Requiem : The Pity of War - Bostridge Pappano

"Requiem: the Pity of War with Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano.  The inspiration came from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which Bostridge has done numerous times. Britten's War Requiem," he writes "seems to express in art Winston Churchill's notion of the 1914-18 conflict as the initiator of the 20th century's own Thirty Years War" since it spans the First and Second World Wars, blending the poetry of Wilfred Owen, poet of the trenches and the spirit of reconciliation that motivated the commission marking the  rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Thus the quotation from Owen, "My subject is War, and the Pity of War". "How might one reflect the experience and significance of the conflict" writes Bostridge "in a song recital ?". The answer might be this excellent programme, with interesting repertoire choices and approaches to more familiar material. Bostridge and Pappano, whose partnership is long and fruiful, are doing this recital live at the Barbican Hall on December 5th. The recording, from Warner Classics, is now available, well produced with good illustrations.

Bostridge and Pappano begin with George Butterworth's Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, perhaps th best known English song cycle with a connection to war, given that Butterworth  was killed in the Somme in August 1916.  Housman's poems were published in 1896 : the war they pertain to might  be the Boer War, or colonial wars, but the connotations are not specifically military. They deal with more generalized concepts of youth and death, impermanence and loss.  Even though Butterworth collected folk song, a quasi-folk song approach doesn't necessarily apply.  Bostridge and Pappano demonstrate an art song approach, which may at first seem unsettling, but works on a more esoteric level  In "When I was One and Twenty" the last words "'tis true, 'tis true" are held open ended, suggesting possibilities beyond text. If the dynamic lines in "Look not into mine Eyes" are more extreme than usual, this emphasizes the unease that lies behind the poem : the lad "that many loved in vain" does not reveal himself, to anyone. "A Jonquil, not a Grecian Lad". "Is my team ploughing" feels decidedly supernatural.

This disc is worth getting, though for a superlative performance of Rudi Stephan’s song cycle Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied. Stephan was an extremely promising composer as his best-known works, the two Musik für Orkester in einem Satz attest, his opera Der ersten Mensch being a prototype of Expressionist music theatre.  The six songs in this cycle, to poems by Gerda von Robertus (1873-1939) inhabit a world much closer to aesthetics of the period when exoticism was heightened  by an awareness of the dangers of the subconcious.  The poems are terse aphorisms, Stephan's settings concise. The nearest equivalent might be Alban Berg's Altenberg-Lieder, also from the same period (1911-12) In "Kythera", "Der Rosen Düfte liebeatmend schwingen in welchen Weilen" while the sound of aoelian harps drifts from afar. The setting floats gently, held sotto voce.  In "Pantherlied" the piano line ripples, suggesting pent-up animal energy.  The text in "Abendfrieden" is little more than a series of broken phrases which Stephan uses to create a song so delicate that it seems to hover in stillness. This oscillation occurs also in individual words like "Sonnenfeuer" which need careful shaping, but Bostridge captures the right vulnerabilty.  "In Nachbars Garten duftet" describes a linden tree, which shivers "dammerlauschig kühl". Yet this is no pastoral. Lovers embrace, but why do the poet's eyes "overflow in burning pain"?  The song is as magical as a song by Hugo Wolf, but with a kick in the tail.  The mood of secrecy continues in "Glück zu Zweien" where "in the hubbub of the crowd, we found the silence of shared feeling".  The vocal line stretches and curls, twining like "Zwei Könige wir, die finden das Reich ihrer Einsamkeiten". Throughout this cycle, tension has been building up, which finds release in the final song "Das Hohelied der Nacht". Yet again Stephan observes the fragmented nature of the phrases,  using them to proceed rapidly to the last line "Du küsst es mir vom Munde", which rises like a cry of sudden triumph.  These songs are miniature masterpieces and are done reasonably often, but Bostridge brings out the inner musical logic better than anyone else, with his intuitive feel for meaning and the curling, curving timbre of his voice.  Incidentally,  Stephan died in strange circumstances. The night before he died, he could not sleep, surrounded by the agonized cries of the wounded all around.  In the early hours of the morning, he stood upright in his trench at Tarnopol in Galicia on the Eastern Front, and shouted  "Ich halte es nicht aus!" and was promptly shot by a sniper.  He was barely 28.  

From the sophistication of Rudi Stephan to the relative straightforwardness of Kurt Weill's Four Walt Whitman Songs.  Bostridge varies the marching rhythms in "Beat ! Beat ! The Drums" with articulation that twists in protest. If  "Captain ! My captain !" is a strophic ballad, "Come up from the Fields, my Father, there's a letter" is dramatic, delivered here with appropriate portent.  The military antecedents of "The Dirge for Two Veterans" are impeccable. Gustav Holst set this text ("The Last Sunbeam") in 1914, and it was also set by Vaughan Williams (in Dona Nobis Pacem).  Weill wrote these songs after Pearl Harbor, when the United States joined the Second World War.  Like Britten's War Requiem, they help this Bostridge and Pappano programme bridge two World Wars.   
Three songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn conclude the programme. Again, these are not folk songs, but art songs.  Significantly, the songs chosen here are ghost songs, which suit a singer who is a superlative Peter Quint. In "Revelge", skeletons march through a town at night, and "Der Tambourg'sell" is a death knell, Pappano's piano "drumming" as Bostridge's voice rises to near-scream before descending to the low rumble of the refrain "Gute Nacht".  Best of all, though, is "Wo die Schöne Trompeten blasen" where Bostridge and Pappano capture the spookiness that pervades the song even before the girl knows what's going on. She, too, will die before the year is over.

Elgar, Britten, Brian Elias Prom Wigglesworth BBC NOW

Toby Spence, Prom 32 photo : Chris Christoduolou, B|BC

For more about Britten Ballad for Heroes please see here.

Four British composers, four different worlds : Britten, Brian Elias, Purcell and Elgar, Ryan Wigglesworth conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Choir, Prom 32 Royal Albert Hall.   Wigglesworth and BBC NOW delivered a very fine Elgar's Enigma Variations . The Variations are so interesting  that it would only be "news" if it were exceptionally stellar or not done well, so if I don't write much about this performance, it's because it was thoroughly satisfying though not "news". What was unusual about this Prom were the pieces around it.

Benjamin Britten's Ballad Of Heroes, Op 14, 1939  for example.  It' runs 15 minutes and is scored for (by Britten standards) a fairly large orchestra and choir, so doesn't get programmed other than in large-scale concerts where such forces are available.  Please read Paul Spicer's notes on Ballad of Heroes for Boosey &aHawkes HERE because they're comprehensive and by far the best, anywhere.   When I first heard the piece six years ago (Ilan Volkov BBCSO, Barbican) I didn't understand the piece but this time round it made much more sense.  The disparity between the poetry of W H Auden and the doggerel of Randall Swingler is a problem, but Britten uses it with a certain degree of irony.  Though the Spanish Civil War wasn't quite on the scale of 1914-1918, it was a modern political war, as opposed to a war between nations.  The International Brigades represented the idealism of the left versus the repression of Fascism.  Thus the contradictions in the piece provoke, just as the situation did. The piece is about a lot more than a conflict between pro and anti war.  It should be noted that the Spanish Civil War  ended in April 1939, with the triumph of the fascists and their Nazi allies.   The war is over ! This makes all the difference to interpretation.

