The Tale the Pine-trees knew

Wintry weekend coming up, colder than usual this side of Xmas. So a visit to Arnold Bax The Tale the Pine-trees Knew (1931), particularly relevant after Martyn Brabbins’s outstanding Bax November Woods at the Barbican (Please read my piece Internal Landscapes here).  There is no explicit programme,  but Bax wrote about climbing a mountain in Ireland . "Anyone going up from the South the sea is hidden by the landward bulk of the mountain itself, so that when it bursts into view at a height of almost 2,000 ft, the sudden sight of the Atlantic horizon tilted half-way up the sky is completely overwhelming." Thus the chords in the introduction, one after another looming upwards, pausing briefly before continuing. As the ascent draws near, the pace speeds up, energized. A bright woodwind figure enters. Though the ostinato tread remains, it's now no longer dominant : elipticak string lines suggest spaciousness, small bright figures tantalize. The lively second theme fades into a quieter passage where horns echo, much as they do in mountains.  More ascendant figures, now lighter, as the central section approaches.  Excitement mounts : brasses call, timpani rush : grand crescendi, suggesting panoramic expanses, before the final section, where the chords gradually diminish in force, the pulse decelerating. A whimsical wind figure suggests something magical remains as stillness descends once more.  So what is the "tale the pine-trees know?"  This is no Strauss Alpensinfonie where the peaks extend way above the treeline and elements become hostile, nor a Sibelius tone poem where cosmic forces are unleashed.   But neither is it comfortable scene painting.  The ending is abrupt, open-ended, to the extent that David Lloyd-Jones checked the manuscript and Barbirolli's markings, repeating the first four bars of fig. 57 on his recording.

Internal Landscapes : Bax, Vaughan Williams - Brabbins, BBCSO

Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. at the Barbican in Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony no 4 and Arnold Bax November Woods   A good combination which had the potential to yield  interesting insights in musical terms. So why does BBC Radio 3 management need to market this as "Remembering World War I" ? Neither piece has  anything to do with war.  Alas, BBC R3 seems hell bent on prioritizing non-musical agendas over music, to meet non-musical targets. Long term, this policy of dumbing down destroys real musical understanding. Better to treat audiences as adults who aren't afraid to think or listen.

Both Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony and Bax's November Woods are explorations of ideas that aren't so easy to put in prose : "internal landscapes" so to speak, that find expression in sounds and musical form.  November Woods (1917) isn't about forests per se but forests as metaphors for emotion    It's worth quoting Bax's (non-symphonic) poem Amersham, as the programme book does :

Storm, a mad painter's brush, swept sky and land
with burning signs of beauty and despair
And once rain scourged through shrivelling wood and brake,
And in our hearts tears stung, and the old ache
Was more than any God would have us bear. 

Here the musical forces were in the fore, the orchestra voicing whatever inner storm Bax might have sought to address. The introduction seems to surge and strain, driven by fast-flowing strings, lit by flashes of woodwinds and harp, darkened by violas, celli, oboe and bassoons.  A theme energes, first from cor anglais, then more boldly by horn and then oboe and cello : a duality which could suggest many things, but is part of the very conception. Themes cool and warm, creating flux, but there's no easy resolution. The coda was hushed, mysterious, open-ended.  November Woods is much more "modern" than you'd expect, connecting in this sense to other works of the period.

photo : Jules Barbieri

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony no 4 in F minor (1931-4) received an astonishing performance from Brabbins and the BBCSO. In the Barbican Hall, the impact was spectacular. Though BBC broadcasts are usually good, on air this one was lifeless, giving no sense of occasion.  "I don't like the work itself much",  RVW told Sir Henry Wood, but it is undoubtedly a very fine piece. Good music "exists" by its own creative volition : it's not manufactured to preconceived specifications like a consumer product.  As the composer was later to write "I do think it beautiful...because we know that beauty can come from unbeautiful things".  The introduction on this occasion exploded with extreme but controlled force. Although this fanfare is shocking, it does connect to other aspects of the composer’s work.  At times I was reminded of the figure in the Antiphon in Five Mystical Songs which is relevant, since "The Church with psalms must shout....My God and King ". Vaughan Williams, who knew the Bible and Messianic traditions, understood the concept of forces so powerful that they cannot be constrained.  Pounding ostinato, trumpets (with Biblical signifigance) ablaze, trombones and tuba adding depth.  The theme isn't meant to be soothing. It could reflect the "terrible beauty" from the Book of Job Ch 37, 17-22, though there is nothing religious about this symphony. The references merely serve to indicate that a cataclysm of some sort is being unleashed : no other connotations.

