The Classic Show - Everything you could want to know about this month's show!
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed this month's show! Some of my favourite music managed to find its way into the playlist, though I tend to think that every time I put one of these together. Must have a lot more 'favourite' tunes than I realise!
So, one of the main themes and the start and finishing point for the show was that great British tradition, The Festival. It seemed particularly topical with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival looming and the exciting line-up of artists recently announced. Festivals in their various levels of grandeur and prestige, have been nurturing music in our country for centuries, commissioning new works, bringing together musical forces to perform them; providing a stage for some of our most emminent composers, peformers and conductors.
The festival I focussed on in the show was the Aldebugh Festival, across the border in Suffolk. This was founded in 1948 by that electric pairing of composer Benjamin Britten and singer Peter Pears, along with librettist Eric Crozier. They had originally intended for it to be a home to their opera company, the English Opera Group, but this vision soon widened to include a range of artistry from poetry to paintings. The first festival featured a performance of Britten's newly-written cantata, St Nicolas, the first professional work by Britten intended primarily for performance by amateur musicians. We opened the show with the second movement of this cantata, recounting the miraculous birth when from his mother's womb Nicolas sprang and cried God be Glorified. This is a brilliant piece, with the nice detail of a note in the score that the youngest boy in the choir is supposed to do the treble solo. Whether this actually happens when it comes to recordings is debateable, but I rather like that Britten put that instruction in the score, and I think when I was involved in a performance of this piece (actually, in Aldeburgh, funnily enough!), the youngest boy in the choir did sing the solo!
Aldeburgh is just one of many famous festivals around England, up there with the Three Counties Festival, York Early Music Festival, and, of course, the Proms. But, the most established of all the festivals is a lot closer to home. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival is England's oldest single city arts festival, established back in 1772 to support the building of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. It grew substantially in the mid 1990s under the direction of Marcus Davey and includes a variety of major performances and new works every year. Last year one of the highlights was a premier of James MacMillan's arrangement of his piece Kiss On Wood, an ornamental paraphrase on the Good Friday versicle, Ecce Lignum Crucis... behold the wood of the cross. This would be sung as the crucifix is slowly unveiled and before the people are invited forward to kiss the wood of the cross, hence kiss on wood. In the show I featured the original setting of the piece for violin and piano.
And a marvellous piece it is too. Slightly challenging 'modern' music, and yet completely accessibly and at times very beauitful.
We stuck with Good Friday as we moved onto the next piece in the show and also with arrangements. Bach's famous Goldberg Variations were originally written for Harpsichord. Lgend has it that a Count mentioned to Bach that he suffered from Insomnia and would appreciate some clavier pieces that could be played in the middle of the night to cheer him. With the constraints of midnight performances lifted, various performers have reworked the variations over the years, from transcribing them for string orchestra to arranging them for jazz trio. The transcription we turned to in the show was Dmitri Sitkovetsky's offering of 1984, for string trio, and the movement, number 15. This, one of the many canons in the set, struck a particular chord with the great pianist Glenn Gould who said 'It’s a piece so moving, so anguished – and so uplifting at the same time – that it would not be in any way out of place in the St. Matthew’s Passion; matter of fact, I’ve always thought of Variation 15 as the perfect Good Friday spell.'
Glenn Gould was of course noted in particular for his recordings of Bach's music, but perhaps rather less known about him was that his maternal grandfather was a cousin of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg! Grieg was himself a talented pianist, piano having been his first study when he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory aged 15. It's no surprise that his Piano Concerto in A minor, written in 1869, is his most popular work. But, before he came to write his celebrated Piano Concerto, he penned another important, though much lesser known work, a funeral march. In 1866, Grieg's good friend Rikard Nordraak, the composer of the Norwegian national anthem, died of tuberculosis aged just 23. Grieg composed a funeral march in his honour and when he himself died in the autumn of 1907, this same funeral march was played as he had wished it would be. His original conception was as piano piece, but Grieg also produced a transcription for brass choir and it is this we turn to in the show. The London Brass Virtuosi with Sørgemarsj, in memory of Rikard Nordraak.
Now arranging pieces for brass band is common practice. Rather more unusual is the arrangement of a piece originally written for brass into a choral work. But this is precisely what the American composer Eric Whitacre did with this next piece and it works a treat. Under the baton of Stephen Layton, we turned to his choir, Polyphony with Lux Aurumque...
If you don't know Lux Arumque I would definitely suggest giving it a listen and perhaps even purchasing it online. If you do, go for the Polyphony version. It wins hands down and was nominated for a Classical Grammy, with good reason. When putting this show together I usually have to listen through to lots of different versions of pieces to make sure you get the best one, but with this it was clear. There's really no competition!
But, anyway, Lux Arumque is written by Eric Whitacre. While Eric Whitacre is arguably one of the most prominent and peformed choral composers of his generation, this is not his only focus. He is also involved with wind bands and is a founding member of the consortium BCM International, a quartet of composers whose mission is to enrich the wind ensemble repertoire.
Over the last 40 years or so, many composers have made wind band music their focus, (writing major new works for the ensemble). But these were preceded by a long list of illustrious names who, from the early twentieth century, had been establishing the wind or concert band repertoire among them Percy Grainger, Gustav Holst, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Up there with these greats was John Philip Sousa, the March King, famed for his military and patriotic marches, among them Stars and Stripes Forever, the national march of the United States. It was only three years before Stars and Stripes, in 1886, that Sousa achieved his first success with The Gladiator, selling over a million copies. Considering that this piece was so popular with the audience of 19th century America, I thought it deserved a spot in the show, so we turned to a bit of pomp and ceremony with the Royal Artillery Band and The Gladiator.
As I said, The Gladiator was written in 1886. 1886, as it would turn out, was rather a big year. May saw Coca-Cola introduced to the world, followed by the unveiling of the first successful gasoline-driven automobile, the Benz Patent Motorwagen in July, and Heinrich Hertz verification of the existence of electromagnetic waves in November. It was a big year for commerce and science, and also for music, though in rather a less obvious way. On August 27 in Harrow, Rebecca Helferich Clarke was born. She would go on to be quite possibly one of the most distinguised British female composers of her generation.
Though unfortunately she wrote little, possibly due to her ideas that a woman's place was not to compose music, her work is recognised for its compositional skill. She is best known for her chamber music featuring the Viola, playing to its strengths, an insight gained by her own mastery of the instrument. During 1939 to 1942, the last prolific period near the end of her compositional career, Clarke's music found a new clarity, the influences of neoclassicism leading to greater emphasis on motives and tonal structure. One product of this period was her Passacaglia on an Old English Tune, which we featured next on the show, performed by Philip Dukes and Sophia Rahman.
This Passacaglia was based on a theme attributed to Thomas Tallis, lending that piece its modal flavour, and it is to Tallis that we turned to next, to an anthem which managed to survive the religious upheavals of 16th century England and find favour under both Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Today, it is a mainstay of the English Choral Tradition and one of my favourite pieces. The version I picked is performed by the Kings Singers, another mainstay of the English Choral Tradition. The Anthem, If Ye Love Me, by Thomas Tallis from their English Renaissance CD.
After this we went from Tallis to a composer who, like Rebecca Clarke featured earlier, used Tallis' music as a basis for his own in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Vaughan Williams is of course the man about whom I'm talking, composer of symphonies, chambler music, opera, choral music and film scores! In 1947, Vaughan Williams provided the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic and was so inspired by it, that he decided to incorporate some of the music into a symphony, his seventh. The score includes a literary quotation at the start of each of the five movements, from biblical sources, to poems, to Scott's own journal. We heard next the fourth movement of this symphony, whose own quotation is 'Love, all alike, no season known, nor clime/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time'.
After the Intermezzo from Vaugh William's Sinfonia Antarctica and with time running out I turned back to the opening theme of Festivals and also to Good Friday. Like other composers of his time, Vaughan Williams was involved with various festivals, (his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis that we mentioned earlier, being premiered at The Three Choirs Festival). For nearly 50 years, from its first concert in 1905, he conducted the Leith Hill Music Festival at Dorking, writing much of his music with the Festival in mind. However, the work for which RVW is chiefly remembered there is probably not one of his own compositions, but the Bach St Matthew Passion. This was first performed in the town in 1931, a moving occassion dedicated to the composer's sister Margaret who had died earlier that year. Vaughan Williams had a deep love of Bach and had gone through the work page by page with the less than accomplished members of the chorus in order to achieve the performance he was after. Well, the St Matthew Passion is indeed a stunning work and there are few pieces more captivating than the Alto solo, Erbarme Dich. And so, we concluded this week's show with this aria performed by the superb counter tenor Andreas Scholl and the Collegium Vocale Gent under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe.
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