21 & 22 February

Organ and Piano Music by Mike Burrows (repeat)

14 & 15 February

CB Blake

(Repeated from July 2012)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s rogramme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  Let’s begin with a nocturne of great beauty written for tenor solo, solo viola, semi-chorus and orchestra, by Sir George Dyson, Night Hath No Wings, a conflation of verses by Robert Herrick and Isaac Williams.  It forms the third movement of a massive “Cycle of Poems” written for performance at the Three Choirs Festival:  Quo Vadis, or in English, Whither goest thou?  The austere timbre of the viola sets the tone for what follows:  an arioso not far removed in melodic or harmonic style from those of the Seventeenth Century of Herrick - incidentally, Isaac Williams was a Victorian and follower of the Oxford Movement.  Dyson sets the words with modest aptness, but smouldering intensity in which voice, viola and strings vie in pathos, woodwind - flute and clarinet -introducing a kind of sickroom closeness.  Pizzicati punctuate.    

Night hath no wings for him that cannot sleep;

And time seems then not to fly, but creep;

Slowly her chariot drives as if that she

Had broke her wheel...

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress...

When God knows I’m tossed about

Either with despair or doubt,

Yet before the glass be out,

Sweet spirit, comfort me...

Consolation comes slowly and unsurely with Isaac Williams’ smoother, longer-lined verse: 

Unto the east we turn with watchful eyes

Where opens the white haze of silvery lawn

And the still trees stand in the streak of dawn...

The sub-chorus sing, first soothingly, then, after further protest from the soloist, with pizzicato tread of strings...

With a restatement of Herrick’s verse beginning, In The hour of my distress, comfort is perhaps felt at the close, with its repetitions of the words comfort me, and a dying fall.  Written for the cancelled Three Choirs Festival of 1939, Quo Vadis was performed in full only in 1949.

Track One:  Quo Vadis, Night Hath No Wings,  Dyson (10.30 min) 

Next, an improvization by the clarinettist, Richard Stolzmann and the percussion-group, Nexus.  Eternal Triangle Beckons. 

Track Two:  Eternal Triangle Beckons, Stolzmann/Nexus (6.23 min)

Now, a group of orchestral songs by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, all performed by Kirsten Flagstad, and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Oivin Fjelstad.  These are marvellously idiomatic renderings.   First off, Since Then I have Questioned No Further, a setting of a poem by Runeberg, dates from early in its composer’s career, and was praised for its folkishly lyrical quality by no less a figure than Johannes Brahms, when performed at a soiree in Vienna.  In his maturity, Sibelius orchestrated the song in customary neutral tones of effectiveness. 

Why is Spring so fleeting,

Why does Summer never last

Thus did I used to wonder

And ask many a person in vain...

Track Three:  Since Then I have Questioned No Further, Sibelius (2.22 min)

But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen is a song from Sibelius’ maturity, around the time of his Second Symphony, and instinct with pity and sadness that gnaws at the heart of mankind whatever the season.  The poem is again by Runeberg.  A girl longs for her lover, who does not return with Spring, the swan, the lark, the curlew...

Track Four:  But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen, Sibelius (2.43 min)

The last of our Sibelius songs today is To The Night, a setting of AV Forsman-Koskiemies from the period of Since Then I have Questioned No Further.  The spirit of the singer hastens to meet comforting night.

Track Five:  To The Night, Sibelius (1.36 min)

Now, a work for trumpet solo and string orchestra by the Armenian--Scottish American composer, Alan Hovhaness.  The great crisis in his career - rejection by his teachers at Tanglewood Music School after the award of a scholarship - was two years behind him when he set to work on this piece.   It portrays a heroic priest, the eponymous Khrimian Hairig, who led his people through many persecutions.  The trumpet intones as the voice of this man, the strings’ block--chordal responses growing in fervour and canonic contrapuntal independence.  Armenian semitones spice modal forms of chant.  There are moments of holy calm as at the beginning.  The fullest statement of the melodic material is reserved until the close, and broadens in typical idealistic statement, the trumpet like a golden crown.  The piece is subdivided into three sections:  The Chalice of Holiness; Wings of Compassion and The Triumph of Faith.  Khrimian Hairig, by Alan Hovhaness. 