 The Ballad of Heroes isn't a call to war, by any means, but a scream of frustrarion.  It's also contemporary with Britten's Violin Concerto op 15 (1938/9) expressing the composer's anguish about the fate of Europe. He needed to get away, in order to believe in his ideals. As it happened, his experiences in America made him realize that things there weren't actually that good. Some still sneer at Britten for going abroad. They don't realize what strength it took for him to come back to Britain and face what needed to be done.  Through his music, Britten showed that there are other ways to stand up to violence.  Six years ago, Toby Spence sang the tenor solo, as he did for this Prom : in the years between he personally has been through a few struggles, and has come out the stronger for it. Excellent performance ! (Please read my other pieces on Britten, on music about war and Ernst Busch)

Brian Elias's Cello Concerto, (2015) a BBC commission, received its world premiere with soloist Leonard Elschenbroich, replacing the dedicatee Natalie Clein at short notice.  It's a brooding piece making the most of the cello's dark timbre. Frantic bowing suggests movement and speed, through which rip whips of high-pitched winds and lively percussion.  Part way, the orchestra takes over, the cello biding its time with a growl, then returning to the fray.  Pounding brassy flourishes in the orchestra, not just from the brass.   I've written about Elias's Electra Mourns, Geranos and Meet Me in the Green Glen, released on CD through NMC Recordings in April. Read my review HERE.  Ryan Wigglesworth is himself a composer  and has always had a good feel for new music.
And from one of the earliest known British composers, Henry Purcell Jehova, quam multi suntm in an arrangement by Edward Elgar for choir, tenor (Toby Spence again) and bass (Henry Waddington) conducted by one of the best conductors of British choral music (and a stalwart of the Three Choirs Festival), Adrian Partington.

Ikuma Dan Hiroshima Symphony - the finest Hiroshima music of all

Ikura Dan's Symphony no 6 "Hiroshima" (1985). The photo above isn't Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, but a still from the movie The Last War (世界大戦争) (Toho, 1961) about an apocalypse in a Cold War future.  Frighteningly prescient now when trolls play power games with nuclear weapons for toys.  Ikura Dan (1924-2001) was an aristocrat from a wealthy samurai family.   His forebears were part of the Zaibatsu, who created the modern Japanese economy and banking system. His grandfather was Baron Takuma Dan, boss of the Mitsui Corporation, and Prime Minister of Japan.  Born into privilege, Ikuma Dan had all the advantages that his position offered him. He had a good education, both in Japanese and international culture. Yet he lived in times of unprecedented social change. When he was six, his grandfather was assassinated by right-wing extremists.  He lived through the wars against China, though he was not a combatant.  Like many Japanese intellectuals he had an affinity for Chinese culture. He died in Suzhou.

The western media thinks almost exclusively in English-language terms, blanking out the experience of other cultures and peoples.  It's not easy to learn about non-western cultures, but try we must, for the distorted imbalance of western media blinds us, trapping us in ignorance, bigotry and war.  Ikuma Dan is a good point from which to start. Many composers -- west as well as east -- wrote music for film, in order to make a living.  In any case, in Japan, cinema was an art form almost from the beginning, creating masterpieces of poetic power.   Even Godzilla is more than schlock! (read my Godzilla and the Tsunami HERE).  Being independently wealthy, Dan didn't write much for fiml, concentrating on orchestral music -- even symphonies -- opera, ballet and chamber music.

Shrill whirring marks the start of Dan's Hiroshima Symphony. Suddenly a blast, then silence and the eerie cry of a lone woodwind instrument. Swirling, turbulent figures ascend upwards. Tense, angular figures. Fierce ostinato, interspersed with themes where staccato notes  fly in flurries.  Long, sweeping lines in the strings, reaching out as if searching, yet also smothering the other layers in the music. Yet other textures emerge. The searching lines clear to reveal the high-pitched solo woodwind, calling into space. It's intriguing. A nohkan is a flute with a high tessitura that can range over two octaves and carry across a large performing space.   Dominant chords for strings, brass and winds in more or less unison return, but the lone woodwind struggles against them. Trumpets scream strident lines, marked by the thud of timpani. The strings soar ever upwards gradually breaking from the relentless ostinato.  A harp sounds, introducing a new motif, also soaring but more subtle.  Delicate hints of lyrical melody peak out from the gloom, and the woodwind reappears, now more confident, singing its strange melody. It's much more interesting than the orchestral lines with their very western timbre, which dominates for many measures.  Significantly, the nohkan was invented in the fifteenth century, long before the modern concert orchestra.   The nohkan will not be beaten. It screams, holding legato at a very high pitch, Very dramatic and highly original.  Not concertante in the least but a battle of wits between large forces and a wayward, elusive solo instrument  played with such intensity that it holds the orchestra at bay.  A descent into ominous semi-silence.

Zingy zig-zag figures fly fiercely as the second movement, an Allegro ritmico, begins. The pace is fleet, dizzying lines giving way to oddly dance-like snippets, broken by violent staccato. Pastiche "Japonisme" stepping rhythms and crashing cymbals alternate with trumpets and heavier plodding figures, possibly meant to sound borderline vulgar.  Tempi grow faster, almost to whirlwind. Suddenly, the  nohkan breaks through, the music now properly Japanese.   Imagine  a bird singing in a wilderness, or a stream trickling in the forest around a temple.  Frenzied figures return, hurtling on in new directions.  The orchestra  swells up again, highlighted with drums, trumpets, bells and crashing percussion. Something is changing, somehow.

The Andante, marked sostenuto e funebre, is an elegy. and particularly sophisticated. From a steady opening,  the woodwind returns, but now is joined by another even more "Japanese" woodwind, a hollow-toned instrument called a shinobue, used in ttraditional folk and ritual music.  At first this sings fitfully, in broken phrases, overwhelmed by the swirling forces in the orchestra.  Soon, though, it gathers force, as if inspired by the more dominant woodwind. Together they dialogue, pushing back the "shadows" in the orchestra. The hollow-voiced woodwind now sings more than brief snatches. Its melody is like an ancient Japanese folk tune, fragile, yet strong enough to assert itself against the orchestra around it.   It seems timeless.  Now the "voice" becomes human. A soprano replicates the lines of the woodwinds.  She sings long, searching lines like the lines of the strings earlier in the symphony.  the writing for brass is interesting, too - smokey and mysterious, no longer strident.  It's as if all the elements that had gone before were being combined and renewed . A crescendo builds up, and the orchestra swells up, singing   I don't know what this means, but the effect is inspiring. Hence the photo here of doves being released before the bombed building that is the memorial at Hiroshima.  Fluttering wings symbolize the triumph of hope over hate.  Perhaps, a new, more positive dawn is emerging, and it's beautiful.

Frankly, I don't know why Penderecki's Threnody gets so much publicity.  It's fame lies in its title, but that  title is bogus and exploitative.  It wasn't written "for the victims of Hiroshima", but was dreamed up for a premiere   As music, it's also not nearly as well written as Ohki and Dan's Hiroshima symphonies, which are sincere.  (Read more sbout Ohki HERE and HERE.)  Ikuma Dan';s Hiroshima is the real thing,  written by a composer who knew from personal experience what Hiroshima meant and how it connects to Japanese history and to world humanity. So let's give Ikuma Dan the honour he deserves.

If you like this, please read about Toru Takemitsu's Requiem HERE  and about Japanese art movies about war, like The Burmese Harp  HERE and  Kobayashi's three part saga The Human Condition HERE

Joan of Arc, they are calling you !

Today marks the 586th anniversary of the death of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake. This year also marks the centenary of the song Joan of Arc, They are Calling You, used in a Broadway musical. Presumably the show was patriotic, since the United States entered the First World War, on the side of the French, in April 1917.

