What are you looking for?

by Rebecca Reynolds Creators of dystopian fiction often emphasize the losses of a post-apocalyptic world by featuring remnants of a former, easier life. From the H.G. Wells 1936 film  Things to Come  to the 2023 HBO release  The Last of Us , directors show everyday objects we take for granted grown precious in the realm of the survivor: a box of shoelaces, a Top 100 Billboard Hits book, airplane parts, a can of peaches–bits and bobbles of pre-disaster ease now precious to people trying to scrap together life in a world grown dark.   Maybe “apocalyptic” is too strong of a word, but many Western Christians have experienced severe spiritual disorientation over the past decade. Leaders, organizations, and ideologies aren’t what we thought they were. Our lives and relationships don’t look like we were told they would. There have long been disappointments surrounding the use of the name of Jesus, but the recent concentration of trust-destroying events has been the highest I’ve seen in fifty years. As I survey the wreckage of faith systems that once felt like home to me, a few pre-disaster relics have held their value. Tim Keller’s life and ministry are on my short list here. I don’t mean that every word he ever wrote or spoke gees and haws with how I now view the world. I no longer expect that of any teacher. However, when so many other pastors sold out to political panic and manipulation, he didn’t. He remained kind, focused, curious. 'The sky is falling' was never Keller’s vibe. How badly I needed to see at least one older pastor behave this way in our present chaos. Rebecca Reynolds In a reductionistic culture intent on forcing us to choose between extremes, Keller continued to think outside many boxes, even on issues that made him a pariah in extremist circles. His nuance made feverish corners of the establishment itchy. Yet, he also held to certain tenets without wavering. He stood confidently in those beliefs while maintaining a posture of respect for other viewpoints, offering to share his platform and engage in civil discourse. “The sky is falling,” was never Keller’s vibe. How badly I needed to see at least one older pastor behave this way in our present chaos. But even more critical than these marks of ethos, Keller’s teaching reminds me of a redemption that I desperately need, freely given by a Prodigal God. It feels weird to talk about needing redemption post-’90s religious trauma. Shame was used to control many believers in decades of my young adulthood. Youth speakers drove forks violently into oranges, warning us about the ruin we would bring upon ourselves and our future relationships if we made a sexual mistake. We were given rule books telling us how God wanted us to date, do marriage, parent, and engage in outreach. Extreme examples of devotion were constantly set before us, and we didn’t want to be the sorts of fools who strove to keep what was fading while forfeiting what we could never lose. So, we committed to radical “obedience.” Eventually, though, it became evident that some of the teachings we followed were dead wrong. Radical religious advice was doing harm to our marriages and our kids. Sin-talk was being wielded to keep us inside damaging systems run by narcissistic leaders. We realized that corrupt political machines had been using religious language and religious networks for earthly power grabs. Our early willingness to give our lives for faith began to ring with the disillusionment of Wilfred Owen’s grave poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In the aftermath of such trauma, who wouldn’t flinch at the suggestion that we need redemption? Our spiritual vulnerability was commandeered by selfish and dangerous people pointing fingers at us and telling us we needed someone to die for us—doesn’t it make sense that we would at least temporarily feel safer shedding that entire dynamic? Recently, however, I re-opened Keller’s Prodigal God , and after a few pages, I realized how thirsty I’ve been to hear the pure, simple good news of the gospel. While I’ve needed to learn more about manipulation, boundaries, and inherent self-worth, those discoveries haven’t negated my deepest need for a savior. Hebrews 12:27 describes a hard season of revelation in which debris is shaken off truth so everything which cannot be shaken becomes evident. Think of a white sheet snapped in the summer sky. Lies fall away. Beauty, truth, and goodness linger almost weightless in the breeze. Maybe what has felt like dystopia has actually been some sort of Divine reclamation instead. And on the other side, I find I still need the grace Keller describes. “There is no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and cover; there is no sin that is a match for grace.” “Nothing, not even abject contrition, merits the favor of God. The father’s love and acceptance are absolutely free.” The true gospel is freeing, not constraining. Rebecca Reynolds “It’s not [the older brother’s] sins that create the barrier between him and his father, it’s the pride he has in his moral record; it’s not his wrongdoing but his righteousness that is keeping him from sharing in the feast of the father.” Liberty. Wave after wave of liberty. Keller doesn’t wield sin as a tool to corral us into an earthly system of religious power. In fact, such teaching can protect us from the conniving of harmful religious organizations and leaders. The true gospel is freeing, not constraining. A few days ago, my sister-in-law sent us a photo of a coffee shop called Shadrach, Meschach & ABeanToGo. Their slogan is: “Master roasted, never burnt.” I bet you just groaned. We did, too. But some things do pass through the fire and emerge sweeter. Papa Keller’s ministry has been that sort of gift to me. I’m going to miss his ready presence on earth. But, I’m so thankful he held our hands through the chaos. I’m so thankful he didn’t go crazy when so many others did. I’m so thankful he continued to walk with Jesus to the end. I’m so thankful his words linger to guide us still. Rebecca K. Reynolds is the editorial director of Oasis Family Media and Sky Turtle Press. She is the author of a text-faithful modern prose rendering of Edmund Spenser’s 1590’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene and of Courage, Dear Heart by Nav Press. Rebecca is a longtime member of the Rabbit Room, and she has spoken at Hutchmoot both in the US and the UK. She taught high school literature for seven years and has written lyrics for Ron Block of Alison Krauss, Union Station.

by Adam Whipple The drug of comeuppance no longer satisfies me. I’ve tasted it too many times, mostly in movies, or in the rolling celluloid fiction of my mind. The high has vanished now, leaving in its place a shadow that looks like Saint Peter drawing a sword at Gethsemane, an echo that sounds like a Savior disappointed, even slightly alarmed. Comeuppance is a thing we all covet to some degree, as evidenced by its mass-market appeal. Storytellers go to great lengths to keep their heroes from glorying in victory though. Disney plays variations on the theme of throwing villains off cliffs. Clint Eastwood types have post-shootout crises of conscience, or they leave town. Antagonists get taken down by accidents, or by their own machinations. The dynamic of oneupmanship between enemy and hero gets neatly answered. Real life is rarely so simple. Good justice might be poetic, but I don’t think it should always rhyme. Like everyone I know, I grew up with bullies. I didn’t really see them as people very often, just elements, forces of nature, things that could be avoided by a degree of manipulation. Imagine rain. You can’t really beat it, but you can stay dry with a raincoat. There was no avoiding the weather of cruel schoolmates. There was only keeping one’s head down, using a side entrance, or on rare occasions, spitting out a timely riposte. These aren’t always manipulation, of course, but for me, the spirit was certainly there. I grew street smarts. Street smarts are made to work by manipulating a situation, reading terrain, and making it work for you instead of against you. Troublingly, manipulation is itself a bully’s game. Underneath it (again, for me), was that desire for comeuppance, the longing for young oppressors to get what was coming to them, or better yet, to admit they were wrong. The problem with comeuppance is that it’s not extemporaneous, in a very literal sense of the word. We understand things done extemporaneously are done with no preparation, but the Latin ex-tempore literally means outwith time or out of time . When the villain gets his in the story, he gets it within time . With the exception of Revelation, Daniel, and lesser smatterings of apocalypse salted through the literary corpus, all judgment is both temporal and partial. It is not God’s final judgment; therefore, it is not an ultimate word. Even in dealings with the diabolical, we do well to temper our sense of heroism. On days when I wish to see a villain beg for mercy, I hear a warning in Jesus’ admonition to his disciples. In Luke’s account, seventy-two of them go out with instructions to preach and heal the sick. Then back they come with, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!” You can almost hear the mix of emotions in Jesus’ response. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” he says. “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 20:18-20) “Yes, indeed,” he seems to be telling them. “Satan is defeated, and through me, you partake in that victory. Yet there’s danger in being grossly happy over this particular thing.” Revelation, perhaps predictably, is understated in its description of the devil’s doom. Even in a book that, if we may say so reverently, is gloriously Lovecraftian as a creature feature, Satan’s end is a little dry. Yes, there’s a battle, and he’s thrown into the lake of fire. Yet it’s followed by John’s simple “tormented day and night for ever and ever,” and we don’t hear from Ol’ Scratch again. No one really gets to see him squeal. I kind of want to. In missing Jesus’ point, in reveling in an enemy’s fall, even The Enemy’s, perhaps we become something other, something self-obsessed. Adam Whipple What is the danger in this? In missing Jesus’ point, in reveling in an enemy’s fall, even The Enemy’s, perhaps we become something other, something self-obsessed. I’m not often one for changing the lyrics to old hymns; we move menhirs at our peril. Still, I chafe at the verse in “Be Thou My Vision” that sings, “High King of Heaven, my victory won.” My victory? My own? My precious? That’s too easy a thing to say, especially for an American like me. Irish journalist Mary Byrne, in 1905, translated part of the original Old Irish as “With the King of all, with him after victory won by piety.” She followed this with a verse translation that reads, “Beloved Father, hear, hear my lamentations. Timely is the cry of woe of this miserable wretch.” Hardly victorious. Even Eleanor Hull’s later translation, from which the ‘my victory’ line is drawn, has an alternate reading: “High King of heaven, Thou heaven’s bright Sun, O grant me its joys, after vict’ry is won.” There, the ownership of such victory sings more as though it belongs to the Lord than to me, the singer. Real fights don’t feel victorious. The few times I’ve been part of a physical altercation, the emotions were overwhelming. I can revisit with great clarity the moments of fights or possible fights, even down to colors and smells. Adrenaline courses, and the busy scribes of the subconscious start writing in capitals. Given time to reflect, the wolf in me that wishes to glory in some outcome feels eerily akin to the wolf I saw in the other person or persons involved. In arguments of various stripes—fights not with bodies but with words—our ideology is built not only on its coherence but on our tactics and the way we employ them. We cannot become wolves and bullies. What I want—what I used to want—was for people to change their minds. I still desire this, but in hoping so jealously for it, I have felt the vapidity of coveting such a thing. Hearing scripted nonsense in my head—those with whom I disagree finally admitting their wrongfulness—I can also hear my own continual hunger for something more. The little book of Obadiah is a powerful indictment of Edom for the way they stood by, and even profited, as Babylon sacked Jerusalem. This was a divine punishment rendered. Yet even to take a prideful, arm’s-length joy in it, for Edom, was deadly. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls,” says Proverbs 24. “When they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice, or the Lord will see and disapprove, and turn his wrath away from them.” Let’s say, ideologically, that I get everything I want in an argument. Two things happen. Firstly, I find myself in grave danger of an unassailable and all-consuming self-righteousness. Secondly, being in triumphant possession of others’ admissions of error does not make me love them. And I am commanded to love people. Perfect justice belongs to the Lord and shall be rendered in His time only. Kairos, not chronos. Adam Whipple Do not hear in this a disavowal of orthodoxy or of non-contradiction. There is always room for discussion. We follow Scripture, and we pray the Spirit guides us into all truth. It is natural, in most disagreements, that someone is wrong. Yet if Scripture cannot be broken, I can also depend on the fact that, on some level, the person who is wrong is me. Regarding cruelties both large and small, we look for earthly justice—insofar as we may render it—to reflect Christ’s justice. As lawyers may note, this is a great way to beat our heads against a wall. Our justice system is not perfect and must never be recreated due to its native fallenness. Our native fallenness. Perfect justice belongs to the Lord and shall be rendered in His time only. Kairos , not chronos . I love the new-seeming focus in school systems and parent groups on the dangers of bullying. We must continually confront ourselves with the harm that we cause and, in following Jesus (and by His own grace), make efforts to better serve our neighbors. Part of that, I think, means not becoming bullies ourselves: refusing to cheer when the cruel are punished. This confrontation of the self means recognizing that cruelty, since the Fall, is seeded like a poison plant in the heart of each of us. I, for one, am thoroughly exhausted by my own continued belligerence, along with that of everyone else. It feels as though a combative spirit is demanded of me, a constant sword. In better moments, I want nothing so much as to lay it down. Chased down for years now by a Sho Baraka line, by the book of Proverbs, and by my own addiction to shifts in the earthly power dynamic, I finally wrote a poem to codify my thoughts, or at least to wrestle with them. I’m not sure it is complete, but here it is in part. from “ Fear and Trembling, Southbound, 2022” “Do I want peace, or do I want power so I can try it?” —Sho Baraka Once, we came easy, intuiting and fearful, to biting tongues, thin-lipped when bullies got theirs. Darian MacMahan sniffed out trouble to taste it, for example, another grade school farm-punk laurel-crowned by hiding his fears in cruelty. He bet our Sunday school teacher, a Navy Seal, that he could whip him in a straight wrestling match, till amid a chorus of laughing boys, the man tied him in a granny knot in our small basement classroom and sat on him; it was different than mornings of sandpaper nerves when going to school again meant walking past the boy, past his orbit of hungry sycophants, knowing his father had chastened him after a phone call the previous evening: your own parents, confronting. Then after the boy died early, drunk-wrecked, the reverend shooed away the unsure gang guzzling piss-cheap beer in the churchyard, grasping with Protestant, redneck blindness the gut-deep emotion of an Irish wake. They were still boys, and gone was their leader, flame-to-glory in boondock martyrdom. Now in every wiry, bookish child is a skeeving, rat-hearted thing that gnaws the faces of bullies until they weep penance. What we hope to know by grace, unspoken, is that not all hungers can be quelled. Some grow like crocodiles, to fill available space.

by Janna Barber We could never go back and be strangers All our secrets are mixed and distilled But you’ve taught me to temper my anger And you’ve learned what it’s like to be still Jason Isbell sings these lines in a song called “Running With Our Eyes Closed,” which is also the title of a new documentary by Sam Jones that follows the recording and release of Reunions –the chart-topping record put out by Isbell and his band, The 400 Unit, in early 2020. “Jason Isbell is one of those songwriters that makes you feel like you know him and he knows you,” Jones, the director, says from the jump. “This collection of songs are some of the most personal he’s ever written so I wanted to discover where the life and the art connect.” Twenty-two minutes into the documentary we’re treated to a scene of Isbell belting out a heartbreaking ballad called “Dreamsicle” that delves into his chaotic childhood rooted in small-town Alabama and his parents’ divorce when he was an adolescent. “There was a pretty big religious undertone to everything down there,” Isbell says, and this preacher’s kid from Arkansas can relate. Creative Writing classes regularly teach students about three kinds of stories: Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy, but Isbell says there’s essentially one kind of story, “Will you listen to what my life is like and let’s compare?” After Isbell finishes singing, he joins his wife, Amanda Shires, under the soundboard and they share a quiet moment holding hands as the vocals replay and you understand just how deep this song cuts for everyone in the room. It was at this point in the documentary that I began wishing for a happy ending to Jason’s (and perhaps my own) story. I’ve been listening to Isbell since 2017, when songs like “Cumberland Gap” and “Anxiety” became a regular part of my husband’s kitchen rituals. Whether he’s cleaning up after dinner or preparing to try out a new recipe, John usually has loud music blaring from the Google speaker as he putters around the kitchen, and after twenty-five years, I can tell what kind of mood he’s in based on the playlist. That Spring was a particularly tough one as we prepared for our oldest to fly the coop. Lyrics like, “Even with my lover sleeping close to me / I’m wide awake and I’m in pain” and “Mama said ‘God won’t give you too much to bear’ / Might be true in Arkansas but I’m a long long way from there” provided some companionship in that season for our grief, anger, and fear. As we worried endlessly over the future, life felt a lot like this chorus from “24 Frames”: You thought God was an architect, now you know He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow And everything you built that’s all for show, goes up in flames In 24 frames Isbell’s songs from the last few albums cover everything from his own struggles with addiction to his longings to change Southern culture. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the level of intimacy this film sheds on Isbell’s early life—particularly the storms his marriage has weathered over the last ten years. These storms have produced songs like “Cover Me Up” and “It Gets Easier,” both powerful anthems, that also carry the potential to trigger former addicts as well as victims of domestic violence. The documentary does not end with the entire Isbell family sitting in church on Sunday morning–the neat and tidy ending my crooked heart longs for, but it does show an authentic story of redemption. And if Christianity has taught me anything, it’s that redemption is messy and difficult, rather than clean and easy. Which reminds me of the main character in the song “River.” He’s a man who’s done terrible, awful things, but the melody feels like a lullaby, and Isbell ends the song with these words: The river is my savior She’s running to the sea And to reach her destination Is to simply cease to be And running ’til you’re nothing Sounds a lot like being free So I’ll lay myself inside her And I’ll let her carry me The initial savior in Isbell’s life is Shires, as she helped him get on the road to recovery; by the end of the film, it’s clear that Isbell needs more. Shire’s sacrifices are not capable of providing a lasting solution for all his sins. As Isbell attests when speaking about his mother’s failed attempts to change his father’s behavior in the early nineties, “For a long time I thought that was possible,” he says. “And… it’s not, turns out.” Isbell’s story, as it turns out, is just as complicated as either of his parents, but this movie sparks hope in my heart as it bears witness to a life that’s still in process, just like mine.

Karen Swallow Prior. Photo © Ashlee Glen I (Joel J Miller) first met Karen Swallow Prior a decade ago while working at Thomas Nelson as vice president of editorial and acquisitions. I signed her book Fierce Convictions—a biography of British social reformer, educator, and abolitionist Hannah More—back in 2013. I’ve followed and benefitted from Prior’s work ever since. She’s written and edited several other books, including (most recently) The Evangelical Imagination, On Reading Well, and Booked. Her guide to the classics series for B&H Publishing features such titles as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, and The Scarlet Letter. Beyond her books, Prior’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Christianity Today, First Things, Vox, and several other publications. She also pens a monthly column for Religion News Service and has recently started her own newsletter here on Substack, The Priory. In this conversation, Prior and I talk about the role of imagination in shaping our experience of the world—whether we realize it or not. Joel Miller: As I read your new book, The Evangelical Imagination, I reflected on the role imagination plays in our daily experience. We know the world through both external sensation and internal imagination, but even the external is filtered through our imagination because it’s how we make meaning of what we sense. Our entire experience is one of the imagination. Karen Swallow Prior: Exactly. Imagination is so much more than just the obvious, creative activity we tend to think of when we think about “using” our imagination. All of our thinking, dreaming, and processing relies on the imagination. As you said, our entire experience! JM: In the 1990s, it was popular in some circles to talk about worldview. Since Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in 2007, it seems more popular to speak in terms of social imaginary, a term you put to good use. What do these concepts share and how do they differ? KSP: This is such an important question. The two concepts are related but refer to very different elements of thinking. Worldview is the conscious, rational application of beliefs or principles to some specific, concrete question or issue. It is a very cognitive and intentional activity. Social imaginaries, as Charles Taylor describes them, are precognitive, communal pools of inherited or traditional visions, assumptions, myths, metaphors, and so on. These lurk beneath the surface, often driving or directing our sense of how things should go, whether we realize it or not. Obviously, there are thoughts that can fit into either category. But a social imaginary contains elements that we often don’t know are there until something causes us to realize such an assumption exists. That something might be an experience in a different culture where expectations differ, or a conversation or book (ahem!) that brings to the surface something assumed that is not a conscious, chosen belief or understanding. For example, a Christian might apply a biblical worldview in deciding how to vote. But the sense that it is a duty of a responsible citizen to vote might originate from within a particular social imaginary. JM: You’ve written a bookish memoir, Booked, along with a very popular book on how to read well, On Reading Well. What role do books play in shaping our imaginations? KSP: Books, of course, are not the only way to shape our imaginations. As we noted above, humans use the imagination all the time. But books—stories in particular—expand our imaginations with materials, images, characters, events, outcomes, possibilities, people, problems, solutions, disasters, delights, and so much more than we’d ever “see” in our minds without them. We could say the same of any works of the imagination—film, music, and so on. But I do think there is something inherently more rigorous to the mind (and therefore the imagination) about worlds created by words. Words must be translated into images, feelings, sensations, and experiences. Words are more mediated, requiring more from us, and therefore yielding more for us. JM: Are there ways of being more intentional about that shaping? KSP: Absolutely. And it’s not an all-or-nothing deal. Whatever our entertainment/leisure time diet is, we can always be more intentional about taking in more of the good, true, and beautiful and less of the easy, comforting, and familiar. If it takes a year to read one great classical work, you’ll have read that work when the year is over. It will stay with you forever no matter how long it takes. You can also be intentional about shutting out more of the noise (no easy feat these days). That’s something I’m working on myself because, in my case, my life centers on the good stuff—but I have also been drawn in too often and too easily to the bad stuff (the latest Twitter dustup or church scandal or whatever). It’s not that we ought to ignore or escape from the real world. But it’s about being more intentional with what we do in our discretionary time to form our minds, tastes, and imaginations toward a desire for the good. Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books JM: One of the points you make in The Evangelical Imagination is that a massive overlap exists between Victorian and evangelical sensibilities since they were concurrent social movements. That seems true today as well with American Christianity. How do we tease out what’s Christian from what’s merely American? KSP: Well, this is really what I’m trying to model in The Evangelical Imagination. The fact is that the Victorian Age, taking place during the reign of the British Empire, affected all of the world, especially America. So what we see in contemporary American evangelicalism was shaped significantly by Victorian culture. But what I’m trying to show in the book is that it doesn’t matter what culture a Christian society is or was part of or developed alongside. The task will always be the same: to distinguish between what is cultural and what is eternal. We will always be products of our culture to some degree. And that isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just a matter of discerning the difference. I was explaining to a friend recently, for example, it’s not wrong to have an altar call or ask people to raise their hands to make a decision for Christ (something I discuss in the book). But it is wrong to assume that this method is universal and necessary for all church gatherings across time and place and that those who don’t practice it are wrong. Yet those who have grown up without knowing anything else can find themselves assuming that churches that don’t use this modern practice are somehow less Christian. That’s another example of an assumption that is part of the social imaginary. JM: Americans tend to be highly individualistic and therefore prone to biases and blindspots when it comes to larger social constructs. What impact do you think that has on seeing the role of institutions and shaping our imaginations? KSP: This is an important point. As I said above, the duty of distinguishing between what is cultural and what is eternal in our faith applies to all Christians in all times and places. Yet I do think this task of distinguishing is a bit harder for contemporary Americans because of the way we have been formed—as you say, more individualistic, more autonomous, and so forth. Our less communal culture puts up particular obstacles to seeing the way a social imaginary works. JM: Since we presuppose most of the stories and metaphors that shape our imaginations, we’re mostly unaware of them and how they function in our lives. What can we do to become more aware of these formative stories and metaphors? I think the first step is to recognize that language itself is metaphorical. This understanding comes more easily for those who study other languages. (Think of the difference, for example, between what we say in English about the weather—it is cold—as opposed to the same idea in French—it makes the cold. It’s a subtle difference but shows how the same experience can be expressed in terms of existence or createdness.) Once you become aware of how language itself is metaphorical, it is easier to see the patterns and archetypes in a culture for expressing those ideas, even the Christian ones. Conversion, for example (to which I devote a chapter in the book) is both a key Christian concept and one central to human experience. We see conversion stories everywhere! JM: Final question: You can invite any three authors for a lengthy meal. Language is not an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and how does the conversation go? KSP: I am inviting Jonathan Swift (eighteenth-century British satirist and Anglican priest), Flannery O’Connor (twentieth-century American Catholic writer), and Gustave Flaubert (nineteenth-century French novelist). O’Connor brings her mother, Flaubert brings the wine, but Swift is not allowed to contribute the main dish. Regina (O’Connor’s mother) dozes off, but the rest of us stay up until 1 a.m. discussing Romanticism-versus-Realism, satire, empathy, and consubstantiation-versus-transubstantiation-versus-“doing this in remembrance of Me.” No one changes their mind about the Lord’s Supper, but O’Connor leaves with a new short story idea. [This conversation was first published at MillersBookReview.com, where Joel J. Miller publishes essays, reviews, and other bookish diversions.]

It is only natural that those of an artistic temperament will be drawn to the natural world. Forms of human creativity are almost bound to be captivated by aspects of divine creativity. Consider the landscapes of the Hudson River School (like those of Frederic Church or Thomas Cole); or the profound attention to nature’s exuberance in Vincent van Gogh or kaleidoscopic shifts in light in Claude Monet; or the human realities in the biblical story as captured by Rembrandt or Giotto. Then, when it comes to words, just a couple of minutes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s company will awaken us to what we’re constantly surrounded by but too often overlook. Yet it should come as no surprise that the world of birds is a profound inspiration for musicians, those perhaps more likely to be captured by the aural than the visual. Of course, the avian world has all kinds of wonders to recommend it: being able to fly is pretty cool, for one thing; then there are the colours, gaudy and gratuitous. But above all, there is its sound. Even in big cities, close attention to the dawn chorus is surely worth fewer hours in bed on occasion. This is divine music! How else can you explain it? Concerto in D ma ‘Il Gardellino’ (RV428 – Allegro-Cantabile-Allegro) Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741, Italian) Sébastien Marq (flute), Ensemble Matheus, Jean-Christophe Spinosi (cond.) Where possible, I try to introduce new names to each 5&1 list (although today’s has a couple of repeat offenders, inevitably). But I can’t quite believe it’s taken twenty-three lists to welcome the renowned red-haired priest of Venice onto the podium. He was an ordained catholic priest who spent many years teaching in an orphanage for abandoned girls. The music there was of such high quality that people would travel from all over Europe to hear it. Vivaldi was prolific and influential—J. S. Bach, his junior by seven years, was a notable fan—and wrote for many instrumental combinations alongside his many choral and operatic works. This short flute concerto (a concerto is usually a piece for solo instrument plus orchestra, commonly with a standard fast-slow-fast three movement structure, as here) has the name ‘Il Gardellino,’ meaning ‘goldfinch.’ No prizes for figuring out why flutes and piccolos are commonly used to convey birdsong. You might think we’re listening to a cuckoo at the start. Perhaps goldfinches in the Venetian republic were particularly good mimics. In Vivaldi’s mind, though, they can certainly sing their hearts out (cantabile means songlike, after all). The Swan of Tuonela (Op. 22, No. 2) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) Barry Davis (cor anglais), Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) We’ve flown a thousand miles from the Venetian lagoon and find ourselves in the frozen mists of mythical Finland. Sibelius had a Tolkienesque fascination with Finland’s mythological epic, the Kalevala. He wrote an early orchestral suite called Four Legends from the Kalevala, of which this is the second movement. Admittedly, we don’t have the swan’s cry evoked here, so strictly speaking it doesn’t entirely belong on this playlist. But it is a gorgeous piece, and it is about a bird, and Sibelius gives it a unique voice. Tuonela was the realm of the dead in Finnish myth (akin to Hades in Greek myth, the underworld where all people end up) and the eponymous Swan hangs out there, generally being sacred and mysterious. The epic’s hero, Lemminkäinen has been told to kill this swan (you can just tell that’s a bad move, can’t you?) and the music depicts the mysterious bird minding its own underworld business (as it would). The swan’s haunting call is portrayed by the cor anglais (known as the English Horn in north America), a beautiful instrument in the oboe family. Just stunning. Livre d’orgue: IV. Chants d’oiseaux (‘Organ book: 4. Birdsong’) Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992, French) Olivier Latry (organ) Okay, I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like this piece. You’ll probably be thinking on first hearing that it is a grim cacophony of mechanical noises and arbitrary notes. But bear with me. Olivier Messiaen was an organist and composer, one of the most influential of the twentieth century. He was also a devout Catholic and passionate ornithologist. After France fell to the Nazi Reich in 1940, he was made a prisoner of war, during which he wrote the extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time, a difficult piece that is endlessly fascinating and incredibly powerful. But unlike many Twitchers (you know, those obsessive ornithological types who trample the world to bag rare bird sightings), Messiaen applied his profound musical knowledge to the study of their songs. He would listen very carefully, trying to notate all the variations and fluctuations. Naturally, they don’t follow standard rules of western musical harmony and the like, but they do display clear patterns and forms. He would then include these little motifs in all kinds of compositions, to provide incidental colour or as a primary focus. Next time you’re out in the countryside, try to listen with a musical ear. How might you try to replicate a blackbird’s call or nightingale’s song? Even for the most adept at music theory, it’s hard! But so interesting. Because if you believe in a creator, it follows that their songs are divinely composed. Having considered this, now listen to this short organ piece. Concentrate and imagine a walk in the countryside. I hope you’ll gradually find yourself more attuned to the glorious sounds of woodlands than the dehumanised hell of a mechanical world. I enter the meadow beside the hills Where the fern casts its net of foliage. And I hear speaking the soft, divine voice Of calm nature, the milieu of birds. —Cécile Sauvage A Farewell to St. Petersburg: No. 10, The Lark (arr. M. Balakirev) Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857, Russian) Tara Kamangar (piano) Glinka was one of the first home-grown composers to gain fame throughout the territories of the Russian empire. He was a key figure in the development of Russian music, through his orchestral works, operas and songs particularly. His song-cycle A Farewell to St. Petersburg was written in 1840 for voice and piano, setting twelve poems by the playwright Nestor Kukolnik. The tenth in the cycle, The Lark, is apparently quite sentimental and even mawkish in the original, but the melody is gorgeous. Perhaps this is the reason why many opt for this arrangement for solo piano by composer, conductor and pianist, Mily Balakirev (leader of Russian composers known as ‘The Five,’ Glinka protégés who sought to create a distinctive Russian sound in music—the others were César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikola Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin). Laideronette; Apothéose. Le jardin féerique (Ma mère l’Oye suite) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Orchestre Symphonique De Montreal, Charles Dutoit (cond.) Okay, so this is definitely stretching things. Ravel wrote a set of piano duets under the title of Ma mère l’Oye (‘Mother Goose’) for the young children of some dear friends. Mother Goose was the imaginary author of some French fairy tales, which subsequently gained popularity over the Channel in Britain in the 18th century. He later arranged it for orchestral suite and combined some of the elements into individual movements. This one combines Laideronnette (the Little Ugly Girl who becomes the Empress of the Pagodas) with Le Jardin féerique (the fairy garden). This is gorgeous, lush musical story-telling at its best, and is one of the pieces that made me fall in love with Ravel’s music in the first place. But if I’m honest, I’ve only included it in this list because it has a type of bird in the title. Gli Uccelli ‘The Birds’ (1928) Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936, Italian) Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Respighi is best known, perhaps, for his three Roman tone poems (the Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals) but it was The Birds which I first heard through a music teacher when I was about twelve. I loved it immediately. Respighi would be influential on a 20th century musical movement known as neo-classicism, spearheaded by Igor Stravinsky in particular. It was a reaction against (isn’t everything?!) the emotional density and melodrama of late Romanticism, as they perceived it. They sought inspiration from the more disciplined and distilled music of the classical period from the late 18th century. You can certainly hear the echoes of a musical world with which Vivaldi, for example, would have been very familiar. Taking its cue from several classical pieces which sought to notate birdsong (much like Messiaen two centuries later), Respighi depicts doves, hens, nightingales and (inescapably) cuckoos in five movements: Prelude La colomba La gallina L’usignuolo Il cucù Bonus! No. 4, Liten Fugl ‘Little Bird’ (Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, 1886) Edvard Grieg (1843-1907, Norwegian) Nelson Freire (piano) Finally, an added bonus. It should have taken Mother Goose’s place, but I just couldn’t bring myself to delete it. This is a piano miniature, one of sixty-six so-called Lyric Pieces that Grieg wrote throughout his life. It’s as delicate and fragile as the little bird it depicts.

Without warning, Twelfth Night opens with Duke Orsino’s appearance on stage. He’s not alone, of course, but accompanied by a grand retinue which includes ‘Musicians playing’. If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. (Act 1, Sc 1) Orsino feels that the only way to be cured of his lovesick heart is to have too much music, in the same way that appetites are cured by eating too much food! Whether he's right is for you to decide. But music was as significant for Shakespeare's Comedies as it was for the rest of his output. Now, many come away disappointed from their initial experience of Shakespeare’s Comedies for one simple reason. Quite frankly, they’re not that funny. Not in a Saturday Night Live or Monty Python sense, let alone the sophisticated brilliance of Tom Stoppard’s plays. But that, of course, is to make a category mistake. To describe these plays as ‘comedies’ is to take a cue from the ancient Greeks, with the difference between comedy and tragedy being primarily one of trajectory. The former end well while the latter end badly for the protagonist(s). This is not to say that Shakespeare is unfunny; there are some wonderful moments of laugh-out-loud humour and they’re not restricted to the Comedies. The tensions resulting from Macbeth’s regicide, for example, are superbly released immediately by the drunk doorkeeper. Shakespeare is always breaking dramatic boundaries and so even some of the plays in today’s list defy strict categorisation. So long as expectations are reordered, there is so much to love and relish in these plays. No wonder composers have been creatively inspired by them. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 1:1-3 (Op. 60, 1960) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) Alfred Deller (countertenor), Elizabeth Harwood (soprano), Choir of Downside School etc, London Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Britten (cond.) Fitting to start here having enjoyed Midsummer in the northern hemisphere just last week. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a weird play, full of relationships gone awry and gender politics, set around various weddings in the Dukedom of Athens (ruled by Duke Theseus who is about to marry his fiancée Hippolyta). It’s a world that seems curiously like Tudor England (funny that). But with fairies. Not necessarily the kinds of fairies you might expect, mind you, because they’re ruled by King Oberon, aided and abetted by his impish sidekick Puck. He’s got his own domestic difficulties with Queen Titania, so for all the chaos he and Puck bring to the human world, he rather has his own house to set in order. Britten was one of the 20th century masters of opera (we have already heard a couple of excerpts from his Peter Grimes). His setting of Shakespeare’s play seeks to convey the alienness and threats of fairy meddling in the affairs of men. We can hear that in the eerie slides in the orchestra’s introduction and especially in his decision to make Oberon the central character and sung by a countertenor (an adult man who sings falsetto). Countertenors were common in Handel’s time and were regularly used in choral music, but they had largely fallen out of fashion. Britten’s opera was instrumental in resurrecting interest in opera in the 1960s. This recording, conducted by Britten himself, features the great Alfred Deller as Oberon. It was for him that the part was specifically written and he sings it with a strange majesty, here giving orders to Puck and the other sprites. Up and Down, Up and Down (from Such Sweet Thunder, 1957) Duke Ellington (1899-1974, American) Duke Ellington & His Orchestra Puck is the character in the Duke’s mind in this track. We heard Hank Cinq in the History Plays list. The mood here feels quite similar, putting one in mind of the confident Sprite-about-town. Puck is up to his old tricks but he’s invulnerable, safe in the knowledge that he’s doing his king’s bidding. After all, who can possibly take on a fairy monarch and win? Though, to be strictly accurate, Titania is no pushover and is certainly a heady match for her husband. Ellington is not particularly concerned for the eeriness of the fairy realm here, but he’s certainly out to catch the swagger. Puck might be other-worldly but he’s also mischievous and that is here in dollops. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Serenade to Music (1938) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) Carla Huhtanen (soprano), Emily D’angelo (mezzo), Lawrence Wiliford (tenor), Tyler Duncan (baritone), Elmer Iseler Singers, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Peter Oundjian (cond.) A different play now, and one that isn’t an obvious candidate for comedy, even by Greek standards (but this is how it was placed in the First Folio). I don’t really know it at all, having never read it through nor seen it performed. I just know the odd purple passage. But it’s included here because of this piece of choral brilliance. I suspect it’s not quite to everybody’s taste. Vaughan-Williams is laying it on thick: the musical equivalent of triple layers of double cream, meringue and large drifts of icing sugar. But I am unashamed. I just love it. It is a serenade to music after all. These are the opening words: How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. —”Serenade to Music,” Ralph Vaughan-Williams Vaughan-Williams took various lines from Act V of the play, setting them to music for full orchestra with sixteen (yes, 16!!) solo singers. It was written as a tribute to Sir Henry Wood, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first Promenade concert (which continue to this day in the Royal Albert Hall as the BBC Proms, the world’s largest music festival). Composer and conductor together chose the soloists from the cream of 1930s British music to perform the premiere. However, since assembling such a group is no small challenge, RV-W made another arrangement for four soloists, which is the version here. THE TEMPEST Prospero’s Magic (1991, for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books) Michael Nyman (1944- , English) Michael Nyman Band Michael Nyman is much more than a film composer and yet, to many, he’s best known for the soundtracks to Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Piano, and many of Peter Greenaway’s visually arresting and stunning but, frankly, pretty disturbing films. But you can admire Nyman’s music without having to love the films (and naturally, vice-versa). Prospero’s Books is Greenaway’s version of The Tempest, another of the First Folio’s comedies (although it is far too complex for that). It’s a deeply fascinating play and one of my favourites. I’ll never forget an amazing RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) production in the 90s with the much-missed Ian ‘Bilbo’ Holm as Prospero and a surprising Simon Russell-Beale as Ariel. Greenaway cast the aging John Gielgud as Prospero (who had a lifelong ambition to film the play) and it was to be his final cinematic appearance. It was also to prove Nyman’s last collaboration with the director and he drew on several cues written for previous films. His style is minimalist (akin to the Philip Glass and John Adams tracks from previous 5&1s) but there is a grandeur to this piece. He creates a neo-Baroque soundworld, which seems vaguely fitting. But it is unsettling too, as befits a narrative about an inscrutable magus with magical powers. The Tempest Overture (Op. 109) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka Saraste (cond.) Sibelius is the composer par excellence to capture vast, frigid landscapes and the terrors of wild weather. This is on brilliant display in the overture to his incidental music for a 1926 production in Copenhagen. It would prove to be one of his very last compositions despite living for another three decades (dying in 1957 at 92). The storms that led to the shipwrecks on Prospero’s island are vivid and thus prove the perfect way to open the play. The unpredictability of the winds and waves are hard to miss. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Op. 21, 1826; Op. 61, 1842) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy(1809-1847, German) Judi Dench (narrator), Kathleen Battle (soprano), Frederica von Stade (mezzo), Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa (cond.) We come full-circle to the most famous setting of Midsummer, by a composer whose first 5&1 nod this is. That is a little awkward since Mendelssohn was prodigious and brilliant (as was his sister Fanny, an accomplished composer and performer in her own right). It is quite possible that without him, the modern obsession with J. S. Bach would never have come about, since it was his performances of a ‘rediscovered’ St. Matthew Passion and other masterpieces that rescued Bach from cruel obscurity. Be that as it may, Mendelssohn originally wrote an overture inspired by Shakespeare’s play aged only 17, although it was not intended for a specific production. It was an instant hit and contributed to his growing international fame. Sixteen years later he returned to the play on a special commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia to write incidental music to accompany a production of the play. If Britten captures the sinister chills of the fairy world, and Duke Ellington conveys its mischievous swagger, then Mendelssohn’s fairies are impish but fun. But of course, the play is about so much more than fairies, which is why the incidental music captures so many other moods and narrative developments. Several numbers have become popular as standalone pieces, including the Wedding March (which has now become almost too clichéd, although that’s hardly Mendelssohn’s fault). So, it is interesting to hear a recording of the whole work with every section in its right context. This performance is precisely that, complete with readings by the incomparable Shakespearean Judi Dench. This is music of unalloyed vivacity and joie-de-vivre; you won’t hear much darkness in Mendelssohn unlike with his Romantic era contemporaries. That is one reason for some unfairly dismissing his music as light and lightweight; either that or it is plain old anti-Semitism that lies behind it. No, we all need injections of joy, perhaps now more than ever, for which Mendelssohn is an ever-reliable envoy.

How on earth do you pick six compositions to represent an entire continent? Answer: You don’t. Because you can’t. So perhaps this is the first of a few more Latin 5&1s to come. My knowledge of what is out there is patchy, to say the least, but here are a few gems I’ve picked up over the years, with a bit of a geographical spread thrown in. Classical music, as conventionally understood, is not often associated with Latin America, though, as we will see, this is a situation that needs rectifying. Some extraordinary soundworlds were being created long before the Conquistadores arrived from European shores, and together with the cultural impact of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa, the musical mix that resulted is unique. To put it at its most simplistic, we could say that the two key musical influences were the Catholic Church and the complex rhythms of percussion and dance; and often, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Missa de Lima: I. Kyrie (1730s) Roque Ceruti (1683-1760, Peruvian) Barbara Kusa, Flora Grill (sopranos), Ximena Biondo (contralto), Pablo Pollitzer (tenor), Ensamble Louis Berger, Ricardo Massun (cond.) Ceruti was Italian by birth and the music of his homeland clearly influenced his own work (to give some context, Antonio Vivaldi was only five years his senior). He was recruited by the Viceroy of Peru to become the conductor of his court orchestra in Lima, and he would remain there for the rest of his life. Like his countless European counterparts, he would therefore have focused on composing on music for both court and chapel. This track is the first component of Ceruti’s setting of the Catholic Mass, dedicated to his adopted city. As it opens, this liturgical cry for the Lord’s mercy (kyrie eleison) could easily be mistaken for a setting by Bach or Vivaldi but as it develops, something about the rhythms in both instruments and soloists hints at a different context. Misa Criolla: I. Kyrie (1963-64) Ariel Ramirez (1921-2010, Argentine) José Carreras (tenor), Jorge Padin (percussion), Coral Salvé de Laredo, Sociedad Coral de Bilbao, José Luis Ocejo (cond.) Fast forward over two centuries and the world is radically changed. Spain’s rule over the continent is a distant memory and the Catholic church is a very different institution. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) has started shaking things up. No longer was Latin the only, exclusively permissible language of the mass, for one thing. So, the Argentine composer Ariel Ramirez lost little time in making the most of the new freedom. It is not just the text of the mass that is now in vernacular Spanish, but the music is too. It is hard to imagine this originating from anywhere other than South America, and the Andes in particular. Scored for choir and soloist (who can be soprano or tenor), this recording is led by the sublime voice of the Spanish tenor, José Carreras. With his flawless breath control and tuning, he seems to float the plea for mercy all the way up to heaven’s throne-room, while the choir chant it on its way. Dos Aires Candomberos: No. 1, Nubes de Buenos Aires Máximo Diego Pujol (1957- , Argentine) Guido Bombardieri (Clarinet) & Gabriele Zanetti (Guitar) We have now travelled far beyond the cathedral walls into the plazas and community spaces of the towns. Under the weight of Spain’s influence in the region, it’s hardly surprising that the guitar is so important to Latin American music. In this track we hear it enjoying a thorough work out. The Candombe was a dance style that originated in Uruguay among African slaves, many of whom had been trafficked from Angola particularly. This spread throughout the Southern American countries where there were former slaves and other African diaspora communities, such as in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. With this piece, Argentine composer and guitarist Máximo Pujol uses various forms associated with the Candombe style as one of his Two Candombe Airs. This, the first, means ‘Clouds of Buenos Aires’ and was originally scored for guitar and flute. This arrangement for Clarinet is even better (give me a clarinet over a flute more or less every time). The piece is by turns evocative, mesmerising, thrilling, romantic and utterly Latin. Hard to believe it is all squeezed into just a few minutes. Dame Albricia Mano Anton Gaspar Fernandes (1566-1629, Mexican) Grupo de Canto Coral, Grupo Canto Choral Baroque Orchestra, Nestor E. Adrenacci (cond.) Further north to Spanish Mexico now and back into church confines. But musically, we are far from constrained. The influences of mediaeval polyphony (choral music featuring the interplay of several different lines simultaneously) and early European Baroque music are clearly audible. This is a four-part anthem, a common feature in churches for centuries. But as this performance illustrates brilliantly, contained within its simple melodies are the rhythms of both Africa and indigenous American populations. So the use of percussion and guitars or lutes was entirely authentic. The style was known as Guineo (i.e. from western Africa) and followed a standard call and response model. But the most striking element is the language, which is a kind of Spanish creole, an organic dialect forged by a mix of Africans, indigenous Nahua-speakers, plus some Portuguese thrown in for good measure. The result of this is that I can’t figure out what on earth they’re all singing about. Sounds great though! Tango por una cabeza (1935, arr. Armen Babakhanian) Carlos Gardel (1887-1935, Argentine) Cadence Ensemble There are many dance rhythms that deserve a place on this list. The samba, rumba and salsa, of coruse; then there’s the paso doble, the Cha cha cha, and the bossa nova. I could go on (after googling, naturally). But the one that just has to be given airtime on this first Latin 5&1 is surely the tango. It is the epitome of Argentine style and who better to turn to than Carlos Gardel. This one, ‘por una cabeza’ (a horse-racing term which refers to winning ‘by a head’; in other words, a very close thing), is one of the most well-known. I’m sure you’ll recognise it, even if you couldn’t put a name to it. Gardel was originally born France to a single mother, Berthe, and they emigrated to Buenos Aires when the boy was three. He was to become the consummate entertainer (actor with movie-star good looks, singer, songwriter, composer), indisputably the greatest tango-singer in history and revered the world-over. He was killed in a plane-crash in Colombia along with a group of other musicians and thousands travelled to Montevideo to see his body lying in state. This arrangement evokes all the overwrought thrills and undercurrents of aggression for which the tango is known—and in a rather wonderful sign of how globalised we all are, it is performed by an Armenian folk music group, Cadence. They preserve all the authentically Argentine elements, with piano, guitars and band accompanied by the bandoneon, the concertina-like instrument that is so integral to that tango sound. Yet with a knowing wink and a knowing nod, the piano opens the proceedings with a homage to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz! How’s that for a cultural melting pot?! Such joy! Chôros No. 8 “Dance Chôro” (1925) Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959, Brazilian) Linda Bustani & Ilan Rechtman (pianos), Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, John Neschling (cond.) Finally, we come to the Brazilian master, Heitor Villa-Lobos. His output was simply enormous and I’ve only found myself beginning to explore it in recent months. He was a guitarist and conductor in his own right, quite apart from his composing (there are over 2000 works to his name). So I feel like I’m in the foothills of the Himalayas. Or perhaps Andes is more appropriate (despite them bypassing Brazil altogether)? He was a great champion of Brazilian culture and identity while at the same time drawing from rich seams from the European classical tradition. He was especially obsessed with J. S. Bach and composed nine suites for all kinds of instrumental combinations under the title Bachianas Brasileiras (meaning something like ‘Brazilian Bach pieces’). But for this week’s longer piece, I’ve gone for Chôros No. 8, an orchestral work on a grand scale. In Portuguese, a chôro is ‘weeping’ or ‘a cry’. Villa-Lobos wrote 15 chôros, for all kinds of different combinations or even soloists (just as he did for the Bachianas Brasileiras). This one is scored for a full symphony orchestra plus several surprises: two harps, saxophone, a large percussion section, and two grand pianos! Talk about a wall of sound. This is dense and It’s not hard to hear why it was nicknamed “le fou huitiême” (‘the mad eighth’) after its Parisian premiere. It is complex and wild, with repeated rhythms and snippets of melody, all weaved together into an atmospheric and at times alien whole. Just stunning.

The great jazz bass player Charlie Haden once said: The bass, no matter what kind of music you’re playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything. —Charlie Haden This is as true of vocal as it is of instrumental music. Unless you’re listening carefully, the bass line(s) might meander merrily around without you taking the slightest notice. But remove the bassline and the piece suddenly seems unstable or even insubstantial. I drive my family crazy because I tend to hum along to bass lines when listening to stuff (which to be fair is quite a ‘niche’ thing to do). But listening specifically for the lower parts can be a lot of fun. On top of it all, basses get some juicy roles. The caricature is that sopranos and tenors get all the glory-hunting romantic leads whereas altos and basses are relegated to ‘best supporting’ or ‘character’ roles. But there are some fantastic bass parts out there, once you start digging around. To get everything into perspective, however, we must head east, to Russia and the treasured depths of the Orthodox church. Because the big question is, how low can you actually go? Evening Bells (Вечерний звон) Alexander Alybayev (1787-1851); text by Ivan Kozlov (1779-1840) both Russian Vladimir Miller, Mikhail Kruglov, Sergey Krytzhenko (The Three Bassi Profundi) & Mikhail Buzin (piano) This track opens with a piano rendition of the great bells of Moscow as captured musically by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky for his opera Boris Godunov. We then shift into a much-loved 1820s Russian song, based, ironically enough, on a poem by an Englishman. But I’ve picked this recording because of its stunning display of lowness! In operatic terms, the lowest voice (in other words, one that has a range lower than regular basses) is termed Basso Profundo (many technical terms are in Italian because of opera’s roots in Monteverdi and others). In Russian music, their equivalents are oktavists, so called because they tend to sing a whole octave below the regular bass part. They give orthodox acapella music its unique flavour. Think of Middle C. Then go down an octave. Repeat. And repeat again! Yup—three octaves below middle C—we’re almost subsonic here, wallowing in the depths at which whales communicate their greatest intimacies. If you don’t believe me, just listen to these chaps. And keep on listening to the bitter end. After listening to this, you’ll even believe a man can fly. . . or at least launch open-cast mining with just the power of his vocal cords. In this recording we don’t just have one oktavist but three! I defy you to keep a straight face once they get under way, especially when one of them gets into full campanology-mode. So much 2 say (from 1990 album of same name) Cedric Dent, Mervyn Warren (1964- , American) Take 6 And now for something equally spectacular (if aural fireworks can truly be described as a spectacle). I first encountered this acapella group from Alabama while I was at university. A friend who was a choral scholar and destined for professional music introduced me to this album. I was surprised, not least because of its overtly gospel lyrics. But he ignored the words. After all, on most days of term, he could be found in the college chapel singing all kinds of religious stuff while somehow keeping the meaning of it all at arm’s length. It was simply that, as a professional singer in training, he had never heard anything quite like Take 6. It needs to be heard to be believed. The sextet came together in the 1980s at Oakwood College, Huntsville, and have more or less stayed the same since (with only a couple of line-up changes). They’ve won Grammies, Doves and performed at the White House and Saturday Night Live (probably the only 5&1 artist to have done all that so far). Blink and you’ll miss this track; it’s only a minute! I suspect you’ll need to give it several listens just to figure out the magic tricks they squeeze into that minute. The way they slide at around 50 seconds (a glissando, to be specific) in perfect sync is just astonishing. But I picked this one out simply for the use of the bass vocal as a rhythm section. He is the one who holds it all together, providing the song with impetus, harmonic intrigue, and joy, all at once! I don’t think I’d really encountered beatboxing before these guys, so it was a rather overwhelming experience! Bear in mind that no instruments were used in the creation of this track. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth and The People that walked in darkness (from ‘Messiah’) George Frederic Handel (1685-1759, German then English) Christopher Purves (bass), The Sixteen Orchestra and Choir, Harry Christophers (cond.) The first two songs are clearly outliers. The vast majority of mere mortals can only dream of such vocal superpowers. Even so, these two consecutive numbers from Handel’s masterpiece, Messiah, make perfect use of the regular bass voice. Taking the famous verses from Isaiah 60 and then Isaiah 9, Handel conveys a sense of spiritual fog with the creeping strings and the sinuous vocal line. But as soon as he mentions ‘the Lord shall arise’ the tone instantly changes as the fog begins to dissipate. Likewise in the second track, the people seem to be groping in the dark until the light comes. He doesn’t tell the whole story of course in this piece. He doesn’t want to give the whole game away. But listen carefully to how the orchestra reflects the slightest shifts of tone or imagery in the text. It’s hard to imagine another voice managing to convey both Isaiah’s spiritual gravity and peril here better than a bass. Handel was the master of the voice, putting his training in Italian opera to good use in this oratorio. He was a musical revolutionary and many contemporaries objected to his dangerous import into church life of musical styles normally associated with the theatre’s loose morals. But he knew what he was doing and nobody would bat an eyelid today. He sought to dramatize aspects of the gospel story in music and the whole of Messiah is subsequently one of the most performed pieces in history. Ol’ Man River (from Showboat, 1927) Jerome Kern (1885-1945) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1969) both American Sir Willard White (bass), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Carl Davis (cond.) For many in the west in the mid-twentieth century, the bass par excellence was Paul Robeson (1898-1976). A multi-talented African-American singer and political activist who travelled the world, he was instrumental in making this song a hit. It portrays the struggles and hardship of enslaved stevedores working the ships on the mighty Mississippi, contrasting their sweat and efforts with the river’s relentless but effortless current. It’s a poignant song, and unusual in Broadway shows for giving a musical’s signature number to a bass. This recording is much more recent. Sir Willard White is a Jamaican-born Brit who was knighted in 2004. His repertoire is vast and long-lasting—he sang in a production in Vienna even this year while in his seventies. I first saw him live singing Porgy in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, even getting to meet him backstage afterwards. Unfortunately, I was rather overcome by his star power and was completely struck dumb. Awkward. His performance of this song here is glorious—full of pathos and pain but also great presence. “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco m’invitasti,” Don Giovanni (K. 527, Act 2) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Vitalij Kowaljow (Commendatore, bass), Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (Don Giovanni, baritone), Luca Pisaroni (Leporello, bass), Mahler Chamber Orchestra & Vocalensemble Rastatt, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (cond.) The Spanish know him as Don Juan; Lord Byron wrote an epic poem about him but pronounced it Don Jewun, to rhyme with ‘true one’ (the English are petulant like that with foreign words); but because Mozart’s opera was in Italian (using a text by his friend Lorenzo da Ponte), he’s known as Don Giovanni. He is the archetypal womanizing aristocrat, seducing left, right, and centre, aided and abetted by his sidekick Leporello. It’s actually quite a grim story, especially in the light of #MeToo. The surprise, however, is not that such things are depicted on stage, but that the drama occurs within a clearly moral universe in which the feckless and selfish Don does not get away with it. In the final minutes of the opera, he gets his comeuppance. And Mozart’s brilliance is on display here yet again because we have a trio of three totally distinct characters each trying to do something very different. In less reliable hands, a trio of two basses and one baritone would have ended up as an impenetrable aural soup. In Mozart’s it is utterly compelling and fraught in its dramatic and musical intensity. Right at the opera’s start, Don Giovanni tried to seduce Donna Anna, daughter of Don Pedro, the Commendatore (a military commander). He gets caught and is challenged by the old soldier to a duel. Remarkably, Giovanni kills Don Pedro and escapes scot-free. But now at the end of Act 2, in a terrifying scene, a statue of the Commendatore appears with the words ‘Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you.’ He grips his hand and calls on him to repent. The rogue blankly refuses. The statue then drags him down to hell. All the while, Leporello has been hiding in terror under the table. So, listen out for how Mozart ingeniously separates out each character’s predicament and emotional state while ratcheting up the tension and drama in the music. Astonishing and haunting. *The All-Night Vigil (Op. 37, 1915) Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943, Russian) Gloriæ Dei Cantores, The St. Romanos Cappella, Patriarch Tikhon Choir, Washington Master Chorale, Peter Jermihov (cond.) Finally, back to Russia. And Rachmaninov’s much loved All-Night Vigil (commonly called the Vespers). You want to hear how the rumbling deep of the oktavists can possibly blend well with other singers? You’ve come to the right place. In fifteen short movements, these Vespers are a glorious combination of liturgical prayers, taken from the orthodox service of Vespers, Mattins and the service of the First Hour. You can find the texts and their sources here but in particular, listen out for the fifth movement, which in the western church is known as the Nunc Dimittis (Simeon’s song in Luke 2). In this movement, the composer expects his oktavists to descend to a Bb a full three octaves below middle C. When he played through his composition to his friend the choral conductor Nikolai Danilin, the response was sheer astonishment. Danilin shook his head, saying, “Now where on earth are we to find such basses? They are as rare as asparagus at Christmas!” Nevertheless, he did find them. I knew the voices of my countrymen…

There is no guarantee that one’s last words on planet earth will be weighty, profound or even memorable. None of us know the exact hour of our passing from these shadowlands, so the aspiration to leave a representative grand statement is futile. [Please note my resistance here to that preacher’s rent-a-giggle cliché of googling clickbait sites for some famous last words.] Still less can artists ensure that their final work is either representative or weighty. As one might expect, sustaining creativity throughout one’s life is difficult. Many of those who have poured their life’s energies into making new things find that retirement, when it comes, is very welcome! Sibelius, for example, famously composed no major works in the last three decades of his long life. Others have continued to write, but rarely topped the triumphs of their younger selves. This is why this list is remarkable. These pieces are genuine masterpieces in their own right; the fact that each is a last major work only adds to their poignancy. Contrapunctus VIII à 3, The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Rachel Podger (violin), Brecon Baroque Bach never completed ‘The Art of Fugue’ but tinkered and contributed elements to it throughout the last decade of his life. It features a sequence of ‘fugues,’ a form that we have encountered before whereby a theme (or ‘subject’) is repeated in sequence different voices, demonstrating the art of counterpoint. This is the technique of making distinct musical lines work in harmony with each other when played simultaneously. Part of the genius of this work is Bach’s decision to use the same subject for all the movements; each time he adds another layer of complexity. Even just trying to understand this makes the brain hurt; creating music that inspires and satisfies while doing this is little less than miraculous. Bach never specified the instrument(s) the Art of Fugue should be played on, so it has become a proving ground for pianists, organists, string quartets, and even electric guitarists. We will hear an arrangement for a chamber group or small orchestra; one way to listen is to fix your ear to one of the lines and try to follow it as long as you can. The momentum of the music’s logic pulls one along. I find it quite mesmerising! Lacrimosa from Requiem (K626, completed by Sussmayr) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Barbara Bonney (soprano), Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner (cond.) If Peter Shaffer’s brilliant play Amadeus is to be believed, his great rival Antonio Salieri exacts his revenge by covertly commissioning a requiem mass, supposedly with the purpose of driving him to an early grave in some perverted psych-ops strategy. Total nonsense, of course! Yet, what is undoubtedly true is that Mozart died in the course of writing the Requiem, leaving behind only one completed movement and fragments for the rest. So, for the Lacrimosa, we have only the first nine bars (‘measures’ in American!) in his hand. The rest was originally completed on the basis of his jottings and fragments by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr (and it’s his version that is most commonly performed today). Yet, even with those nine bars, the pathos is overwhelming. The text is from the Catholic funeral mass and so don’t expect it to conform to sound protestant theology! Full of tears will be that day when from the ashes shall arise the guilty man to be judged; Therefore spare him, O God, Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them eternal rest. Amen. The music’s poignancy is only deepened by the knowledge that Mozart in all likelihood knew he was dying. Is this his way of mourning for his own imminent passing? He was only 35. Who knows what might have resulted had he lived even five more years? I. Molto Moderato from Piano Sonata in Bb (D. 960, 1828) Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Alfred Brendel How bright some flames shine before they are cruelly extinguished. Schubert was another lost far too young. He was only 31, but his final years brought him bouts of terrible illness and pain (most likely the result of syphilis). He knew he was dying, a fact which seemed to spur him all the more feverishly. In the spring of 1828, Schubert started jotting down ideas for what would become his last three piano sonatas. He was always spinning several compositional plates simultaneously, but there are grounds for thinking that these three (numbered D 958, D 959, and D 960) were the final completed compositions of his short life. And it is this, the third in the trio, to which I find myself constantly returning. It is worth listening to the whole sonata (made up of four movements) in