Track 6:  Khrimian Hairig, Alan Hovhaness (7.39 min)

Our last work today is the Clarinet Concerto by Howard Blake.  Blake, a Londoner born in 1938, studied as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music, his lessons in composition given by the Belfast-born pianist-composer, Howard Ferguson.  His catalogue of works is massive, running into over nine hundred opus numbers:  but he has worked intensively as an accompanist and conductor, this secondary hectic career involving much travel and exposure to many styles of music ranging from pop, through jazz, to modern art-music.  A brilliant pasticheur, he has written much music in a tonal idiom recognizably influenced by that of his own teacher, Ferguson, Gerald Finzi, Hindemith, Delius and Peter Warlock.  You will know him by his music for the film, The Snowman. 

It is fair to say that this much-commissioned composer has an ability to create music that is sometimes described as ‘accessible’.  The idiom is approachable and recognizably of a tradition.  

It’s not revolutionary in style, and for many decades, this was to say that music was dull or fake: in the days when a culture of ‘lightning war’ seems to have been the anti-aesthetic believed on by all fashionable terrible infants and BBC Controllers.

Blake’s Concerto is structurally akin to that by Gerald Finzi (who was himself under-appreciated by movers and shakers in his life-time), and covers much the same emotional range, beginning with a flourish - though one provided by the soloist rather than strings.  The first movement, Invocation: Recitativo-Moderato, Molto Deciso,  opens in near-blues, which are supplanted by a mediaeval chant-sounding first subject coloured by the clarinet. Brusque onward movement is held back by the tug of doubt or sadness, complex canonic or imitational textures or semitonal sighs.  The scoring is harsh, with many misalliances in instruments’ weaker registers; the sense of driven-ness not to be put away as the flourish and chant are developed against an ever-changing background of counterpoint.  The semitonal sighs are heard most affectingly in a moment notable for high violin harmonics and held notes in the horn.  The inexhaustible energy and variety in the music builds to baroque or Finzi-like use of high strings with bass accompaniment, leading to a stalking climax, jabbing Dies Irae unisons punctuating the chant-theme.  The opening flourish - and clarinet - enter, and a slow fading chord coloured by the horn ends the movement. 

Track Five:  Invocation:  Recitativo-Allegro Deciso (7.51 min)       .

The Second Movement, Recitativo - Lento Serioso, is possibly haunted by Ravel’s piano-piece, Le Ghibet, another emotionally complex inspiration.  It begins with the flourish that began the first, but soon, the matter is proved to be a development of the high violin harmonics figure in amongst the imaginative thematic transformations later on.  Again, the horns are involved.  The clarinet and violins with cautionary matter from other parts of the orchestra build to a brief climax - underpinned by an upward scale - and a lowish consolatory sound is made by horn and warbling clarinet and other woodwind in exchanges of the melodic line.  Tension comes in on the high strings, stridency bringing back the swaying semitones on misallied woodwind - oboe noticeable - and brass.  Again, the music seeks to expand, and the oboe has its moment, answered by the clarinet.  The upward scale is heard from underneath.  Again, there is consolation, and the strings lead the warmer but quietly peremptory winding-down. 

Track Six:  Ceremony:  Recitativo-Lento Serioso (7.12 min)

The Finale is a Round Dance, marked Vivace.  An impish variation on the solo flourish leads to a jog-trot similar to the chant of the first movement.  Woodwind have a counter-melody that is flat in curve, more blues-like or jazzy and so modern in sound. 

It may remind one of the spikier inspirations of Malcolm Arnold.  The clarinet soon dominates it, as does the opening matter.  The semitonal swaying from the first two movements is heard with pizzicato accompaniment and what become roulades in the solo-part.  The chant-like theme is still there.  A crescendo grows with chuckling outbursts from woodwind and a more haunting air in the clarinet’s restricted figures.  The opening music of the rondo returns - barer, more gaunt.  Time is passing, even the clarinet is audibly flagging - or a final effort is inspired by the counter-melody, scotched at last by horn and rounded off by woodwind, strings and brass - the clarinet in at the very last.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM , and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s Programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!       

