Musicke in the Ayre Baroque Beginnings 22/23 May 2015

Baroque Beginnings: from Peri to Purcell 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham.  Today's programme show-cases the early music group, Musicke In The Ayre, with extracts of a concert-performance at St Lawrence's Church in the village of Stanton Prior (a lovely setting, in itself). The concert, Baroque Beginnings: from Peri to Purcell, took

place on the 1st May 2015, at 7.30 pm, and featured Jane Hunt soprano, and Maria Danishvar Brown, soprano, accompanied by the lute and archlute of Din Ghani.

We thank Din for providing us with the recordings of both music and spoken links.

In Din's words, the concert consisted of 17th century songs and duets tracing the progress of the “New Musicke” from Italy to England, via France and Spain.

Any revivification of music in the minds of those who are not scholars depends on the advocacy of committed, skilled and feeling musicians; musicians with not only a grasp of the idioms of long ago, but also a talent for reminding us of the significance of music that doesn't die, but that like old soldiers, fades away. Early music does not die; it only fades away – and returns repeatedly and deservedly as

fashions change and tastes come and go. There is no “authentic” performance beyond cavil, but rhythm, melody and harmony sculpted in the mind of a composer, pricked out on the page centuries ago, and given performance

from the heart and brain of contemporary musicians who understand its essence

and who avoid unlikely and unlooked-for contemporary embellishment or sentimentalism, will live for us. Its essence belongs to us for enjoyment, as to the century in which it was written.

Nel pur ardor Jacopo Peri (1561 – 1633) 

Amarilli, mia bella Giulio Caccini (1551 – 1618) 

Se di farmi morire Domenico Maria Melli (c1580 – c1620) 

Alla luce Johannes Kapsberger (1583 – 1643)

Chiaconna Alessandro Piccinini (1566 – 1638) 

Zefiro Torna  Claudio Monteverdi (1567 – 1643) 

Che si puo fare Barbara Strozzi (1619 – 1677) 

Se l’aura spira Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 – c1643) 

Begli occhi Girolamo Frescobaldi 

Esperar, sentir, morir Juan Hidalgo (1614 – 1685) 

El baxel esta en la playa Anon (1609) 

Canten dos jilguerillos Francisco Escalada (fl. 1677)  

Goutons un doux repos Michel Lambert (1610 – 1698) 

Ma bergere Michel Lambert 

Dialogue de la Paix et la Felicite Michel Lambert

Dido’s lament Henry Purcell (1659—1695) 

If music be the food of love Henry Purcell 

We the spirits of the air Henry Purcell 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM. We thank the early music group, Musicke In The Ayre and Din Ghani for providing us with all the materials for our

programme, Baroque Beginnings: From Peri To Purcell. We wish them well in

all their endeavours for music that remains as compellingly and humanely expressive, beautiful and affecting as when it was written. Music that we need

in our everyday lives. 

We hope you will join us again soon. Goodbye!

Musicke in the Ayre: Jane Hunt soprano 
                         Maria Danishvar Brown soprano 
                            Din Ghani lute, archlute 

16 & 17 May Spanish Guitar- Music

Our programme this week was to be one show-casing a concert given by the early music-group, Musicke In The Ayre at Stanton Prior on the 1st of May this year.  We are sorry that owing to the kind of mix-up that might have been savoured for its ironies and tissues of cross-purposes by many play-goers of the 16th or 17th Century, it must now be broadcast next weekend.  Apologies to Din Ghani and his colleagues of MITA.  We mention this at the beginning of our blog both in apology, and also in what remains of a humble good turn to our listeners as well as MITA.  Din has advized us that the concert, Baroque Beginnings:  From Peri to Purcell, is to be repeated on Thursday, the 21st of May, at St Stephen's Church, Bristol, between 7.30-9.30pm.  There would be no better way to end the working-week with unusual ease and promptitude and be borne through the customary and contractual end by hauntingly lovely music, than to attend this concert.  On Saturday or Sunday morning, or on Listen Again @ Somer Valley FM, you could tune in and be gratifyingly reminded of the experience!    

Anyway, read on.

Spanish Guitar-music

The programme (Repeat) was scripted by Mike Burows and performed by Rupert Kirkham, broadcast on July the 16th, 2011. 

