Easter / Spring April 9 & 10

CB Spring/Easter 2016

(Some passages may not be heard on the programme, owing to lack of time). 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. Today's programme, written and researched by Mike Burrows, is devoted to Spring and Easter. We begin with Spring Song, the tone-poem by Jean Sibelius, a piece dating from early on in its composer's career – 1895 - that was later much-altered and simplified before publication in 1903. It is not lightly named. It is a Song, an orchestral “song without words”. The revision derives great strength from a long-breathed melody whose developing fervour and amplitude express perfectly the hopes attendant on the end of Winter and the replenishment – the increase in life - brought about by the return of the sun's warmth to the fertility of earth. 

The trajectory of the piece, as revized, is an emotive leap of directness, faith and seeming inevitability, the climax well-timed and -judged. The full-throated orchestration, in which the lower strings take their share in the singing, has much to do with this. The pealing of bells and brass at the close has little to do with Christianity. The hyperaesthetic Sibelius was not a Christian in any narrowly conventional sense, but a believer in Christian ethics, and pantheist or animist - lifelong a believer in the God of Creation, or the divine spark or spirit, in all living things. He felt the upswing in mood that Spring represents to dwellers in a cold climate. He praised that upswing's origin.

Fascinatingly, the effect of the single, opening, drum-accentuated chord of the piece is repeated at the opening of his last symphonic works, the 7th Symphony and Tapiola – commanding attention – and attendance in the world of his imagination - by the simplest of means. 

Track 1: Spring Song, Sibelius

Schumann's Six Songs for Choir, Opus 33, date from his Year of Song, during which he wrote at least 140 lieder, and sang out his heart in the long months before his fiancee of some years, Clara Wieck, and he escaped from her father's legal and not-so-legal efforts to separate them, and were married, the day before Clara reached her majority. 

Schumann's head must have rung with the synaesthetic seasonal symbolism of German poetry during that time, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – and especially Spring! Thaw, changeable weather, raindrops, sunbeams, birdsong – particularly the nightingale – recovering gardens and bowers, linden-blossoms, early flowers, trees coming into leaf, fresh brooks, butterflies, frolicking lambs, the growth of love in all that was young.

Spring Bells, a poem by Robert Reinick – takes us from the snowdrop through the rose and lily, to the bluebell. It is a wistful appreciation of Spring, the only sadness being that with the bluebell, one has the last of Spring, and the consolation being that Spring has brought one so much. Birdsong culminates in the nightingale, of course - with the ghostly light of glow-worms, a mainstay of the mild nights of the Romantic late Spring and early Summer.

A strophic song of simplicity, characteristically German in its formulae of melody and harmonies is briefly – and exquisitely shadowed near the close, but ends as winningly as it has begun. 

Track 2: Fruhlingsglocken, Schumann 

Here is a lively instrumental version of a Lauda – a 13th Century demotic hymn, in this case from Cortona in Italy - De la Crudel Morte de Cristo, Of The Cruel Death of Christ. This dates from a time when hymns were often fitted to adaptations of popular tunes. The words, not sung here, tell the story of Christ's examination, condemnation, torture and death.

Track 3: De la Crudel Morte de Cristo, Cortona Manuscript 

Our view of Easter has changed mightily, if in cycles, over the 

years as expression of Christian faith has developed ever more in the way of schisms – often miscalled heresies – in the face of the material, purely political corruption of established religious institutions. Bishop Jeremy Taylor's 17th Century Jeremiad, Lord Come Away, calls on Christ to return, ride on triumphantly on the long-prepared way, rescue His Temple – “as full and dear/As that of Sion, and as full of sin:/Nothing but thieves and robbers dwell therein;/Enter, and chase them forth, and cleanse the floor!” - and crucify His enemies!

These sobering words were set to the full measure of their sternness by Vaughan Williams as the first of his Four Hymns for Tenor, Viola and Piano, later arranged for accompaniment by solo viola and string orchestra, commissioned from him for the Three Choirs Festival of 1914. 

Vaughan Williams was one of the few composers of his day capable of entering into the minds of 16th and 17th Century poets and composers and suiting his modes of expression to theirs, yet creating something inspirationally new and unencumbered in the 

process. Unegotistical by nature, he was, one may feel, something of a time-traveller. 

