian legend and the conflicts caused by a passionate affair, but is placed within a score that, beginning in an evocation of sea-birds wheeling and calling above the gaunt ruined castle and brilliant, high-running sea in Summer, draws one into a drama of the elements, nature and a man’s restless but uncompromizing spirit.  A drama, too, of love.  Bax once claimed to be ‘a brazen romantic’ and to have no time for ‘isms’ in music, but even if you have never seen or felt Tintagel, the place, hearing his Tintagel, the word that comes to mind as you listen may be idealism.    

Track 2 Arnold Bax:  Tintagel

That was Tintagel, a tone-poem by Sir Arnold Bax and not the last work that he would  dedicate to Harriet Cohen, his beloved Tania.

The Australian, Percy Grainger, 1882-1961, was at first primarily a pianist.  Frankfurt-trained, he was inspired by the example and friendship of the Norwegian, Edvard Grieg.

His compositions were mined from his own peculiar temperament and energy in addition to his deep study of folk-music in England, America, the South Seas and elsewhere - like Bartok, he recorded singers and players in order to notate their tunes with becoming accuracy, and delighted in scoring and rescoring his folk-based work to recreate not only the music but also the ‘atmosphere’, the unique, idiosyncratic nature of realistic performance and make-up of choirs and instrumental groups!

He pioneered the use of poly--rhythms and ‘elastic scoring’ to this end. 

This arrangement of Scottish folk-tunes -Strathspey and Reel  - What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor counterpointed - is art-music that expresses uniquely something of music-making in context - in the bar of a dockside pub or confines of the foc’sle.  Grieg would have been fascinated by it.  (1 m 32)

Track 3 Grainger:  Strathspey and Reel 

Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) was for many years a pianist-accompanist and conductor of the front rank in British music.

He was also a fine composer and wrote amongst other things two extraordinary Tone poems on Irish Legend, With The Wild Geese, and The Children of Lir.

We are going to hear an extract from The Children of Lir, an unaccountably neglected masterpiece by a great musician.

Towards the end of his life, suffering from terminal cancer and on holiday in Ireland, he saw a tapestry treatment of this strange story, in which the children of a king are ransformed by a curse into swans and doomed to rest for three hundred years on a lake near their old home, three hundred years in the stormy wastes of the Sea of Moyle and three hundred years off a group of islands.

The piece is as much of legend, coast and sea as isTintagel.  It requires a large orchestra and, in one place, soprano-vocalise, for performance, and lasts for about half-an-hour in one continuous movement carefully divided into chapters of the story.

The idiom is less fluent or modern than Bax’s, more openly influenced by the previous generation, composers such as Tchaikovsky, and of the generation before that, particularly Berlioz - Harty’s speciality as a conductor was music of this stamp.  The scoring is coarser and bolder, instruments are more obviously confined to customary roles.  The Irish accent of Harty’s music, a matter of speech-rhythms and familiar turns of synthetic folk-melody, is surprizingly well-reconciled with the idiom of these models.

Let’s hear Calm Seas and Blue Skies.   

Track 4 Hamilton Harty:  The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra:  Calm Seas and Blue Skies

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was born in 1852 and died in 1924.  He wrote prolifically in every genre of Art-music and was also the foremost teacher of composition and an important festival-administrator in the England of his day.

His music was often performed abroad - his Third Symphony, the Irish, was presented by Mahler, amongst others.  He  wrote seven symphonies, several concertos, six Irish Rhapsodies, chamber music, many operas, cantatas, much liturgical music, including Anglican Services, songs and other pieces, including parodies of ‘modern’ music, which he regarded as ‘damned ugly, me bhoy’.

We will hear the opening song from Songs of The Fleet.  This cycle, his second dealing with the patriotic British nautical tradition, was once highly popular, like its predecessor, Songs of The Sea, a staple work for choral festivals, concert-recitals, and in piano-reduction, home-performance and early recording.  In its original form, it is a demonstration in full of his choral, orchestral technique, in which vivid melody, rich harmony, dovetailing and scoring all play their part.  In its inspired and inspirational tone, it is simply the expression of sailors’ feelings on leaving port, as the latest representatives of the breed of sailors who ‘Lead the line’ and face both the sea and battle, today.  As such, it could express the pride to be taken in any courageous endeavour - in life itself.  Here it is:  Sailing at Dawn. 