Intro Track:  Nortena, J Gomez-Crespo

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and scripted by Mike Burrows, and is a presentation of largely Spanish guitar-music. We have just heard Nortena, a piano-piece drawn from an Inca lullaby by the Argentinian composer, J Gomez-Crespo, 1900-1971,  and arranged by the great guitarist Andres Segovia, of whom more later.  Besides the lilt of melody, aided by the rhythmically defined though sweet-harmonied accompaniment, notice the use of rapping of the soundbox, an effect more resounding than can be gained by the tapping of strings con legno of a bowed instrument.

“Only one thing is more beautiful to hear than a guitar, and that is two guitars,” so Chopin professed.  Developed from the lute and mandolin, the guitar has the lute’s fretted neck, but a flat-backed soundbox nipped in at the flanks that appears to owe something to the viol-family.  The breadth of the body and length of neck promote resonance and an ease in finding notes, it is light for its size and a comfortable shape to hold aslant the midriff and lower chest by left hand on neck and right elbow and forearm.  It comes in a variety of sizes, usually with four strings, its pubescent or matronly figure capable of a wide compass.  It does not require the speed of note-production needed on, say, the mandolin, to create a sustained sonority.  No other stringed instrument is easier to play well.  In its simplicity, it can be supremely expressive, neither as heavy nor as over-resonant as a piano, and less scratchy than a bowed instrument.  For centuries, it has been at home in most parts of the world, an instrument of choice for both colonialists and native peoples overtaken by European and American incursions.  Beginning among hired musicians and courtiers, its use has thus spread until in both acoustic and electrical forms, it has become a pillar in the edifice of modern blues, pop- or folk music.

The Valencian, Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-99) wrote a number of concertante guitar-works in an approachable idiom that owes much to folk-music and Art-music in Spain, all sadly overshadowed by the admittedly justly popular Concierto D’Aranjuez.  Blinded in an accident at the age of two, he was trained in his home town, Sagunto, and at the Madrid Conservatory.  He arranged the music of such composers as Soler and the courtly composers of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, revealing both a long historical perspective on the music of all Spain’s provinces and considerable imagination in orchestral scoring whose richness approaches that of Respighi, yet, as Respighi’s does, preserves the tang of an earlier period.  This is achieved by favouring clear contrasts in the blending of the sections and treble, alto and bass registers of the orchestra. 

Here is a movement, Canario, from his colourful four-movement Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, a homage to the 17th Century performer and composer Gaspar Sanz (c1650-c1710), the gentleman of the title, and based on songs and dances from Sanz’s published collections.  This Fantasia was composed in 1954 for performance by Rodrigo’s friend Segovia. 

            A Canario is a variety of lively dance from the Canary Islands.

Track One: Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo

Often, we cry for the authentic, and decry the efforts of those who paid homage in the age before ours.  We can check on an original in this instance.  Gaspar Sanz’s Canario or Canarios in its solo-form shows us how brilliantly Rodrigo treats and develops his material. 

Track Two:  Canarios, Sanz 

Now, let’s hear the set of Six Catalan Folksongs by the Catalan guitarist-composer, Miguel Llobet-Soles (1878-1938).  Born in Barcelona, Llobet was one of the great artists of the guitar. A contemporary of Maurice Ravel, much of whose supersensitive sensibility and craftsmanship he shared, in Spanish music, he occupies an honoured position re-established by the end of the Franco-regime, which had subordinated all regions of Spain to rule from Madrid..  He lived a quiet life as a travelling musician welcomed by many countries around the world, and resident in Paris for long periods.  His tours exhausted him (however!) and he returned to Barcelona.  Tragically, he lost his mind during the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936.  His collapse came when his local church was fired; according to his wife, he was left with the mental image of an eyeball gouged out of its socket.  His final illness followed swiftly, pleurisy ending his life soon after Barcelona was subjected to its first and heaviest air-raid.

 Six Catalan Folksongs consists of:  The Son of the Mother (A religious song), Amelia’s Testament, Robber’s Song, The Nightingale, Heir of The Rieras, and Christmas Night.  We have heard the guitar dance, now let’s once again hear it sing. 