The composer was Jack Wells, also known as John Barnes Wells (1880-1935), a tenor who appeared in music hall and on early recordings.  He was involved with the famous 1903 production of The Wizard of Oz, though in what capacity, I don't know. A composite recording is available on the market.  This Wizard of Oz is apparently a lot closer to the original L Frank Baum novel than the Hollywood movie with Judy Garland (one of my favourite films of all time).  As music, the song has references to the Marsellaise but sugared up. The song is too naive to represent the fearless Marianne.  Listen to that refrain "Joan of Arc ! Joan of Arc! ".As if she were a boulevardier ! The words are by Alfred Bryan and Willie Weston. The text is such doggerel, it would be offensive if the reality had not been so serious.  But then, that sort of sentimentality was popular taste 100 years ago, and the intentions were sincere.. Please see my numerous other posts on Joan of Arc  (Braunfels, Honneger, Dreyer etc) by clicking on the label Joan of Arc below.

While you are sleeping
Your France is weeping
Wake from your dreams, Maid of France !
Her heart is bleeding, are you unheeding,
Come with the flame in your glance !
Through the gates of heaven, with your sword in hand,
Come your legions to command.

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Do your eyes, from the skies, see the foe?
Don't you see the drooping fleur-de-lis
Can't you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Let your spirit guide us through.
Come lead your France to victory;
Joan of Arc, they are calling you !

Alsace is sighing, Lorraine is crying,
Their Mother France looks to you
Persons at Verdun, bearing the burden
Pray for your coming anew
At the gates of heaven, do they bar your way?
Those that passed through yesterday.

Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc........

"

Anti-nazi Ostersonntag - Hanns Eisler sets Brecht

Ostersonntag Hanns Eisler's setting of Bertolt Brecht's poem Frühling 1938, from Eisler's Hollywood Liederbuch.  Brecht opposed capitalist oppression  but his heirs enforce copyright to extreme lengths.  Fortunately, Eisler believed in the dissemination of Brecht's ideas, and in solidarity with the People. Eisler's song begins almost hesitantly, as if the feelings expressed are too painful to confront. The piano plays dotted rhythms,  pulsating tension and suppressed  anxiety.

"Today", the singer intones, "it's Easter Sunday." But a chill wind blows a sudden snowstorm, across the sea, covering the green shoots of Spring under a blanket of snow. An apricot tree stands in the garden, protected by the warm walls of the house. Will its buds be killed by frost?  The poet's son begs him to protect the tree . The words "younger son" are warmly shaped, in contrast to the frigid tension that's gone before.  The pace becomes more urgent.  The father had been writing a diatribe against the warmongers whose machinations threaten the whole continent, the island of calm, the people there and "my family", words again set with gentle warmth.  Eisler elides the last phrase,  with a dramatic descending curve, ending with the words "vertilgen muss"  half-spoken, half-sung, but sinister.  The edgy chords become stronger and more defiant.  Minor key, but major impact. Silently, father and son place hessian over the freezing buds.  Will the tree survive, will it bear fruit? The song ends inconclusively, the last figures on the piano repeating, hovering, unresolved.  The song lasts barely 90 seconds, yet encompasses vast stretches of time, place and feeling.  Like Brecht, Eisler was in exile, physically comfortable but vulnerable.  Poet and composer both in emotional "islands", trying to stave off the chill of what they knew was happening back home.

Eisler's Hollywood Liederbuch is an amazingly varied document of alienation and protest, the "Winterreise of the Twentieth Century", as Matthias Goerne, its finest interpreter, has called it.   Read more about Goerne and Eisler's Hollywood Liederbuch HERE, and about Eisler's Deutsche Sinfonie HERE. Lots  more on this site about Eisler, Brecht, Goerne, war and anti-facism.

The photo below is ironic, too.  In the early 20th century cars were a symbol of progress and faith in a future where machines would serve man. Thus cars were often depicted on greeting cards, especially at New Year. Although commercial cards were common, people often arranged for photographers to take bespoke greetings cards.   Private photography was only for the rich, then, and people would often pop into studios or hire a professional to commemorate special occasions.  So when these soldiers, at the front somewhere in the 1914-1918 war, posed together in a car, they were having a joke   Notice the "broken" bicycle.  Most of their families and friends back home would not have owned cars, so the novelty would have been even more exciting then than it is now. The original was shot in colour, too, even more impressive !

Hubert Parry and the Battle of Jutland

Commemorations this weekend for the Battle of Jutland, which took place 100 years ago this week.  The British navy seemed invincible, Admiral Jellicoe tipped to become the Nelson of his age.  The Dreadnoughts were the largest warships ever built, and the Battle of Jutland was the biggest  naval skirmish in European history. With the Army bogged down in the Somme, the Royal Navy was to claim spectacular victory.  Above, the warships sailing in neat, textbook formation., guns blazing. What went wrong ? So much had been invested in superstructure that simple, human procedures were overlooked.  Below decks, the men loading the guns had so little space to manoeuvre that they cut corners.  When the munitions stores ignited, the ships exploded and sank rapidly.  In the midst of war, the government had to maintain that Jutland was a victory. This week, the Royal Navy announced the building of vast new aircraft carriers that "will make enemies think twice about starting war". (more here)  But the very nature of warfare has changed, as the Russians discovered in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam.  We only need to follow the news. On the open seas, where there is no cover and no fallback position, it might not be a good idea to concentrate resources in one place.  On the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, should we reflect ?

Charles Hubert Parry's The Chivalry of the Sea - a Naval Ode, was written for a concert on December 12th 1916, commemorating the 6,000 men who died on the night of 31st May and 1st June. The text, by Robert Bridges, is dedicated to Charles Fisher, a graduate of and don at Christ Church, Oxford, a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who went down with HMS Invincible when it blew up. The photo below shows the Invincible as it sank, with Fisher and 1,025 men. We don't see the massive plume of smoke, captured in other photos. The ship is already part submerged.

Bridges' text might glorify sacrifice. But as Lewis Foreman has said, Parry was a born sailor, "never happier than when running before a prevailing wind", sailing in his small two-master even to Ireland.  A sailor knows the sea and has no illusions about its power.  Parry's Chivalry of  the Sea begins in the depths with a sonorous undertow from which the brighter "chivalry" theme emerges for a moment, soon dissipating like foam on waves, whose strong undercurrents emerge again in a long passage in the midst of the verse.  The orchestral surge continues behind the lines "Over the warring waters".  No question here who's really boss.

The second verse, in which Bridges describes the "staunch and valiant hearted" who eagerly rush to war, is set with conventional brightness,  bright and eager, but Parry repeats the word "war" three times to Bridges' single instance, lest we think the men are off on jolly jaunts.  In the final verse, Parry has the measure of the occasion. The "surging waves" in the orchestra return, and the mood is more doleful.   "in the storm of battle, fast-thundering upon the foe, ye add your kindred names  to the heroes of long ago, and mid the blasting wrack, in the glad sudden death  of the brave....ye lie in your unvisited graves".   Although the choral setting is lush - the voice of the masses - Parry sets the word "sudden" with a chill. Perhaps he intuited the horror of Jutland. At least those blown to atoms at Jutland didn't suffer long.  But some of them were little more than children. Please read the comment below - Parry's godson was one of the only 6 survivors of The Invincible.  The young man's other godfather was Richard Wagner, no less !

Enigma : Cecil Coles, Martyn Brabbins BBC SSO

Three premieres of sorts of works by composers who have been dead for a hundred years?  Intriguing. Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in  George Butterworth's Orchestral Fantasia and Cecil Coles Behind the Lines and Sorrowful Dance (broadcast available on BBC Radio 3 here).

