Classical Christmas Break 26th & 27th December-2015

Classical Christmas Break 

Today's programme is mainly of traditional Christian carols. Three differing music groups give their interpretations of many of the well-known and some slightly obscure Christmas musical offerings..

Don't forget that Classical Break is available to listen to 'on demand' and there is a link to the right of this panel if you wish to have another listen to the programme.

Programme tracklisting.

CD’s featured:

The Choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor from “Christmas at Windsor” FCM1003

Clare College Singers conducted and arr. by John Rutter  HMV 5 72340 2

The Salvation Army Band “Twelve Days of Christmas”  Hallmark 309322

Sussex Carol: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

Gabriel’s Message: Clare College Singers

Adam Lay Ybounden: St George’s Chapel

Angel Tidings: Clare College Singers

Shepherd’s Pipe Carol: Clare College Singers

O Little Town of Bethlehem: Clare College Singers

The Christmas Song: The Salvation Army Band

In Dulci Jubilo: Clare College Singers

Stille Nacht: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

The Twelve Days of Christmas: Clare College Singers

Quelle est Cette Odeur Agréable: Clare College Singers

Here we Come a Wassailing: The Salvation Army Band

Quem Pastores Laudavere: Clare College Singers

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

Resonet in Laudibus: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

Il Est Ne, le Divin Enfant: Clare College Singers

There is a Flower Springing: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

Hodie Christus Natus Est: The Choir of St George’s Chapel

Infant Holy, Infant Lowly: Clare College Singers

Nativity Carol: Clare College Singers

Running time: 58:00

                                            

                                             

Andalusia 12 &13 December 2015

CB Andalusia

To warm you up on this winter weekend, here's a burst of Spanish sun!

Classical Break:  Andalusia

Photos of Andalusia by Rupert Kirkham

Track One:  Los Pacos Els Pacos, Vincente Perez LLedo

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s music is from Spanish composers attracted to the theme of Granada and the region of Andalusia.  You have just heard Los Pacos Els Pacos, a festive ‘Moorish’ March associated with Christian Spain’s age-old driving out of its borders of the Arabian and Moroccan invader.  The composer was Vincente Perez Lledo.  The performers are the Sociedad Musica “La Alianza” de Muchamel (a town near Alicante).  The  timbre of the trumpets possesses the almost explosively effortful vibrato common to much of Spain.

They came to Andalusia, the Southern Kingdom of Spain, in force,  in  811AD:  the Moors of North Africa.  Their influence did not end with the Catholic reconquest of the Kingdom in 1492, when joint rulers of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella passed laws requiring Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave. Andalusia had been occupied for over 6 centuries, and had been a place of trade with the whole of the Mediterranean for far longer than that.  The influence of North Africa and the Middle East was strong (incidentally, Sephardism was almost as important as Islam, before the Inquisition closed in), and Andalusians have been suspected of divided loyalties as well as a people of great cultural fascination for poets, musicians, artists of all kinds, proud and distinct. 

Spanish music has often been aped by Germans, Russians, Frenchmen,  Englishmen; it was á la mode throughout the 19^th Century, and - via South America to some extent - added to the melting-pot of popular music in the 20^th.  Frequently, just as Hungarian and zigeuner sounds have been confused, so Andalusian music  has coloured our idea of Spanish music plus non ultra standing for music of the other just as distinct regions. Many of the catchy rhythmical patterns of what we take to be Spanish music originated in Moorish and Gypsified Andalusia. Zapateados, Sevillanas, Alegrias, Bulerias, Tarantas, Malaguenas, Polos – many, flamenco steps - belong to the Andalusians, to a limestone-rocky, mountainous country of tropical vegetation that is lush near water, dusty and barren elsewhere, a land of cities such as Granada, Malaga, Alicante, Seville, and of villages perched on vertiginous slopes connected by high bridges or steep, dusty tracks, where water must be carried from a spring-head.  A land of religious processions, ferias, corrida, municipal bands, and folk-musicians. 

