Prospects 22 & 23 October 2016

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 

Benjamin Britten - Oct 9, 15 and 16, 2016

Classical Break - Benjamin Britten (first broadcast in 2013)

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 saw 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

Autumn - 17 & 18 September

Friday, 2 October 2015

Autumn  

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and our subject is Autumn in music.
Let’s begin with the folksong, John Barleycorn, an encapsulation of the agrarian farm-year and a link with fertility rites of the past. John Barleycorn is the soul of ale. The brewing of ales and wines is no longer, if ever it was, an activity confined to Autumn, but my dad didn’t know that. For the labourer, barley was for bread as well as for beer, but good ale took one pleasantly beyond a full stomach. Often, water was added after brewing to ensure that it didn’t take anyone too far - small beer felled no-one.
Track One: John Barley-corn, trad

The song, Høstkvall - Autumn Evening - by Jean Sibelius, invokes falling night and the entrancing unrest of coastal Autumn as felt by the traveller. It is thrilled by the powerful grimness of Autumnal images: sunset, the screams of gulls and birds of prey, rain, forest and surging wind and sea, screams of pain heard in the forest, gathering darkness. The poem ends in the question, Does our traveller’s soul feel in harmony with the song raised by starless night? Does grief die like a soft note beneath Autumn’s mighty threnody? The orchestration by the composer lacks a part for flute, or indeed any instrument that would detract from a glowing sombreness of sound that favours deep--toned bassoon, trombones, tuba and double--basses; and utilizes oboe and clarinet and higher strings as additional inhuman voices. A feature of the percussion section is the dry rattle of side-drum - rain, or the sea on shingle? The very key of the music is dark and rich - D-Flat Minor. This dramatic scene dates from 1904, coming between the heroic Second Symphony and ‘classical’ Third. Its style is quintessential Sibelius, not Wagner, a massive, lyrical climax building from motifs but suggesting vast dimensions beyond mere duration, an absolute, tragic force of suffering and dignity, opening with what sounds like a cry of anguish. Knife-edge suspensions resolved with the slowness of the cries of birds or the conflicting power of hypersensitive hysteria and stoicism recurred ever more strongly in the Finn’s imagistic music, long pedal notes an earth-deep foundation to whatever takes place above them. The beauty is uncanny, the after-echoes are strange butright. On another occasion, Sibelius wrote of learning assiduously from the cries of migrating cranes. Autumn Evening is sung here by Kirsten Flagstad, accompanied by the L-SO, conducted by Øivin Fjelstad.

Track Two: Høstkvall, Sibelius

Autumn is a time for reflection; every harvest has its aftermath and tares, and the leaves fly like so many billets or lost souls. Here is a song by Benjamin Britten, a setting of Paul Verlaine - Chanson D’Automne - for tenor and small orchestra. It was written as the concluding number of a cycle of four by a fourteen year-old who had just begun to study music-composition with that modernist and majority of one, Frank Bridge. The cycle was edited by Colin Matthews, the composer entrusted with the task of preparing a number of Britten’s juvenilia for posthumous publication. A French, specifically Debussyan quality to the harmony - and spare but not austere scoring - and moreover the elegance of the word-setting, owe much to Bridge’s exacting standards, but impress more with every hearing as the achievement of a young boy. The pre-echoes of the Serenade For Tenor, Horn and Strings, are as striking as the influence of Debussy - or Chausson - and of a highly-regarded teacher. This warmly romantic piece on the fall of the leaf, a French Melodie in all but name, had to wait eighty years for performance. 

Track Three: Chanson D’Autonne, Britten

Now, one of Finzi’s Five Bagatelles, for clarinet and piano. Opus Twenty--three: Forlana. The forlana is a Sixteenth Century dance-form in triple or compound-duple time, characterized by dotted rhythms, and this one strolls with a certain dry wistfulness.
Track Four: Forlana, Finzi