Track Seven:  Round Dance:  Vivace (6.28 min)

7 & 8 February 2015 Rachmaninov 1st Symphony

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. 

 “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

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

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.
And, for the last of these brief cues, here is the Rachmaninoff:

Cue:  Diminuendo and Outset of Development, Rachmaninoff  

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)

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.

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. 

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.

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

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

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 contrapuntal clashes and as-logical harmonic progressions.

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!

(Winter 2) 31 January and 1 February

Classical Break Winter 2

(Repeated from February 2012)

Intro:  In Freezing Winter Night, Britten

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of winter music and was researched and written by Mike Burrows  We have just heard In Freezing Winter Night from A Ceremony of Carols for three--part treble voices and harp by Benjamin Britten.  This is Winter standing all about one:  everywhere one looks, the frost bareness, a merciless beauty. Our earth is cold; yet the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul; we need never lose it.  Wonder is in the frost whiteness as in the white fire of remote stars.  Is this one’s everyday world?   In awe, two boys’ voices move in canon, a third moving with the frost-feeling accompaniment.  This music was written in a cabin on a neutral Swedish freighter crossing the Atlantic, as Britten returned tardily to Britain from the United States in 1942.  Minus its generator-hum, a nearby refrigeration compartment perhaps aided his imagination...  The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by winter:  and yet, we have the Christmas story; this time of seeming frozen stasis is the illusion.  If much sleeps or shivers, Spring is gathering its force under it all, merely in wait. From John Playford’s English Dancing Master of 1651, and words written later for broadsheet-sale, here’s All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away).

Track Two:  All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away) Trad

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  Its theme is Winter.

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was a lonely figure among the Generation of The Eighties - 1880s, that is.  His style was personal:  he was capable of close musical reasoning, a brilliant sense of instrumental colour in combination, but held to no one system of any aspect of music, save instinct.  His music harks back to pastoral and courtly Italy, and forward into regions that are not for nostalgia or the musically faint-hearted.

It can be frankly illustrative of early music, birdsong, bells - or harsh, terse and distorted, and working progressions of thought through regardless of who can follow.  Here is the fourth partita of his Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, which begins in chant and strict, four-part canon!  It is in three movements, for this Sinfonia is in twelve subdivisions - one each for the zodiacal signs - and divided equally into four ‘Partite’ - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...  The composer denied us the crutch of a detailed programme:  what programme there was was, he said, not to be told.  The Sinfonia was written  in 1951.  For its social context, the postwar period in Italy was a time of great bitterness, of the settlings of scores arising from the Fascist regime and its ruinous involvement in the Axis cause, an era of poverty, unemployment and the Marshall Plan.  American aid in funds and food-parcels had as much to do with support for the Left in Italy as with the privations and sufferings of a defeated nation.  In the 69 year-old Malipiero’s complex vision of Winter, there appears to be no place for hope, though there are moments of fleeting beauty and consonance.  It The Partita and Sinfonia end in cruel, growling discord. Perhaps, as Thomas Hardy put it,

“If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’

Tracks Three to Five:  Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, Winter, Malipiero

A near-contemporary of Caplet and Ravel, and taught by Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, Deodat De Severac was a composer of the Languedoc in Southern France.   His output was largely of character--pieces descriptive of everyday life in this distinct region named after 1the language of its people, Oc.  Here is a movement from his  Georgic Suite, Le Chant De La Terre, or The Song of The Land.  Les Semailles, The Sowings - of seed.  In Winter, we think of - and look forward to - Spring.

Track Six:  Le Chant De La Terre.  Les Semailles, de Severac 

To see a light moving on the ground in winter darkness is to wonder who carries it, where And why.  It is one of the memorable images from long winter nights, when wits are sharpened and curiosity excited that much more strongly, or when we are tired and reflective, the cold slowing our minds so that we take time to watch and think.  There can be thoughts of threat; who would be walking abroad on a night like this?