Track Three:  Llobet:  Six Catalan Folksongs 

The guitar originated in Southern Europe and always had its strongest advocates in Italy and Spain, where there were many gifted craftsmen and a love of music and dance of a kind that favoured its use, until the vogue for Grand Tours among the wealthy, and the coming of factory-manufacture, of mass-education, of a culture of home-making and the development of Empires and global trade-links.  The use of the lute and allied instruments had spread throughout Europe, and so the way had been well-prepared.  The guitar, like most instruments, had its periods of favour with the classes, cycles of fashion.   In this country and in much of Northern Europe, the guitar had a golden age from the first third of the Eighteenth Century until the middle-class guitar gave way to the pianoforte in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century, as the family instrument; in the colonies, pianos travelled remarkably, but it was easier to take a wind instrument, guitar or violin on a voyage to some out-of-the-way station!

Undoubtedly, many Europeans knew the guitar from the experiences of well-heeled travellers in Spain and Italy, and during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, a vogue for the Italiana and Espanole swept society at all levels.  Serenatas, canzonas, tarantellas, saltarellos, canciones, danzas de las hachas, fandangos, even flamenco, could be imitated on the piano, and were, but to hear them played on mandoline or guitar or vihuela - a kind of guitar favoured by wealthy Spaniards - was that bit more exotic an experience.

The Eighteenth Century had many guitar-composers, but it was a Spaniard, Fernando Sors (1778-1839), who brought the guitar into the 19th.  He settled in England, and taught, wrote and propagandized for the guitar, and was much favoured by fashionable Society.  Known as the Beethoven of The Guitar - the Cult of Heroic Ego was taking hold - he wrote concertante as well as chamber pieces, and developed the notion of the virtuoso in his own instrument. Here is a set of Variations On A Theme of Mozart by him, written in the lingua franca of the time, common to all Western civilization, rather than a style more characteristically Spanish.  The polite theme comes from The Magic Flute.  The fastidiously careful layout of this piece suits the guitar’s nature as aptly as one would expect.  A fairly simple, square-cut melody is subjected to processes of modification, adornment, rhythmical sequence-making, display coming to the fore towards the emphatic close.  Nimbleness in articulation is necessary in most guitar-music, rhythmical attack can be made wonderfully crisp and exact as well as soft.  The stronger and more flexible the joints of the plucking and pitching fingers, the less force need be exerted, and the better the tonal clarity that may be achieved. The guitar’s resonance requires little encouragement to sustain a note and create harmonic decay of a pleasurable kind as further notes superimpose themselves on it and the air. 

Track Four:  Theme And Variations, Fernando Sors

Without doubt, even if the pianoforte cut in, the Nineteenth Century song and dance were good to the guitar, and not only in the development of the science of guitar-design.  The invention of genre-pieces, short ‘poetic’ pieces of a particular character for a particular instrument, grew out of the John Field or Chopin Nocturne, the Schumann Novelette and Liszt Harmonie.  This, and a certain - in some places political - penchant among nations towards the picturesque elements of ‘nationalism’, stimulated a massive growth in interest in music-making, and mass-market in sheet-music.  Mass-publication, using the new factory printing-processes both met and further increased the demand.   At the highest levels, it paid composers to write well-turned miniatures.  Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the audience for virtuosity and serious musical entertainment widened, and at home or in musical and other clubs, at one level of accomplishment or another, something of the genius of hero- or heroine musician rubbed off on the public.  A good piece contrasting slow or quick A and quick or slow B sections, with or without development, provided people with entertainment and a challenge.  We mentioned the vogue for Italianacy or Spanishry earlier, and from Spain came the next impulse. 

The Castilian, Francisco Tarrega y Eixea, 1852-1909, was the teacher of Llobet, whose Six Catalan Folksongs we heard earlier.   Tarrega was a virtuoso and composer, known internationally as the ‘Sarasate of The Guitar’.  He wrote many genre pieces for his instrument, but, more, transcribed many piano-pieces by his colleagues.  He was educated at Madrid Conservatory, pursued a national career as a performer and achieved great success in Paris and London in 1880.  His piece for solo guitar, Recuerdos de La Alhambra, was perhaps his most popular piece, akin to a Neapolitan song in its melody and supported by tremolo-figuration throughout.  An intense presence on stage, Tarrega was perhaps less gifted as a composer, but his memories of the Alhambra, the Moorish fastness situated in Granada, was to be seen as a contribution to ‘Alhambrismo’; Granada was a place of fascination to Spain as a whole, and Andalucian music was not written by only Andalucians! 

