Classical Break: Autumn 4
Intro: Picking of Sticks, Playford
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was
researched and written by Mike Burrows, and presents a programme of music that,
intentionally or not, seems to evoke Autumn.
Grieg’s Concert Overture, I
Hoest – In Autumn - was an early work revized in the midst of the most active phase in his compulsive
Europeantours. It dated from the first years after his
abridged time at Leipzig Conservatoire, and after his friendship with Richard
Nordraak, a young nationalist composer who had done much to show him where his future path and style
lay. In Rome for the first time, he was
living with the guilt of having left Nordraak on his deathbed in Berlin to see
Italy; Nordraak who described his galloping
tuberculosis in tones of zest as ‘a
grand case’ in the eyes of his doctors, had died waiting for him to
return. Grieg, himself, was plagued as
an adult by chest-trouble – he had lost a lung to pleurisy - at Leipzig; for
once, he had perhaps absented himself in a spirit of self--preservation, though
there is evidence to suggest that he had failed to realize how sick Nordraak
had become.
The Overture was based on a
song written a year previously, Autumn
Storm, and quotes and adds to the sonata-form brew a folktune, a springdans from Hardangerdal. The long--established Danish symphonic
composer, Niels Gade, was meant to be impressed when Grieg returned from Rome
and showed him the work, but wasn’t. It begins with drone-fifths to represent the
Norwegian fiddle, the hardingfele: there is a slow, brooding introduction that
leads to a more venturesome first subject – an extensive quote from the
song - a tenderly-begun second subject and
snatch of the springdans, The development is short-breathed but strenuous,
darting, impulsive, modulatory and occasionally mysterious, before the
recapitulation and fuller, more brazen treatment of the springdans, bring things to a conclusion. The scoring is impressive, as revised, sustaining the curt brevity of the music’s
gestures. The woodwind and strings,
given the most affecting and elementally evocative moments, stay in one’s
memory as much as the blustering brass. It is a fascinating piece, one of Grieg’s few
conventional attempts at ‘form’. It’s as
though he sought to answer academic Leipzig in the person of the self-consciously
folkish Nordraak!
Track 1: In Autumn, Grieg
For Scandinavians, Autumn is a
severe change from Summer, wild, wet and cold, a time for harvest and
battening-down, looming darkness and the promise of months of Arctic chill. All this may be felt in a piece that Grieg
conducted first at Birmingham in 1888, and was proud enough of to send with
other favourites among his works to a new friend, Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Let’s hear a partsong by
Sibelius. Autumn Evening is a strophic setting for mixed voices of a poem by
the Swedish poet, Runeberg. One of a group
of partsongs that date from student-days,
Autumn Evening begins in a world that lies in its bleak grave of Autumn, harried, withered, dead, the blossoms of Summer passed and the forest
silent – but looks up into the stars, from whence eternal home smiles upon the
soul.
“Thus dream I in
the Autumn evening, and see
How the leaves fall
down from the birch,
A naked shore
stands reflected in the deep
bay,
And over the moon a
silver cloud is sailing.”
Autumn has its bleak side,
matched here in the severity of chorale-like strains, dotted rhythms and some awkward
rather than adventurous writing in the parts, but the twenty-three year-old
composer has the measure of the poem’s sentiments. If the setting is less flexible and
imaginative than Sibelius’ later
treatments of Finnish verse, this may
partly be due to the Germanic nature of the Swedish language, its totally
different system of stresses – Finnish stresses first syllables – its heavy consonants and less rich store of
vowel-sounds, all of which lend themselves naturally to a Germanic melody with little irregularity of metre, in
which rhythmical variety is introduced with dotted notes.
Track 2: Autumn Evening, Sibelius
Oh, Autumn,
let thy deepest
colours
shine in bold abandon
for our joy!
“The Michigan Handel”, Leo
Sowerby, was a master of word-setting; his church-music is highly regarded in
the United States, but he was also a great song-writer. His development followed a long and fruitful
course, and his Paean To Autumn, setting words by Jeanne de Lamartier, is a late work, gnarled and making much use of
whole-tones, but following the natural stresses of the lines in a scrupulous
manner that may make some think of Gerald Finzi.
Track 3: Paean To Autumn, Sowerby
A Harvest Song, now. This
folksong urges beer on tired labourers.
Its stressing of the hardness of agricultural labour and the joys of
sinking a quart of beer no doubt derived from the fruits of that labour is understandable in this age of strivers
and skivers – and the song blesses the employer for his generosity! Workers in the fields have never had much
protection from long hours and low pay; further, casual labourers continue to
see even less reward than retained. Of
course, a poor harvest once meant a starved-out year, the harshest conditions
being reserved for the labourer. One
should point out that down three
centuries, many thinkers on employment – strivers to a man or woman - have
decried drink – like smoking - as an evil influence on the ordinary worker, as
much as anything, because it affects optimum productivity.
Track 4: Harvest Song, Trad
Come the night of October the 31st,
everyone who is anyone on another plane is all dressed up with somewhere to go. On this one night of the year, Mr – or Ms - Ghost
goes to town almost with our
approval. What he – or she - makes of
trick-or-treating is anyone’s guess. Ghosts are a part of a tradition that has
outlasted many fads. For them, the next
big night will be New Year’s Eve, when ghost-stories are told.
The dapper ghost conjured up
by trombonist, Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, including a trumpeter of great
style, is evidently a one-time figure in jazz-high-society. ,
Track 5: Mr Ghost Goes To Town, Dorsey
“Remember, remember the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot!”