For the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lantern that moves along the night and that interests our eyes is the light of soul.  In his late choral and orchestral work based on Hopkins’ poetry, Inscape, Edmund Rubbra set this idiosyncratic sonnet in a nocturne of some gravity.

                        “Men go by me whom either beauty bright

                          In mould or mind or whatnot else makes rare.
                        They rain against our much -thick and marsh air
                        Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite...”

Hopkins cannot help them, ultimately as out of sight is out of mind; but Christ minds,

                      “Their ransom, their rescue, and first, last, fast friend.” 

Rubbra’s setting seems, aptly, to grow out of chant; the harp has an important, though sparely speaking role, heard bell-like and intermittently against other sombre colours of accompaniment. 

 Track Seven:  Inscape, 2nd Movt, Rubbra

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, I will Go With My Father A-Ploughing.  The words are by the Irish poet, Joseph Campbell.  There is a wild quality to melody and harmonies - in Gurney’s musical vocabulary, they could be Celtic or Northern:  a similar quality informs his songs On Black Stitchel (a poem with Northumbrian setting), and The Fiddler of Dooney (setting Yeats).  This song has a tragic significance.  Gurney’s Father, a Gloucester tailor, was his hero, and had lately died; Dad, of all his relatives, had understood and admired his musical talent and ambition:  he had died during Gurney’s troubles after discharge from the Army, before he had so much as seen his son’s music in print...

Track Eight:  I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing 

The poor are always with us, as the scriptures have it.  For some, there is a simple explanation.  However unwelcome their attentions, however greedy and cruel they become in pursuit of other people’s fair shares; however many lives are broken or ended to provide that last refinement of power and luxury - the rich, too, are always with us.  A folksong now, a carol:  Cold Winter is Come.  Let’s not tolerate its message.  ‘A time to remember the poor’ is an institution in default of refusing at any time to regard poverty as social justice.  The person or persons who composed it have earned no posthumous fame, owing to his or their class.  An enlightened professional recorded it in 1891, before it, too, could die.

Track Nine:  Cold Winter Is Come, Trad

Here’s a sonnet on Winter, written and read by Mike Burrows:

                                    Winter

         What comes down on the world is not held back

            By words, and protests remind of others –
            Others when mankind was less far off-track,
           That were demeaning enough.  Earth mothers
           The dead as well as she does the living –
           If anything, hugs the dead with more ease,
           The uncomplaining dead to whom giving
            And taking go deep beneath clay and freeze.
            Below the living root they have to lie:
            The poor man lies below the conduit
            Of available wealth, and his sad sigh
            Or rage is a matter of unspirit
            To the soulless for whom those sacrificed
            Are dwarfed by wealth as by the tree of Christ.

That last sprinkle of gold dust on a one-k-snifter as the world goes bust  is a particular pleasure and acquired taste. Local charity replaces the Welfare State,the poor have no cultural ambitions nor skills, no worthy hopes in life, only the dignity of work that they don’t choose.  Off waltz public amenities and common humanity and the rich do rather well - 60 Billion last year alone added to the assets of a thousand people now ‘worth’ between them nearly £400 Billion...  Those who cut, close and sell off our inheritance at will, and those who cost the country over £100 Billion pounds in lost tax-revenues each year, and Billions more in expropriation-contracts, evidently think winter smiles on local charity and ‘austerity’... The relevance to music in this is who writes, performs, criticizes and broadcasts the art-music of tomorrow?  Who grows up sufficiently in this atmosphere of falsehood and denial to create or assist creation in a rich tradition of a thousand years, the phenomenon of mankind’s musical communicativeness?  As music-charities scrabble for a scatter of pennies, children from less well-off backgrounds, it seems, have no entree and need not apply, as most outlets and institutions concerned in musical development close or raise their fees and we return to the days of the common man’s carol we have just heard - of two nations, two musics.  A composer once watched people as they took their seats in one of our opera-houses and said, “Music starves, but the wealthy could live for months on the fat between their ears.”  Let’s hear Winter Wakeneth All My Care from John Rutter’s choral song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment, When Icicles Hang.