More brass in the second movement, marked andante moderato, but this time more restrained, the strings of the BBCSO murmuring en masse, from which the woodwind line rose, moving ever upwards.  A sense of unease : tense pizzicato creating a fragile though regular beat. The flute melody, exquisitely played, had a poignant quality: painfully alone but unbowed.  Wildness returned with the third movement, brass pounding, trombones creating long zig-zag lines. For a moment the tuba leads a trio with grunting bassoons. The term "scherzo" means "joke" but the humour here is darkly ironic. This colours the sprightly theme which follows : it's not escapist.  With the figure I called "My God and King" the overwhelming thrust of the first movement returns, angular dissonances flying in all directions, clod-hopping ostinato suggesting grotesque horror. Again, no resolution, no easy answers. Perhaps we can guess why RVW dedicated it to Bax.

The contrast with the intensity and sheer musical quality of Vaughan Williams's symphony put Cheryl Frances-Hoad's Last Man Standing into place.  This is a big work, running as long as the symphony, and was served up with lighting effects, props and a shower of objects which might be poppies, and co-ordinated dresses for composer and text writer.  The piece was specially commissioned to mark the 1914-1918 war.  But there is a lot more to war than pretty images.  Much of the problem lies in the text, 15 verses on aspects of life in the trenches, by Tamsin Collison.  Frances-Coad's setting illustrates well but is more sound effects than music.  Entertaining enough, and certainly not mentally or emotionally challenging. But war is not entertainment. and never should be trivialized.  We know, or should by now know, what it was like in the trenches, but no sign here of any reflection or personal insight.  The baritone soloist, Marcus Farnsworth, did his best, as did the orchestra, but this piece bore all the signs of music-made-to-order.  Millions died and suffered in the Great War, which re-shaped the whole world.  To what avail ? 

Pubs and the British choral tradition - The Gluepot Connection

"That bloody Gluepot" railed Sir Henry Wood, annoyed by musicians who were late for work because they tarried too long at The George, on the corner of Great Portland Street, adjacent to the old Queen's Hall and near the BBC in Langham Place. The George attracted a close-knit crowd of composers, musicians, poets, artists and writers. It's still around, and thriving, though the clientele has changed, so it's fitting that its past should be remembered in this new recording The Gluepot Connection from SOMM Recordings.  The CD features music from John Ireland, Alan Rawsthorne, Peter Warlock, Arnold Bax, Alan Bush, Elizabeth Lutyens, William Walton and E J Moeran, a few of the many who once thronged therein.  Andrew Griffiths conducts the a capella Londinium Chamber Choir.

The Full Heart is Peter Warlock's earliest choral work, dedicated to the memory of Carlo Gesualdo, an interesting choice of role model for the young Peter Heseltine who was but 21 when he sketched the piece.  The Gesualdo connection probably relates more to musical form, for the piece  employs finely parted chromatics, creating a rapturous work that seems to span centuries.  "O, my companions, Wind, Waters, Stars and Night". The text is by Robert Nicholls, invalided from the Somme, and later a socialite whose friends included Aldous Huxley.  Heseltine heard Frederick Delius's On Craig Ddu (1907) while still a student at Eton, and went on to champion the older composer.  The two pieces complement each other, though Warlock is more stylish.  Beautifully balanced singing from the Londinium Chamber Choir keeps texture clear and clean.  Warlock's The Full Heart is a stand out, on its own worth the price of the CD.

Warlock and Moeran were born in the same year, but had different backgrounds, Heseltine's influences more esoteric and international. He didn't like the John Ireland focus at the Royal College of Music and encouraged Moeran to develop further.  On this recording we hear Moeran's six Songs of Springtime (c. 1931) to poems by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  Warlock amd Moeran were close, and in this set Warlock's influence is clear : more polyphonic inventiveness built on Renaissance models, yet distinctively of its own time.  These Warlock and Moeran settings shine out out in comparison with the more conventional John Ireland songs, The Hills and Twilight Night. The Hills, written to mark the Coronation in 1953, to a poem by James Kirkup, is chastely hymnal, while Twilight Night,

to a poem by Christina Rossetti, while Victorian, is rather more potent. Two people meet clapsed "as close as oak and ivy stand". They may never again meet "in the accustomed way" but that secret encounter is not erased.  Ireland's setting is straightforward, but the meaning of the text could hardly have been lost on the younger moderns, like Warlock and Moeran, in the more liberated 1920's.
Andrew Griffiths' erudite booklet notes give extensive detail on other habitués of the "gluepot", with so many cross-references that one could probably draw up a flowchart.  He quotes Michael Tippett on the "anti-Britten" clique at the George, ".... a cabal of composers who were trying to debunk Ben (Britten) or undermine his reputation.....they all had great chips on their shoulders and enetrtained absurd fantasies about a homosexual conspiracy in music led by Britten and Pears".  Bigots will always find excuses, hence the homophobia, but the real threat Britten posed was not his sexuality but the fact that his music didn't conform to the assumptions of what "British music" should be.  Frank Bridge opened his horizons to Europe, and WH Auden and Colin MacPhee to the world.  Britten was original, and successful, which created resentment.  Britten won the commission for the Coronation of 1953 with Gloriana, in which Queen Elizabeth I sees through sycophancy and status games. This didn't go down well with some, and for some Britten is still too "modern", though his influence has nurtured whole new generations of British composers and musicians.  Britten didn't do the Gluepot, but he is relevant in context.  He, too, drew inspiration from polyphony and Early Music, as any study of Gloriana will demonstrate.