Track 5 Stanford:  Sailing at Dawn from Songs of the Fleet

The American, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) wrote for many films. His best score before Hitchcock called by was written for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, the story of a young widow who goes to live by the sea and takes a cottage once owned by an old sea-captain, whose ghost haunts her and who becomes the love of her life.  As the author of Blood and Swash, the tale of her captain’s life at sea, she meets and falls in love with a philanderer.  In the film, the ghost effaces himself with a powerful speech made to her as she lies sleeping.

The cue that we shall hear accompanies this: in the course of Farewell, we hear many of the leading-motives of the soundtrack.  The mixture is much as before:  light - but not easy - textures involve the high woodwind or violins, and dark and impassioned or less certain moments are conjured up by deeper strings, bassoon and brass.  The brass is usually reserved for expressing storm and stress or - utilising the French horn - romantic warmth.  Above all, the music is touching because impressionistic, harmonically complex, notes constantly qualifying straightwardness; it remains music independent of the images it accompanies, but almost feels its way in life as must even ghosts. 

Captain Gregg talks of her situation,  the wonderful places of his travels,  which they will now never experience together - she will forget him or think of their association as a dream.  The passion in the speech at last appears to gust - but be cut off by the futility of talking of all they have both missed:  she has made her choice - life.  The ebb and flow of the tide is ever-present, the swell and undertow of the sea are as powerful a force as the pull of human attraction is irresistible - whether reciprocated or not - and as merciless.  

Track 6 Bernard Herrmann:  The Ghost and Mrs Muir:  Farewell

We return to Hamilton Harty, to hear the last section of The Children of  Lir, which describes how the bewitched are rescued by an island hermit after their nine centuries of wandering, only to age and die on being christened.  The stillness at that point is that which one feels on coming indoors out of the stormy sea-air, still feeling a humming of the wind in one’s ears, hardened coldness of face and dry brightness of vision.  A bardic peroration of varied scoring builds and subsides stoically with the lonely, resolving sound of a holy bell. The brusque fanfare with which the piece ends rings out much as in the beginning, but with finality.       

Track 7 Hamilton Harty:  The Children of Lir - Poem for Orchestra:  Transformation, Baptism and Death

So we reach our final work for today.  The Finn, Uuno Klami, was born in 1900.  Over-shadowed as all contemporary Finnish musicians were by the international reputation of Sibelius, it was perhaps out of an instinct for artistic self-preservation that Klami looked to the France of Ravel and Les Six, and to Stravinsky for his influences, though the undertow of folksong and Sibelius meant that he did not entirely avoid imitation of the great man, or at least found no means of his own of creating a new national style or content in his brittle, less consistently-inventive music.  Written for the most part between 1930-31, in the conducive surroundings of his coastal birthplace, the six numbers of the orchestral Suite, Sea Pictures were originally intended for a Sea Symphony.  As a skilled sailor, he intended the last movement Force Three, to convey not the appearances of the open sea, but  the feelings of sailing with a Force Three wind behind one!  The result, one might say, culminates in something akin to Bolero In The Finnish Gulf, but even Ravel’s Bolero a work first heard by Klami not long before, was a little--known modern work once, and reminiscences of it would not have seemed so obvious in the 1930s.

Really, the resemblance does Force Three no great harm, being carried off almost as well as Bax’s slighter though perhaps more appropriate quotation from Tristan und Isolde in his Tintagel, which we heard earlier!

You have been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, We hope that you have enjoyed our programme and that we’ll have your company again soon.  This is Mike Burrows casting off with ForceThree, by Uuno Klami.  

Track 8 Uuno Klami, Sea Pictures, Last Movt, Force Three