Track Ten:  Winter Wakeneth All My Care, Rutter

Here’s another song by Gurney.  It sets a poem by Edward Thomas. Snow is a brief portrayal of a little girl’s thoughts as she plays in the snow.  The little girl in question was the poet’s younger daughter, Mywanwy.  A strange, dream-like epiphany of universal suffering is treated with fugitive strokes as in a sketch.  The after-impression is of sensitivity and kindness:  the human warmth that snow cannot pretermit.  Gurney loved children and shared their games, preoccupations and humour with genuine enjoyment.  Edward Thomas was a less certain companion, oversensitive, afraid of derision and often simply impatient;  there is a stressed unease in his words:  you might say that in his anxiety to be truthful and avoid sentimentality, he could not find the way back to being young.  He would have been surprized and made sadder to know how his children loved and looked up to him...

 Track Eleven:  Snow, Gurney

From snow to The Snowdrop, a song for female choir and orchestra from 1909-10, by the late romantic Russian composer, Alexander Grechaninov.

 Track Twelve:  Snow-drop, Grechaninov

Born into a highly musical family in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Edward German began as a composer mainly of symphonic and orchestral works and incidental music for the theatre, but in middle life became a successful tunesmith in light opera, regarded as a successor to Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre.  Rather dead-headed criticism by George Bernard Shaw and other commentators had deterred him from more ambitious work, suggesting that his style was too theatrical! The tragedy of German is very English.  ‘Successful’, he wound up confessing, “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...”    A scrap of paper found among his last effects stated, “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...”  To put his real talents into perspective, it’s believed that Elgar enjoyed his music more than that of any other contemporary.   The trick is to listen to what German composed:  it is obvious that he was a progenitor of most of our tradition of ‘British Light Music’ in the 20th Century, but if the imitations are discounted, he can be heard as Elgar heard him, as a fresh, cosmopolitan voice influenced by French and Russian rather than Teutonic models.  His sound owes something to his Welsh blood (and the Welsh hymn-tradition), and the Marchlands in which  he grew up, but nothing to the music of British academicians.  Written for the Leeds Festival in 1899,  The Suite, The Seasons, is a Symphony in all but name.  The finale, Winter, is written in sonata--form, and is a stirring juxtaposition of a solemn hymn and brilliant tarantella, developed and combined at the close with Tchaikovskian fervour; the movement’s qualities are not a million miles from those of early Sibelius. 

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM.  I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Thanks go to associate producer, Miss Suvi Burrows, aged eight, who requested the Edward German!  Goodbye!

Track Twelve:  Winter from The Seasons, German (

This script was edited and two pieces – Snow by Ivor Gurney and Snow-drop by Alexander Grechaninov – left out owing to lack of time!  The sonnet was written while the programme was being put together and was retained.

23 & 24 January, 2014

We have left last week's programme in for this week. We hope you don't mind!

CB Winter

Intro:  Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes, Gurney

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows and takes winter as it’s theme. 

We have just heard a song by Ivor Gurney, whose benign shade wanders often into the mind.  The Carol of The Skiddaw Yowes sets a poem by Ernest Casson.  It is a song for contemporary shepherds watching their sheep. 

Now, a setting of a sonnet of Edmund Spenser made by Edmund Rubbra.  It comes from his set of Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra, a work of his mid-thirties, first performed in 1935.  After the first performance, he amplified the original string quartet accompaniment, very likely as the textures of the string parts are often strongly contrapuntal and played on only four instruments may not bear the weight; of course, to thicken the lines may overpower the soloist’s contribution.  The sonnet’s compact structure of fourteen lines, balanced phrases and poised rhythms, comparatively long lines and an argument developed tautly within strict metre and rhymes, is not easy to set - its form being a single verse, frequently stating abstract propositions in a manner that does not imply any melody other than its own.  In the case of New Year Forth Looking Out Of Janus’ Gate, the tenor sings above a fugue; the quiet climax brings voice and instruments together in a broadened statement before the stalky opening subject, a tempo primo, ends the piece abruptly.