The anniversary of the First World War generates interest in composers of the period.  British war poets like Wilfred Owen,  Siegfried Sassoon,  Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg  and Rupert Brooke are justly celebrated, even part of the basic school curriculum. But what of British composers of the period?  Ralph Vaughan Williams, being rather older the "Lost Generation",  survived but many others didn't. How might British music have developed  if Butterworth, Gurney, W Denis Browne (read more here) and others even more forgotten, had lived to fulfil their potential?  Understandably we'ree intrigued.

Gurney at least left enough material that some of his music can be reasonably reconstructed. Gurney's War Elegy, for example, is a  significant work that deserves a place in the mainstream repertoire.  Read about the Proms premiere of Gurney's War Elegy HERE and the background behind it HERE.  

Gurney reconstructions are largely built on the composer's original material.  Not so, though, some of the other reconstructions around.  Butterworth's Orchestral Fantasia exists as a 92-bar fragment. A short score may exist, but all that is currently known is a rough manuscript with crossings out and amendments.   Michael Barlow, in his seminal biography of the composer Whom the Gods Love suggests that Butterworth might, in 1914, have been on the cusp of a change in style "with not a few influences from European composers".  Vaughan Williams's music was utterly transformed by his contact with Ravel, and indeed to some extent by Butterworth himself, who spurred RVW to write his Symphony no 2 "London".

Barlow mentions that, while Butterworth was an undergraduate at Oxford a don remarked: "There goes more Red Revolution than in all Russia"   Butterworth is a mystery. Why did he burn his unpublished music? Why did he so cherish the male bonding camaraderie of the trenches? Why did he die the way he did, by throwing himself into the line of fire?  We shall never know.  Barlow also describes the fragment of the Orchestral Fantasia thus  "A hushed, dark-coloured opening, on bassoons and divided violas and cellos, leads to an andantino section in which one basic theme, first heard on oboe and violas, is developed, but the score is too fragmentary for constructive comment. A vivace section of only a few bars includes a promising figure on trumpets, but there the music stops".  

Since there is so little to go on, any "completion" can be little more than conjecture. Kriss Russman's version extends the basic core, described by Barlow above, with references to other music by Butterworth, rather more a suite than what Butterworth might have written. Since there isn't all that much true Butterworth around, we recognize fragments and start to think of those other works, (much of it piano song)  rather than the fragment itself. Like the orchestration of A Shropshire Lad heard at last year's Proms, without much point, though enjoyable enough.

Cecil Coles  (1888-1918) , was three years younger than Butterworth, yet already more European in focus. He had lived in Germany, where he was assistant conductor at Stuttgart Opera. This threw him right into the fertile creative ferment of those times, not only in music but in literature, art, theatre  and film.  He knew Richard Strauss and must have heard Elektra.  Perhaps he even knew of Rudi Stephan (1887-1915), whose orchestral music is truly innovative, and whose opera Die ersten Menschen would shock audiences when it was finally premiered after Stephan was killed on the Eastern Front. 
What might have become of Coles had he survived? The question is even more intriguing than for Butterworth, for Coles's music is  so distinctive and so individual that it doesn'tb really  fit  into conventional British music stereotypes. This may account for why he was largely forgotten until Martyn Brabbins recorded Coles's music for Hyperion in 2002.  Both Before the Lines and Sorrowful Dance appear on this CD. It's significant that Coles's other great admirer was Gustav Holst.

Coles's Behind the Lines  was written in four movements of which only the first and last survive, Estaminet du Carrefour and Cortège. The second and third movements were titled The Wayside Shrine and Rumours, which may give some indication of the scale of its construction.  So much is made of the role of folksong in British music that it's refreshing to hear how Coles adapts the vibrant sounds of a French drinking establishment into the first movement. It's vibrant with a pungent Gallic twist, sensual and uninhibited, Coles must have known the music of Ravel and Debussy: this is far from genteel pastoralism even when that pastoralism describes earthy peasants.  Coles  defines the harmonic line firmly, which takes off with athletic energy.  These are reels, fast dances which swirl round capriciously. It feels almost dangerously wild.  With a flourish, a more assured line emerges, taken up by the brass, which gives even firmer definition to a wall of sound, cymbals riding on its crest .  Cortège. too, is more than a straightforward funeral march.  No maudlin sentimentality here.  Behind the Lines deals with the experience of war, but it's clear sighted and strong,  even quite gracious. 

Coles began Sorrowful Dance for his wife, while on R&R in Southampton. It is a dance, moving with thoughtful deliberation.  It's melancholy yet positive, since a brighter theme  emerges, again firmly defined. Perhaps Coles's wife could take comfort. The circular dance theme returns, as gentle as an embrace.  

And so Brabbins and the BBC SSO ended their Glasgow concert with Elgar Enigma Variations. What do we really know about what went into these 13 vignettes? We can guess but can never be sure. An appropriate end to a concert that featured What Might Have Been.

Hiroshima 70 years on, in art and music

Seventy years ago today, Hiroshima was destroyed. Never must we ever forget. Today, we are in danger of taking  Hiroshima for granted but in 1950,  Japan was still under military occupation and Japanese people weren't allowed official news of the bombing. News leaked out as small horrible hints : people who knew people who knew first hand. And the Japanese were still reeling from the shock of defeat, total carpet bombing, firestorms in cities of wooden houses. Hard news was hard to come by, but information spread by word of mouth, and by art. Novels were written, films were made, music was written. 

Above, Ghosts,  the first of the  fifteen "Hiroshima Panels " Genbaku no zu, made over the course of 32 years by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi. Read more about them HERE. .The artists wrote "It was a procession of ghosts . In an instant, all clothing burned off of hands, faces. breasts swelled. The purple blisters on the victims soon burst and peeled off, hanging down like pieces of rags. With hands lifted half up, the victims appeared as ghosts in procession, dragging their ragged skin behind them  exhausted , rthey fell down moaning in heaps and died, one after another". Click on photo to enlarge.

In 1953, Masao Ohki (1901-1971) composed his fifth symphony, the Hiroshima Symphony, based on the first six of the panels, which were completed between 1950 and 1952. The symphony is a  carefully constructed meditation on the images, which reflects the idea of self contained panels, as if "boxes within boxes" can make sense of the chaos, the totality too hard to absorb at once. .The Prelude starts with unsettling calm, tense cello and bass pizzicatos gradually adding a sense of time ticking away urgently. Ohki is too subtle to "depict" the actual impact. Instead, the second part is a meditation in the lowest registers of winds and strings, a solo trumpet adding a sort of cry of anguished disbelief. He titles it Ghosts – it was a procession of ghosts, referring to the Maruki panel above. 

The third section of the symphony refers to the second Maruki panel, Fire, (pictured above) of which the Marukis wrote "In an instant, everything burst into flames. Even the ruins were ablaze. The dead silence of a vast desert broke. Some fell senseless under fallen debris, others  desperately tried digging out.  Everything was consumed by a crimson light. People fell and were taken by the fire".  Ohki expresses this with rapid chromatic runs and trills, tremolos and glissandi. This is the imagery of wind, and transformation for in those moments, the world  was changed forever. Another darkly meditative section Water,  develops the themes in Ghosts, before the strange and disturbing fifth section, Rainbow. Ohki quotes the description "All of a sudden black rain poured over them and then appeared a beautiful rainbow". A plaintive solo violin, then a solo clarinet evoke the unworldly half light. Ohki isn’t depicting an ordinary rainbow as such, but perhaps a surreal, inchoate response to the idea of beauty in the midst of horror. The sixth section, Boys and Girls is even more poignant.