Here is a typical example of ‘Moorish’ Romantic-Nationalist music, a dance written by Enrique Granados (1867-1916), one of hisDanzas Espagnolas.  It contrasts dusky, almost stealthy measures and a simple lilting and extremely touching song-theme developed from them.  The dance was composed for piano-solo.  Here, Edouado Fernandez plays his arrangement of it for guitar.      

Track Two:  Andaluza, No 5, from Danzas Espagnolas, Granados

 Above Granada stands a monastery.  By an irony that suits the occasion, the water of the fountains, waterfalls and pools of the celebrated and most lavish Moorish palace in Spain, the Alhambra, is ducted from its spring.  Let’s hear some characteristic Gregorian chant from the Mass.  Gloria.

Track Three:  Gloria

The Andalusian School of music of the Moors was just one loss to Spain brought about by the reconquest of Andalusia.  Arabian music derives much of its hypnotic quality from short, self-repeating phrases and a firm, regular beat emphasized by percussion.  The vocalist or pipe-soloist is encouraged to perform straight or embellish a simple line above a bare instrumental background of sparse harmony.  The Sufic style that originally inspired Dervishes to entranced worship remained to colour Christian Andalusian hymns, secular songs and dances, and performance practices.  For ourselves, here in the 21^st Century, we may feel ourselves to be in realms of psychedelia – though not those of the contemporary Costa Del Sol.  Here’s the anonymous hymn to Allah,Jalla Man.   

Track Four:  Jalla Man, the traditional Andalusian School

Flamenco-toque is a busy style of guitar-playing associated with Andalusia.  Its origins are said to be in Moorish and gipsy wedding-dances.  The costumes are bright and fussy, the dance-steps complex, the intensity of displays is known throughout the world, but, even in Andalusia, not always as is claimed to be authentic!  Fandango, for instance, a form imposing accelerando and crescendo, may be a South American import.   A famous gipsy family perform flamenco at inhabited caves not far from the famous Moorish Alhambra and Generaliffe palaces of Granada.  Of the Alhambra, more anon!  Flamenco takes many forms, some sung; in the case of the Tangos, which is emphatically not to be associated with the Argentinian dance, it is traditionally built on its own Phrygian modal scale.  Here is a Tangos by the great Spanish guitarist, Juan Martin – entitled simply Malaga.     

Track Five:  Malaga (Tangos),  Martin

Tomas Breton was born in the city of Salamanca in the Western region of Spain, Castile y Leon.  He wrote fluently in many forms, in particular, in opera, zarzuela – a Spanish folk-form of the genre – and chamber and pictorial orchestral music.  His Andalusian Scenes are justly famous, a suite of four numbers, including a Bolero and Zapateado, and Polo.  Polo is an accompanied and sung form of flamenco.  Here’s Breton’s Polo, a beautiful example of scoring in which the sounds of string-pizzicato (ending on the cellos) seem to resonate as solo or tiered woodwind and even brass.  The sinuous phrases found in scalic figures, narrow melodic intervals and arabesques may be heard as Moorish – not far-removed from the Granados Andalucia we heard earlier.

Track Six: Polo, Breton

(FX Collage:  Evening frogs, nightingale, Jalla Man – fades out before:)

The Alhambra was first built as a fortress, the Alcazaba, overlooking Granada.  Sultan Yusuf 1^st chose it for his home in 899.  Over hundreds of years, additions were made until it became an unrivalled example of the superb palatial residences of Sultans and Governors in Moorish Spain.  After the expulsion of the Moors, it was added to largely by Christian royalty in the 16^th Century – a whole new palace built within the gounds. 

In reality, it is like a small town unto itself, with a huge pleasure-garden.  In buildings, the dominant colours are red, blue and yellow.   Art consists of non-representational geometrical patterns.  Filled with plainly adorned rooms and courts, fountains, cascades, its features also include tiled walls, colonnades, myrtle-, orange-trees, vines, roses...  In the park, there stands a copse of elms,  dating back to 1812, and gifted by the Duke of Wellington after the Peninsular War.  It is a place for tourists, dancers and musicians, a place of solemn contemplation of time and the greatness that lives on after its sponsors.