Track Five:  Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Tarrega

The two great pianist-composers in Spain at the turn of the century were Isaac Albeniz and Enrigue Granados.  Both produced voluminously for piano, and only a proficient amateur can say that he plays from the works of either.  Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909), a Catalunian like Llobet, gave his first concert at the age of four!  He was refused entry to the Paris Conservatoire at seven, and at eleven stowed away to America, where he toured, supporting himself by playing the piano!  Studies in Leipzig and Brussels followed on his return to Europe.  He next went to Barcelona, where he met the composer Pedrell and first studied folk-music.  In 1889, he studied piano-technique with Liszt, after which he toured England.  In 1890, he studied with D’Indy and Dukas.  Back in England, he found patronage - Francis Burdett-Coutts, Lord Latymer, the banker, and in return composed operas to his Lordship’s libretti.  Opera was not his strong suit, and only one opera, Pepita Jimenez, of 1896, was a success.  He settled in Paris and concentrated on cycles of piano-music.  Altogether, his catalogue reaches to well over 200 Opus-numbers.  Even the collapse of his health - tuberculosis - from about 1899 - did not prevent him from accomplishing just the kind of music - piano-music and songs - of a national quality and harmonic and rhythmical sophistication that made it irresistible to Spanish guitarists. The Paris of Debussy, Ravel, Severac, Dukas, D’Indy, Messager, Schmitt and others helped to create the dynamic impressionism of Suites Espagnolas and Iberia.   

Here is an arrangement for two guitars by Llobet of a song, Bajo La Palmera, Beneath The Palm-tree, Number 3 of Cantos de Espana, Opus 232.  In this recording, it is performed by Julian Bream and John Williams.  The two parts demand concentration, but are both together and easily audible in partnership here.

Track Six:  Beneath The Palm Tree, Cantos De Espana, Op 232, No 3, Albeniz     

An instrument for a lover to play - to serenade his girl in languorous, rippling phrases that create a sense of contented laziness; good humour or longing. An instrument to play rapid, syncopated rhythms on, plucking, sliding, damping - even tapping strings or rapping soundboard - at a dance.  The guitar has two personalities, sentimental, sensitive to the point of just-audible stillness, and vital, aggressive and predatory.  It sings, it can mimic human movement in sound, it is a percussion instrument.  Art music took some while to match folk-music in all its variety and primitive but spontaneous skill.

Here is a modern example of flamenco dance-music composed and played by the Andalucian, who is much influenced by the work of Segovia, Juan Martin.  From his Andalucian Suite No 3, Jerez - Buleiras.

Track Seven:  Jerez - Buleiras, Juan Martin  

From Granada, Andres Segovia-Torres (1893-1987) had a concert career that lasted three-quarters of a century.  From his debut in Granada at the age of 15, he made his way throughout the Western World, becoming a good friend of Llobet, who greatly admired his skill and gift for interpretation.  His right hand was possibly stronger than that of any predecessor, and showed new possibilities in composition; perhaps the example of pianist-virtuosi had by now piqued guitarists into equivalent feats of simultaneous detail of rhythm and decoration, just as Paganini had piqued pianists in the early Romantic age!  Segovia transcribed many works for guitar and inspired the composition of works by many composers, and became an ambassador for Spanish culture, as well-regarded by fellow musicians as was Pablo Casals.  Here he is in a Fandanguillo written for him by Joaquin Turina (188-2-1949).  

Track Eight:  Fandanguillo, Turina

Estudio sin Luz, or Study Without Light is one of Segovia’s own finest miniatures, worthy of his composer-friends.

Track Nine: Estudio sin Luz, Segovia

To end our programme, here is a Pavanne by Luis Milan (c1500-flourished 1536-61), who served at the court of the Dukes of Valencia and wrote many collections of songs and pieces for the Vihuela.  The Pavane was a fashionable measure, so-called possibly because it was intended to be danced in the manner of a peacock - in English, it was the pavon or pavan; we have also the word pavonine, peacock-like.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to having your company again, soon. 

Goodbye!

Track Ten:  Pavanne, Luis Milan      

Spanish Guitar-music

The programme was scripted by Mike Burows and performed by Rupert Kirkham, first broadcast on July 16th, 2011. 

