New Year 2017

Classical Break - New Year

This is a repeat from 2011.  A happy new year 2017 to all our listeners!

Here is a new poem by Mike Burrows:

A Sonnet On New Year’s Eve

(A Dream)

Quiet long took the high hills at a rush
And is all intent where ancientness dwells.
On turfed or wooded land, darkness brought hush
Murmurous with wind and traffic: no bells
Speak and swing true change; the word of a near
Ring pierces miles of chill in one’s trance...
In mind only, sounding to the walker
New Year in system of deliverance.
So faint, the twisting scales wished-for and dreamed
Under parishes of half-moon and stars –
Whose communities approve cloudy-streamed
Jubilancy – as jugganauts, like cars,
Shine flat-angled or burrowing headlights,
The lit roads they join now teeming all nights.

Copyright, Mike Burrows, 01/01/15

Track One:       Out In The Dark, Burgon,

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  It is of British music, and is inspired by the season of New Year. You have just heard a setting, for alto voice and chamber orchestra, of Edward Thomas’ poem Out In The Dark, by Geoffrey Burgon. 

This has some of the elusiveness of New Year feeling - of coming out of oneself into the night of change and always-has-been-if one-had-but-known-it.  It comes from the song-cycle  Acquainted With Night.

New Year...: not for nothing was the Roman god-gatekeeper, Janus given two faces, one for the past and the other for the future.  The New Year is a time when we look back as tenaciously - if we have sense - as we look forward.  Where we have been, the sum of our experiences and how we continue, are what we are and, to an extent, our hopes of continuance.  What do we enter upon under the high gate?

We are in the middle of Christmas, and New Year brings Epiphany in its train:  a time associated with the pilgrimage of the Three Kings to the cradleside of Jesus Christ.  Here is a movement from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Hodie, A Christmas Cantata of 1954, The March Of The Three Kings, music of this composer’s old age, although in its vigour and harmonic and colouristic imagination, it suggests that Vaughan Williams was not disposed to look backward more than he had to to continue to build on his achievements.  We too can journey.

Track Two:  Hodie, The March of The Three Kings, Vaughan Williams

Calennig is a South Welsh New Year observance - a gift given between the night of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day noon.  Parties, often of children passed from door to door giving presents of food or money, and organizing the whipround necessary!  Each carried a decorated apple supported on four skewers in order to preserve the decoration.  Here is a breathless traditional song for the occasion, recorded in Gwynedd.

Track Three:  Calennig

Ring Out Wild Bells, a setting of verses from Tennyson’s In Memoriam made by Percy Fletcher, a composer chiefly remembered now for his music for brass band.

Track Four:  Ring Out Wild Bells, Percy Fletcher

Set on New Year’s Eve in Terror Town, Sir Michael Tippett’s fifth opera, New Year, for which he himself wrote the libretto, sees the violence and visionlessness of Somewhere Today opposed by Nowhere Tomorrow - as inhabitants meet strangers from a space-ship - and face up to life and reality and their possibilities.  Here are three numbers from the orchestral Suite: Love-Theme For Jo Ann and Pelegrin, Ringing-in The New Year (spot the references to Auld Lang Syne) and The Space-ship Takes off Again. 

Tracks Five, Six and Seven:  New Year:  Love-Theme For Jo Ann and Pelegrin, Ringing-in The New Year and The Space-ship Takes off Again

Here is a poem by Mike Burrows, New Year

The Gatekeeper’s faces are calm with fate

Gazing both back and through the dark

                                              archway,

And on earth, bronze swings and sounds in

                                               tons-weight

Choirs of ancient peals.  Coming to day,

A stranger will show his face as new

And old and still unknowable; as yet,

He moves in clear concealment where 

                                              he grew -

His span drawn to us from the stars’

                                         bright mesh.

Morning will show him and deliverance

As what we earn, and as the bells clang

                                                      trust

That calms as notes soften to resonance

One’s fear is only that in truth he must

Contract from Eve to a day like others -

To the soul of his least humane brothers.

Sir Arthur Bliss’ music for the ballet Adam Zero was commissioned by the Australian dancer and actor, Robert Helpmann, who created the choreography.  It is the life-cycle of everyman, seen as the birth, growth through high times to maturity and collapse of life-work and death - the seasons -  of a single year.  Let’s hear The Birth of Adam and the strange, starry beginning of life. Incidentally, near the bitter close of the ballet, before the curtain falls, the stage is reset for...Adam Zero’s life to begin again.   