Andres Gaos-Berea

Andres Gaos-Berea, born in A Coruna, Galicia in North-West Spain, was a protégé of Pablo Sarasate,  a violinist of high reputation in South America - in especial, Argentina, where he lived for most of his life.  Our last work for today is his orchestral tone-poem of 1916,Granada – An Evening In The Alhambra.  It is scored for double woodwind, plus cor anglais and piccolo, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, full strings, and percussion that includes the dry festivity of castanets and tambourines.  The piece attracted accolades in Buenos Aires, A Corunna, Vigo and even Paris – there, in 1937, the famous Lamoureux Orchestra were conducted to great effect by the composer, himself, at the Salle Gaveau, and his masterwork of Alhambrismo was given once more the following year. 

Gaos’ piece begins in Debussyan whole-tone harmonics and level woodwind depth of twilight, a viola-shaded arabesque that fixes one’s attention, a tritone hinted-at in the relationship between arabesque and accompaniment; the cor anglais, accompanied by imitational alto and bass strings, sings a highly elegant and yet plangent song – piccolo and lower woodwind suddenly providing brief bird-calls over this appealing sound.  The Alhambra is famed for its nightingales as well as walkers in the mild Summer twilight.  The tone lightens and builds bewitchingly in bassoon, brass and strings – castanets – and with clever play of rapidity over slowness – a Sibelian or Schubertian trick that precludes the audible ‘gear-change’ that disrupts impressions of expressive unity, we have a beautifully scored flamenco of syncopated beat, with tambourines and much exhilarating high woodwind detail, a variation deservedly repeated!  There is something autobiographical in the form of this dance.  It begins as Farruca. 

Farruca is a kind of danced flamenco thought to have come from Galicia – As a rule, it is characterized by minor key tonality rather than by a modal scale; the dancer comes in on a strong first beat, and syncopation - reinforced by clapping -gives rise to quick, unexpected twists and turns amid a complex step-pattern.  Significantly, it is associated with Galician travellers who feel far from home.

Farruca is a ‘male’ dance.  The ‘feminine’ reply that ensues is modal, regular, skippingly light in comparison, responsible for much of the exhilarating woodwind detail!  The birds comment on this dance almost in parenthesis.  A new theme on cellos adds its own commentary, about it, the bird-song plays.  It is the big, romantic tune in the piece, developed from the cor anglais tune of the introduction. The lead is turned over to violins for their higher-pitched fervour, and a quiescent, modal  chant follows its subsidence, wound about by flute and piccolo.  A guitar-like, deep pizzicato leads to a new, Moorish development on clarinet, the strings providing a bolero-like tread, and viola-shading.  It returns, and the modal chant  frames this austere, narrowly lyrical episode.  Abruptly, the flamenco is on us again, as high-spirited as before.  Instead of a two-fold repetition, Gaos plays what is surely his masterstroke in continuity – as the secondary crescendo launches straight into his passionate  big tune, full-throated in its fervour.  This seems the heart of Spain herself singing.  Extended, it is as though lifted higher by its  own afflatus, ending in the modal chant.  This muses lullingly, with great pathos and brings us back to the music of the rapt introduction, minus the opening tritonal passage – the strings draw out this lovely melody with Griegian harmonies which suggest that Gaos is more than loath to leave his dreamworld.  The birdcalls and dusky strings muse on this sublime, humane song of regret until it finds something of its own consolation, after which the birds sing more freely again.  The harmonics return, the ghostlier for what we have heard.  Flute and muted horn sound stealthily, almost mockingly, before the neither loud nor quiet last, repeated and extended chords of cadence on lower strings.

The success of this piece in Paris came as Spain endured the bloodiest Civil War in European history, the invader from North Africa and Canary Islands, this time, being the Spanish Army under the Fascistic, avowedly Christian General Franco.