Intro Track:  Nortena, J Gomez-Crespo

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and scripted by Mike Burrows, and is a presentation of largely Spanish guitar-music. We have just heard Nortena, a piano-piece drawn from an Inca lullaby by the Argentinian composer, J Gomez-Crespo, 1900-1971,  and arranged by the great guitarist Andres Segovia, of whom more later.  Besides the lilt of melody, aided by the rhythmically defined though sweet-harmonied accompaniment, notice the use of rapping of the soundbox, an effect more resounding than can be gained by the tapping of strings con legno of a bowed instrument.

“Only one thing is more beautiful to hear than a guitar, and that is two guitars,” so Chopin professed.  Developed from the lute and mandolin, the guitar has the lute’s fretted neck, but a flat-backed soundbox nipped in at the flanks that appears to owe something to the viol-family.  The breadth of the body and length of neck promote resonance and an ease in finding notes, it is light for its size and a comfortable shape to hold aslant the midriff and lower chest by left hand on neck and right elbow and forearm.  It comes in a variety of sizes, usually with four strings, its pubescent or matronly figure capable of a wide compass.  It does not require the speed of note-production needed on, say, the mandolin, to create a sustained sonority.  No other stringed instrument is easier to play well.  In its simplicity, it can be supremely expressive, neither as heavy nor as over-resonant as a piano, and less scratchy than a bowed instrument.  For centuries, it has been at home in most parts of the world, an instrument of choice for both colonialists and native peoples overtaken by European and American incursions.  Beginning among hired musicians and courtiers, its use has thus spread until in both acoustic and electrical forms, it has become a pillar in the edifice of modern blues, pop- or folk music.

The Valencian, Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-99) wrote a number of concertante guitar-works in an approachable idiom that owes much to folk-music and Art-music in Spain, all sadly overshadowed by the admittedly justly popular Concierto D’Aranjuez.  Blinded in an accident at the age of two, he was trained in his home town, Sagunto, and at the Madrid Conservatory.  He arranged the music of such composers as Soler and the courtly composers of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, revealing both a long historical perspective on the music of all Spain’s provinces and considerable imagination in orchestral scoring whose richness approaches that of Respighi, yet, as Respighi’s does, preserves the tang of an earlier period.  This is achieved by favouring clear contrasts in the blending of the sections and treble, alto and bass registers of the orchestra. 

Here is a movement, Canario, from his colourful four-movement Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, a homage to the 17th Century performer and composer Gaspar Sanz (c1650-c1710), the gentleman of the title, and based on songs and dances from Sanz’s published collections.  This Fantasia was composed in 1954 for performance by Rodrigo’s friend Segovia. 

            A Canario is a variety of lively dance from the Canary Islands.

Track One: Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo

Often, we cry for the authentic, and decry the efforts of those who paid homage in the age before ours.  We can check on an original in this instance.  Gaspar Sanz’s Canario or Canarios in its solo-form shows us how brilliantly Rodrigo treats and develops his material. 

Track Two:  Canarios, Sanz 

Now, let’s hear the set of Six Catalan Folksongs by the Catalan guitarist-composer, Miguel Llobet-Soles (1878-1938).  Born in Barcelona, Llobet was one of the great artists of the guitar. A contemporary of Maurice Ravel, much of whose supersensitive sensibility and craftsmanship he shared, in Spanish music, he occupies an honoured position re-established by the end of the Franco-regime, which had subordinated all regions of Spain to rule from Madrid..  He lived a quiet life as a travelling musician welcomed by many countries around the world, and resident in Paris for long periods.  His tours exhausted him (however!) and he returned to Barcelona.  Tragically, he lost his mind during the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936.  His collapse came when his local church was fired; according to his wife, he was left with the mental image of an eyeball gouged out of its socket.  His final illness followed swiftly, pleurisy ending his life soon after Barcelona was subjected to its first and heaviest air-raid.

 Six Catalan Folksongs consists of:  The Son of the Mother (A religious song), Amelia’s Testament, Robber’s Song, The Nightingale, Heir of The Rieras, and Christmas Night.  We have heard the guitar dance, now let’s once again hear it sing. 