Track Eight:  Adam Zero, The Birth of Adam

Wishes that loom so large at New Year are not always wise. In the poem, The Clock of The Years, a man imagines his dead wife made young again by the Spirit of time.  There is a terrible irony that will become clear as you listen.  This song comes from Gerald Finzi’s cycle based on poems of Thomas Hardy, Earth

And Air And Rain.  The song begins with a biblical quotation - Job, Four, Fifteen - recited over piano-flourishes, an appropriately hair-raising effect.  The poem is taken from Hardy’s collection, Moments of Vision. 

Track Nine:  The Clock of The Years, Finzi

So the young girl becomes a child, the child a baby, the baby goes to nothingness; the dead Wife is lost to memory.  It was the man’s choice, not Time’s, to mar the ordained.

All the same, this is a time for dreams of what were and what may be. Here is a setting of the poem of Yeats, He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven, by Howard Skempton, a friend of the Communist activist and modernist, Cornelius Cardew.

Track Ten:  He Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven, Skempton

Inspired by the writings on New Year of the essayist, Charles Lamb, here is an orchestral piece by Gerald Finzi:  Nocturne - New Year’s Music.  Written early in the composer’s working-life, when he resided in Gloucestershire, an agnostic idealist much inspired by Morris’ Socialist writings, the works of Thomas Hardy, Georgian poetry, metaphysical literature and Charles Lamb’s antiquarian mysticism, this sombre piece is an expression of landscape and solitude with Winter thoughts on mortality and man’s determination to grow more worthy of his self-chosen destiny.  Warm wistfulness amid frost becomes resolve.  Finzi’s life was in many ways a race against time; his Father died a lingering death from cancer and siblings were struck down by illness, War and suicide, until one Sister and his Mother remained.  He was made conscious of the ironies of life and blindness of fate too early on to be at ease unless concentrating on his passions of his wife and two sons, music, poetry, apple-arboriculture.  Written in the 1920s, as he was starting out, it was revized during the Second World War and first published in 1950 - not long before its composer was stricken with leukaemia.  The broad hymn that rises out of wistful contemplation of the New Year landscape and distant bells is on an unusually large scale for this composer, typical in its undermined diatonic harmonies but beautiful in its uneasy struggle and triumph.  The dying fall is dark and resigned but there is no sense of that melody’s having been in vain; it sweetens the darkness, not with what might be but what may be.  The means are within our grasp.  Wishes and resolutions for oneself and for all count for something.  What the young composer wished and resolved became his life, and many have been the happier for getting to know him and his music.

Track Eleven:  Nocturne, New Year’s Music, Finzi

We’ll end with a medley of Scottish songs for New Year’s Eve.  Scotland Ho!  Fill Your Glass; We’re No’ Awa Tae Bide Awa; Happy We’ve Been Athegither, Highland Whisky; The Christmas Carousel; If I’d Get A Dram I’d Take It.  This was Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  I hope that you have enjoyed our New Year programme and will join us again soon.  We wish you all the best for 2012.  Goodbye!

Track Twelve: New Year Medley, Trad

Christmas 2016 (2)

CB Christmas

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today, we celebrate Christmas with an anthology of music and words, and our script was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  The huge quantities and variety of music – and arrangements of music - inspired by the long-lived spiritual value of Christmas has made selection extremely difficult, but we hope that everyone will find something to enjoy amongst our choices.

We begin with a spry instrumental arrangement by Percy Faith, a skilful band-leader, arranger and original composer, of Joy To The World, a popular carol that utilizes a theme

by Handel.  The recording dates from 1959.

Track 1: Joy To The World, Handel/Mason/Watts/Faith

Now, two carols together, one from 14^th Century Poland and entitled, Judas Sold Jesus and Good King Wenceslas.  Both originated as popular dance-tunes, and would have been performed during general dances in church.   Judas would have been disrespected; Wenceslas was a martyred young Bohemian king who had been canonized.  In Winter, thanks both to thoughts of the rebirth of Spring or renewal of faith, one could triumph over betrayal or untimely death.

