For the Fallen 5th and 6th November 2016

This week's Classical Break is a recording of a lunchtime concert given at the Holburne Museum, Bath on November 11th, 2014. 

Below are the programme notes by the concert's co-organiser, Edna Blackwell, from which the radio script has been shamelessly drawn. Thanks to the Holburne Museum for allowing us to record the concert for your listening delight!

The Holburne Museum

Lunchtime Concert Tuesday, 11^th November at 1.10pm

 For the Fallen

Ludlow and Teme by Ivor Gurney

Bruce Evans (tenor)

Edna Blackwell (piano)

and The Remembrance Quartet

A Shropshire Lad by George Butterworth

and songs by Rudi Stephan and W. Denis Browne

Niall Hoskin (baritone)

Steven Hollas (piano)

All today’s composers were born within 5 years of each other. By the end of the First World War three – the Englishmen Butterworth and Browne and the German Stephan – were dead, the other (Ivor Gurney) psychologically damaged.

Ivor Gurney was born in 1890 in Gloucester. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Music to study composition with Stanford.
He was equally talented as poet and musician writing nearly 900 poems between 1913 and 1926 and continuing to write poems long after his ability to compose coherent music ceased.
At first rejected for military service he joined the Army in 1915 and served in France where he was wounded, gassed and shellshocked. After treatment in military and mental hospitals he resumed his studies at the R.C.M, this time with Vaughan Williams.
Leaving college in 1921 he returned to Gloucester where he failed to find permanent employment and felt he was being rejected both as a composer and a poet.
He threatened suicide and the instability which seemed like eccentricity before the war was aggravated by his feverish activity in producing poems and songs and, of course, his war experiences eventually leading to his admission to Gloucester Mental Hospital.
Gurney rarely set his own poems and was drawn to A.E. Housman for his two song cycles ‘Ludlow and Teme’ and ‘Western Playland’ which were eventually published in 1923 and 1926 after much revision, a process which he continued throughout his composing life.
The seven songs of ‘Ludlow and Teme’ were all probably written in 1919. There is no attempt at musical narrative or cross reference between the songs. He rarely uses word painting, instead he captures changing moods in his accompaniments. The tonality is fluid, the music hovers around rather than settles into a key.
Gurney very much admired Vaughan Williams’ song cycle ‘On Wenlock Edge’ which uses an accompaniment of piano and string quartet, he follows this idea for both his song cycles.
With his deteriorating mental health, musical friends, particularly Marion Scott, had to take over preserving and preparing his manuscripts for publication.
In a letter to a friend, Gurney wrote ‘My Housman cycle is to be done at a party at the Scotts in March (1920), Stewart Wilson as the singer and the Philharmonic Quartet and myself as back ground’. This is a very apt description of the role of the accompanying instruments.
Now permanently resident in a London mental hospital, Gurney was allowed to listen to a first broadcast performance of ‘Ludlow and Teme’ in August 1925. He commented ‘I wish the singer had used the revisions I made – to avoid squareness’. His many revisions are noted in Philip Lancaster’s edition of 2011 which is being used today. All creative activity ceased in 1927, Ivor Gurney eventually died in 1937.

Ludlow and Teme  [words by A.E. Housman]
When smoke stood up from Ludlow
Far in a Western Brookland
‘Tis time, I think by Wenlock Town
*Ludlow Fair
On the Idle Hill of Summer
*When I was One and Twenty
The Lent Lily
*These two poems are also set by Butterworth in the second part of this programme.

Bruce Evans studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has sung both opera and oratorio widely, working for English Touring Opera, Opera della Luna and Glyndebourne Festival and Touring Opera. He also toured in Europe, the Far East and United States with Pavillion Opera. Next year he will be singing the title role in Stravinsky’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ for Bristol Opera. Bruce has enjoyed greatly the opportunity of studying this beautiful and challenging work. He is currently a Technical Project Leader at Heathrow Airport Ltd.

Edna Blackwell is a pianist, conductor and teacher. Apart from conducting many choral and instrumental works, mainly for the Bath Cantata Group, she has enjoyed acting as repétiteur for many operas and has conducted quite a few including ‘La Bohéme’ and ‘Albert Herring’. She enjoys playing chamber music and accompanying in particular. She founded ‘Operaletta’ whose one act comic operas at the Rondo Theatre and latterly Shakespeare’s Birthday Concerts at the Holburne have been particularly successful.