The seventh section is Atomic desert: boundless desert with skulls. Against a background of "flat-lining" strings, keening and wailing, the disembodied sounds of flute, piccolo and clarinet rise tentatively. It’s a bizarrely abstract piece, strikingly modern, particularly when considering how Ohki had been cut off from western mainstream music for a good fifteen years since the Japanese regime, allied to the Nazis, suppressed "modern" music. The final movement, Elegy, draws in themes from the earlier sections, yet also develops them with deeper emphasis. As Morihide Katayama writes in the booklet of the CD (Takuo Yuasa, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra): "the conflict is unresolved, and whether the terror is broken down or not depends on subsequent human conscience".

Below an excellent blend of music and illustrations:  

Hiroshima - never forget. Follow the label "Hiroshima" to see all the other pieces I've written about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, related films, history and music about war.Later I'll write about Ikura Dan.

"A Song outlasts a Dynasty" Gerald Finzi

"I should feel suicidal" wrote Gerald Finzi in October 1938, a few weeks after Chamberlain sacrificed Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler, "If I didn't know a song outlasts a dynasty".

Against the horrors of the world around us, what can an artist achieve? Finzi neither rattled sabres nor swords, but in his own quiet, obtrusive way stood up to tyranny. At Ashmanswortth, he ran a self sufficient organic farm long before such things came into fashion. He grew apples, preserving varieties that otherwise might have been lost to cultivation. His son Christopher (Kiffer) carried on these ideals. Years later, when Daniel Barenboim, Hilary Finzi's sister's husband, came to visit the family on holiday in France, he was horrified to discover that they did "organic plumbing".

Finzi also collected 15th to 17th century poetry. His library, still preserved intact, is one of the most comprehensive study collections in this country. Finzi believed that art served a purpose greater than time or place. Art endures.

In the dark days of 1944, Finzi wrote Farewell to Arms, nothing like the Ernest Hemingway novel apart from a  general sense of pacifism. Finzi's Farewell to Arms connects two poems based on the theme of change..

The first poem, by Ralph Knevet (1600-71)

The helmet now an hive for bees becomes, 
And hilts of swords may serve for spiders' looms; 
Sharp pikes may make Teeth for a rake;
And the keen blade, th'arch enemy of life,
Shall be degraded to a pruning knife. 
The rustic spade 
Which first was made 
For honest agriculture, shall retake
Its primitive employment, and forsake 
The rampires steep And trenches deep. 
Tame conies in our brazen guns shall breed, 
Or gentle doves their young ones there shall feed
 In musket barrels 

Mice shall raise quarrels 
For their quarters. The ventriloquious drum, 
Like lawyers in vacations, shall be dumb. 
Now all recruits, But those of fruits, 
Shall be forgot; and th'unarmed soldier 
Shall only boast of what he did whilere,
 In chimney's ends
 Among his friends. 

The second poem, by George Peele (1556 -1596)

His golden locks Time hath to silver turned.
O Time too swift! Oh swiftness never ceasing!
His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned,
But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing.
Beauty, strength, youth are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love are roots and ever green.

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,
And lover's sonnets turn to holy psalms.
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers which are Age's alms.
But though from Court to cottage he depart,
His Saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

His golden locks Time hath to silver turned.
O Time too swift! Oh swiftness never ceasing!

Flowers of the Field - Gurney Finzi Butterworth RVW

"As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes", so goes Psalm 103. This new recording, Flowers of the Field  connects composers affected by the 1914-1918 war, but it's real significance lies in its featuring the world premiere recording of Ivor Gurney's The Trumpet and of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera. 

Ivor Gurney was gassed at Passchendaele, and spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of mental  hospitals. The Trumpet was written in 1921 but remained unpublished and unperformed until 2007. Here we hear the edition reconstructed by Gurney scholar Philip Lancaster with full orchestration, which received its Three Choirs Festival premiere in 2010, which I was privileged to attend.  Read Philip Lancaster on the genesis of the piece HERE.  Gurney used a poem by Edward Thomas, killed in Arras in 1917, whose work he had set previously. The song begins with a resolute "Rise up! Rise up!", the City of London choir singing as one voice with forceful attack. It's a curious poem. Does the trumpet  refer to the trumpet of modern battle or to the trumpet that marks the beginning of the End of Time in the book of Revelation? Gurney emphasizes the word "Scatters" in the phrase "as the trumpet blowing scatters the dreams of Man".  Unlit stars, dew and the traces of lovers must be scattered in this strange new dawn. Percussion pounds, and the full orchestra surges. The choir cries out, unequivocally "Scatter it, Scatter it!". The clarity of the setting reflects the image of  "that clear horn"  and "the air that has washed  the eyes of the stars". No maudlin sentimentality here, but clear-sighted fervour. "Arise! Arise!" the choir sings. After Armageddon, the past will be erased, the dead will rise from their graves in a new era of hope.

Strictly speaking, the premiere recording of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera was conducted by Richard Hickox nearly ten years ago, but in a different  performing edition by Philip Thomas, made in 1990. This version is edited and completed by Christian Alexander. Hilary Davan Wetton conducts the London Mozart Players with idiomatic depth.  The Reqiuem de Camera (1924) is an ambitious piece in  four sections. An orchestral prelude leads to an extended choral setting of a poem by John Masefield  "How still this quiet cornfield is tonight". The text doesn't explicitly mention context, but the original poem was titled August 1914. Although this is very early Finzi, we can already hear how he would go on to be influenced by images of English landscape and history, and the passage of time.  Wetton, who has conducted a great deal of English choral music, gets the City of London Choir to sing with nicely hushed tones: silence is of the essence.  The same mood of timelessness prevails in the section for baritone (Roderick Williams) and orchestra: "Only a man harrowing clods".  Finzi dedicated the work to Ernest Farrar, his tutor, who was killed on the Somme in 1918, but I think it's a mistake to overstate the idea that the Requiem connects musically to Butterworth or to Gurney (whom Finzi championed). It is far more relevant to assess its relevance to Finzi's own later work, and to his songs and choral pieces. It's not as sophisticated as Intimations of Immortality, but contains, in germ, the spirit of Finzi's future greatness.

On this disc we can hear Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad – Rhapsody for Orchestra and, more of a rarity, the complete Ralph Vaughan Williams An Oxford Elegy, with Jeremy Irons as narrator. The Oxford Elegy is based on a poem by Matthew Arnold about a scholar who runs away to learn from gypsies.  He could be any man who disdains academia for real life experience: I don't think we should make too much of its connection to Oxonians who went to war, since it was written 1946-9 in the wake of a much more gruesome war.  Oddly enough, its connection to George Butterworth isn't mentioned in the booklet notes, a surprising omission in a compilation based on 1914-18. Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were so close that RVW might have not developed as he did without the influence of Butterworth, who pushed RVW creatively, and for whom RVW dedicated his Symphony no 2 "London" in 1913.

Please see my numerous other posts on Gurney, Finzi, Butterworth and RVW (use labels below)

Illuminating Britten War Requiem Nelsons CBSO Prom

Andris Nelsons conducted Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at Prom 47. Nelsons' War Requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Birmingham is legendary, but the Royal Albert Hall is a unique setting. It illuminates even relatively straightforward performances, like Bychkov's on 11/11/13 more here)  But whatever the reason, Nelsons' Prom Britten War Requiem was exceptional. You can never say "the finest ever" but this came close. Wh ? I think because Nelsons brought out its fundamental musicality. The War Requiem carries emotive baggage, which is perfectly valid, but Nelsons emphasizes its musical depth, making its impact even more powerful.