Track Two:   Five Spenser Sonnets for Tenor and String Orchestra Rubbra

Tchaikovsky’s twelve piano pieces, The Seasons, were written month by month for the journal Nuvellist.  They were intended for readers to play, they were written to deadlines, work on them being often prompted by Tchaikovsky’s valet.  It was fortunate for us that Alexei remembered.  Small-scale and unambitious as they are in form, The Seasons are anything but ephemeral as music.  Each was headed by a quotation from Russian poetry.  January (At The Fireside) is headed by words from Pushkin:  “A little corner of peaceful bliss, the night dressed in twilight; the little fire is dying in the fire-place, and the candle has burned out...”  There you have it, two of Russia’s more sophisticated artists of the 19th Century:  but the piece is a miniaturization of much that is best in Tchaikovsky, the song, the thought-provoking forays into rhythmical contrast and overall charmingly sensitive affect conveyed with notable melodic and harmonic skill, all this in a form of simple alternation.  

Track Three:  January (At The Fireside), Tchaikovsky   

Schubert’s Winterreise, composed only two years before his death, frightened his friends.  One can imagine that Schubert stared for too for long into its icy regions for their comfort:  how far their friend could travel by staring into the flame of a candle and thinking...   A twenty-four song-cycle setting poems of Muller, it tells the story of a journey into cold and nightmare, snows and madness, undertaken by a disappointed lover.  Here are three contrasting songs from the cycle, No 11, Frühlingstraum, No 18, Stürmische Morgen and No 20, Der Wegweiser - Dream of Spring, Stormy Morning and The Signpost.  Spring is the hope of salvation; storms and cold are too much to the lover’s mood; the lover has his path; it is shown him by the sign-post; the beloved did not have to make this journey - she has a home.  The wanderer’s journey is far from over.   

Track Four, Five, Six:  Winterreise - Fruhlingstraum and Sturmische Morgen, Der Wegweiser, Schubert

When news broke that Schubert had died, the eighteen year-old Schumann was heard to sob nightlong. Here is the Slow Movement of Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor.  This arioso is possibly Schumann’s most beautiful concertante creation.  The entire concerto was written and scored within a few days in the October of 1853 and during a spate of inspiration.  It was his last major work and was composed for the young Hungarian violinist, Josef Joachim, who with the twenty-year-old Brahms had done much to brighten what was a difficult time in his professional career.  In the event, the concerto was suppressed by Schumann’s musical executors, his pianist-wife, Clara, Joachim and Brahms after a private run-through with an orchestra, two years after the composer’s death.  Nearly eighty years later, during a seance, a spirit contacted another Hungarian violinist, Jelly D’Aranhji, and the objections of Schumann’s last remaining daughter, Eugenie, merely delayed performance and publication of the concerto a short time, which took place after Eugenie’s death, in 1938.  We hope to devote space to the entire work and the fascinating story surrounding it, in a future programme.  Marked Langsam -Slow - and beginning on cellos, the slow movement treats an introduction and violin solo melody to ornamentation and development in ternary form; near the close, the violin sings its melody a third lower and in the minor.  Filled with baroque touches, canons, imitations, appogiatura and trills, this is music instinct with the skills of old music made anew, and with all the dignity of the old.  The movement as a whole expresses a depth of sadness unusual in Schumann, and yet the sheer, full-hearted purity of means and ends and beautiful sense of form one finds in it confers on it an air of wisdom innocent of self-pity.  It seems to sing over the cradle of the vanity of human wishes.  Schumann loved his children, six of whom he watched grow:  here, it is as if we watch a dear child at the window, its dark eyes hypnotized by the twisting fall of snow-flakes, the fall that seems to rise.  We feel the sadness of how much young promise must learn by suffering through a too-short life.  This is not to sentimentalize either Schumann’s fascination by the baroque, or his own winter thoughts. “Work,” he had written to himself some time earlier, “while there is still light...”        .  
    

