June 11 & 12th 2016: D-Day

Classical Break remembers  D-Day (June 6th, 1944)

We have left this show in again for this weekend - The script differs from that broadcast, owing to exigences of time.

Track One: Sea-surf FX, Drum-beat - Vee For Victory. Marche Lorraine

This is Classical Break, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. You've just heard the Marche Lorraine by Louis Ganne. Today's programme celebrates the heroism of the Allied troops, sailors and airmen who formed the massive forces of land, sea and air engaged in the biggest amphibious operation in military history. D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944, opened the last eleven months of the Second World War in Europe: the achievement in breaching the long-prepared North Atlantic fortifications via 5 Normandy beaches, codenamed Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah was shared by the crews of 532 warships and 360 coastal craft of the Royal Navy, 89 American warships, 49 warships and smaller craft manned by Dutch, French, Norwegian, Greek and Polish exiles, and 155,000 Allied troops, over whose voyage and advance on landing, thousands of fighter- and bomber- sorties were flown by men of the RAF, USAAF and Fleet Air Arm; some hours before the landings, hundreds of transport aircraft had dropped 23,000 paratroopers in behind the German defences by 'brolly”, 'chute or glider.

Over 4,000 British and American landing-craft were employed in bringing the invasion-force from their troopships to the beaches...

The balance of an army of 3 million men were left behind in England, waiting on the results of gaining a foothold in France. The free flow of vital supplies had to be kept up; a fuel-pipeline – Pluto - was being laid across the Channel seabed, and huge artificial harbours – code-named Mulberry - were to be towed to France and used by freighters until Cherbourg were captured.

On the day, the heaviest losses were taken by the paratroopers and air-force crews during the hours of darkness, owing to the Luftwaffe Night-hunters, flak-defences and infantry units, and by American Rangers on Omaha beach, at the head of which stood high cliffs that had to be rushed and scaled in the face of mines and heavy fire. 3,000 men became casualties on Omaha beach alone.

Perhaps the most terrifying and convincing film-representation of Omaha is found in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Men died or were badly injured by withering machine-gun-fire, mines and shells, while still in their landing-craft; men drowned; when the ramps came down, men dropped in the shallows; men fell at every step of the way up the beach; yet those left climbed ladders to reach the German barbed wire, pill-boxes and come to conclusions hand-to-hand or by grenade and flame-thrower with brave or ruthless opposite numbers.

In a far cry from his work on such features as ET, the Indiana Jones-franchise and Jurassic Park, the American film-composer, John Williams'. carefully somnambulistic music for this terrible confrontation between weaponry and young men – and History - invokes the spirit of Lincoln, via Copland, with sombre, brazen textures and angular pentatonic fanfares and harmonies.

Track 2: Omaha Beach, from Saving Private Ryan, John Williams

Of course, if the Germans had not expected the invasion to occur in the Pas-de-Calais-area rather than Normandy; if they had been able to mount pre-emptive heavy bombing-raids on the bases at which men and material had been amassed, and on the major ports at which the fleet had been gathered, or if the Luftwaffe

had met force with force over the beaches...casualty-figures should have been far higher than even those

suffered by airborne forces and by those who had landed on Omaha beach.

The lack of opposition from the air astonished most who took part in D-Day. Some of the best Luftwaffe units were based in France, in spite of withdrawals to Germany and the Eastern Front. Throughout the day, a single sortie was flown over Sword Beach by two German Focke-Wulf 190 interceptors The pair made a single sweep at low level that the forlorn pilots had been convinced must end in their deaths. They cut a swathe through Allied troops before leaving only more quickly than they had arrived.

The first many German ground-units knew of D-Day was the frontal vision of a vast fleet of ships – and they didn't have sight of it for long before they were ducking under heavy naval bombardment or trying to fire back.