Track 4: Lord, Come Away, from Four Hymns, Vaughan Williams 

Now, an anthem, The Risen Lord, by the Michigan Handel, Leo Sowerby. For decades a church organist and choirmaster as well as composer, Sowerby wrote this in 1919; it was first performed in arrangement for Soprano/Alto/Tenor/Bass voices and four soloists at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago at Eastertide of that year. In this recording it is performed by two antiphonal groups. The text is drawn from a Hymn To The Trinity by Charles Wesley and a Lutheran text, Christ Ist Verstanden. 

Its tune and treatment are both straightforward; Sowerby was, first and foremost, a great practical musician of faith, but this should not blind one to his profound gift, which found expression in almost all Art-music's genres, including Symphony.

Track 5: The Risen Lord, Sowerby

Two short songs by Ernest John Moeran, now. Moeran, of Irish extraction, was a great setter of English verse. Here are his settings of Spring Goeth All in White, by Robert Bridges, and Blue-eyed Spring, by Robert Nichols. These poets of another age were alive at the time of the songs' composition – what a time to be a song-writer that must have been! The songs exemplify many aspects of Moeran's style, his Delius-derived chromatic harmony; his enjoyment of the inflections of both reflective and jolly folksong, a gratefulness in the writing for voice and downright or shyly and wistfully beautiful writing for piano (adapting to the sense of the words). For the rest, just as the Germans have their requisite Spring symbolism, so do we, and he does British Spring-imagery full justice. Whether reflections on a scene, mortality or yeasty youth, these are songs of the open air. 

Track 6: Spring Goeth All In White, Moeran 

Track 7: Blue-eyed Spring, Moeran 

Isn't Easter the time of redemption? Ivor Gurney's unaccompanied Anthem for Double Choir, Since I believe In God The Father Almighty (Johannes Milton Senex), setting verse by the freethinking Robert Bridges, was composed from the depths of The Stone House, Dartford Hospital, Kent, in the Summer of 1925, almost three years after his final breakdown. In it, he sets out his credo of freedom from “studied system”, “argument”, “delusion”, and “foolish invention”; he “will cherish his freedom in loving service,/Greatly adoring for delight beyond asking/Or thinking, and in hours of anguish and darkness /Confiding always on His excellent greatness.”  He has not seen God, cannot know him, nor know the “Heav'nly purpose” in this life, but he loves beauty and hates evil as unworthy.

This extraordinary work was written by a man who feared electrical tricks, radio-waves, machines under the floors that tortured him; heard voices; demanded death or regular employment; aggressively defied attendants and shunned the company of fellow-inmates. Its peculiar intensity derives from narrow intervals that widen unexpectedly, and by the interplay of the parts of the two choirs, which spotlight certain high or low notes, frequently dissonant, with weird distinctness, in the midst of expected periods of chant. An ex-chorister himself, Gurney would have known Anglican anthems and liturgical music of the past like the back of his hand, and comprehended their every feature.This is chant with a difference – chant that betrays fitful torment as well as settled faith, and with it, the well-understood melodic and harmonic influence of Sibelius in his strongest late vein. Its spareness, angularities and absence of academic counterpoint are skilful. It was true, though, that, as his friend Marion Scott put it, “Ivor could only ever do things in his own way.” There is aliveness to the moment, to the dark night within, but also outside, the asylum-cell. Gurney had been the Night-walker, tramping in Southern England between London and his home county, Gloucestershire, and become the night-pacer in corridors and his room. This did not prevent him from writing book after book of poetry and both composing and revizing songs – and Since I believed In God, The Father Almighty. Now, Gloucester Cathedral hears (and performs), 90 years too late, the suffering, clear vision of the creative artist, one of its own as a child and youth, who was said to be mad.

Dictates of pitch and of form, including extended canonic texture, do not prevent this Anthem from sounding akin to the music of an aeolian harp. 

Track 8: Since I believe In God The Father, Gurney

Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov was the youngest of the group of five composers, The Mighty Handful, that came to dominate art-music in the capital of the Tsarist Russian Empire in the 1860s. 

By the time that he composed the Russian Easter Festival Overture in 1888, He was a mature artist, a long-time professor of composition at the St Petersburg Conservatoire whose learning had been acquired by self-will and diligence, and he had left the 

amateurism of the Mighty Handful behind, though not its desire to advance the cause of Russian music. He had made his peace with the Moscow of Tchaikovsky, and become an authority on fugue as well as on peasant themes and musical scales. The influences on him were wide, from Glinka, but also Berlioz, to Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, and he had the singularity, detachment and creative imagination to buy wisely at a market; to unite apt aspects of their styles in himself. 

This Overture On Liturgical Themes is based on three specimens of Orthodox Chant, Let God Arise, An Angel Cried, and Christ Is Risen. In spite of the long, solemn introduction that seems at one point to portray in solo trombone a priest intoning and in strings, a congregation's responses, Rimsky's aim was not to write religiose music. His inspiration juxtaposed liturgy with pagan life – with a life older than Christianity that had taken on the trappings of Christianity in their beauty, but that rejoiced in nature and Spring at least as much as in Easter, in merrymaking at least as much as in glorying in the Resurrection of the New Testament.

It is one of his more popular works, thrilling in its power and variety of orchestration, its contrasts in tone and focus, its harmonic resource and play of rhythm. It evokes all that it was intended to do, a masterpiece of hard-won skill, but is also intensely humane and humorous – a kind of measure of the full roundedness of ideal sprituality, earthy and honest in addition to wondering and a little uncanny. Birdsong and the glow of sun on white blossoms and an awakened world may succeed a candlelit, incense-filled atmosphere of solemn chant, with the suddenness of stepping outside the church entrance, and itself be succeeded by the dance. One scarcely notices sonata-form as the work unfolds, but the basic themes are thoroughly developed, contrasted and combined before the massive, gong-and bell-capped Christ Is Risen of the close! 

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. We hope you enjoyed our Spring And Easter Programme, and will tune in again soon. Goodbye!

Track 9: Overture, Russian Easter Festival, Rimsky-Korsakov 

CB Spring 2 & 3 April 2016

Our friends, the early music specialist group Musicke

In The Ayre have performed three

times on Classical Break.  Here are

some details from their latest press-

-release, which may be of interest

to local listeners : 

“Happy hour concert series launched in

Bath.  The Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel

on the Vineyards, above the Paragon,

houses the Museum of Bath Architecture,

run by Bath Preservation Trust. The

space has an acoustic ideal for

small-scale intimate classical concerts…  The

Musicke in the Ayre series kicks

off on April 8^th with “Grounds

for Delight” in which Din will

use three different period instruments (lute,

archlute and baroque guitar to accompany

soprano Jane Hunt in songs based

on popular “grounds” – standard musical patterns

well-known 400 years ago,

a musical practice which persists to

this day. Top composers such as

Monteverdi and Purcell were fond of

using grounds; they provide some of

the highlights of the programme. The

Museum is at The Vineyards, The

Paragon, Bath BA1 5-

-NA. Tickets £8 including

a glass of wine. Doors open

at 6.00pm, the concerts

are 6.30 – 7.30p-

-m.  For more details, check out

www.museumofbatharchitecture.org.uk/whats-on/events.”

Boasting a lovely venue, underlying patterns

and ingenious elaboration by music and

wine, this concert would seem to

represent grounds for delight indeed!

CB Spring (this programme is a repeat)

Intro:  Blackbird song

Hullo, this is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme goes in Pursuit of Spring.

Let’s hear Song of Spring from Troubadour Suite, an orchestral work by the Worcestershire composer, Julius Harrison, (1885-1963), who studied at the Birmingham and Midland Musical Institute and became an influential critic as well as composer.  Spring has none of the opulence of Summer, but freshness; it has chill like Winter to remind us that Summer is coming, and raw beauty gathered in with much of the security of Autumn Harvest-home - this harvest is too green and sour to eat, but sustains the spirit on sensing.  Troubadour Suite was written during the Second World War and dedicated to the composer’s friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley - a friend in turn of a greater poet, Edward Thomas, one of whose books furnished us with the title of our programme.  The movements are based on courtly songs by King Thibault the Fourth of Navarre, Song of Spring on a song about the re-greening of the wood:  the opening, with its dusky, austere coloration - of violas, blossoms into a beautifully tended song drawn-out in graceful nods - and passing notes - from section of string orchestra to section, and warmth enters sparingly on French horns:  the harp is intended to portray the playing of the troubadour himself; his voice is full of heart, his heart full of song.    

Track One:  Song of Spring, Julius Harrison

Now, a song from a cycle for voices and orchestra, Fantasticks, by the American composer, Bernard Herrmann - famous for his scores for Hitchcock thrillers and other films such as The Day The Earth Stood Still.   A song-cycle based on pithy prose-works descriptive of the seasons, by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton, The Fantasticks is one of Hermann’s anglophile works; he felt a real affinity with England and its literature.

In March, his style is between the Mahler ofDas Lied Von Der Erde and Holst: brusque woodwind opening, rasping brass - it is blustery, damp - celesta or glockenspiel providing cold brightness - the phrases short and nervous -  intermittently giving fanfaring brass its head, the climax more aggressive yet. This is like the mood of the Housman poem OnWenlock Edge: The tree of Man is never quiet. The baritone voice rings out declaiming operatically the challenge to Winter’s spirit, the coming of Spring.

Track Two:  March from The Fantasticks, Hermann

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s subject is a journey in pursuit of Spring.

Track Three:  Song of Nightingale

A setting of a poem, Fruhlingsnacht, Spring Night, by Eichendorff, next - a tiny nocturne so slight that it seems the picture of an instant in time in a young man’s mind.  Robert Schumann was an inspired song-writer whose songs were mainly written in two creative bursts in his thirty-first year and his forties.  Both a poet and composer, he himself had had no high opinion of songs right up until he read Schubert’s unpublished manuscripts on a visit to Vienna.

Spring Night sings of birds returning, spring scents returning soon, blossoms returning; with both joy and tears the lover thinks absurdly that it could be a dream, but the old miracles come back in the moonlight;  the stars and moon say, the woods whisper and the nightingale sings to the listener that his beloved is his.

It is certainly startling to hear Schumann’s casual yet urgent mastery of the song-form, given the fewness of the songs that he had written before, but this was to be the pattern in his every new venture in composition in years to come.  The song resounds long after its duration of just over a minute - just as might Spring birdsong.  Winter is over!

Track Four:  Fruhlingsnacht, Liederkreis, Op 39, Schumann.  

Another take on Spring and Love, It Was A Lover.  Cleo Laine sings a swung version of Shakespeare’s song from As You Like It, music by Arthur Young, accompaniment by Johnny Dankworth Quartet.

Track Five:  It Was A Lover And His Lass,Young

Track Six: Song of Cuckoo

The Norwegian, Edvard Grieg, 1843-1907, wrote perhaps his greatest piano pieces towards the end of his life, in two sets of arrangements of folk-tunes, 19 Norske Folkviser, Opus 66 and Slaater, Opus 72. Just four foot ten inches tall, a keen hill-walker, with only one lung, he loved the mountains and valleys of the Hardanger region and poor health did not prevent this last-gasp burst of creativity in homage to Norway’s music and people, though it had certainly prevented composition on a large scale throughout most of his life. Taking the raw material from folk-collections or from folk-musicians, he sought to capture the harmonic compexity implied in even simple melodies.  His friend, the violinist and composer, Johan Halvorsen assisted with notation in the case of the Slaater or dances.  From the folksongs, I have chosen Ola Dal, as it was used by Delius in his orchestral piece, On Hearing The First Cuckoo in Spring; the Delius is beautiful, but, here,the vernal-sounding folksong is treated increasingly to some of Grieg’s richest and most poignant chromatic harmonies over three verses.  The cuckoo is there to be heard in the stillness of a personal moment to be looked back on and recaptured only in memory.  He said himself that he was endlessly fascinated by the magic of harmony and that he wanted to build a house in which man could be happy and at home, and frequently he succeeds.  Certainly, here, the transitoriness of Spring comes to be banished, the life and freshness retained. Spring was a time of release for Grieg, whose Winters were frequently spent like a migrant bird, anywhere but in the cold, foggy North: Spring and Summer in Norway truly revived him..

Track Seven: Ola Dal, from 19 Folksongs, Op 66, Grieg

Now, a Chinese folksong arranged by the guitarist, Gerald Garcia and performed by him and the Japanese violinist, Takako Nishizaki. About three-quarters of the way through, the violin is given a short cadenza akin to sudden birdsong before this longing piece ends as quietly and, at heart, peaceably as it began.  

Track Eight:  Spring Breeze - Chinese Folksong arranged by Gerald Garcia

            “Praise to the eternal spring of life,

            That has created everything!

            The tiniest things have a beginning...”

The Norweigian, Arne Eggen (1881-1955) sets these words in our next piece, the song, Aere Det Evige Foraar I Livet by the romantic poet and secularist, Bjoernsjerne Bjoernson, and is a glorious response to the new season, seeing life in constant evolution and rebirth.

            “The tiniest insect

            can build a mountain.

            A speck of dust

            Or a grain of sand

            May have founded a kingdom!”

The stirring tune expresses this feeling perfectly, and comes clothed in rich, Griegian harmony and even richer orchestration.  Here, it is sung, chin-up, by the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad: the recording was made when she was in her sixties.

Track Nine:  Praise To The Eternal Spring of Life, Eggen

To The Ring of Kerry Suite by Peter Hope born in 1930.  This is a vividly colourful orchestral portrayal of a famous road in County Kerry, South West Eire.  The first movement describes travel by a jaunting-car, a horse-and-trap; the middle, slow movement views a placid lake and the finale portrays a lively country fair,Killorglin Fair.  Spring is a time for fairs:  all seasons of the year have them, but this one is so cheerful that it would have to be celebrating Spring.

One thing is certain, it stays with one some way along the road. 

A busy jig displays the sections of the orchestra in turn and together; a lyrical tune shows sentiment, oboe, warbling clarinet and flute evocative of fresh air and bright, dark countryside as woodwind lead; the jig returns the stronger for having been subdued for a space and above it, the brass and strings crown the song-theme - it sounds like love - for the fair’s boistrous dealing and side-shows to take over and bring the movement to a drily brusque close. The Ring Of Kerry Suite won the Ivor Novello Award in 1969.

Track Ten:  Killorglin Fair from Ring Of Kerry Suite, Hope

To ancient Russia.  Rimsky-Korsakov was the star-operatic, symphonic and orchestral technician of the famous St Petersburg group, Mogyucha Kuchka, The Mighty Handful or The Five.  He was fascinated by fairy-tale, Russian paganism and folk-music and found a congenial subject in Snegorochka, Snow Maiden, the tragedy of the daughter of Frost and Spring, a cold being who longs to feel the warmth of love.  This opera culminates in the death of herself and her suitor and yet contains the essence of Rimsky’s superb orchestral and choral technique, creating another world of myth and legend and the cruel beauty of nature and its seasons, and ends in Russia’s continuance:  the Tsar leading his people in a hymn to the sun-god, Yarilo.  Here is that hymn.

Track Eleven:  Snegorochka, Hymn To The Sun-god Yarilo, Rimsky Korsakov         The Spring, for many religions, is a time of rebirth:  pilgrimages are taken in a spirit of purgation and renewal in life and soul, worked by rituals of fasting, cleansing, praise and self-abnegation.  One seeks yet again harmony between oneself and the infinite that supports one:  in whose goodness one wishes to confirm one’s faith.  For Christians, the sacrifice and continuing love of Christ bring hope of forgiveness and the means to face the future in grace and gratitude, with God.  Here are two pieces that represent Easter for me:  the first is Angelus Ad Virginem, a hymn popular with the Canterbury Pilgrims.  The refrain is one of our nation-memories.  The beauty of Chaucer’s floweres brightens it, the freshness of Aprile showeres is on it.

Track Twelve:  Angelus Ad Virginem

Edmund Rubbra (1901-86) was probably Britain’s greatest symphonist of the generation that followed Vaughan Williams, but he was also a fine setter of poetry in both Latin and English.  His influences were mainly of the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Tudor periods in music, and Bach, with something of the organic control of material of Sibelius.  His magnum opus is his Ninth Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, The Resurrection’ This sombrely beautiful work calls for solo voices, choir and orchestra: Bach’s Passions were a model for the form of the work, a wonderfully concentrated form in Rubbra’s hands, of purely orchestral passages and sung chorales - Catholic as well as Lutheran.

The Prelude to the Symphony is a via dolorosa to the foot of the cross, and from there, all flows.  But let’s hear the last, choral and orchestral section, where, after the ascension, the Catholic text Viri Galilaei is followed without pause by Hasler’s Lutheran chorale Thy blessing be upon us.  Throughout the section, bell-like peals and alleluyas are hinted at or sounded in the voices and matched by orchestral accompaniment as sustained, and including tuned bells at one point - a valedictory sweetness in the violins and woodwind in particular.  Amens turn us to the stronger melodic outline of the Hasler - it is a wonderful, oddly dreamlike jump-cut from one style to another:  the second of two tunes sounding, like the first, as if in a dream-vision, a vision that many Catholics and Protestants still find it hard to share, and ending in sublime affirmation, unity and renewal, an Easter vision, in God.   

Track Thirteen:  Symphony No 9, The Resurrection, Rubbra

As an undergraduate in the post-war period, the composer Kenneth Leighton, who was born in 1929 and died recently, wrote an orchestral suite for oboe, cello and orchestra, Veris Gratia,  His inspiration came from mediaeval poems on Spring and love.  Let’s hear the last movement, Epilogue, Sostenuto ma con moto, sustainedly but moving along. Here, oboe and cello muse on the previous sections, the cello more passionately, the oboe with a more feminine, questioning air.  From the opening, the melodic and harmonic influence of Vaughan Williams (his Suite for Viola and Orchestra, Flos Campi) is clear, the strings divided later in overlapping phrases, amens, perhaps...  The oboe has the last floated word. The epigraph for this music is:  “praise together this earth...  And God have pity on the sadder folk...”  words with real resonance at this time.    

Track Fourteen:  Veris Gratia,  Epilogue, Leighton

Our last piece is a song by Ivor Gurney, setting a lyric by Thomas Nashe, and one of the five songs for baritone or contralto voice and piano that make up his cycle, The Elizas, so-called from the provenance of the poetry.  The cycle was completed in 1912, when its composer was still a student.  Its jauntiness and imitations of birdsong, particularly a droll cuckoo, appear both traditional and entirely characteristic of this composer, who suffered greatly in his life but was remembered affectionately for his high spirits and sense of humour as well as genius by those who knew him, and daily makes new friends through his music, poetry and published letters.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  I hope you have enjoyed our pursuit of Spring, and will join me for another journey.

Track Fifteen:  Spring From The Elizas, Gurney

Spring - 26 & 27 March 2016

Intro:  Blackbird song

Hullo, this is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme goes in Pursuit of Spring.

Let’s hear Song of Spring from Troubadour Suite, an orchestral work by the Worcestershire composer, Julius Harrison, (1885-1963), who studied at the Birmingham and Midland Musical Institute and became an influential critic as well as composer.  Spring has none of the opulence of Summer, but freshness; it has chill like Winter to remind us that Summer is coming, and raw beauty gathered in with much of the security of Autumn Harvest-home - this harvest is too green and sour to eat, but sustains the spirit on sensing.  Troubadour Suite was written during the Second World War and dedicated to the composer’s friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley - a friend in turn of a greater poet, Edward Thomas, one of whose books furnished us with the title of our programme.  The movements are based on courtly songs by King Thibault the Fourth of Navarre, Song of Spring on a song about the re-greening of the wood:  the opening, with its dusky, austere coloration - of violas, blossoms into a beautifully tended song drawn-out in graceful nods - and passing notes - from section of string orchestra to section, and warmth enters sparingly on French horns:  the harp is intended to portray the playing of the troubadour himself; his voice is full of heart, his heart full of song.    

Track One:  Song of Spring, Julius Harrison

Now, a song from a cycle for voices and orchestra, Fantasticks, by the American composer, Bernard Herrmann - famous for his scores for Hitchcock thrillers and other films such as The Day The Earth Stood Still.   A song-cycle based on pithy prose-works descriptive of the seasons, by the Elizabethan poet, Nicholas Breton, The Fantasticks is one of Hermann’s anglophile works; he felt a real affinity with England and its literature.

In March, his style is between the Mahler ofDas Lied Von Der Erde and Holst: brusque woodwind opening, rasping brass - it is blustery, damp - celesta or glockenspiel providing cold brightness - the phrases short and nervous -  intermittently giving fanfaring brass its head, the climax more aggressive yet. This is like the mood of the Housman poem OnWenlock Edge: The tree of Man is never quiet. The baritone voice rings out declaiming operatically the challenge to Winter’s spirit, the coming of Spring.

Track Two:  March from The Fantasticks, Hermann

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s subject is a journey in pursuit of Spring.

Track Three:  Song of Nightingale

A setting of a poem, Fruhlingsnacht, Spring Night, by Eichendorff, next - a tiny nocturne so slight that it seems the picture of an instant in time in a young man’s mind.  Robert Schumann was an inspired song-writer whose songs were mainly written in two creative bursts in his thirty-first year and his forties.  Both a poet and composer, he himself had had no high opinion of songs right up until he read Schubert’s unpublished manuscripts on a visit to Vienna.

Spring Night sings of birds returning, spring scents returning soon, blossoms returning; with both joy and tears the lover thinks absurdly that it could be a dream, but the old miracles come back in the moonlight;  the stars and moon say, the woods whisper and the nightingale sings to the listener that his beloved is his.