Here are two sonnets, the
first commemorating a Bonfire-night party and the second, its morning after, written by Mike Burrows.
(Guy Fawkes Party At Tanybwlch
Hall)
Fireworks
were never the same again. There
In
the wood, standing in groups, the chill night
Warmed
by thick clothes, friendships - and
embers bright
And
smoking in the incinerator -
Some
played with sparklers; all watched for the
glare
Of
first banged colours to print threads on
sight
From
volcano, or a rocket’s whooshed white
Popped
in stars. This galaxy made me stare.
For
forms - wool hats, scarves, coats - the
warden’s hand
And
‘tached smile touched off such spells, or
checked spuds
In
glowing ash. And the girl at my side
Deepened,
lit little, kissing. Sombre land
Lay
silent, its true stars high-spaced - no
duds -
In
bursts of aeons: a lover’s thrilled
pride.
Never
the same, that powder-reek rejoiced
In. So it is my memory. Rainbow-fire,
Spittering
glints, thick smoke billowing from
pyre
Of
a tiny soul whose burnt body, hoist
With
its reason for being, I found by moist
Autumn
garlic next day, charred where,
entire,
I
shook my head and went on: the lost
spire
Of
a roman candle scorched, lit, still
voiced.
To
the beach and town - or college - simply
A
student in love. Or a ghost years off,
Picturing
the next year as on each year,
Self
hoist by what I did not want to be.
Sparks
brilliant for others - smoke’s sharp
cough
Makes
them smile, and aeons will shine them
clear.
Copyright, Mike Burrows, October 16th,
2013
Our Remembrance piece this
year is a setting of AE Housman’s tribute to the military dead of all wars, Soldier From The Wars Returning, made by
the reclusive Charles Wilfrid Orr, the Cheltenham composer who recoiled from
the artistic life in London to live in Painswick. He served briefly in the Coldstream Guards
during the Great War before being discharged without seeing active service,
owing to eczema. Soldier From The Wars Returning is a heartfelt elegy beginning over
a solemn tread of rich progressions that rises swaying into a sturdy dismissal
of the kingly sponsors of patriotism and the wars of empire. Sadly, in these avowedly more democratic days,
we have kings and kaisers of our own. Mourning the dead need not bamboozle us into
accepting that they must be sent others for company.
Track 6: Soldier From The Wars Returning, CW Orr
The prosperous Alexandr
Glazunov’s eminence in Pre-Revolutionary Russia began under the tutelage of
Rimsky-Korsakov. He matured early, and his First Symphony was presented to acclaim when he was just 16.
His was a first-rate talent, and he lived long after its eclipse; he
directed the St Petersburg Conservatoire for many years, and emigrated from
Russia to Paris some time after the Revolution.
Since his early days, musical styles had changed greatly, which
circumstance only served to confirm him in his articulate
conservatism.
However he may have felt out of
sympathy with modern tendencies where the new, bold and bewildering at first
dominated the Soviet musical world, one wonders if he would have survived the
accession to power of Comrade General Secretary Stalin.
Like Rimsky, he was a fine,
imaginative harmonist and orchestrator, and blended occasionally Wagnerist
harmony with Russian melody as exemplified in folksong and liturgical
music. He learned, also, from Rimsky’s
rival, Tchaikovsky. There is a certain
detachment in his address to the listener, which may be put down partly to his
controlling intellect and professional prolificness: he did not have to wait on inspiration. In his own right, he has been consistently
under-rated by musicologists and historians.
Very often, his music, whether for concert-hall or theatre, has
irresistible verve. His most popular
work may be The Seasons, a ballet
presented first at the Hermitage Theatre in St Petersburg in 1900. There is no continuous story, only the character
of the seasons in turn; the dancers represent satyrs, fauns, nymphs, bacchantes
of the classical world. The thrill of
the tones from the orchestra-pit would have been extraordinary, not to be
outdone by the staging, even in metropolitan Tsarist Russia, where ballet- and
opera-production had become the most
imaginative and lavish to be found anywhere in the world. The brass in the music rang out to tiers of
gilded boxes , but all eyes would have been on the stage – on hypnotic light
and colour, and sublimely choreographed, swift and graceful movement. Of
Glazunov’s Seasons, Autumn is the culminatory group
of dances. In brilliant and affecting
succession, we hear: Bacchanal; Entries of The Seasons; Petit
Adagio; Variation: The Satyr; The
Bacchantes; The Satyrs and Fauns; Fall of The Dead Leaves – Apotheosis.
Track 7: Autumn, from The Seasons, Glazunov
Where were we?
The Finn, Ilmari Hannikainen
came of the generation following that of Sibelius. He received his training in Helsinki, Vienna
and St Petersburg, and became an international pianist as well as composer
mainly for the piano. His style is of
its time, elegant, finely-turned, Griegian, Debussyan, often playful, but with
an undertow of deep feeling and thinking – as might be expected, given his
models. The occasional melancholy that –
thanks, perhaps, to Grieg and Sibelius in particular - is required of a Scandinavian composer is
there, expressed in pauses, ostinati, subdued melody– sometimes owing something to
Finnish folksong – and chordal complexities; but somehow it does not prevail with the
listener, who feels a kind of contentment in harmonic and sentimental
beauty. Here is his piece, Syysateita, Autumn Rain.
This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Our celebration of
Autumn in music was written and researched by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in
again, soon. Goodbye!
Track 8: Autumn Rain, Hannikainen