The preparations for D-Day had been long-drawn-out, reaching a height of activity in the late Spring and early Summer. Something of the mood in Britain can be gathered from two films straddling the period, A Canterbury Tale and Henry The Fifth. The one weds the themes of pilgrimage, English cultural tradition and the Anglo-American relationship, the other, the oft-played and digested moral of British heroism and victory

against the odds. The names and art of Chaucer and Shakespeare were well-invoked. By the mid-1940s, thanks to readiness and modern methods of surveillance, the game of invasion had become an overwhelming hazard; no matter how many soldiers, aircraft, tanks and warships were thrown into the assault, a coast and deep defensive lines remained an unknowable obstacle; covering fire from however many ships and aircraft perhaps drawn from other fronts or other activities, might still encounter an impassable wall of enemy resistance. The Allies had to win their goal – and know how to follow it up. Overwhelming weight of numbers and equipment had suffered great reverses in Sicily and on mainland Italy, owing to strategic inco-ordination, friendly fire and brave defence. The channel's small breadth rendered the invasion-fleet highly conspicuous from first to last. From the commanding officers to the other ranks, shrewd, individual courage from conviction had to be the modern military's strongest resource. A Canterbury Tale was released in Canterbury on May the 11^th, 1944, Henry The Fifth, in London, on the 22^nd of November, 1944.

Here is the rousing Prelude to A Canterbury Tale, music by the Polish emigre, Allan Gray.

It quotes Angelus Ad Virginem, as a pilgrims' hymn, at the outset. The verses from Chaucer's Prologue To The Canterbury Tales are read beautifully by Esmonde Knight – who took the part of Fluellin in Henry The Fifth, and, who, in A Canterbury Tale, plays two roles, those of a sergeant and a village idiot! How the phrase in the high chorus haunts the mind after seeing this beautiful black-and-white film of rural and Canterburian South-east

England ..

Track 3: A Canterbury Tale, Prelude, Gray

From Sir Laurence Olivier's Henry The Fifth, accompanied by the galvanic music of Sir William Walton, Speech Before Harfleur - part of a re-recorded sequence in which the actor adds Chorus' commentary at the conclusion. From the same source follows soldier William's reflections on the cause for which the commoner fights, “But if the cause be not good”.again voiced by Olivier, and Henry's second great speech – urging on his men to stand to at Agincourt – “This day is called The Feast of Crispian”.

Track 4: Speech Before Harfleur

Track 5: But if the Cause be not good

Track 6: This Day Is Called

The assembling of Brahms' Requiem occupied him so long that it only began in the shocking fate of his short lived friend and advocate, Robert Schumann. It came to be a requiem for his beloved mother as well. It is A German Requiem; in settings of Lutheran biblical texts; it seeks to console the living, rather than to sing a mass over the dead. Nowhere is the name of Christ invoked. Brahms was not only nominally a Lutheran, he was an agnostic or atheist who saw life in all its grandeur, complexity, and ethical significance, but who was unable to believe in the saviour of the New Testament. “Such a great man,” Dvorak once said, “and he believes in nothing!” Reactions to the long, slow, patient and hugely learned Requiem have ranged from ecstasy to the decrying of its bourgeois wearisomeness. Its immense span ends in its beginning, with the music of the opening providing the close: grief is never assuaged, never forgotten, but over the course of seven movements, one has a sterling spiritual experience of circularity, of psychologically acute and compassionate ariosi and Handelian heights of choral and orchestral counterpoint that symbolize the positive moods and actions of social and cultural tradition and survival. Consistent musical logic and lyrical beauty in severe style are put at the service of sincere grief and fellow-feeling. The spirit is far from the Protestant work-ethic that may underlie the composer's development. This is not workfare-music any more than it is the

music of any church-sect or of Nazi strength through joy.

“Such a great man, and he believes in nothing...” Is that true?

If Beethoven gave the free world its Vee-For-Victory signal, we invoke Brahms as the 19^th Century German nationalist who accorded a wreathed portrait of Bismarck a place of honour on his wall, but who would certainly have loathed the Kultur of Nazism, even if still almost unaware of its abysmally evil crimes. Let's hear “Herr, Lehre doch mich”, the third movement, in honour of the men who drove and ran up to death, or who stood to in the defensive wall. “Lord, make me to know mine end” Darkness appears to surround the lonely baritone voice. This extract from a complete recording of the German Requiem in English, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had himself flagrantly opposed Fascism and emigrated, was made in 1943. Some American servicemen may have heard it.. The individual is borne up at length by the contrapuntal chorus of what may comfort him, by the example of his righteous fellow-sufferers – all rest in the hand of God. This piece may have struck Dvorak to the heart; a prominent falling phrase from it turns up in his powerful 'Cello Concerto of many years later.