The Gluepot "cabal" Tippett mentioned centred around Constance Lambert, his wife Isabel Nicholas, who later married Alan Rawsthorne, William Walton, and Elizabeth Lutyens and Alan Bush   Most of these are represented in this collection, apart from Lambert who didn't write a capella choral work.   Rawsthorne's Four Seasonal Songs (1956). The title is slightly misleading, since three of the songs refer to Spring. More multipart harmonics applied to 16th century texts !  In Lutyens' Verses of Love (1970) to a text by Ben Jonson, long lines elide, sounds shimmering.  Walton's Where does the Uttered Music Go ? (1946) was written for the dedication of the memorial window of Sir Henry Wood in the Musicians Chapel in St Sepulchre's where Wood, as a boy, learned to play the organ.  This disc also includes the premiere recordings of Alan Bush's Like Rivers Flowing (1957) with sinuous lines, and Lidice (1947) commemorating the massacre in Lidice by the Nazis.  The mood is hushed, the lines swirling : a secular Requiem. 

Another Gluepot regular was Arnold Bax. His I sing of a maiden (1923)  has charm, but is eclipsed by his Mater ora filium (1921) a substantial (11 minute) masterpiece based on William Byrd's five-part Mass, beefed up for as many as 16 parts, embellished by what Griffiths calls "prodigious extremes of range" (cloaked in) "luscious, late Romantic harmony in myriad different textures". The voices of the Londinium Chamber Choir rise to the task, their voices glowing "Amen, Amen". It's as if a stained glass window were bursting into song !

A British Christmas - in Paris!

An all British Christmas concert de Noël - but from Paris, with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Mikko Franck.  Elgar, Britten and RVW, but also Arnold Bax, Frederick Delius and Victor Hely-Hutchinson.. If the BBC SO did a programme as ambitious as this, it would be a major event. But Radio France beat them to it. Aha! Britishness through a non-British prism! OPRF don't sound "English" but the music benefits from being performed "as" music, without baggage.

Adeste Fideles, or O Come, all ye Faithful, started the party, the first of four movements in A Carol Symphony (1929) by Victor Hely-Hutchinson (1901-47)  According to wiki, he died because he wouldn't turn on the heating in his office in the cold winter of 1947. Hopefully, his fellow workers didn't suffer. In contrast, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols (1912) an altogether more original work, not mere transcription, where the carols become part of a larger creation, with suggestions of medieval music and plain chant (baritone Marc Pancek). .  In Frederick Delius Sleigh Ride (no 2 of Three Small Tone Poems) Franck downplayed the obvious "sleigh bells" in the introduction, emphasizing the finesse in the abstract themes that followed.  This approach also enhanced Arnold Bax's Christmas Eve (1912 rev. 1921) , a tone poem with sweeping  lines that might suggest vast nocturnal landscapes, the opacity in the tutti lushness darkness lit by flashes of brass and light.

The youth choir of Radio France returned for several songs from Benjamin Britten A Ceremony of Carols op 26, 1942. Lovely, clear, piping voices with the purity Britten sought. If they had slight French accents, not a problem at all ! That brought out the sense of otherworldliness that makes such a difference in Britten interpretation. The adult choirs assembled Douce Nuit (Silent Night), followed by a new transcription of the carol for solo organ, magical and bizarre at the same time.  Then the Elgar part song, The Snow, op 26/1 1894, for choir, two violins and small orchestra.   More Elgar, "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations , here played with magisterial elegance.  An excellent choice, reminding me at least of Bax Christmas Eve and Delius and even Holst and Finzi.  Yet again, thoughtful programming, setting the scene for Britten's St Nicholas.(1948). The girl singing the treble part was lovely, as was the tenor (Christophe Poncet) and the full choir striking. Yet even in these grand moments, Britten doesn't really write in the British choral tradition but does his own quirky variation.

But it's Christmas, and party time ! So Vive le vent (Jingle Bells in French). Then the Hallelujah Chorus, written by a German, sung in English by a French choir, conducted by a Finn, who sang along, as did the Paris audience.  Proper Christmas spirit, and dare I say, proper European spirit, too.   Enjoy the concert HERE on arte.tv - better than most things planned in UK this season