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 our musical tour of Southern Spain, and will join us again soon.  Adios!

 Granada, Un Creposculo En La Alhambra, by Andres Gaos-Berea.          

Track Seven:  An Evening In The Alhambra, Gaos-Berea

Benjamin Britten 28th & 29th November 2015

Classical Break - Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten 1913-1976

Hunt the Squirrel – 1.20

Hello and welcome to Classical Break. I’m Rupert Kirkham.

Today’s programme features music  by one of England’s finest composers, Benjamin Britten.

November 2013 sees the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Britten, in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast, the coast where he lived and composed for much of his life, where he built an opera house and a festival, and where he died in December 1976.

The son of a dentist, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. He was a brilliant pianist and had a phenomenal understanding of the capabilities and limitations of all the instruments in the orchestra.

One of the last pieces of music Britten composed, he undertook in 4 weeks between October and November 1974 – two years before his death. This was the Suite on English Folk Tunes, opus 90, from which our opening piece today was taken. Subtitled, “A time there was,...” after a phrase in a poem by Thomas Hardy, the Suite draws from a number of English folk songs and tunes. We heard ‘Hunt the Squirrel’ – an appropriate little number I felt as we ponder the rights and wrongs of the badger-culling experiment in Somerset that has just begun. There’ll be more from Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes later in the programme.

But  let’s hear next, a piece of music originally written by the man to whom the Suite on English Folksongs was dedicated – a collector of folksongs himself, the Australian composer, Percy Grainger. Molly on the Shore.

Molly on the Shore - Percy Grainger – 3.49

Molly on the Shore, by Percy Grainger. That came from a collection of Grainger’s tunes re-set by Britten called ‘Salute to Percy Grainger’.

Next, we have one of Britten’s most well-known works, from his Variations and Fugue on a theme of Purcell, also known as ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’, here’s the fugue.

Fugue from Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra – 2.40

Like most artists, Britten drew his inspiration from life. He lived, as I mentioned earlier, on the Suffolk coast – a wild and desolate place, so it’s not surprising that some of his music reflects the strength and beauty of the sea. In his opera, Peter Grimes,  Britten chooses a story that is not only  set in a coastal fishing village, but also features a character with some of the problems faced by Britten as a homosexual in a country that for much of his life, could have incarcerated him.

Courtesy pbs.org

He says of the Opera ‘(It is) a subject very close to my heart – the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.'

Set in the early 1800’s Peter Grimes is a fisherman who is accused of killing not one, but two young boy apprentices. The action is broken up by 4 ‘Sea Interludes’ The climax of the action takes place during a huge storm.

Here’s the Storm interlude. 

A scene from "Peter Grimes" at the Aldeburgh Festival. The action took place on a network of wooden walkways.

Storm interlude from Peter Grimes – 4.13

The Storm from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes.

You’re listening to Somer Valley community radio on 97.5 FM and online at somervalleyfm.co.uk. I’m Rupert Kirkham and this is Classical Break. If you want to hear this programme again, or get your friends to listen go to the website and click LISTEN AGAIN. It’s that simple.

Today in the 100^th anniversary year of his birth, we’re listening to music by Benjamin Britten.

Let’s head inland now for another number from Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes. Something  one assumes good country folk used to knock back whilst watching the morris dancers do their stuff outside the village pub in days of yore  – cakes and ale.

Cakes and Ale from English Folk Tunes – 2.24

When I was a lad, I was lucky enough to sing as a treble in the Choir at New College, Oxford. It was undoubtedly an incredible way to learn about music, and whenever we saw that we were to perform something  by Britten our spirits rose. There’s only so much Palestrina and Gibbons you can handle in a week of evensongs!

Our next pieces come from one of the magical experiences Britten gave me as a chorister – the singing of his Christmas collection, ‘A Ceremony of Carols.’