"Kleenex at the ready… one goes from the critics to the music, knowing that if one should dare to disagree with ‘practically everyone’, one will be made to feel as if one had failed to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen' " said Igor Stravinsky. He had a point, for the image we get of the 1914-18 war is distorted by media emphasis on the Western Front. Stravinsky knew that what happened on the Eastern Front was arguably far more catastrophic. Famine, ethnic cleansing, the rise of Bolshevism and the collapse of the Old Order.  "Which war, whose requiem?" as Ian Bostridge wrote in A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War (Continuum, 2008) . Can a piece commissioned to commemorate Coventry tell us about Dresden, Stalingrad, Nanjing, Hiroshima and the Holocaust?  Nelsons' magisterial account connected the War Requiem to the ages, and made it timeless. Exceptionally good choral singing (concert master Simon Halsey) and playing made this a Prom to remember.

The long chords of the organ thundered into endless resonance, searching infinity. Shimmering brass, and the bright, younger voices of the BBC Proms Youth Choir: a Requiem Aeternam that truly felt eternal.  "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? " comes as a shock. The brutality of Wilfred Owen's imagery emphasized by the quiet menace of the tolling bells in the orchestra.  Trumpets led forward, dazzling in their brightness, percussion at once beautiful and brutal, in telling contrast. For whatever reason, mankind is seduced by war.  Hence, perhaps, the contrast between "bugle" and solo flute, and the first appearance of the soprano.. The elegance Nelsons draws from his players and singers is far more unsettling than straightforward dissonance.The swirling counter-rhythms in the chorus  further shake us from our bearings. Nelsons defined the critical descent into silence from which the soprano (Susan Gritton) rose. Lovely back and forward rhythms, yet chilling, for they suggest the swaying of a body being carried on a stretcher. "Move him into the sun " thus felt surprisingly physical, even earthy, for Owen's poem refers to clay and the fields unknown soldier might have tilled. The poem, however, is titled "Futility" for the sun's rays cannot revive the dead.

What "offering" is this Offertorium?  jaunty rhythms like a mad folk tune from the ancient past. This sets the context for the "Abraham and Isaac" passage, where Toby Spence and  Hanno Müller-Brachmann sang together, victim and killer bound in an unclean pact.  We're in the trenches but the weight of  Biblical forces bears down. "Half the seed of Europe, one by one" is destroyed. Nelsons marks the silences between each repeat, so the portent sank in fully .

The Sanctus refers to the sacrament of consecration. Bell sounds rang out, as in the most holy moment in the Mass. Susan Gritton's voice shone on the word "Sanctus", but also picked up on the "medieval" decoration Britten wrote into the part, not always observed so cleanly. From cataclysmic tumult to all-illuminating transfiguration. All the forces Nelsons had at his command united in a glorious pinnacle of overpowering brightness. Truly, "after the blast of lightning from the east, the flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot throne".

In the Agnus Dei, Britten quotes Owen's "At a Calvary near Ancre" which mentions a wayside calvary with the image of a crucifix and priests whose proud faces are "flesh-marked by the Beast". How few conventional performances recognize the irony!  Britten's sympathies are not with the Church. This Libera Me was driven by powerful forces indeed. Gritton's voice marked the choppy, deliberately breathless excitement which culminated in a glorious  crescendo.  Insistent tappings in the orchestra, machine-gun staccato deployed with purpose, mixing death and transition. A transformative Liberation indeed. We've passed through Owen's "profound dark tunnel"  (a reverse of birth) into a new , strange plane of existence where earthly enmities have no meaning. Listen to the quiet drone behind Spence's voice on the rebroadcast,  it's very atmospheric. The baritone's final words need no accompaniment. Müller-Brachmann intoned the words "I am the enemy you killed" so it felt personal. At the culmination of his War Requiem, Britten brings back the youthful chorus, the blending of orchestra, organ, massed voices and soloists suggesting a glorious rebirth, a bright new tapestry looking forwards. This time, when we hear the bells and the words "Requiem Aeternam", we are on another plane.  Best Prom of the 2014 season so far!

Please explore my other posts on Britten and Britten's War Requiem on the BBC Proms and on war. More on this site about Britten than any non-dedicated site

Please also see Claire Seymour's review in Opera Today

photo of Andris Nelsons : Marco Borggreve

Lest we forget - Bleuet Poulenc

Just as the Poppy symbolizes war to the British, the cornflower symbolizes loss and memory for the French. The Western Front was in France and Belgium, lest we forget....... French soldiers wore blue uniforms, hence the multiple connotations of the word "bleuet".

At right, Francis Poulenc aged 21, in uniform, painted by a friend. "Jeune homme /de vingt ans /Qui as vu des choses si affreuses /que penses-tu des hommes /de ton enfance/la bravure et la ruse" wrote Guillaume Apollinaire. Read the whole poem HERE in Emily Ezust's Lieder and Song Texts page, because Apollinaire sets the poem out so it descends diagonally across the page, as if the very words were marching. Apollinaire's visual layout emphasises the meaning of the poem,where phrases break off and the word "Mourir" stands alone.

"Young man of 20 , who has seen things so awful, what do you think of  the men of your childhood, of courage and cunning?

"You who have faced death in the face more than 100 times, you take it as if it were life.  Transmit your fearlessness to those who will come after you. Young man, you are joyful. Your memory is soaked in blood, your soul is red. with joy. You have absorbed the life of those who died next to you."

"For you it is decided.  It is 5 o'clock and you're going to die. If not better than those who went before you, at least more piously, because you know death better than you know life." 

"Ô douceur d'autrefois, Lenteur immémoriale"
.O sweetness of former times, to linger in eternity.

Apollinaire was injured badly at the front in 1917. Poulenc, writing his setting in October 1939, reflected not on militarism or glory, but on the tenderness with which Apollinaire depicted the waste of youth and life. 

Lest We Forget Prom - RVW Butterworth Stephan Kelly Manze BBC SSO

 "They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, The lads that will die in their glory and never be old." 

 A E Housman was writing about handsome farm boys going off to the Boer War. Maybe he was more concerned with the loss of their physical beauty but Prom 42 "Lest We Forget"  with Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra reminded us of the lost music which the three younger composers featured in this concert might have produced.

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth's Six Songs From a Shropshire Lad.  He never disappoints. He sang with the commitment and heroism the occasion of a keynote Prom warrants. I've written extensively about George Butterworth, (read more here) so I'll just comment on the version  we heard here. It's not strictly Butterworth but a modern orchestral adaptation. Butterworth wrote two separate pieces based on Housman's verse, one for voice and piano and an entirely orchestral version, A Shropshire Lad: a Rhapsody. where the themes are reiterated. Maybe piano song doesn't work so well in the Royal Albert Hall, but it would have been wiser to pick the orchestral piece. Much as I adore Roderick Williams, I think we need to appreciate Butterworth for more than his songs. When there is enough authentic Butterworth around, can't we "honour the fallen" by  using the man's own work?

Butterworth's orchestral A Shropshire Lad would have worked better with the rest of the programme too, especially with Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra no. 2 (1912, rev. 1913), Stephan's breakthrough piece which won him a publisher and a lot of favourable attention. It's superb. It's full of interesting ideas, crafted together with flair: definitely a distinctive voice. Listen to the rebroadcast : this isn't recycled retro but intelligent and highly original, reflecting the creative ferment of Secession Munich, and possibly the "modern" Germany of Weimar art and, film and literature. Stephan might have given Alban Berg (also a serving soldier) a great deal to think about. Stephan is definitely on the radar in Germany. There are no less than three recordings of his opera Die ersten Menschen on the market. I'll write about that when I have time - please come back.

In contrast, Frederick Kelly's Elegy for Strings was written in memoriam Rupert Brooke. Kelly is also remembered because he was born in Sydney of Irish parents and served in Gallipoli, and is thus a figure in Australian music history. It's a lovely, elegiac piece with a good violin part, but without the character of Stephan and Butterworth.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was too old to fight in the frontline but served in an ambulance unit, experiencing bombardment knowing he'd have to go out and pick up the carnage. Vaughan Williams's Symphony no 3 "The Pastoral"  may be "about " landscape in an abstract sense, but it's even more about the strange, new landscape of the trenches. Ancient farms and villages were flattened, pitted with craters like the moon. The terrain still hasn't recovered.  RVW's ambiguous swirling tonality suggests psychic dislocation. This isn't "cowpat school", though you can "feel" the mud. It's far more unsettling.

RVWs 3rd is a companion to his 2nd, the "London" Symphony, dedicated  to and inspired by George Butterworth, so hearing the 3rd at this Prom was particularly poignant. Andrew Manze and the BBC SSO  gave a dignified account. An excellent "distant" trumpet, and nicely defined references to typical RVW themes expressing nostaglia and, well, Sensucht,  and loss. Unusually, Manze used a tenor, Allan Clayton to sing the vocal part. A male voice is probably more appropriate in the circumstances  and RVW knew his Bible well enough to know that angels were often men. The trumpet can be diffuse, since RVW was remembering a real trumpeter playing in the landscape. But the dead and dying were all too present. Clayton's "manly" tenor rang out loud and clear. No, we must not shy from the reality of war. There's violence in the crescendi, and folk tunes pop up as  ghosts. Perhaps the voice, like the violin part, loosely reminiscent of The Lark Ascending, is reminding us that life, and nature, will soar upwards from the ruins.

Jacques Imbrailo Wigmore Hall

I'll be at The Royal Opera House Wagner Parsifal  Monday. Review here. But first: Jacques Imbrailo at the Wigmore Hall, with pianist Alisdair Hogarth.The programme didn't look promising in theory but Imbrailo is the kind of artist who can make anything interesting and individual.  At the end I was so glad I came that I didn't miss the rush at Covent Garden!

What thread would connect the songs of Liszt, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Stephen Hough? Imbrailo's choices revealed great intelligence and sensitivity. He began with RVW's early Songs of Travel, unfortunately marred because latecomers were allowed in while he was singing.T he ushers at WH are kind hearted but it's really not fair on the audience and on the performer. Luckily the RVW songs are not the composer's finest works but served to highlight what was to come. Imbrailo sang them with his customary warmth. When Terfel and Roderick Williams sing these songs they sound robust, the kind of "Muscular Christianity" that appealed to Late Victorians. When Imbrailo sings them, his lighter, more lyrical voice broiught out something more sensitive. His "Let Beauty Awake", "Youth and Love" and "Whither must I wander?" felt like sincere songs of love and regret. RVW ends the cycle with  " I have tread the upward and the downward slope", where the piano describes clodhopping footseps : Hogarth played them with a flexible touch, to match Imbrailo's gentleness.

Only ten years separate Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel from George Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad but the two cycles are worlds apart. The Songs of Travel bear the heavy, suffocating hand of Charles Villiers Stanford, from whom RVW only escaped when he went to France and studied with Ravel. Butterworth was only 13 years younger than RVW but his mindset was radically different. When Butterworth was a student at Oxford, one of the dons remarked "There goes more Red Revolution than in all Russia". Considering that the remark was made after the Uprising of 1905, this was not small talk. Butterworth was also far more upper crust and Establishment than RVW. He was an Eton man, not easily intimdated by Stanford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. This year, with so much attention on Britten's alternative British music, we should be reassessing Butterworth more deeply.

A E Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad were set by Butterworth and RVW a mere two years apart. Anyone seriously interested in the composers would do well to compare them. It's not my job here in this review, but I might write more sooner or later. There is more on Butterworth on this site than most anywhere else, and some first-hand research. Please explore.

Imbrailo's "Loveliest of Trees" was thoughtfully phrased. He lingered on the words "stands about the woodland ride" so one thought about the tree, rooted to its soil. Then, when Imbrailo sang "wearing white for Eastertide", his voice glowed with beauty. Men grow old, but each Spring, the cherry tree blossoms and grows anew. English singers tend to stress vocal lines at the expense of more abstract musical values  Imbrailo, with his extensive opera experience, showed masterful control of the legato in "Look not into my eyes", revealing the beautiful structure of the song. Like the Grecian lad, its beauty is elusive : danger lies in those seductive lines.

Butterworth's "The Lads in their Hundreds" has become connected with the mass slaughter of the 1914-18 war partly because the composer himself was a casualty (Please read my account of his death in battle). Housman, however, was writing about the Boer War, and the terrible waste (to him)  of handsome young men. But the Boer War was gruesome. It saw mass ethnic cleansing and the invention of concentration camps. We would do well to ponder the Boer War as a prototype of what was to happen in Europe, in the mass public "celebrations" that start next year.  When Imbrailo sang "The Lads in their Hundreds", he sang with such poignant tenderness, that he made me think of the wide-scale human tragedy that lies beneath the song. My partner's eyes filled with tears. We've all heard this song s often that we forget what it really means.

"We couldn't follow A Shropshire Lad" with something upbeat, said Imbrailo, in his usual understated way, introducing his first encore. So he sang My Sarie Marais, an Afrikaans folk song referring to the Great Trek, the mass migration of the Boer people across Southern Africa, and the wars which followed. The song has been adopted by military marching bands, which is ironic. Imbrailo, however, sang it with exquisite tenderness, so it felt poignantly personal.  As music, the song is naive, but Imbrailo's performance gave it emotional power greater than the "art" folk songs RVW and his peers collected. Sincerity makes all the difference!


Imbrailo's many fans had come to hear him sing the gloriously Italianate star turns he does so well. With Franz Liszt's Three Petrach Sonnets S270/1 (1842-6) he delivered.  Exceptionally lyrical singing, richly coloured and resonant. Yet, being the opera singer he is, Imbrailo doesn't simply make beautiful sounds, but infuses them with meaning. "E nulla stringo, tutto l'mondo abbracio" he sang.  His technical control is superb - this is how rubato should properly be used. His chest opened out and soared so you could feel "i sospiri e le lagrime e 'l desio" welling up from deep within. The piano lines are almost more beautiful, delicately sculpted by Hogarth. He and Imbrailo are an excellent team.

Like Liszt, Stephen Hough is a pianist who writes song. Imbrailo and Hogarth premiered Hough's Herbstlieder at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2010. Please see my detailed review here.  Hearing it a second time, I could appreciate the subtle images, diminuendos like falling leaves and mists settling on a landscape. Curling lines that circulate like autumn breezes, smoky lines that blur. As a mood piece, it's atmospheric. Yet there's suppressed pain here, too. "Welcher wie ein weisses Stadt" leapt high up the register like a scream of anguish. Hogarth's piano pounded like an oncoming train "Bestürz tmich, Musik, mit rythmischen Zürnen" sang Imbrailo. A good performance, but what weill remain with me is the meory of Imbrailo singing Butterworth and My Sarie Marais.

Britten War Requiem Royal Albert Hall Bychkov BBC SO

On Remembrance Sunday, Semyon Bychkov conducted Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus, Crouch End Festival Chorus and choristers of Westminster Abbey.  The sense of occasion was overwhelming. The vast auditorium was packed, and the arena area, where Prommers throng in summer, was filled with seats. Before the performance began, the house lights were turned, not onto the stage but onto the audience. It was a moment of sheer theatre, but utterly appropriate, for everyone in the building must have known, or know of someone affected by the barbarity of war. No-one could remain unmoved. Wilfred Owen wrote about the First World War, and Britten wrote to commemorate peace after the Second World War. But the world is still wracked by conflict. Wars of attrition continue, millions of people still suffer. Turning the spotlight on the audience reminded us that Remembrance is more than "Lest we forget" but also implies moral obligation.