Track Seven:  Violin Concerto, 11 Langsam, Schumann

The four North Country Sketches were the Bradford-born Frederick Delius’ tribute to his home county, Yorkshire.  Most of his life was spent in France with periods when he was resident in Florida, Germany and Norway, but in 1913-14, he wrote an orchestral suite depicting the Yorkshire countryside that he had loved and explored as a boy.  Frederick. or Fred, Delius came of German stock, and was named Fritz.  As a man he had a curious accent, but at the bottom of a weakness for French idioms and beyond fencing of slightly German gutterals softened by the Norwegian of his wife, one encountered the tell-tale flat vowels of his county of origin.  His view of the moors in Winter, Winter Landscape, has the characteristic breadth and light and shade of all his pictures in music, but the violins, violas and woodwind bring an edge, the higher-pitched instruments at first chiming in coldness, the horns subdued, flute and oboe and clarinet only gradually becoming the hope of warmth.  The chromaticism of the harmony and rocking ostinati beloved of this composer are restricted and end unresolved, as though keen perceptions of Winter have no contrivable end in themselves, and simply fade out as the focus of one’s gaze is claimed elsewhere...

Track Eight:  North Country Sketches, Winter Landscape, Delius 

Now, a Branles de la Torche from Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore or book of dances, of 1612.  Torch--dances were a favourite courtly spectacle at this time, torches borne aloft throughout.  What a symbol for defiance of harsher winters than we know now!

Track Nine:  Bransles de la Torche, Praetorius,  

The American composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote many fine film-scores:  but also a number of equally striking concert-works, where his colouristic imagination was given full play.  Here is his glistening evocation of February, from the song-cycle, Fantasticks, to words by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton.

If one wants to take on Winter and win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other men, all of whom are starving.

To end, here’s a suite of cues from Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in 1911-12.  Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished from cold and scurvy on the return journey.  

 

Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, or the photography of the Terra Nova expedition – the artistry of Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five extraordinary men.  It is music of human endeavour and the inhumanity of the elements.  Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment - strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness, of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...

 

The cues are entitled:  Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.

 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

 

Tracks Thirteen - Nineteen:  Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams

Track Ten:  February, Fantasticks, Herrmann

Another traditional song: As It Fell Out Upon One Day, otherwise known As Dives and Lazarus.  In this,

The miserly contempt of the rich man for the presumably undeserving poor man brings its own reward...

Track Eleven:  As It Fell Out Upon One Day, Trad 

To Bernard Herrmann the film composer.

Let’s hear his Sleigh-Ride, written for the film The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which a Midford farmer sells his soul to the devil (Scratch) for Hessian gold.  The Scots song on which the cue is based is one thing;  the prominence of the tritone - the devil’s interval in music - in the harmonies quite another, seeming to be telling us where the enriched Jabez Stone is ultimately headed...

Track Twelve:  Sleigh-Ride, Herrmann

“Great God, this is an awful place!”

If one wants to take on Winter and win, it’s best not to take on the Antarctic Autumn and Winter - perhaps the coldest recorded Antarctic Winter - whilst hauling a sledge with four other men, all of whom are starving.

To end, here’s a suite of cues from Vaughan Williams’ music for Scott of The Antarctic, an Ealing film about Captain Scott’s illfated bid for for ‘prority’ at the South Pole in 1911-12.  Captain Scott, Doctor Edward Wilson, Captain Laurence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans reached the Pole a month late, on January the Seventeenth, and perished from cold and scurvy on the return journey

Vaughan Williams’ orchestral mastery may do as much as Scott’s own journals and the sketches of his comrade, Bill Wilson, not to mention Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, or the photography of the Terra Nova expedition – the artistry of Herbert Ponting and Scott himself - to perpetuate the memory of five extraordinary men.  It is music of human endeavour and the inhumanity of the elements.  Every stroke of harmony and colour - including tuned and untuned percussion and, notably, soprano voices like banshees, furies or fates in detachment - strikes home. The antics of penguins and moments of expedition-comradeliness, of course, permit warm humour in contrast to the dazzle or sunless glare of snow and ice as damp goes to one’s bones...

The cues are entitled:  Prologue, Pony March, Penguins, Climbing The Glacier, The Return, Blizzard and Final Music.

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!

Tracks Thirteen - Nineteen:  Scott of The Antarctic, Vaughan-Williams