A ceremony of Carols

Here are three carols from the piece, Wolcum, There is no Rose and Deo Gracias.

Ceremony of Carols: Wolcum, There is No Rose, Deo Gracias – 5.00

Peter Pears, Tenor

We’ll hear some more music for choirs later, but first I want to play you part of Britten’s song cycle, The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

The libretto is a series of poems by British poets on the subject of night. It was written in 1943 when Britten and his partner, Peter Pears – had just returned from 2 years in America and Britten was preparing his first  large scale opera – Peter Grimes – which we heard about earlier. It’s scored for horn and small string ensemble and the piece has become a central work in both Tenor and Horn repertoire.

In three of the songs, Prologue, Pastoral and Hymn, Peter Pears is the Tenor, Barry Tuckwell plays the Horn and the band is the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer, Benjamin Britten in a recording made in December 1963.

Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings – 7.00

Now we’re going back to the chapel to hear another of Britten’s choral works. It’s his Missa Brevis in D and he dedicated it to George Malcom and the boys of Westminster Cathedral Choir. It was first performed in 1959 on the occasion of Malcom’s retirement as organist and choirmaster.

Actually, this  performance is by the boys of King’s College Cambridge, with Ian Hare at the organ and Sir David Willcocks conducting.

Missa Brevis in D – 10.05

Britten and Pears

This is Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today the programme features music by Benjamin Britten.

Now it’s back to the song cycles. Britten’s texts for his song cycles operas and other works came from various sources. The text for his song cycle, Les Illuminations – sung in French – probably came from the library of WH Auden, who was a friend of Britten’s with whom he collaborated on a number of projects.

Les Illuminations is based on a set of rather risqué poems by the French poet Rimbaud, written, some say, under the influence of mind-altering substances. They certainly are pretty weird, but quite advanced for around 1873 when they were written.

Arthur Rimbaud was one of the most important precursors of modernism in poetry although his entire output was created in the space of 3 years and it was probably this that attracted Britten. Rimbaud was also ...er ‘connected’ to a fellow poet Paul Verlaine and following a series of rather public scandals involving Verlaine, Rimbaud put away his quill and set off for Asia and Africa as a travelling salesman, never to be heard of again. Britten would have liked that too!

Set for Tenor or Soprano and strings, we’re going to hear 3 ‘Illuminations’ –Fanfare, Ville, and Marine. There’s that sea again. The first and third are sung by a tenor, Peter Pears, in fact, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer and the second by the soprano, Felicity Lott on a 1989 Chandos CD with the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson.

Les Illuminations: Fanfare - Ville - Marine  – 5.15

In 1940, just before they bombed Pearl Harbour, the Japanese government commissioned a series of works to mark the 2,600^th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire. The next piece was one of those commissions.

Sinfonia Da Requiem is a symphony written when Britten was 26. It’s in 3 movements, and is probably Britten’s largest orchestral work for the concert hall.

Anyway, the Japanese rejected it because he used Latin titles for the movements taken from the Catholic Requiem and because it was too sombre for them. To be fair, it’s not something you’d play at a children’s party. I remember when I was at school, I used it as interval music for our touring production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It was just about long enough for the interval and suitably demonic for the kind of capers to come in the second half of the play.

Some say that the tone of this piece was influenced by the recent deaths of his Mother and Father.

Here’s the second movement, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Richard Hickox.

Dies Irae.

Sinfonia da Requiem - Dies Irae – 5.27

I hope I’ve shown you some of the diversity of music produced by this outstanding English composer, Benjamin Britten. He was truly an icon in the musical 20^th century. His music is edgy, but accessible and it takes risks. Some of his music doesn’t get played much these days, which is a shame, but in this 100^th anniversary year, you are likely to find performances of all kinds from musicians at all levels around the country honouring his contribution to the English musical heritage.

In this programme we haven’t even touched on his contribution to the education of young schoolchildren through his school operas – Noye’s Flood, for example. I hope that in Classical Breaks to come this year we can play you some of this fine music which so many schoolchildren have experienced and which, one hopes, has inspired them to not only tolerate, but actually take an interest in ‘classical’ music amidst the cacophony of sounds and images that are thrown at them every second of the day.