The pagan origins of Christmas were more to the fore in mediaeval times than they are today; public Christmas services in churches were like shindigs held to spite the cold winter and flaunt what fruits of their labour were made available to villeins and serfs.  In contrast to the exalted, cold and austere observances of priests and monks, they were wild, vigorous occasions among the peasantry.  There was much drinking, singing and dancing; such licence that, eventually, the Church banned the performing of carols in church, the ban being the foundation of a tradition of going carol-singing.  It is possible that the church inadvertently took Christmas back to Viking roots, in that among the Norsemen, the figure who became Father Christmas was a man chosen yearly to go from homestead to homestead and be plied with drink and food as he went.  It took things back to the Roman occupation and Saturnalia, too.  Carol-singers roamed the countryside unchosen but expecting food and drink in front of a log-fire in payment for their performances.  Feasts in castles and palaces were feasts on plenty; in inns, taverns and cottages, they might be feasts on more than usual

Track 2:  Judas/Wenceslas (Trad)

The employment of professional waits or musicians by towns and cities did not necessarily deter the unofficial variety from performances, although such did not have the right to break curfew.  In the countryside, carol-singing slowly became more measured in spite of the impossibility of maintaining control over the movements of bands of common folk after dark. All the same, the mania for clampdowns had its rueful martyrs into the days of Thomas Case Sterndale Bennett (1882-1944).  Let’s hear his slyly folkish comic song, The Carol Singers, which for its grasp of the complex psychological nature of British seasonal behaviours on both sides of The Law cannot be beaten…

Track 3:  The Carol Singers, TC Sterndale-Bennett

Memories of an old Somerset and Devon custom of Christmas Eve, memories of the ashen faggot, remind us of Winter solstice customs of days older still.  The Yule-log was kept burning festival long in the time of Arctic darkness. Like alcohol, it warmed celebrants thankful for what the year had borne them to reward their labours.  Country folk’s regard for a good blaze and auguries drawn from close observation of the peculiar nature of faggot or log is not surprizing.  It is worth remembering that permission to gather firewood on a landowner’s estate was not freely given, and to gather it without permission was a felony.

Track 4:  Memories Of The Ashen Faggot

In Hamlet, there is a reference to the bird of dawning singeth all night long - Christmas Night, that is. The Canadian composer Jean Coulthard took her cue from this for a sombre, rapt and meditative piece for violin, harp and strings of that title.  Waiting on daybreak has always been hard for adult as well as child since Christmas began.  One expects it at every other moment, wanting to be up and being and doing on a day of hope for the future.  In this piece the listener travels far in search of Christ’s and his or her own hour. Coulthard was one of Canada’s most-respected musicians of the last Century.  She was born in Vancouver in 1908, and died there in 2000.  Her teachers included figures as diverse as RO Morris and Vaughan Williams and Bartok and Schoenberg.  Her personal style here reflects something of most of those influences.  Lovers of English music may detect a noble yet at some moments impassioned, almost mediaevally lacerating tone similar to that of Edmund Rubbra, who was also a pupil of RO Morris. 

Track 5:  The Bird of Dawning, Coulthard

Here's another carol, seemingly as well-known a berceuse as any.  It is one that many children of a number of generations may have found poignant.

Track 6:  Away In A manger, Trad

A touching description of Christmas Eve hospitality, now.  The hardness of life in the countryside was visited on journeymen, tinkers, tool-sharpeners; all making themselves useful to a district when need arose.  The cold of Winter was bitter.  Deaths from exposure were common among those who worked on the land, particularly shepherds.  Where did they live, the itinerents, in a country where movement about the country was curtailed  by the Poor Law and by zealous prosecution of vagrants or vagabonds?  They had their name, tools and calloused hands as proof that they were not sturdy or able-bodied beggars, a class of person once branded or mutilated – hanged, thanks to Bluff King Hal, if caught homeless and occupationless 3 times by the authorities..   A statute never rescinded

prescribed death for anyone caught living like an Aegyptian (that is, a gipsy) – it was passed in the name of Good Queen Bess, who later instituted the first poorhouses.  When could these nomad-workmen of all weathers sleep swaddled like the baby Jesus?  On Christmas Eve, perhaps? It is sometimes hard to tell from social attitudes that Christians believe all men were made in God’s image.  The meaning of the beauty of the divine human child in the manger, whose parents and worshippers comforted and blessed his first waking or sleeping hours, has not generally sunk in, it seems; because no-one cares about their parents, 120,000 children have no real home, this Christmas, and as many as 17m adults will be buying Christmas for others on the Never-never, as salaries don’t necessarily cover popular celebrations.  Other children still won’t see their parents or sole parent for most of Christmas Day – or perhaps they will be caring for them or for another sick relative.   This is, after all, the 24/7 society.