Hallowe’en, a night of witches, ghoulies, ghosties and things that go bump in the night: we once had more cause to fear this than now that it is a commercial fancy-dress function and opportunity for flat tricks and sticky treats. Hallowe’en has outlasted plagues, broken hearts, magic and superstition, gibbets, witch-burnings and inaccessible places of suicide and murder - the burial of sacrifices to consecrate graveyards, or pinning-down of dead evil under the cross-roads.
Robert Burns’ satirical poem, Tam O’Shanter tells of a drunken man forced to flee witches in the dead of night - he escapes over a stream, but his mare loses her tail. A humorous overture by Sir Malcolm Arnoldportrays the story in delightful orchestral detail and considerable dour Scotch-snappiness. Arnold, whose career began as a trumpeter in the LSO, brought the impishness of his comic film-scores into the concert-hall. Tipsy flute and strings and then low woodwind invoke bagpipes-music, the brass threatening, a passage of some eeriness on tremolo strings as woodwind startledly rub their eyes. A tam-tam clash - and reprise of the opening theme leads to another clash, an upward scale on the brass...: yes, it is a witches’ sabbath taking place in the churchyard, during which the drunken trombone has plenty of opportunity to make a fool of itself with the witches - one attracts Tam, her cutty-sark being too small for her... The pursuit is as unclear and calls for intermittent piccolo and a whip as well as the mixture as before - much marking time on the surface - an effect like running in a nightmare - a series of typical upward-scale brass crescendos and reprise of bagpipes dissonant with brass snarls, a bell, string ostinati, the irrepressible piccolo all stirred in before the farce ends in brief hymn-like sounds on flute and clarinet, the melting away of the causes of panic and a pay-off chord. Trick or treat? You decide.
Track Five: Tam O Shanter, Arnold

On Bonfire Night we see - if we choose - the momentary rushes, spurtles and reports of fireworks - rockets, air-bombs, catherine wheels, roman candles, fountains, bangers, crackers against the slow-motion real Autumn pyrotechnics of billions of light-years of universe. In continuity, good and evil remain real on our planet, but politics seem flippant in the life of the universe. The guy sags silhouetted in flames of a religious fire lit centuries ago. There are actually still those who, for a sense of their Englishness, depend on this barbaric tradition of burning in effigy a failed Seventeenth Century terrorist - if that was what the original Guy, Guido Fawkes, was. For the rest of us, sculptures of light that fade to after-image in the cold sky, and the thick reek of gunpowder have nothing to do with celebration of religious persecution, a weak king and scotched Plot, if we can help it.

Debussy’s Preludes, Book Two, contain music of the utmost refinement under adventurously poetic titles. Like most other serious musicians, he distanced himself from the provision of onomatopoeia alone; music was always a matter more of feeling than of painting. All the same, in the mysterious resonance of lulls in the bass and sudden, florid bursts and flourishes in the treble, a similitude between music and intensities of light on a dark sky defies absolute music, that is, music written without a programme or the intention of bringing images to mind. The point is that the resources of music are handled with exquisitely fluent harmonic and pianistic skill and taste. Feux D’Artifice, Fireworks.
Track Six: Feux D’Artifice, Debussy

As a contrast in treatment of the falling of leaves, let’s hear a piece by the Belgian harpist, Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912), Feuilles D’Automne. This modest, expressive little work has an almost balletic quality in the gentle hispanified style so popular in the second half of the 19th Century.

Track Seven: Feuilles D’Automne, Hasselmans


If only Autumn were simply a matter of gathering or of sweeping away. It is the time for another kind of reckoning as it passes in mists, rain and bonfires and first frosts. It is a time of ghosts in the leaf-strewn shadows, Halloween, All Hallows and All Souls. Autumn brings, too, remembrance of those on all sides killed in War since 1914. Every November, the poppies of Summer bedew the many cold monuments that were dedicated to them long ago with the dark red of blood-sacrifice, a peculiar image of peace. Once, sacrifices to deities of fertility thanked and propitiated the earth before crops were again planted, and Rome communed with the spirits of dead warriors by pouring blood into a trench.