Track Three:  Llobet:  Six Catalan Folksongs 

The guitar originated in Southern Europe and always had its strongest advocates in Italy and Spain, where there were many gifted craftsmen and a love of music and dance of a kind that favoured its use, until the vogue for Grand Tours among the wealthy, and the coming of factory-manufacture, of mass-education, of a culture of home-making and the development of Empires and global trade-links.  The use of the lute and allied instruments had spread throughout Europe, and so the way had been well-prepared.  The guitar, like most instruments, had its periods of favour with the classes, cycles of fashion.   In this country and in much of Northern Europe, the guitar had a golden age from the first third of the Eighteenth Century until the middle-class guitar gave way to the pianoforte in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century, as the family instrument; in the colonies, pianos travelled remarkably, but it was easier to take a wind instrument, guitar or violin on a voyage to some out-of-the-way station!

Undoubtedly, many Europeans knew the guitar from the experiences of well-heeled travellers in Spain and Italy, and during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, a vogue for the Italiana and Espanole swept society at all levels.  Serenatas, canzonas, tarantellas, saltarellos, canciones, danzas de las hachas, fandangos, even flamenco, could be imitated on the piano, and were, but to hear them played on mandoline or guitar or vihuela - a kind of guitar favoured by wealthy Spaniards - was that bit more exotic an experience.

The Eighteenth Century had many guitar-composers, but it was a Spaniard, Fernando Sors (1778-1839), who brought the guitar into the 19th.  He settled in England, and taught, wrote and propagandized for the guitar, and was much favoured by fashionable Society.  Known as the Beethoven of The Guitar - the Cult of Heroic Ego was taking hold - he wrote concertante as well as chamber pieces, and developed the notion of the virtuoso in his own instrument. Here is a set of Variations On A Theme of Mozart by him, written in the lingua franca of the time, common to all Western civilization, rather than a style more characteristically Spanish.  The polite theme comes from The Magic Flute.  The fastidiously careful layout of this piece suits the guitar’s nature as aptly as one would expect.  A fairly simple, square-cut melody is subjected to processes of modification, adornment, rhythmical sequence-making, display coming to the fore towards the emphatic close.  Nimbleness in articulation is necessary in most guitar-music, rhythmical attack can be made wonderfully crisp and exact as well as soft.  The stronger and more flexible the joints of the plucking and pitching fingers, the less force need be exerted, and the better the tonal clarity that may be achieved. The guitar’s resonance requires little encouragement to sustain a note and create harmonic decay of a pleasurable kind as further notes superimpose themselves on it and the air. 

Track Four:  Theme And Variations, Fernando Sors

Without doubt, even if the pianoforte cut in, the Nineteenth Century song and dance were good to the guitar, and not only in the development of the science of guitar-design.  The invention of genre-pieces, short ‘poetic’ pieces of a particular character for a particular instrument, grew out of the John Field or Chopin Nocturne, the Schumann Novelette and Liszt Harmonie.  This, and a certain - in some places political - penchant among nations towards the picturesque elements of ‘nationalism’, stimulated a massive growth in interest in music-making, and mass-market in sheet-music.  Mass-publication, using the new factory printing-processes both met and further increased the demand.   At the highest levels, it paid composers to write well-turned miniatures.  Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the audience for virtuosity and serious musical entertainment widened, and at home or in musical and other clubs, at one level of accomplishment or another, something of the genius of hero- or heroine musician rubbed off on the public.  A good piece contrasting slow or quick A and quick or slow B sections, with or without development, provided people with entertainment and a challenge.  We mentioned the vogue for Italianacy or Spanishry earlier, and from Spain came the next impulse. 

The Castilian, Francisco Tarrega y Eixea, 1852-1909, was the teacher of Llobet, whose Six Catalan Folksongs we heard earlier.   Tarrega was a virtuoso and composer, known internationally as the ‘Sarasate of The Guitar’.  He wrote many genre pieces for his instrument, but, more, transcribed many piano-pieces by his colleagues.  He was educated at Madrid Conservatory, pursued a national career as a performer and achieved great success in Paris and London in 1880.  His piece for solo guitar, Recuerdos de La Alhambra, was perhaps his most popular piece, akin to a Neapolitan song in its melody and supported by tremolo-figuration throughout.  An intense presence on stage, Tarrega was perhaps less gifted as a composer, but his memories of the Alhambra, the Moorish fastness situated in Granada, was to be seen as a contribution to ‘Alhambrismo’; Granada was a place of fascination to Spain as a whole, and Andalucian music was not written by only Andalucians! 