It is certainly startling to hear Schumann’s casual yet urgent mastery of the song-form, given the fewness of the songs that he had written before, but this was to be the pattern in his every new venture in composition in years to come.  The song resounds long after its duration of just over a minute - just as might Spring birdsong.  Winter is over!

Track Four:  Fruhlingsnacht, Liederkreis, Op 39, Schumann.  

Another take on Spring and Love, It Was A Lover.  Cleo Laine sings a swung version of Shakespeare’s song from As You Like It, music by Arthur Young, accompaniment by Johnny Dankworth Quartet.

Track Five:  It Was A Lover And His Lass,Young

Track Six: Song of Cuckoo

The Norwegian, Edvard Grieg, 1843-1907, wrote perhaps his greatest piano pieces towards the end of his life, in two sets of arrangements of folk-tunes, 19 Norske Folkviser, Opus 66 and Slaater, Opus 72. Just four foot ten inches tall, a keen hill-walker, with only one lung, he loved the mountains and valleys of the Hardanger region and poor health did not prevent this last-gasp burst of creativity in homage to Norway’s music and people, though it had certainly prevented composition on a large scale throughout most of his life. Taking the raw material from folk-collections or from folk-musicians, he sought to capture the harmonic compexity implied in even simple melodies.  His friend, the violinist and composer, Johan Halvorsen assisted with notation in the case of the Slaater or dances.  From the folksongs, I have chosen Ola Dal, as it was used by Delius in his orchestral piece, On Hearing The First Cuckoo in Spring; the Delius is beautiful, but, here,the vernal-sounding folksong is treated increasingly to some of Grieg’s richest and most poignant chromatic harmonies over three verses.  The cuckoo is there to be heard in the stillness of a personal moment to be looked back on and recaptured only in memory.  He said himself that he was endlessly fascinated by the magic of harmony and that he wanted to build a house in which man could be happy and at home, and frequently he succeeds.  Certainly, here, the transitoriness of Spring comes to be banished, the life and freshness retained. Spring was a time of release for Grieg, whose Winters were frequently spent like a migrant bird, anywhere but in the cold, foggy North: Spring and Summer in Norway truly revived him..

Track Seven: Ola Dal, from 19 Folksongs, Op 66, Grieg

Now, a Chinese folksong arranged by the guitarist, Gerald Garcia and performed by him and the Japanese violinist, Takako Nishizaki. About three-quarters of the way through, the violin is given a short cadenza akin to sudden birdsong before this longing piece ends as quietly and, at heart, peaceably as it began.  

Track Eight:  Spring Breeze - Chinese Folksong arranged by Gerald Garcia

            “Praise to the eternal spring of life,

            That has created everything!

            The tiniest things have a beginning...”

The Norweigian, Arne Eggen (1881-1955) sets these words in our next piece, the song, Aere Det Evige Foraar I Livet by the romantic poet and secularist, Bjoernsjerne Bjoernson, and is a glorious response to the new season, seeing life in constant evolution and rebirth.

            “The tiniest insect

            can build a mountain.

            A speck of dust

            Or a grain of sand

            May have founded a kingdom!”

The stirring tune expresses this feeling perfectly, and comes clothed in rich, Griegian harmony and even richer orchestration.  Here, it is sung, chin-up, by the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad: the recording was made when she was in her sixties.

Track Nine:  Praise To The Eternal Spring of Life, Eggen

To The Ring of Kerry Suite by Peter Hope born in 1930.  This is a vividly colourful orchestral portrayal of a famous road in County Kerry, South West Eire.  The first movement describes travel by a jaunting-car, a horse-and-trap; the middle, slow movement views a placid lake and the finale portrays a lively country fair,Killorglin Fair.  Spring is a time for fairs:  all seasons of the year have them, but this one is so cheerful that it would have to be celebrating Spring.

One thing is certain, it stays with one some way along the road. 

A busy jig displays the sections of the orchestra in turn and together; a lyrical tune shows sentiment, oboe, warbling clarinet and flute evocative of fresh air and bright, dark countryside as woodwind lead; the jig returns the stronger for having been subdued for a space and above it, the brass and strings crown the song-theme - it sounds like love - for the fair’s boistrous dealing and side-shows to take over and bring the movement to a drily brusque close. The Ring Of Kerry Suite won the Ivor Novello Award in 1969.

Track Ten:  Killorglin Fair from Ring Of Kerry Suite, Hope

To ancient Russia.  Rimsky-Korsakov was the star-operatic, symphonic and orchestral technician of the famous St Petersburg group, Mogyucha Kuchka, The Mighty Handful or The Five.  He was fascinated by fairy-tale, Russian paganism and folk-music and found a congenial subject in Snegorochka, Snow Maiden, the tragedy of the daughter of Frost and Spring, a cold being who longs to feel the warmth of love.  This opera culminates in the death of herself and her suitor and yet contains the essence of Rimsky’s superb orchestral and choral technique, creating another world of myth and legend and the cruel beauty of nature and its seasons, and ends in Russia’s continuance:  the Tsar leading his people in a hymn to the sun-god, Yarilo.  Here is that hymn.

Track Eleven:  Snegorochka, Hymn To The Sun-god Yarilo, Rimsky Korsakov         The Spring, for many religions, is a time of rebirth:  pilgrimages are taken in a spirit of purgation and renewal in life and soul, worked by rituals of fasting, cleansing, praise and self-abnegation.  One seeks yet again harmony between oneself and the infinite that supports one:  in whose goodness one wishes to confirm one’s faith.  For Christians, the sacrifice and continuing love of Christ bring hope of forgiveness and the means to face the future in grace and gratitude, with God.  Here are two pieces that represent Easter for me:  the first is Angelus Ad Virginem, a hymn popular with the Canterbury Pilgrims.  The refrain is one of our nation-memories.  The beauty of Chaucer’s floweres brightens it, the freshness of Aprile showeres is on it.

Track Twelve:  Angelus Ad Virginem

Edmund Rubbra (1901-86) was probably Britain’s greatest symphonist of the generation that followed Vaughan Williams, but he was also a fine setter of poetry in both Latin and English.  His influences were mainly of the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Tudor periods in music, and Bach, with something of the organic control of material of Sibelius.  His magnum opus is his Ninth Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, The Resurrection’ This sombrely beautiful work calls for solo voices, choir and orchestra: Bach’s Passions were a model for the form of the work, a wonderfully concentrated form in Rubbra’s hands, of purely orchestral passages and sung chorales - Catholic as well as Lutheran.

The Prelude to the Symphony is a via dolorosa to the foot of the cross, and from there, all flows.  But let’s hear the last, choral and orchestral section, where, after the ascension, the Catholic text Viri Galilaei is followed without pause by Hasler’s Lutheran chorale Thy blessing be upon us.  Throughout the section, bell-like peals and alleluyas are hinted at or sounded in the voices and matched by orchestral accompaniment as sustained, and including tuned bells at one point - a valedictory sweetness in the violins and woodwind in particular.  Amens turn us to the stronger melodic outline of the Hasler - it is a wonderful, oddly dreamlike jump-cut from one style to another:  the second of two tunes sounding, like the first, as if in a dream-vision, a vision that many Catholics and Protestants still find it hard to share, and ending in sublime affirmation, unity and renewal, an Easter vision, in God.   

Track Thirteen:  Symphony No 9, The Resurrection, Rubbra

As an undergraduate in the post-war period, the composer Kenneth Leighton, who was born in 1929 and died recently, wrote an orchestral suite for oboe, cello and orchestra, Veris Gratia,  His inspiration came from mediaeval poems on Spring and love.  Let’s hear the last movement, Epilogue, Sostenuto ma con moto, sustainedly but moving along. Here, oboe and cello muse on the previous sections, the cello more passionately, the oboe with a more feminine, questioning air.  From the opening, the melodic and harmonic influence of Vaughan Williams (his Suite for Viola and Orchestra, Flos Campi) is clear, the strings divided later in overlapping phrases, amens, perhaps...  The oboe has the last floated word. The epigraph for this music is:  “praise together this earth...  And God have pity on the sadder folk...”  words with real resonance at this time.    

Track Fourteen:  Veris Gratia,  Epilogue, Leighton

Our last piece is a song by Ivor Gurney, setting a lyric by Thomas Nashe, and one of the five songs for baritone or contralto voice and piano that make up his cycle, The Elizas, so-called from the provenance of the poetry.  The cycle was completed in 1912, when its composer was still a student.  Its jauntiness and imitations of birdsong, particularly a droll cuckoo, appear both traditional and entirely characteristic of this composer, who suffered greatly in his life but was remembered affectionately for his high spirits and sense of humour as well as genius by those who knew him, and daily makes new friends through his music, poetry and published letters.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  I hope you have enjoyed our pursuit of Spring, and will join me for another journey.

Track Fifteen:  Spring From The Elizas, Gurney