Track 7:  Swaddling Clothes

Let’s hear another cradle-song, this time for piano-solo, written by a contemporary composer.  Archishman Ghosh is a research-scientist who lives and works in Florida.  Much-travelled and

aware, his musical personality is close to his everyday character, logical, sceptical, slightly aloof, but capable of expressing deep warmth and affection.  Like Ravel’s, his irony and even sarcasm can

be suspect! The influences on his style are many; ranging from Scarlatti and Mozart through Grieg and Grainger to Scriabin and a later, grittier aesthetic.  The mark of his gift is that he has digested all

these influences to make his own, distinctive music.  Here, he gives us a well-worked, deceptively simple Berceuse in F-Sharp.  The harmonic sense and handling of rhythm and part-writing on show have a real distinction and modern sensibility and yet express something of the timeless awe a

human feels in looking up at a starry sky. The tracings of a map, a meaning, orientation – and pure beauty, the boundlessness of belief, hope and imagination can be…

On Christmas Night, will the stars turn to angels who sing? Our children gaze up at us and our

tenderness as we sing them to sleep. So sly is the composer's tonal sense that this innocent Berceuse in F# ends with seeming-total consistency in F!

Track 8:  Berceuse In F#, Archishman Ghosh

Track 9:  Church-bells ringing changes

A Virgin So Pure is an old carol of great freshness and beauty, a song in praise of Christ’s mother.  .  Here, the choir is accompanied with handbells.

Track 10:  A Virgin So Pure

Arise And Hail The Glorious Star announces the birth of Christ in bright directness.  This carol is from Cornwall and has a Wesleyan fervour.  The arrangement appears to be in 18^th Century-style, the contrapuntal parts contrasting and pitting registers against eachother in a cheerful, rudimentarily canonic manner…

Track 11:  Arise And Hail The Glorious Star, Trad

See Amid The Winter Snow.  Children may miss snow in many parts of the UK this Winter.  However cruel the winter cold used to be, if one had a hearth, relatives and friends and blessed holyday, once church was got over, it was possible to choose whether or not to fool about in it

Track 12:  See Amid The Winter Snow, Trad

It’s that time of year again:  we’ve trailed through Advent, meeting the consequences of a year of all-too human decisions – and perhaps must hope that the festival will grant us the kind of joys it granted us as children:  that the magic will work to comfort and console all of us who long for peace, tolerance and repose in which it is the soul that speaks and does for the sake of those whom we love.  To go a stage further, the more people we show that we love over 12 days, perhaps, the more chance that magic has of happening for us.  The New Year may be truly NEW.

This next track is dedicated to Miss Suvi Burrows, now on the way to grownupness.  It is an evocation of Peter Pan’s Fairy-companion, but to her parents oddly evocative also of their companion.  It is by Angela Morley, a fine composer and arranger of light music.

Track 13:  Tinkerbell, Morley

The composer Gerald Finzi once wrote a familial carol.  Though an agnostic, he loved the culture and imaginative appeal and the potential moral effect of Christmas traditions.  Later, he arranged the carol for clarinet and piano to exquisite effect.  This music is a miracle of expression, of deceptive simplicity.  Finzi’s music may be characterized in an image of metaphysical poetry that saw jewels as “contracted” stars and heavenly bodies.  A wealth of

experience of this world’s beauties, including those of humanity, is contracted to become musical sounds supremely yet unpretentiously well-wrought. One hears wisdom whose

expression is compassionate love, quite an achievement for a man of enthusiasms and known to some of his close confreres as Frenzy!  When in his farmhouse-home, on Christmas Eve, this solemn and highly-strung little man obsessed with the too-short time, was given to calling down a chimney-flue to his children and their friends, in the person of Father Christmas…

Track 14:  Carol from 5 Bagatelles for Clarinet and piano, Finzi

It doesn’t take much for a parent to make Christmas a time of wonders for a child who may have been looking up at the stars or imagining houselights to be stars - or the light of

angels – on dark Winter nights.  The stars may be candles, Christmas-tree lights, or the faces of holy messengers; as blessings draw nearer out of the void of night and ordinary life. An airliner coming from or leaving Bristol, or a star or planet may guide from huge distance and stand over a barn.  Other symbols may be:  holly, mistletoe, baubles -spirit-balls at their first appearance), crib-scenes, robins, frost, icicles, snowflakes and carpets of snow, bittersweet cakes and puddings eaten at no other time of the year, spiced drinks against the cold, burning hearths of domesticity and ancient woodcraft  a white-haired bishop of Myra or sprite in red or green from a toy-factory at Rovaniemi in the north of Finland, which might as well be the North Pole; who walks with Black Peter or drives a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer between the clouds and stars..