Cyril Rootham (1875-1938), a well-regarded academic musician and composer, is now famous, if at all, for being first to set the Great War poem, For The Fallen, by Laurence Binyon. As he was writing his work, Elgar was drawn by the poet’s friends into setting what have become immortal verses. Elgar hesitated, knowing that if he did so, it would squash Rootham’s best efforts, but permitted himself to be persuaded to go ahead. His version is overwhelming, a miniature cantata in itself within the cycle, Spirit Of England, and as he feared, it did outdo Rootham, whose version fell by the wayside. However, Rootham is not to be despised; his lesser conception of what is in the words still achieves all that one looks for in a setting: a sombre, forceful orchestral accompaniment, a sonorous choir, no vocal soloists; smouldering Vaughan Williams-style chant and fanfaring from the brass, like the strings almost a choir in their own right; some imaginative detailing in the woodwind, and percussion including a snare-drum to go with fife-noises: plus something less looked-for, a sudden eruption of songs - including the Garryowen - that had been popular in the BEF on the outbreak of war, which last occurs during the second section of a tripartite structure. Here is this second section of Rootham’s For The Fallen: They Went With Songs To The Battle.
Track Eight: For The Fallen, They Went With Songs, Rootham

Something slightly less daunting in prospect than going off to war is to be young and starting the school-year, or, to be less partisan - to be older and a teacher who feels personal responsibility for the welfare and education of the eternal foe. For those on both sides who have not already fallen during the Autumn campaign, we programme a school song. It was written by Richard Adinsell (1904-1977) for the fictitious Brookfield School for Boys, and the 1930s film adaptation of James Hilton’s idealistic bestseller, Goodbye Mister Chips, which starred Robert Donat and Greer Garson. An institution that passed most schools by but that still afflicts some in the private sector, the school song, usually composed by Old Boys, is given its apotheosis complete with effulgent orchestration in addition to choir. Unmediated by modish cynicism, it may just work on the hardened child as on the nostalgic adult... As for Mister Chipping - the teacher who learned to be lovable and teach from experience and by example, in defiance of the exam-standards of snobs - may now be too exotic a figure to be believed in...
Track Nine: School Song from Goodbye Mister Chips, Richard Adinsell



Lastly, a piece for piano, by an amateur who wishes to remain anonymous. It wasn’t me, sir,it was Mike Burrows... Some apologies have to be made for the sound-quality, as it was recorded in the performer’s front room and with a dictaphone. It is calledLeckhampton after the hill just outside Cheltenham, and is intended to evoke a brisk walk with brisk thoughts on a bright Autumn afternoon, in leafmeal-scented air, to stand by the famous rock-formation The Devil’s Chimney and look out on his home-town. Autumn is a time for home and deep feelings for all that is and all that has passed - all we have gathered against Winter. Leckhampton was made up as it was played and as the mood took ten fingers. It was considered for as long as it took to play. There is some of the appearance of a fugue, but Mike has no classical training; his piece has spontaneity, love of Autumn, the Cotswolds and music.
Everyone has moments like this; everyone has a harvest each year, everyone drinks Autumn air as though it were new wine or beer, stands on the sea-shore at some stormy time as it grows dark and there is darkness within as black as any stormy night. Everyone watches falling leaves with a sense of transience and mortality. Everyone has ghosts that people the mist out of the corner of an eye; there are always witches and terrorists (perhaps politicians see these most clearly, but are happy to apprise us of their presence).
One goes to school to believe one’s teachers, even go to war as well as live long and at peace. There are intimations ripe for music. Thing is, to act on them!

This was Classical Break on Somer Vallwy FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. We hope you have enjoyed our Autumn miscellany, researched and written by Mike Burrows, and will join us again, soon.

Track Ten: Leckhampton, Mike Burrows

Debussy - 20th & 21st August 2016

Debussy’s early piano works
played by Monique Haas

TRACK 1:

Danse Bohemienne

Welcome to Classical Break. I’m Rupert Kirkham. We opened today’s programme with Danse Bohemienne, by Claude Debussy, played by  Monique Haas.  Born 102 years ago, Monique Haas started her career at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1920’s. She was one of the world’s finest exponents of French 20^th century piano music, especially that of Debussy, whose early compositions for piano we are to hear her play today. Debussy had attended the Paris Conservatoire too, in 1872, at the age of ten, and he spent eleven years there.

Monique Haas died in 1987 and today’s music comes from a CD which has been hailed as one of the best recordings of Debussy’s piano music ever.