The Remembrance Quartet was especially formed for the concert.

Its members are: Matthew Taylor, Anna Salamonsen, Tim Robb and Shena Power.

Note from producer, Rupert Kirkham. Live concerts don't always fit the slot available for a radio programme - in the case of Classical Break, it's 58 minutes. We are running a little early, so I have added in an item which went out on Somer Valley FM earlier this year, researched and written by Mike Burrows. It's another song by Ivor Gurney, called, In Flanders. But as you will hear, although written at the Front, it's about Gurney's love of the Gloucestershire countryside. The singer is the baritone, Stephen Varcoe, the pianist, Clifford Benson. The introduction is me.

George Butterworth was born in 1885, was educated at Eton and Oxford and studied at the Royal College of Music. He was part of the Folksong Revival movement, as a song collector and an enthusiastic dancer (there survives a very short film of him Morris dancing). When war broke out in 1914, as Peter Pirie says ‘it gave him something to do. No-one near him in the army suspected he was interested in music, and he was killed in the Battle of the Somme on 5th August 1916.’
A.E. Housman’s collection of poems ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was published in 1896; Butterworth’s setting dates from 1911.

Loveliest of trees
When I was one-and-twenty
Look not in my eyes
Think no more,lad
The lads in their hundreds
Is my team ploughing?  

    
Rudi Stephan grew up in the Rhineland city of Worms: he was born there in 1887. He studied in Frankfurt, and following performances of orchestral works at the Festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Muskiverein he was hailed as a leading light among the younger generation of German composers. His only opera had just been accepted for performance in 1915 when he volunteered for action. He was killed by a Russian sniper’s bullet in September of that year.

Waldnachmittag   (Woodland Afternoon) (composed 1906)

The peace of Sunday lies over the land: you and I rest beneath a leafy roof. Birds sing sleepily; a sweet breathing silence goes its evening way. The sun dapples the ground, deer graze. Distant hymns tell of love and pain, and the darkling soul quivers at its transience. – words by Maurice Reinhold von Stern.

Memento vivere  (Remember to live) (first draft 1908, final version 1913)

I rode through the dark, silent as sad as night, thinking of the few friends I had on earth, and of those already under the earth. Then a ghostly voice called from the dark mountain: ‘Man, enjoy life today, for tomorrow you go to your grave!’ Was it a shepherd boy singing? I do not know, but it filled my soul with fear. Once I heard those words from a brother’s lips: now he lies in the cold ground. – words by Friedrich Hebbel.
 

William Denis Browne, born 1888, was educated at Rugby and Clare College Cambridge,
where he was later organ scholar. He was a close friend of Rupert Brooke, who was next door at King’s. Browne studied under Charles Wood and Busoni; he taught for a while before he and Brooke were commissioned together. Brooke died en route to the Dardanelles, where Browne died in action on 4th June 1915

To Gratiana Dancing and Singing – to words of Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

See! with what constant motion

Even, and glorious, as the sun,

Gratiana steers that noble frame,

Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice

That gave each winding law and poise,

And swifter than the wings of Fame.

Each step trod out a lover's thought

And the ambitious hopes he brought,

Chain'd to her brave feet with such arts;

Such sweet command, and gentle awe,

As when she ceas'd, we sighing saw

The floor lay pav'd with broken hearts.

So did she move; so did she sing

Like the harmonious spheres that bring

Unto their rounds their music's aid;

Which she performed such a way,

As all th' enamoured world will say:

The Graces danced, and Apollo play'd.

Note by the composer: ‘the melody on which the accompaniment is founded is that of an anonymous Allmayne in Elizabeth Rogers’ Virginal Book (17th century)’

Niall Hoskin (Tenor) was in Clare College Choir, Cambridge. He sings in oratorio and recitals, and has now reached the stage where his operatic roles are daddies and baddies. He has done title roles from Orfeo to Don Giovanni, Falstaff to the Mikado. Future oratorio includes Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, Brahms’ German Requiem and Vaughan Williams’Dona nobis pacem. Next year he will be singing in Bath Opera’s Peter Grimes and Bristol Opera’s The Rake’s Progress

Steven Hollas (piano) read music and history of art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He teaches piano, mainly at St. Lawrence School, accompanies Bath Minerva Choir and Cantamus Choir, plays harpsichord and organ for the Paragon Singers and Bradford Baroque Band. He very much enjoys accompanying singers, especially on historic pianos of various periods.

Edna Blackwell

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