Track 7: lll Herr, Lehre Doch Mich from Ein Deutches Requiem, Brahms

From the Piano Sonata no 2, Concord Sonata, by Charles Ives, the second movement, The Alcotts – a home

to New England Transcendentalism in the 19^th Century. Transcendentalism is the word, as so often with this composer, for whom concord was to be reached-after by mortal man. An astonishing, elegiac and uneasily beautiful piece. Note the Beethovenian gesture from long before Vee-for-Victory was thought of. Beethoven was a Transcendentalist before Transcendentalism was thought of.

Track 8: The Alcotts from Piano Sonata No 2, Concord, Ives

For three months before D-Day,The Glenn Miller Band – renamed the American Band of The Allied Expeditionary Force kept up a gruelling schedule of concerts in the South of England. Here's their cover of Summertime,from Gershwin's pre-war opera, Porgy and Bess. The arrangement exhibits to the full Glenn Miller's trademark micromanagement of scoring and expressiveness – of contrasts between orchestral sections and bold use of mutes. How peace must have been longed-for.

Track 9: Summertime, Gershwin

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. We hope you have enjoyed our programme in commemoration of D-Day, dedicated to all who took part in this massive but heroic action – or who faced it; to the men on both sides, many of whom have lain in peace in the same cemeteries these 70 years. We thank Mike Burrows for researching and writing it. He keeps in mind Sapper James Kenyon, who worked on the Mulberry temporary harbours used in the days after the landings.

We end with The Day Thou Gavest. Last Post and Sunset. Goodbye.

Track 11: The Day Thou Gavest & Last Post & Sunset

June 4th and 5th - D Day landings

Classical Break remembers  D-Day (June 6th, 1944)

The script differs from that broadcast, owing to exigences of time.

Track One: Sea-surf FX, Drum-beat - Vee For Victory. Marche Lorraine

This is Classical Break, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. You've just heard the Marche Lorraine by Louis Ganne. Today's programme celebrates the heroism of the Allied troops, sailors and airmen who formed the massive forces of land, sea and air engaged in the biggest amphibious operation in military history. D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944, opened the last eleven months of the Second World War in Europe: the achievement in breaching the long-prepared North Atlantic fortifications via 5 Normandy beaches, codenamed Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah was shared by the crews of 532 warships and 360 coastal craft of the Royal Navy, 89 American warships, 49 warships and smaller craft manned by Dutch, French, Norwegian, Greek and Polish exiles, and 155,000 Allied troops, over whose voyage and advance on landing, thousands of fighter- and bomber- sorties were flown by men of the RAF, USAAF and Fleet Air Arm; some hours before the landings, hundreds of transport aircraft had dropped 23,000 paratroopers in behind the German defences by 'brolly”, 'chute or glider.

Over 4,000 British and American landing-craft were employed in bringing the invasion-force from their troopships to the beaches...

The balance of an army of 3 million men were left behind in England, waiting on the results of gaining a foothold in France. The free flow of vital supplies had to be kept up; a fuel-pipeline – Pluto - was being laid across the Channel seabed, and huge artificial harbours – code-named Mulberry - were to be towed to France and used by freighters until Cherbourg were captured.

On the day, the heaviest losses were taken by the paratroopers and air-force crews during the hours of darkness, owing to the Luftwaffe Night-hunters, flak-defences and infantry units, and by American Rangers on Omaha beach, at the head of which stood high cliffs that had to be rushed and scaled in the face of mines and heavy fire. 3,000 men became casualties on Omaha beach alone.

Perhaps the most terrifying and convincing film-representation of Omaha is found in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Men died or were badly injured by withering machine-gun-fire, mines and shells, while still in their landing-craft; men drowned; when the ramps came down, men dropped in the shallows; men fell at every step of the way up the beach; yet those left climbed ladders to reach the German barbed wire, pill-boxes and come to conclusions hand-to-hand or by grenade and flame-thrower with brave or ruthless opposite numbers.