Next, 2 Arabesques composed between the years 1888 and 1891, when Debussy was still in his twenties. (28)

TRACK 2 & 3:

Two Arabesques

Historically, Debussy is known for being something of a rebel in composition. In the second part of his career, after 1900, he challenged the previous generation’s concepts of tonality and structure and became an enormous influence on those classical composers who followed. The piano works in today’s programme come from his early period, before he became famous and really started to rattle his cage! Here are 3 more compositions, all written in 1890, when he was 28.

Reverie, Tarantelle Styrienne and Valse Romantique.

TRACK 4, 5, 6:

Reverie, Tarantelle Styrienne, Valse Romantique

The next two pieces, played by Monique Haas, Nocturne and Mazurka, come from the same period as the music we just heard – around 1890.

The Nocturne has hints of Liszt in the opening, and of Massenet and perhaps even Fauré, in its thematic lushness.

The Mazurka shows the strong influence of Chopin, Debussy's piano teacher was a student of Chopin, and it could be that the Mazurka was intended as an homage.

TRACK 7, 8:

Nocturne, Mazurka

The Suite Bergamasque is one of the most famous piano suites by Claude Debussy. Although Debussy commenced the suite in 1890 – he certainly did a lot of work in 1890 - but he didn’t finish or publish it until 1905 by which time it had been significantly revised.

It seems that by the time a publisher came to Debussy in order to cash in on his fame and have these pieces published, Debussy loathed the earlier piano style in which these pieces were written. While it is not known how much of the Suite was written in 1890 and how much was written in 1905, we do know that Debussy changed the names of at least two of the pieces.

In this recording, the pieces are, Prelude, Menuet, Claire de Lune and Passepied.

TRACK 9, 10, 11 & 12:

Prelude, Menuet, Claire de Lune and Passepied.

Our final piece today is taken from Debussy’s 1901 composition, Pour le Piano. It’s the final movement of three, Toccata. The piece is poised and energetic, extroverted and graceful, demanding unflappable technique and poise on the part of the pianist.

It has been said that this piece gives us the message that Debussy has mastered the piano's unique language on his own terms. It certainly points to his later work and was first performed as the composer finally became a real celebrity in the world of classical composition.

We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s programme of Debussy’s early piano music, played by the French pianist, Monique Haas. Until next time, I’m  Rupert Kirkham and this has been  Classical Break, Goodbye.

TRACK 13:  
Pour le Piano – Toccata

6 & & July "Butterworth"

CBButterworth

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme, written and researched by

Mike Burrows, is a tribute to

the composer, George Butterworth.

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth was born

in 1885, the son

of a lawyer and managing-director

on the railways, and died as

an Acting Captain in the Durham Light

Infantry during the Battle of the

Somme. At about dawn, in August

1916, leading his company in

A trench-digging

action near Pozieres he was killed

instantly by a sniper in a

moment of sleep-deprived unconcern for

his own safety.  As a soldier,

he had liked to lead from

the front; here, he had made

an elementary slip and raised his head too high. 

Posthumously awarded the Military Cross, he

lived up fully to what had

been expected of him and thus

to the example of his grandfather,

an army General.  Like many of

his contemporaries of the privileged middle-

classes, he died as a junior

officer fighting the Hun, his last

moments spent caught up in the

digging of a trench towards a

well-fortified enemy position amid the

blasted landscape of a sector of

the Western Front, his body never

recovered, his name added to the

famous Thiepval Monument to many of

those Allied troops who were killed

in France or Belgium between 1914

-18 and who have no known

grave.  The monument stands not far

from where he was killed.   At

the time, the earthwork in which

he fell became known as The

Butterworth Trench.

Let’s hear an arrangement of a

folksong arranged by him, one of

his 11 Sussex Folksongs, Roving In

The Dew.  He collected 3 versions

of this song himself, under the

title, Dabbling In The Dew, but

for this arrangement used a version

taken down by another researcher.  