How amazing it must have been for the performers to look onto the Royal Albert Hall and see the lights shining on thousands of faces!  This was infinitely more a communal experience than just a musical event. The lines between performance and reception blurred.  Normal measures of performance were largely irrelevant. We were all participating in something much greater than ourselves.

Because the War Requiem was commissioned to mark the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, it has become associated with vast venues and ostentatious displays of public piety.Although it's written for some 300 performers, at the really critical moments, Britten silences the tumult. Britten was essentially a private man, not given to big public gestures of emotion. The heart of the piece is the twelve member ensemble that accompanies the two male soloists. The choruses and the female soloist sing in Latin, and sing words that would fit neatly into any standard Requiem Mass. Significantly, Britten sets the key texts in English, using the words of Wilfred Owen, who wrote from personal experience.  Owen does not celebrate public victory: quite the opposite.  He fought bravely, but eschewed formal religion. Britten doesn't quote the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but Wilfred Owen's Parable of the Old Men and the Young, with its reference to the wilful slaying, not sanctioned by God, of "half the seed of Europe, one by one"

"Move him into the sun" sings the tenor (Allan Clayton). The quote is from a poem titled "Futility". A corpse lies on snowbound ground.  The soprano and choruses sing "Lachrymosa", of tears and the conventional expression of sorrow. The music is beautiful, but Owen, and Britten are having none of this. "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil, to break earth's sleep at all"?  Unlike seeds in the soil, the dead don't re-sprout. In the Sanctus, the choirs sing "Hosanna in excelcis". But Britten has the baritone (Roderick Williams) sing, quite pointedly: "Mine ancient scars should not be gloried. Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried". Britten's War Requiem isn't designed to comfort, but to provoke.

Bychkov places the chamber ensemble to his immediate left, "the heart side" in theatre parlance..The instrumentation mimics that of a large orchestra - five strings, four winds, horn, harp and percussion - but the individual voices are heard clearly: It's another indication of Britten's "inner" programme.

"Lbera me, Domine" the soprano (Sabina Cvilak) sings, haloed by the chorus. "Tremens factus sum ego" (I tremble  and fear)  The orchestra screams, cymbals crashing, suggesting the chaos of battle. Bychkov's definition of horns, trumpets and trombones was specially good, emphasizing military conflict. But Britten deliberately shifts focus. To minimal accompaniment the tenor sings ""Strange friend, I said, here is no cause to mourn".  Tenor and baritone face each other in a strange No Man's Land where  nations do not fight. There are no "Germans" or "British" here, but two human beings, man to man. Their voices blend. "Let us sleep now", singing in unity.  They are turning away from the vast forces around them. Perhaps Britten recognized that social forces dominate over the private. The War Requiem ends on a wave of uplifting glory, sending the audience out into the world feeling  the better for having been part of the experience.

 Please also see my reviews of the War Requiem with Jurowski, the LPO, Bostridge and Goerne (best soloists), and of Antonio Pappano's recording with  the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome,, Academia Stana Cecilia Rome, Bostridge, Hampson (best orchestral playing). Semyon Bychov, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Clayton, Williams and Cvilak, however, won hands down on atmosphere. More on this site about Britten and war than any other, bar Britten-only sites.

This review also appears in Opera Today.

Apropos to the ideal of "conventional piety" please read this article "This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time" by a 91 year old veteran.  He's right. Piety is a good thing but it can be hijacked by commercial and political interests. To honour those who have fallen, we should care enough that we don't let these things happen again.

Wartime Elgar The Longed-for Light SOMM

For Novemvber 11th and for the forthcoming centenary of World War One, a prescient new release by Siva Oke's SOMM label The Longed-for Light : Elgar's Music in Wartime.

Elgar was a a public figure, from whom the Nation expected support at a time of war. He had no choice but to echo the sentiments of the time .Within two weeks of the declaration of war, Sir Henrty Wood conducted Land of Hope and Glory, requisitioning it forever as a work of belligerent patriotism.  On this CD, we have another work conducted on that same programme, Sospiri op 70 (Sighs) is very different. A graceful violin line, harp and organ suggest peacefulness.

More unusual is Polonia op76 (1915), since Poland didn't yet exist except as part of the Austrian and Russian Empires. It's an iunteresting exercise which blends themes from Chopin and Paderewski in a mix of grand orchestral music, mazurkas and marches. This piece could be also do service for memorials to the Second World War, and to the thousands of Poles who escaped to England after 1939.

Elgar's Fringes of the Fleet was a smash hit at the Coliseum London, when it was a music hall, long before it became the home of the ENO. In similar stirring vein is Carillon op 75 1914, based on a poem by Belgian poet Emile Cammaerts. The grand orchestral sweep, with its evocation of church bells and bugles, is bizarrely cheerful but defiant. "Sing, Belgians, Sing! Although our wounds may bleed, although our voices break, louder than the storm, louder than the guns, Sing of hope and fiercest hate!"  Simon Callow declamation is perfect.. He describes the burial of dead children with tenderness, but spits out words like "Hate!" with vehemence.  We need that blustering  because it recreates the mentality of 1914, with the violent revanchisme. We must face this, unpleasant as it is, because that was the extremism that would lead to Versailles, reparations and  revenge from the other side.

Une voix dans le Désert op 77 is based on a much more contemplative text by Cammaerts. Hollow drum beats suggest war and the trudge of tired, marching soldiers."A hundred yards from the trenches" Callow speaks in   "there stands a little house, lonely and desperate" The farmer refuses to leave. His daughter sings of larks and of peace, while  soldiers march past. "Not a breath, not a life, not a soul, only a flight of crows along the railway line".  Elgar decorates that phrase beautifully. It's a moment of humour amid the horror, like the farmhouse itself, surrounded by battlefield.

The third Cammaerts setting is Le Drapeau  Belge op 79. "Red for the blood of soldiers! Black, yellow and red !"  Elgar's music moves like a march, so you can imagine the flag unfurled. Callow is magnificent. Irony would be out of order here. He has to sound bombastic, for such was the spirit of the time.

The longest piece on this recording is a ballet The Sanguine Fan op 81. A ballet in wartime? Elegant Elgarian sweeps, delicate lyrical notes ideal for dancing to. Pan, Echo and cupids dance in a glade while humans die. It is escapist fantasy, a coda to the comfortable Edwardian world. For a moment the music darkens with alarming chords, but serenity returns.

Surprisingly, this recording works well as a seamless whole, although the works weren't written to be heard together as such.  Just as the farmer's daughter sings about larks and peace in the midst of battle, hearing pieces like The Sanguine Fan after Le Drapeau Belge reminds us that even in wartime, life goes on  and hope will return.  Whoever decided to place Sospiri and Carissima between the  Cammaerts settings knew what they were doing.  Together the five pieces form a kind of meta-tone poem for orchestra and voices, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts.  Indeed, I think it should be regular performance practice to blend the Cammaerts settings in this way for maximum impact.  On their own the Cammaerts settings are propaganda, almost music hall.  But heard in the context of  other, more characteristic Elgar, they give much deeper insight into how Elgar responded to war. Together with SOMM's superb Fringes of the Fleet (more here ) this recording expands our appreciation of Elgar's wartime works beyond The Spirit of England and Starlight Express.

John Wilson conductsd the BBC Concert Orchestra. Hear extracts from this disc incl Carillon on BBC RAdio 3 from 12/11.