Auditory symbols will be carols and songs of peculiar fervour or pathos, the tunes various, the harmonies like a spiritual hug or caress of one’s brow and hair, and as warming as taperlight or sounds of a brass band in the coldest stone church.  Light survives Winter; the

cold can’t end warmth, life and hope, or the magic of love.

Track 15: The Twelfth Day of Christmas, Trad

Presents appear and are unwrapped on Christmas Day.  However swish with logos or cheap, they have come seemingly out of nowhere as symbols of what love and sense of fun can do.  Not only can the loving child marvel that something he may have wanted or that suits him fine turned up, but also – for some years – the agency of the act of generosity is unclear and possibly supernatural.  Not bad!  The element of fantasy is created from love, pure and simple.  It’s the love itself that can seem supernatural to older minds.  The presents have been wrapped and await his or her Lord or Ladyships.  But first things first:  the muddy boot-prints on newspaper, the nibbled carrot, the glass with a drop of the tawny stuff in the bottom of it and the plate with a sprinkle of crumbs of mince-pie.   Then come the corroborative details of what mum or dad thinks she or he saw or heard, or the possible thesis to be drawn from this or that circumstance.  The inquisition must be parried with the

maximum of tongue-in-cheek believability… What’s that all about, if it isn’t love?  In their deep happiness, parents may extend, even improve on, the traditions of their childhood – even celebrate the coming of their own children in memory of a holy birth in Bethlehem.

Track 16:  It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, Trad

What is the name of our Saviour?  Christ?  Father Christmas?  Santa Claus?  Are His helpers angels or elves?  Are we saviours ourselves, either for ourselves or for those about us? 

Does it matter?  Kindness, compassion, a willingness to rise to the slightest glimpses and epiphanies of faith, hope, love and imagination we meet and to behave well for others from

the heart will create or go towards creating what we call Christmas.  We say that the angels sang, “On earth, peace; goodwill to all men.”  In fact this was a mistranslation when the Bible was Englished.  They sang, “On earth, peace to all men of goodwill.”  In truth, only goodwill can bring about peace, either world peace, national peace, familial or personal peace; nothing will do but goodwill – it is obviously up to those who have this in their hearts and minds to spread the word, and to spread it through their deeds, which when extended by many, may bring about peace.  Peace through an unquenchable longing for peace and goodwill.

John Rutter is the doyen of carol-writers, and with good reason; reason that only some critics are incapable of hearing and believing.  Here is his Carol of The Children, a rearrangement of a movement from his lovely Suite Antique for harpsichord, flute and strings.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Our Christmas edition was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and that

you will tune in again soon.  We both extend our best wishes to you all for a happy,

easeful and peaceful Christmas.  Goodbye!

Track 17:  The Carol of The Children, Rutter

Christmas Classical Break 2016

Classical Christmas Break  

December-2016 / 1

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

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

Programme tracklisting.

CD’s featured:

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

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

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

1. Sussex Carol: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
2. Gabriel’s Message: Clare College Singers
3. Adam Lay Ybounden: St George’s Chapel
4. Angel Tidings: Clare College Singers
5. Shepherd’s Pipe Carol: Clare College Singers
6. O Little Town of Bethlehem: Clare College Singers
7. The Christmas Song: The Salvation Army Band
8. In Dulci Jubilo: Clare College Singers
9. Stille Nacht: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
10. The Twelve Days of Christmas: Clare College Singers
11. Quelle est Cette Odeur Agréable: Clare College Singers
12. Here we Come a Wassailing: The Salvation Army Band
13. Quem Pastores Laudavere: Clare College Singers
14. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
15. Resonet in Laudibus: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
16. Il Est Ne, le Divin Enfant: Clare College Singers
17. There is a Flower Springing: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
18. Hodie Christus Natus Est: The Choir of St George’s Chapel
19. Infant Holy, Infant Lowly: Clare College Singers
20. Nativity Carol: Clare College Singers

3&4 December Britten

 Another chance to hear. ...

Classical Break - Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten 1913-1976

Hunt the Squirrel – 1.20

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly on the Shore - Percy Grainger – 3.49

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

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

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

Scene from Peter Grimes

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.

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. 

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

A Ceremony of Carols

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.’

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 wierd, 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