Track 1 Dabbling In The Dew, Arr Butterworth 

It is doubtful that George Butterworth

ever had thoughts of living up

to his Grandfather’s example. Though an

Old Etonian and graduate of Trinity

College, Oxford and one who would

have regarded himself as the social

equal of most of the more

famous victims of the meatgrinder in

the teens of the last Century –

the first-rate Tennants, Grenfells, Asquiths

and Horners of this life - was

no conventional patriot, no Tory, no

euphuist in any aspect of existence. 

Whether learning or teaching music – he

taught piano at Radley, and formed

a choir there – he was an

artist of close mouth and practical

activity.  He was a physically strong,

man who smoked a straight Lovat

briar, grew the expected flourishing moustache

in answer to dark, bushy eyebrows

and tended to look as though

smiling at the eyes – lucent eyes

crinkled at the corners, the lower

lids subject to upward pressure from

his cheeks, humorous eyes, their humour

with a touch of irony or

scepticism, perhaps. 

They were also watchful eyes.  A

graduate in Classics, he attended the

Royal College of Music from 1910,

a late starter in the College’s

eyes  – though a composer from the

age of 9 - who knew where

he was going.  The courses disappointed

him, leading nowhere; he left after

a year.  At University, he had

been President of the Music Society,

noted as one who was

“impatient of humbug.” He had the

clearest ideas of form and harmony

and had made a study of

folk-music, becoming a staunch member

of Cecil Sharp’s Folksong Society.  He

had worked through the expected influences

of the day that wrecked the

work of lesser talents; Wagner left

his mark, possibly Grieg or Debussy

and possibly, at the outside, the

colourful and ingenious style of Slavic

instrumentation.  He remained the most analytical

and clearminded of critics, and certainly

cut through musical problems for that

late-developer, Vaughan Williams.  At the

end of an evening, he took

his pipe out of his mouth

to suggest in his “gruff, abrupt” manner

that Vaughan Williams write a 2^nd

Symphony, The London Symphony, and Vaughan

Williams dedicated it to him before

its premiere in 1913.   When Butterworth

died, Vaughan Williams felt as though

utterly bereft; there’s the matter of

his having volunteered for war-service

as an ambulance-driver but, in

time, changing his battlefield vocation to

become a Royal Artillery officer.  Perhaps

the death of Butterworth contributed to

this decision.

George would not have been impressed

by talk of his bravery in

encouraging his men – mostly hardbitten ex-

miners - to one more effort, or

by admiration of his Military Cross –

which only officers could win.   His

men loved him, but that would

have made the error seem all

the more stupid.   He would have

kicked himself for making the mistake

made by chivalrous idiots just posted

up from home, clever lads who

forgot to duck or who had

no idea how hard it were

to dodge the bullet of an

unseen assailant – the speed with which

death could be dealt in a

modern War in France.   

As a composer, George Butterworth’s work

has come down to us as

a proof of his technical ability

as well as pure expression; he

seems the most humane but poised

of artists, a man who, quite

possibly attained the very highest degree

of feeling and polish; not one

of his works appears blemished by

extraneous or awkward details or developments. 

They appear to have been distilled

and perfected by a musical magician. 

He must have destroyed volumes of

early pieces before leaving for France –

if not sooner.  His complete oeuvre

consists of four orchestral pieces, a

couple of single songs – one setting

Requiescat by Oscar Wilde after the

death of his own mother, three

song cycles – one based on poems

from Stevenson’s Songs of Travel, two

on the Shropshire Lad poems of

AE Housman, one on poems

by WE Henley, Love Blows

As The Wind Blows, a book

of arrangements of 11 Sussex folksongs .

a Suite For String Quartette

and – most famously – the ever-fresh

four orchestral pieces,  the Two English

Idylls of 1911, the Rhapsody:

A Shropshire Lad, (1912) and

An Idyll:  The Banks of Green

Willow (1913).

The Folksong movement in English music

has been decried by modernists and

so-called internationalists ever since its

co-opted member-composers came to

fame.  Not one of the brilliant

minds who have pointed out that

the world of folksong nostalgically revived

was invalid as a form of

artistic expression because dead on its

feet even as it was obtruded

on the minds of sophisticated Rightwing

intellectuals, or just plain substanceless when

contrasted with industrial machine-reality, has

managed to extirpate the public’s love

of its Art-music.   The point

has so often been missed that

folksong-and-dance formed the musical

means of self-expression and

entertainment of ordinary people who did

not attend Public School or University 

or hire a suburban piano.  Ordinary

people toiled and died without mark

save birth, confirmation, marriage and funeral – unless

they attained the charge-sheet, or

entered the Workhouse.

Let’s hear the two English Idylls.

The first is based on three

folksongs:  Dabbling in The Dew, whose

subject is unsuccessful wooing, Just as

The Tide was Flowing, a story

of successful wooing and Henry Martin,

in which a man turns to

piracy on the high seas in

order to support his brothers!

Track 2:  English Idyll No 1, Butterworth 

Butterworth’s use of alto instruments is

a shading feature – voices we made

of oboe, clarinet, violas, cellos, horns,

trombones.  The light and freshness comes

from flute, harp, solo trumpet, violins. 

In rounding out the story how

effective his harp runs are.  The

bass is unobtrusive but mobile or

provides pedals of depth – a depth

of earth like firmness.  The interplay

of instrumentation is lively.  His use

of harmonics and mutes is as

breathtaking in its elemental scene setting

as is his sense of drama

and tragedy.  Full throated, his orchestra

is a formidable force from which

both Holst and Vaughan Williams and

many other composers learned, as the

deep earth settled on its perhaps

one time Wagnerist only begetter.  Constantly,

the blending of timbres is both

subtle and unerringly distinct.

In the English Idyll No 2,

the folksong is Phoebe and Her

Dark-eyed Sailor:  in it, a

girl encounters a sailor; he seeks

to win her; she refuses the

confident well-set up lad until

she suddenly realizes that he is

her betrothed who went to sea

and was thought to have drowned. 

He tried and made his fortune.

Track 3:  English Idyll No 2, Butterworth 

People had flocked from the poverty-

stricken land to the cities, where

pay was supposed survivable.  The cities

swelled with increasingly cheap labour with

predictable results. Thousands were killed young

by machines, dust or fibre-polluted

atmospheres and toxic agents, or by

a home-life best imagined from

the prints of contemporary artists.  The

workhouse – the being a charity-case –

was merely dreaded more than work

or a cholera- or typhoid epidemic.

No wonder many folksongs sing bittersweetly

or longingly of love, usually lost

love, betrayal, death or some other

form of separation, dalliances while going

or coming from somewhere, or sailors,

the season or life-occupation, the

possibility of making one’s fortune – with

plenty of fireside beer, warming spice

and baccy as well.  It has

to be remembered that at his

most utile (and, coincidentally virtuous), the

common man or woman was young,

fit, unmarried, politically submissive and an

abstainer from drinking, smoking and sexual

relations.  When rich enough to feed,

clothe and house children on one

wage, well, a man and woman

could marry, settle down and breed

fit young children of the same

make.  After all, at a higher

differential, this was how professionals not

of independent means ought to live,

to the glory of God and

Capital, and everyone knew what the

alternative was – to be a pauper

and expected to die.  Moral force was

with wealth and the employer; even

the established church, socially enmeshed with

the gentry and middleclasses, would not

or could not ameliorate the conditions

created by tyrannical Mammon, yet one

had to conform.

The conflicts in AE Housman’s

A Shropshire Lad are many; but

central to Butterworth’s probable view of

them would have been that between

living in the countryside or coming

to live and work in the

City, in London, as Housman had

done, and having to hide one’s

own very nature.  Facing up to

an inimical, godless universe of chance

and ill-fate, and to society’s

capacity for damning short-lived man’s

non-existent soul to cowering under

the threat of social disgrace and

even capital punishment as a criminal

was a peculiarly Victorian dilemma – particularly

after the trial of Oscar Wilde. 

The covertly homosexual Housman described himself

as an Epicurian, and Butterworth likewise

was no believer in the Christian

God, but both must have felt

themselves still to be swimming against

the tide of middleclass conventional religion,

politics and morality. Both loved the

countryside, the seasons, the general goodheartedness

of unsophisticated people.  The countryside and

country folk were still there, still

sang and danced in reaction to

life.  The beauty of Butterworth’s orchestral

evocation of Spring in the Rhapsody

is superfine from the opening on

string harmonics, but also as though

of Nature itself.  The woodwind, violins,

violas and cellos shade the music

to perfection, the brass affirmatory of

warmth, youthful happiness or dread fate. 

To judge from the use of

harmony, Butterworth’s study of music must

have included the works of Richard

Strauss.  I’d venture to suggest that

no Straussian nor expressionist composer achieved

a starker, harsher climax than that

of this piece in which vaulting

fanfare builds and is broken by

the tritone as in Sibelius.  A

moment of horror that stays with

one.  (The whole tone scale from

the harp at close may symbolize

death by drowning).  The day is

not saved by the Loveliest of

Trees motif that has opposed it,

all along, but by the phrase

of last line of the song. 

“To see the cherry hung with

snow.”  Butterworth’s modification, qualification or distortion

of song-themes is a brilliant

and original feature of his orchestral

work:  he develops them as might

a symphonist.  He searches out the

harmonic implication or resonance to the

last drachm (dram) or scruple.  The

harp’s rippling wholetone scale near the

end has been suggested to symbolize

a self-drowning.

The main theme of the Rhapsody,

by name, Loveliest of Trees, is

a folksong that was in fact

entirely Butterworth’s own.  In its original

form, it is the first song

in his first cycle of Shropshire

Lad settings.  He ventriloquized Housman’s and

Great Britain’s Lad in a song

indistinguishable from those that move by

every means but the intentional.  To

adapt Wilfred Owen, the poetry of

the art-musician inspired by folksong

is in the pity.  No wonder

the soldiers of his company thought so well of him.

In Butterworth’s music it is never,

to use the Masefield couplet, “The

smoke of…farms lifts blue in

air/As though man’s passionate mind

had never suffered there.”

Track 4:  Rhapsody – A Shropshire Lad, Butterworth 

Turn to 1913 and another

orchestral Idyll, The Banks of Green

Willow, based on two folksongs, the

first eponymous – a woman elopes with

a captain, believes that she will

die in childbirth and begs him

to throw her over the side –

and the second, Green Bushes, in

which a fickle maid finds a

new lover.

It’s interesting that every Butterworth orchestral

piece is in an arch construction: 

first, there is the proposition of

a beautiful tune and contrast material;

then, there is a vehement quasi-

development section; lastly, there is a

restatement of the opening material – long

drawn out, becoming hushed, fading into

a dying fall, almost unbearably poignant,

nostalgic, regretful but too touching not

to be consoling and unforgettable

Track 5:  The Banks of Green Willow, George Butterworth 

Perhaps folk-music survived even the

worst of the 19^th Century’s

murderous advancement of Feudal Capitalism as the

basis for a modern society, partly

thanks to the Folksong Society and

young composers from privileged, even landed,

backgrounds who bothered to listen and

hear; folk-music was popular self-

expression more real than music-hall

popular songs or polite villa-ballads

provided by paid hacks who might

have wished to write symphonies.  It

was national self-expression; it came

of the people, the nation rather

than its rulers – as glorified by

the latest in Art music-technique,

those, for one thing, who bothered

to note it down as played

or sung, not as taught by

the Brahmsian, Dvorakesque Professor Stanford.  Modal,

not diatonic, pentatonic folk-music could

be embellished by being played over

chromatic harmonies, subjected to direct strokes

of development, manipulation, transformation, even counterpoint –

and gain.  There was never the

intention to seem sophisticated.  Sophistication is

not a positive value – it means

capable of glib persuasiveness.  Not exactly

a desideratum in one who pays

tribute to the victims of the

19^th Century British holocaust who,

trapped and left with little or

no real comfort, leisure or notice

created the only natural, meaningful form

of music we had to distinguish

our artworks from superior European models.

Everyone, not the educated connoisseur, critic

or composer, owned folk-music – felt

its pathos or humour – often, its

defiant humour and unintentional pathos.  Socialists

might just look back to the

17^th Century and think of Commonwealth –

wealth held in common. Holst, Vaughan

Williams, Butterworth, Grainger, Moeran and many

others will not appeal to those

who think their music easy or

unpolitical.  Anyone with half an ear

for music will hear what their

music may mean – and find its

influence compelling, magical and inexhaustible, the

musical equivalent of a powerful poetic

tradition stretching back to Shakespeare or

even Chaucer – a bringing together of

the classes, a levelling process, a

voice for us all, harmonies for

our comedies and tragedies, our own

too-often oppressed and distracted lives.

Even if in the Nineteenth Century

the devil preached from holy scripture,

still, pace the hymn or parlour

song writers, he had almost none

of the best tunes. True feeling

was in the distinct lyrics, ballads

and dances of semi-literate and

self-taught musicians.  Ribald, raucous, insolent

or hail fellow, well-met, wistful,

grieving, seeking solace, folk tunes held

the truth of a materialistic, deeply

false and unspeakably cruel age that

had trashed earth and society for

resources and productivity, profit and power.

How heartrending that Acting Captain Butterworth failed

to duck.  Sometimes, it is hard

to see what he fought and

died for on the Somme.  His

music though is a glory of

his generation and our country and,

as the Great War was simply

one more huge atrocity of Industrialization,

capital and utility, his pieces of

lifelong-taken pains are made still

more poignantly beautiful – as well as

ironically bittersweet - by its being in

part his and his lost generation’s

unconscious memorial. 

How would his music have developed

if he had returned to it

after the Great War?  That is

unknowable; like Ivor Gurney, Butterworth was

his own man, his future tendencies

not to be predicted.  He left

one unfinished orchestral piece.  Fantasia.  He

left off work on the full-

-score in the early months of

1914.  No-one knows what

happened to the short-score.  The

work was completed not long ago

by Kriss Russman.  An eight-minute movement,

scored for larger orchestra than any

that Butterworth had used before –

but with no harp nor percussion! -

it makes for fascinated listening, though

always with the caveats that a

major composer’s ideas are his own

and subject to any change he

likes, and his final intentions are

not divined by editors or, as

in this case, a talented fellow-

composer who helps fragments across within

composition of his own.  It contains

a lovely hushed opening, a long

folksong-like theme that reminds one

of the Somerset Sheep-shearing Song;

motifs from Butterworth’s own orchestral pieces,

fragments of Loveliest of Trees and

folksong, The Banks of Green Willow. 

The first 3 minutes 45

seconds are Butterworth’s, ending

in a vivace marking and a

tune related to the melody he

used to set Housman’s poem, When

I was One-And-Twenty..  Russman begins:

passes back the running to the various

other motifs; the solo trumpet fanfares

twice in the course of a phase

uncertain in tone or atmosphere, yet

still holding the attention.

What happens next is a rejigging

at speed of the wholetone climax

of the Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad,

but then,  the Fantasia-material is brought

most movingly to a passionate, almost

Mahlerian unfolding of rich false relations

and enharmonic changes – wonderfully poignant, passionate

and compelling:  the main theme finds

its apotheosis in aspects of others.

The enlarged – even massive-sounding -scoring

favours bass and treble, with modulations coming

from within the alto-register.  Hair-raising.

The violins are supported in their

unison by sonorous brass and woodwind

harmonies.  It is an all-too-

short flight of inspiration, but Butterworth

himself was no chinless rhapsodist, but a

Laconian among British composers of his

time.  From there, the music dwindles

as though suddenly shy and elusive

after such loveliness.  Butterworth fades into

the shadows.  Folksong and dance, Tudor

church- or consort-music go with

him.  What should he have written?

Here, the coda is in all

senses inconclusive, something unprecedented in Butterworth’s

own work save in his having left

behind less than the torso of

a possibly great Fantasia…

Memories of the pieces heard

Earlier in the programme are rife

but welcome, and there is that very

likeable – but brief - hint of a dance-episode

that Butterworth as

a folk-dancer knew well how

to encompass.  Film exists of his 

demonstrating the steps for such a

dance!  Also, there are moments somewhat

akin to Copland’s Appalachian Spring…

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 you

enjoyed it and will tune in

again soon.  We leave you with

Fantasia, sketched by Butterworth and “realized”

by Kriss Russman.  Goodbye!

Track 6:  Fantasia, Butterworth/Yates