Track Five:  Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Tarrega

The two great pianist-composers in Spain at the turn of the century were Isaac Albeniz and Enrigue Granados.  Both produced voluminously for piano, and only a proficient amateur can say that he plays from the works of either.  Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909), a Catalunian like Llobet, gave his first concert at the age of four!  He was refused entry to the Paris Conservatoire at seven, and at eleven stowed away to America, where he toured, supporting himself by playing the piano!  Studies in Leipzig and Brussels followed on his return to Europe.  He next went to Barcelona, where he met the composer Pedrell and first studied folk-music.  In 1889, he studied piano-technique with Liszt, after which he toured England.  In 1890, he studied with D’Indy and Dukas.  Back in England, he found patronage - Francis Burdett-Coutts, Lord Latymer, the banker, and in return composed operas to his Lordship’s libretti.  Opera was not his strong suit, and only one opera, Pepita Jimenez, of 1896, was a success.  He settled in Paris and concentrated on cycles of piano-music.  Altogether, his catalogue reaches to well over 200 Opus-numbers.  Even the collapse of his health - tuberculosis - from about 1899 - did not prevent him from accomplishing just the kind of music - piano-music and songs - of a national quality and harmonic and rhythmical sophistication that made it irresistible to Spanish guitarists. The Paris of Debussy, Ravel, Severac, Dukas, D’Indy, Messager, Schmitt and others helped to create the dynamic impressionism of Suites Espagnolas and Iberia.   

Here is an arrangement for two guitars by Llobet of a song, Bajo La Palmera, Beneath The Palm-tree, Number 3 of Cantos de Espana, Opus 232.  In this recording, it is performed by Julian Bream and John Williams.  The two parts demand concentration, but are both together and easily audible in partnership here.

Track Six:  Beneath The Palm Tree, Cantos De Espana, Op 232, No 3, Albeniz     

An instrument for a lover to play - to serenade his girl in languorous, rippling phrases that create a sense of contented laziness; good humour or longing. An instrument to play rapid, syncopated rhythms on, plucking, sliding, damping - even tapping strings or rapping soundboard - at a dance.  The guitar has two personalities, sentimental, sensitive to the point of just-audible stillness, and vital, aggressive and predatory.  It sings, it can mimic human movement in sound, it is a percussion instrument.  Art music took some while to match folk-music in all its variety and primitive but spontaneous skill.

Here is a modern example of flamenco dance-music composed and played by the Andalucian, who is much influenced by the work of Segovia, Juan Martin.  From his Andalucian Suite No 3, Jerez - Buleiras.

Track Seven:  Jerez - Buleiras, Juan Martin  

From Granada, Andres Segovia-Torres (1893-1987) had a concert career that lasted three-quarters of a century.  From his debut in Granada at the age of 15, he made his way throughout the Western World, becoming a good friend of Llobet, who greatly admired his skill and gift for interpretation.  His right hand was possibly stronger than that of any predecessor, and showed new possibilities in composition; perhaps the example of pianist-virtuosi had by now piqued guitarists into equivalent feats of simultaneous detail of rhythm and decoration, just as Paganini had piqued pianists in the early Romantic age!  Segovia transcribed many works for guitar and inspired the composition of works by many composers, and became an ambassador for Spanish culture, as well-regarded by fellow musicians as was Pablo Casals.  Here he is in a Fandanguillo written for him by Joaquin Turina (188-2-1949).  

Track Eight:  Fandanguillo, Turina

Estudio sin Luz, or Study Without Light is one of Segovia’s own finest miniatures, worthy of his composer-friends.

Track Nine: Estudio sin Luz, Segovia

To end our programme, here is a Pavanne by Luis Milan (c1500-flourished 1536-61), who served at the court of the Dukes of Valencia and wrote many collections of songs and pieces for the Vihuela.  The Pavane was a fashionable measure, so-called possibly because it was intended to be danced in the manner of a peacock - in English, it was the pavon or pavan; we have also the word pavonine, peacock-like.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to having your company again, soon. 

Goodbye!

Track Ten:  Pavanne, Luis Milan      

CB Gloucestershire 9 & 10 May

CB Gloucestershire

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

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

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

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

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

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

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

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

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

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

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

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

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

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

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

Track 3: lll Scherzo

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

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

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

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

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

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney