Broadcast Music for Coming Week

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 39, 12 April 1929, Page 10

Broadcast Music for Coming Week

By

Bolton

Woods

"Tis the deep music of the rolling world, Kindling within the strings of the waved airAeolian modulations." -Shelley.

"The Dance of Death." ‘VALSH Triste is from the incidental musie written by Jean Sibelius, the foremost Finnish composer, for the drama by Arvid Jarnefeld, entitled "Knolema" (Death), which will account for the shuddering sadness of the theme and its haunting spectral character. One annotator comments thus: "It is night. A-son watching by the bedside of his dying mother falls asleep from weariness. He dreamsthe room is filled with a ruddy light; there is the sound of distant music stealing nearer until the ear is greeted with the strains of a valse melody. The sleeping mother awakens, rises form her bed, her long white garment taking the semblance of a balldress. She begins to move slowly and silently to and fro. She waves her hands and beckons in time to the music, as though summoning a crowd of invisible guests. These now appear, strange visionary couples, turning and gliding to the unearthly valse rhythm. The dying woman mingles with the dancers. She strives to make them look into her eyes, but the shadowy guests one and all avoid her gaze, she sinks exhausted upon her couch, and the music ceases. Presently she gathers all her strength and invokes the dance once again, with more energetic gestures than before. The shadowy, dancers return. The weird gaiety reaches a climax; there is a knock at the door, which flies open; the mother utters a despairing cry; the spectral guests vanish, the music dies away-Death stands on

the threshold." This wonderful composition will be played at8YA on Sunday (April 14) by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "Love’s Greeting." "Salut d’Amour" (Love’s Greeting) is like a little romance or avowal of love, one of Elgar’s most beautiful shorter works. It displays that composer’s ability to write a lovely melody and embellish it with delectable harmonies. A sense of the dramatic is revealed in its fine climax and its romantic fervour. At 1YA on Wednesday next this little gem will be played as an organ solo by Mr. Arthur §S. Wilson. A Jubilee Song. **QWING Low, Sweet Chariot," which will be sung as a baritone solo by Mr. Clinton Williams on Wednesday next at 1YA, is a Jubilee song, and was always a feature in the programmes of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the American Negro Choir that electrified the musical world nearly sixty years ago. The origin of the songs they sang is unique. They were never "composed" after the manner of ordinary music, but sprang into life, ready made, from the white heat of religious fervour during some protracted meeting in church or camp. They came from no musical cultivation whatever, but are the simple ecstatic utterances of wholly untutored minds. From so unpromising a source we could reasonably expect only such a mass of conditions as would

be unendurable to the cultivated ear. On the contrary, however, the cultivated listener confesses to a new charm, and to a power never before felt, at least in its kind. What can be inferred from that but that the child-like receptive minds of the unfortunate slaves and children of slaves were wrought upon with a tone inspiration, and the gift so bestowed quickened the pulses of life and kept them from descending into the abyss of hopeless despair and apathy. Mr. Theo O. Seward further asserts that the coincidence that more than half these jubilee melodies are in the same scale as that in which Scottish music is written, that is, with the fourth and seventh notes omitted. The fact that the music of the ancient Greeks is also said to have been written in this scale suggests an interesting inquiry as to whether it may not be a peculiar language of nature, or a simpler alphabet than the ordinary diatonic scale, in which the uncultivated mind finds its easiest expression. Great as was the power of the Jubilee Singers over audiences the world throughout, this power was chiefly in the songs themselves, and it is a happy outcome that these folk songs are in permanent form, and can be heard in a later century under unique conditions undreamt of by their first exponents. A West Country Song. IX the original Dorset dialect, W. Darnes’s folk song "Linden Lea" makes entertaining reading, and for those unversed in singing unfamiliar and curious words, the publishers have considerately provided a modern version. This charming countryside poem praises God’s bountiful nature as seen in lovely Dorset. We note its rustic beauty in general, and the charm of the apple tree which "do lean down low in Linden Lea" in particular. The music by Ralph Vaughan Williams is captivating and expressive. "Linden Lea" will be sung by Mr. George Crawford at 4YA next Tuesday. "A Perpetual Ascension." JDESCRIBED by Vincent d’Indy as "a perpetual ascension towards pure bless and life-giving light, because its construction is solid and its themes are manifestations of beauty," Cesar Franck’s "Symphony in D Minor" (which will be played by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra at 3YA next Sunday), is a curiously beautiful work. It is, literally, all beauty, but is happily of a beauty that embraces both grace and sternness, and there is thus never any suspicion of there being a surfeit of loveliness, Cesar Franck is a composer whose fame (and the popularity of whose works) is: comparatively recent, though he died over thirtyseven years ago, He was by nature a mystic, and lived a life of comparative seclusion. His works are few in number; the most important can be numbered on the fingers of the hands.

But upon these few works rests his reputation, and it is still a growing one. The Symphony has an extraordinary and wide appeal. It has no esoteric interest; its music is intellig- _ ible to the "man in the street," but its*" appeal nevertheless becomes stronger and stronger as the work becomes more and more familiar. Yet Franck’s music has much of that introspective spiritual quality that ravishes the listener and can move to tears. The composition of the Symphony occupied a period of some years, and it is believed that Franck began it in 1886. It was finished in 1888. It contains only three movements (as in contrast to the conventional four movements of the form), but the second contains a middle section which suggests a scherzo. The whole work is bound together in an interesting way. Franck quotes the principal themes of both the first and second movements in the finals. The effect of this device is to give an impression of unity. Particularly beautiful is the second movement, with its famous passages for harp and for cor anglais. Fated to come as the crown of the composer’s artistic work, the Symphopy is both joyous and sanely vivacious. The once misunderstood and slighted master is at long last recognised as one of the greatest artistic influences of the last century, and the leading spirit in the regeneration of the musical life of his country. "The Sound of a Great Amen." URING the anxious hours of watching by the bedside of his dying brother, Sullivan recalled some verses which had attracted him a few years before when they had appeared in "Household Words." His brother appeared to have drifted into slumber. Arthur Sullivan drew together some odd sheets of paper and sketched ont the complete setting from the first bar to the last of "The Lost Chord." This / tribute to his dear brother, upon its } publication in 1877, swept through { England as an inspiration, and has never since waned in popularity. This famous song will be sung at 3YA on Sunday (April 14) by Mr. Robert Allison. Faust Visits Hungary. At 1YA on Friday (April 19) the famous Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra will play Rakoezy March or Hungarian March from "Faust," by Berlioz. This march was first performed under Berlioz during his visit to Budabest in 1845. Thinking to please the Hungarians he took as its theme their national march, the Rakoczy, and treated it in a very original way. The long, gradual crescendo of the middle part. where fragments of the theme ave heard in different parts of. the orchestra leading up to. a tremendous fortissimo, roused them to such a pitch of enthusiasm that the orchestra was drowned in their excited shouts. At the commencement the trumpets give out the rhythm of the principal theme

which is first heard softly on flutes and clarinets, accompanied by a lovely piz- , zieato by the strings. Afterwards ap- \ pears a contrasting subject in the major, which works up, and _ then, starting from pianissimo, comes the exciting crescendo above-mentioned. BerJioz was so enamoured of this work that in defiance of.Goethe, he drags Faust to the plains of Hungary to see the passing of a regiment of soldiers, solely that he might introduce it into his score.