In a far cry from his work on such features as ET, the Indiana Jones-franchise and Jurassic Park, the American film-composer, John Williams'. carefully somnambulistic music for this terrible confrontation between weaponry and young men – and History - invokes the spirit of Lincoln, via Copland, with sombre, brazen textures and angular pentatonic fanfares and harmonies.

Track 2: Omaha Beach, from Saving Private Ryan, John Williams

Of course, if the Germans had not expected the invasion to occur in the Pas-de-Calais-area rather than Normandy; if they had been able to mount pre-emptive heavy bombing-raids on the bases at which men and material had been amassed, and on the major ports at which the fleet had been gathered, or if the Luftwaffe

had met force with force over the beaches...casualty-figures should have been far higher than even those

suffered by airborne forces and by those who had landed on Omaha beach.

The lack of opposition from the air astonished most who took part in D-Day. Some of the best Luftwaffe units were based in France, in spite of withdrawals to Germany and the Eastern Front. Throughout the day, a single sortie was flown over Sword Beach by two German Focke-Wulf 190 interceptors The pair made a single sweep at low level that the forlorn pilots had been convinced must end in their deaths. They cut a swathe through Allied troops before leaving only more quickly than they had arrived.

The first many German ground-units knew of D-Day was the frontal vision of a vast fleet of ships – and they didn't have sight of it for long before they were ducking under heavy naval bombardment or trying to fire back.

The preparations for D-Day had been long-drawn-out, reaching a height of activity in the late Spring and early Summer. Something of the mood in Britain can be gathered from two films straddling the period, A Canterbury Tale and Henry The Fifth. The one weds the themes of pilgrimage, English cultural tradition and the Anglo-American relationship, the other, the oft-played and digested moral of British heroism and victory

against the odds. The names and art of Chaucer and Shakespeare were well-invoked. By the mid-1940s, thanks to readiness and modern methods of surveillance, the game of invasion had become an overwhelming hazard; no matter how many soldiers, aircraft, tanks and warships were thrown into the assault, a coast and deep defensive lines remained an unknowable obstacle; covering fire from however many ships and aircraft perhaps drawn from other fronts or other activities, might still encounter an impassable wall of enemy resistance. The Allies had to win their goal – and know how to follow it up. Overwhelming weight of numbers and equipment had suffered great reverses in Sicily and on mainland Italy, owing to strategic inco-ordination, friendly fire and brave defence. The channel's small breadth rendered the invasion-fleet highly conspicuous from first to last. From the commanding officers to the other ranks, shrewd, individual courage from conviction had to be the modern military's strongest resource. A Canterbury Tale was released in Canterbury on May the 11^th, 1944, Henry The Fifth, in London, on the 22^nd of November, 1944.

Here is the rousing Prelude to A Canterbury Tale, music by the Polish emigre, Allan Gray.

It quotes Angelus Ad Virginem, as a pilgrims' hymn, at the outset. The verses from Chaucer's Prologue To The Canterbury Tales are read beautifully by Esmonde Knight – who took the part of Fluellin in Henry The Fifth, and, who, in A Canterbury Tale, plays two roles, those of a sergeant and a village idiot! How the phrase in the high chorus haunts the mind after seeing this beautiful black-and-white film of rural and Canterburian South-east

England ..

Track 3: A Canterbury Tale, Prelude, Gray

From Sir Laurence Olivier's Henry The Fifth, accompanied by the galvanic music of Sir William Walton, Speech Before Harfleur - part of a re-recorded sequence in which the actor adds Chorus' commentary at the conclusion. From the same source follows soldier William's reflections on the cause for which the commoner fights, “But if the cause be not good”.again voiced by Olivier, and Henry's second great speech – urging on his men to stand to at Agincourt – “This day is called The Feast of Crispian”.

Track 4: Speech Before Harfleur

Track 5: But if the Cause be not good

Track 6: This Day Is Called

The assembling of Brahms' Requiem occupied him so long that it only began in the shocking fate of his short lived friend and advocate, Robert Schumann. It came to be a requiem for his beloved mother as well. It is A German Requiem; in settings of Lutheran biblical texts; it seeks to console the living, rather than to sing a mass over the dead. Nowhere is the name of Christ invoked. Brahms was not only nominally a Lutheran, he was an agnostic or atheist who saw life in all its grandeur, complexity, and ethical significance, but who was unable to believe in the saviour of the New Testament. “Such a great man,” Dvorak once said, “and he believes in nothing!” Reactions to the long, slow, patient and hugely learned Requiem have ranged from ecstasy to the decrying of its bourgeois wearisomeness. Its immense span ends in its beginning, with the music of the opening providing the close: grief is never assuaged, never forgotten, but over the course of seven movements, one has a sterling spiritual experience of circularity, of psychologically acute and compassionate ariosi and Handelian heights of choral and orchestral counterpoint that symbolize the positive moods and actions of social and cultural tradition and survival. Consistent musical logic and lyrical beauty in severe style are put at the service of sincere grief and fellow-feeling. The spirit is far from the Protestant work-ethic that may underlie the composer's development. This is not workfare-music any more than it is the

music of any church-sect or of Nazi strength through joy.

“Such a great man, and he believes in nothing...” Is that true?

If Beethoven gave the free world its Vee-For-Victory signal, we invoke Brahms as the 19^th Century German nationalist who accorded a wreathed portrait of Bismarck a place of honour on his wall, but who would certainly have loathed the Kultur of Nazism, even if still almost unaware of its abysmally evil crimes. Let's hear “Herr, Lehre doch mich”, the third movement, in honour of the men who drove and ran up to death, or who stood to in the defensive wall. “Lord, make me to know mine end” Darkness appears to surround the lonely baritone voice. This extract from a complete recording of the German Requiem in English, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had himself flagrantly opposed Fascism and emigrated, was made in 1943. Some American servicemen may have heard it.. The individual is borne up at length by the contrapuntal chorus of what may comfort him, by the example of his righteous fellow-sufferers – all rest in the hand of God. This piece may have struck Dvorak to the heart; a prominent falling phrase from it turns up in his powerful 'Cello Concerto of many years later.

Track 7: lll Herr, Lehre Doch Mich from Ein Deutches Requiem, Brahms

From the Piano Sonata no 2, Concord Sonata, by Charles Ives, the second movement, The Alcotts – a home

to New England Transcendentalism in the 19^th Century. Transcendentalism is the word, as so often with this composer, for whom concord was to be reached-after by mortal man. An astonishing, elegiac and uneasily beautiful piece. Note the Beethovenian gesture from long before Vee-for-Victory was thought of. Beethoven was a Transcendentalist before Transcendentalism was thought of.

Track 8: The Alcotts from Piano Sonata No 2, Concord, Ives

For three months before D-Day,The Glenn Miller Band – renamed the American Band of The Allied Expeditionary Force kept up a gruelling schedule of concerts in the South of England. Here's their cover of Summertime,from Gershwin's pre-war opera, Porgy and Bess. The arrangement exhibits to the full Glenn Miller's trademark micromanagement of scoring and expressiveness – of contrasts between orchestral sections and bold use of mutes. How peace must have been longed-for.

Track 9: Summertime, Gershwin

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. We hope you have enjoyed our programme in commemoration of D-Day, dedicated to all who took part in this massive but heroic action – or who faced it; to the men on both sides, many of whom have lain in peace in the same cemeteries these 70 years. We thank Mike Burrows for researching and writing it. He keeps in mind Sapper James Kenyon, who worked on the Mulberry temporary harbours used in the days after the landings.

We end with The Day Thou Gavest. Last Post and Sunset. Goodbye.

Track 11: The Day Thou Gavest & Last Post & Sunset

May 28 & 29 2016: Andalusia

Classical Break:  Andalusia (repeat from August 2013)

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 his Danzas 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

Classical Break:  Andalusia (repeat from August 2013)

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 his Danzas 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