Lecture over. We leave you with Jubilate Deo, a good example of Britten’s simpler writing. It’s a short anthem, written in 1961 at the request of the Duke of Edinburgh for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. Goodbye.

Jubilate Deo – 2.21

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Prospects 21 & 22 November

CB Prospects

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.

Havergal Brian (1876-1972), was an extraordinary figure in 20^th Century British music.  The son of a carpenter and born in Staffordshire, he was largely self-taught and started out on his career with some encouragement from Edward Elgar.  He was fairly successful until the First World War and thereafter had to content himself with a reputation in music-journalism and friendship with composers such as Granville Bantock.  His regard for and deep knowledge of German culture did not help him in his search for a hearing.  His Second Symphony quoted from Wagner’s Ring.  The Fourth Symphony of 1933 was unfortunately entitled Das Siegeslied, the Seventh had a programme connected with Goethe.  He was successful in earning his living with music-criticism, but didn’t give up on his music.  He had begun in an expansive Straussian idiom, capable of creating stupefyingly huge structures – his partly choral 1^st Symphony (actually his 2nd), The Gothic, incorporating a 76-minute setting of the Te Deum, has had a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest symphony ever composed, and his opera, The Tigers, is on the Wagnerian scale.  His first four symphonies were Mahlerian in scale; indeed, his taste for full sonority led to his using huge orchestras.  He composed a vast setting of Shelley’s epic, Prometheus Unbound.  Spool forward in his long life to 1964-5, and we find him working within a quite

different set of dimensions. 

The Symphonia Brevis, No 22, one of a triptych of related symphonies written that year, is comprised of two movements and plays for just over 9 minutes.  What vitiated Brian’s large-scale music life-long was his inability to write memorable tunes to fill the space demanded – and his powers of invention otherwise could not make up for this with clear, long paragraphs of development.  It is useless to compare him with Mahler, who was a melodist and one of the great contrapuntists of his generation.  Brian’s music is deliberate base coin as regards themes; his counterpoint can be almost Ivesian in its congestedness.  Equally, he was no Sibelius, capable of hitting on tiny phrases and turning them into beautifully-scored miracles of dynamic and lyrical imagination. There is a defiant whiff of the Black Country brass-band about his orchestration, with added abrupt pauses and contrasts – some being in a vein of whimsical humour - that will not entertain the listener who knows what he likes or who needs to know where he is being taken; lazy and advanced mind alike may be reduced to asking, “Are we nearly there, yet?”.   Even when it is short, to listen to an intervals-based Brian symphony can be a long haul for either party, though wonderful for those who listen and hear as he permutates, rethinks, hazards solutions. 

The Symphonia Brevis’ two movements are:  Maestoso e ritmico and Tempo di Marcia e ritmico.  It may have been written with Greek tragedy in mind.  Possibly also the anxiety of threatened nuclear war, something that blighted life at the time.  The trademark Brian features are there; big but terse, bluntly inconclusive tuttis; stuttering rhythms; jagged textures; wailing sub-lyrical unisons from the violins; a frequently canonic weave built on intervals, in this case, repeatedly the tritone; switches of mood; insistent brass and percussion, including xylophone; weird moments of abstracted song from soloists; march-rhythms, a fierce struggle for direction.  Tonality wavers and remains bedevilled until the final bars.  The hiatuses and quiet moments are uncanny even for Brian…  The opening material returns crushingly near the level close.  The epic intentions of Romanticism confront an age at once alienated and alienating and inimical to struggle.  The piece ends in a major scalic figure embracing the perfect fourth. 

There is no sense of resolution, only of gritty resolve, perhaps, So:  Watch This Space.

Tracks 1 and 2:  Symphony No 22, Symphonia Brevis, Brian

Havergal Brian’s creativity was amazing in its resilient industry – he was composing into his 92^th year and produced 27 symphonies in his old age, beginning at the age of 72 – and it must be remembered that he had carried almost no authority with him since his middle age.  The trajectory had always been downward after the first signs of success, the isolation deepening as his friends had died out. 

His last home was a council-house in Shoreham-on-Sea.  He died in the belief that his music was being performed, recorded, spoken- and written-about; he had lived and worked long enough to become a curiosity and, indeed, one to be appreciated by the connoisseur.  Tragically, he lost his highly attentive daughter, Elfrida, shortly before his own death – stricken,he dedicated his never-performed Second Symphony, with its modified quotation of the funeral march from Gotterdammerung, to her memory…

Another British composer who received less than his due in his lifetime was Robin Milford (1903-59).  In his case, there was not the bitter self-belief of a Havergal Brian to maintain his pride.  His career was, on the surface, more successful for longer, but when reverses came, he despaired.  His friends Gerald Finzi and Vaughan Williams did what they could to encourage him; both had a high opinion of his work.  The greatest tragedy for him was the death of his son Barnaby at the age of 5; but the loss of his two champions in 1956 and 1958, worsening health and inexorable eclipse as a composer are thought to have been what caused him to take his own life.

His piece for violin and orchestra, The Darkling Thrush was an early work, dating from 1929, while he was still working on piano-rolls for the Aeolian Company.  Based on the New Year poem by Thomas Hardy – Hardy’s poetry was an enthusiasm that Milford shared with Finzi – it is a fantasy of great beauty, modal, with slight Elizabethan or folktune characteristics and some chromaticism in the harmony.  Not very flattering comparisons have been made with Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, as though the piece were no more than a servile imitation – which would be bizarre, when one takes into account that the lark on a Summer afternoon sounds most remarkably unlike a thrush under Winter dusk.  What seems not to have been noticed is that the passacaglia finale of Vaughan Williams’ 5^th Symphony of 1943 contains an aspiring theme that sounds like an obvious echo of subsidiary material in The Darkling Thrush.

The scenario is of New Year’s Eve (1900), at twilight – darkling – and a thrush singing persistently in a tree, the poet asking himself what it can know of the future, what it is telling him.  From the opening bars, this fantasy or tone-poem draws in the listener, its not quite stillness bleak and yet strangely warming in its fineness of scoring, flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon prominent over strings.  The flute begins the piece and will prove important later.  Agitation declares itself; impassionedness enters, the strings and brass in canonic texture, with some baroque infilling.  The climax of the introduction falls away on bassoon – for the solo violin to sing over lovely muted strings whose harmonies follow the plaintive-sounding yet also strangely blithe soloist.  As greatly birdsong-like, the flute leads into a new episode or variation, a striding, confident theme. vouchsafed and decorated by the violin, imitated by flute and others.  The measure turns to a lolloping  dance whose mixed harmony suggests the Milford-modified influence of Warlock or Delius – not of Vaughan Williams.  Ecstasy is reached in a scalic fragment on trumpets and affecting outburst based on the birdsong and affirmative striding theme  -  the music of the violin slowly dies away to return to the music of the opening.  The dying fall is ended by a surprisingly loud chord from flute and low-voiced strings.  A beautiful, fascinating New Year piece, its qualities making it worthy to stand comparison with any example of British pastoral music on its own terms.  As to The Lark Ascending, has it occurred to any commentator that the violin-part may represent the poet’s response to hearing the cold tones of a thrush, here portrayed by flute?  Hardy was a country violinist who inherited a large collection of folk- and hymn-tunes from his father, and the style of his verse is derived partly from country songs and ballads.  Is it Hardy’s instrument that imitates, humanizes, extends, rhapsodizes, improvises folkish-style music based on, the song of the bird? 

Track 3:  The Darkling Thrush, Milford

In 1964, at the age of 82, Gian-Francesco Malipiero completed the last of his 8 string quartets.  Born in 1882, he had lived through a period of colossal social, political and cultural change, two World Wars and  two epochs of near-civil war.  Living in the age of “white-hot technology”, he had been born into a world in which much of the environment of the 1960s would have been unimaginable or the subject of futuristic novels in the style of Jules Verne.  

It is said that his home, a real bolt-hole in the countryside of Venetia, was given over to tamed wildlife, and that he composed with an owl sitting on his shoulder.

Of the 1880s generation, he was possibly his country’s greatest original talent since Verdi.  He had no truck with opera unless as devised by himself, and was prolific in the fields of orchestral music, symphonic and concertante works, chamber music, choral pieces as well as writing several operas of compulsive strangeness.  He was an Italian; sought inspiration in Italian folk, baroque and early music, including Gregorian chant as well as in the new works of his international contemporaries.  He believed in instinct, not conventional musical logic; his structures were self-made, built up from panels of contrast.  He was capable of confronting chant or the music of pifferari with polytonality or musique mechanique, the jump-cuts of an almost filmic technique more imaginative and vivid in constituents than the ellipses of Havergal Brian.  He was most emphatically a Picasso who could draw. 

The Eighth String Quartet “Per Elizabetta” (Elizabeth Coolidge, the music-patroness), is the most abstract of all; like Havergal Brian’s late works showing no let-up in close-thinking on the basic intervals of music.  He revels in the sound of music for strings, in bowings, fingerings, harmonics, pizzicato; the spatial and contrapuntal arrangement of four players, two violins, a viola and cello, each contributing to a tense coming-together of four voices.  At times, the quiet held notes and scutterings resemble nothing so much as the sound of silence in which one hears the functions and intense vibration of one’s own life as one awaits…what?  Malipiero was as unafraid of twelve-note music as of any other idiom, and had valuable things to say. 

His instinct here includes “coincidence” soundings-together but also more formal fugato.  All ends neither loudly nor softly in three distinct notes, a purely musical answer, it seems, to the opening notes of the piece:  but, of course, there is no such as pure music – music is not heard without emotion.  If the quartet is valedictory, it is neither sentimental nor at peace. Malipiero lived until 1973, busy almost until the last.

Track 4:  String Quartet No 8,  Malipiero

A Prelude and Fugue for string trio by Gerald Finzi, now.  This work was written in 1938 for one of his teachers, the composer and expert contrapuntist, R O Morris.  A quiet and intent prelude, elegiac in tone, imitational, canonic and solemn as is Finzi’s wont.  The sound is of the finest, deeper tones suddenly breaking in only to fade into regretful sighs – the subject of the fugue is centred on the notes of the deeper tones; brightness entering with a slight variation that brings greater rhythmical variety, a freer movement in the parts and richer expression.  At the stretto, the bass thuds and the higher parts have an edge eventually made exquisite, Quakerishly joyful, before the peremptory close.

(Owing to time constraints we omitted the Prelude)

Track 5:  Prelude and Fugue For String Trio, Finzi

To end our programme, here is a song by Jean Sibelius, arranged by him for orchestra, the stirring Processional, Op113, No 6.  This came from his sombre and beautiful Masonic Ritual Music, written for the opening of Suomi Lodge Number One in 1927.  Much of this work is in the magical style of his music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Processional originally set a hymn called Salem – Onward, Ye Brethren.  The arrangement dates from 1938, some years into “the silence of Jarvenpaa”, his retirement.  The Age of Anxiety struck Europe some time before it did the US.  Sibelius dreaded war and uncivilization, and it is possible to see in this music a prayer for the certainty of a preserved peace.

The serene melody meets with crisis more mutedly than in Sibelius’ earlier works – Spring Song, his Opus 16, for example – but coasts over it in nobility.

There was a pronounced streak of vulnerable childlikeness in Sibelius, evidenced most clearly in the clear-eyed optimism of the communal hymn-tunes that he bequeathed us.

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 will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

Track 6:  Processional, Op113, No 6, Sibelius