one go. But for now, just focus on the first movement. The initial melody is worthy of a gorgeous song (I’ve mentioned before that Schubert was one of the greatest song-writers in history) and it is filled with yearning beauty. There are few musical moments that give me more teary joy than when that melody resolutely returns. If you want to know how the eighteenth century articulated sehnsucht, you can do a lot worse than immersing yourself in this sonata. Schubert first performed the three sonatas to friends at the end of September. Seven weeks later, he was dead. II. September from Four Last Songs Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Jessye Norman (soprano), Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Kurt Masur (cond.) Strauss lived a long life, experiencing German history at its most turbulent and horrendous. How compromised he became under the Nazis is hotly debated, but one thing is certain. He could justify his reluctant membership of the Nazi Party as a means of protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and (through her) his grandchildren. This no doubt contributed to his being acquitted in the Allies’ denazification process after the war. He composed several songs in 1948, but they were published posthumously under a title given by the publisher: Four Last Songs. He was 84 and already had many masterpieces to his name. How astonishing, then, that he was able to add another to that list in his final months. The other three titles were Spring, When Falling Asleep, and At Sunset. All four meditate on our mortality, as Strauss knew his life was drawing to a close. But what beauty as he does so. September is a Herman Hesse poem, with him standing in a garden at the end of summer, as petals and leaves fall to the ground and the tiredness that comes of facing inevitable winter. This is so alien for modern generations, isn’t it? We perversely live with what the American anthropologist Ernest Becker succinctly described as The Denial of Death. Yet, our ancestors were so much better equipped to contemplate our mortal existence with a healthy realism. As the ancients taught and artists down the centuries have confronted us, we all need memento mori (‘remember that we must die’). This recording by the astonishing African American soprano, Jessye Norman, was iconic, and the Four Last Songs are now forever identified with her. II. Adagio religioso from Piano Concerto No. 3 (BB 127, Sz 119) Béla Bartók (1881-1945, Hungarian) Andreas Haefliger (piano), Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki (cond.) Bartók died in American exile from his native Hungary. He fled in 1940 because his strong anti-fascist views put him at odds with the government after it entered Axis Powers’ Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy, and Japan). But he never fully settled, even though his son from his second marriage had joined the US navy in 1942 and he took citizenship in 1945. He composed little in the States, until he was jolted into creativity by a leukaemia diagnosis in 1944. This brought an astonishing outpouring. His final completed (more or less) work was his 3rd Piano Concerto, written as a birthday present for his second wife and former student, Ditta. Surprisingly, the piece communicates a light contentedness, a reflection perhaps of his happy marriage and also the sense of coming to terms with his own circumstances. The middle movement, in common with most concertos, is meditative and slow, marked ‘religioso’ because it sounds at times like a Chorale by Bach or Beethoven. But listen out for the sounds of the natural world in both piano and orchestra. String Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) Takács Quartet The last two years of Beethoven’s life were marked by debilitating illness. In addition, he was by then deaf (a process that may have begun in around 1798 when he was only 28). So the last decade and a half were spent in general silence (although he could still detect low or sudden noises). And yet still torrents of music poured out from him. His last completed works were the Six Last Quartets, so-called. So picture him, deaf, sick and most often bed-bound. These quartets are not the most immediately accessible pieces of music, truth be told. But I urge you to work at this one, the last. By which I mean, give it your undistracted attention, try to identify the emotional resonances you might have with it. It is no accident that Schubert loved these pieces, despite the near universal scorn they received at the time. Schubert revered Beethoven and was a torchbearer at the latter’s funeral. Only a year later, he too was dying—and he requested friends play one of these late Quartets by his master. I don’t know of a more profound, simultaneously comforting and challenging, musical memento mori, than this, crafted as it was by a genius facing his own mortality.

It feels rather apt to be considering Exiles for this playlist, since I’m actually spending the week at the Rabbit Room mothership, North Wind Manor (or should that be motherburrow?). Robert Browning perfectly captured the nostalgia of homesickness with his sonnet, “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” as he finds himself wistfully imagining the exuberance of an English Spring from Italy (and within a few years of writing this, he would move there permanently with his new wife Elizabeth until her death in 1861). Here is the first stanza: Oh, to be in England  Now that April’s there,  And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware… That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!  —”Home Thoughts from Abroad,” Robert Browning The Brownings would live in Italy primarily because of her poor health. But many do not live far from home by choice. Their native land has, for whatever reason, become inhospitable or even dangerous. That was certainly true for several of this week’s composers. 1. Flow My Tears (2nd Book of Songs, 1600) John Dowland (1563-1626, English) Stile Antico If anyone qualifies for the title Renaissance King of Melancholy, it is surely the lutenist John Dowland. A shadowy figure from London (or possibly from Dublin), he found favour in the Danish royal court at a time when he was discriminated against by Elizabeth I (or so he claimed) because of his Catholicism (although Elizabeth did employ other known Catholics, despite their potentially divided political loyalties). The subject matter of many of his songs seem consistent: I saw my Lady weepe; Flow my teares fall from your springs; Mourne, mourne, day is with darkness fled; If fluds of teares could cleanse my follies past. You catch the drift. Apparently, he was a more jovial chap than this setlist suggests, but one can’t help feeling that we’re dealing with quite the misery-guts. Still, he was a brilliant misery-guts. And his songs have stood the test of time, with a wide range of fans from Benjamin Britten and Percy Grainger all the way to Elvis Costello and Sting, not to mention sci-fi genius Philip K. Dick (if you know his work, you will recognise this track’s title). This song is perhaps his most famous. It was an early seventeenth century hit, undoubtedly the number one request at all his gigs. It’s one thing if your best-loved hit is a jolly happy number since that’s tough to pull off every time, when being on the road means you’re exhausted, tired, or lonely. But having a misery-memoir as your hit? I’ve no experience of such things, but I imagine it’s tough constantly having to suppress those occasional rays of sun. Anyway, this arrangement is a gorgeous one for choral ensemble sung by a superb English choir, Stile Antico. One of its founding members is a friend and since 2000 they have gone from strength to strength in the realm of renaissance music. 2. On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912) Frederick Delius (1862-1934, English, then French) Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) Frederick Delius had German blood but grew up in the north of England. However, he spent the last thirty years of his life outside Paris with his German wife, Jelka, having spent some time on a family-owned orange plantation in Florida. He lived a fairly bohemian lifestyle even after his marriage, so he was never going to blend easily into the mercantile respectability of his family. He certainly had little time for business and was easily distracted by musical cultures he encountered; for example, the African American spirituals he heard in the U.S. or the Nordic sound world of Edvard Grieg. So, it is perhaps surprising to find this composition amongst his most celebrated: a palpable nostalgia trip to the England of his youth written a decade after his marriage. Along with George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad (1911) and Vaughan-Williams’ The Lark Ascending (1914, in the very first 5&1), the piece is the epitome of so-called ‘English Pastoral’ school, so rudely dismissed in the 1950s by Elizabeth Lutyens as ‘cowpat music’ with its ‘folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais’! Very unfair. But as in Browning’s poem, the earth’s annual Spring rebirth lies at the heart of the celebration, heralded by noting the first cuckoo call of the year. Beethoven famously included a cuckoo in his great Pastoral Symphony. But Delius here makes it sound particularly English! 3. The Woman Who Lived Up There, from Street Scene (1946) Kurt Weill (1900-1950, German then American) Bonaventura Bottone, (tenor), Janis Kelly (soprano) & Meriel Dickinson (mezzo), English National Opera Weimar, Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was a seething cauldron of political strife, bohemian morals and insatiable creativity. It was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. The best way to get a feel for the place is through Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These in turn inspired a stage play which in turn was turned into the musical Cabaret. Of those most associated today with Berlin cabaret of the era (with its risqué humour and dark satire), most famous were the playwright Berthold Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, along with the latter’s wife Lotte Lenya. You may know her from her role as Bond Baddie Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love!). And you almost certainly will know the much-covered Mack the Knife from the Brecht-Weill work, The Threepenny Opera. But once the Nazis came to power, the cabaret scene died, not least because its leading lights were largely by left-, if not communist-, leaning. Weill was doubly at risk because he was also Jewish. Unlike the millions who never managed it, Weill escaped, first to England and then to New York, alongside thousands of German Jewish intellectuals and artists. An exile, of course, has a creative choice at that point: hark back or embrace the new. Weill did both. But with his Street Scene, using texts from the African American genius Langston Hughes and the German Jewish but American-born Elmer Rice, he created a genuinely American opera. Set in the poverty of New York tenements on Manhattan’s East Side, it focuses on three families during a couple of blisteringly hot days. It is raw and unflinching—and tragic; as far removed as it is possible to get from the common perception of operas as ivory-towered, elitist, and escapist. Here the young Rose Maurrant comes home to find her mother had been killed by her brutal father. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story would follow a decade later, and the influences of Street Scene are obvious. 4. Escape & Storm / Fog / Cooky / Asleep (from The Sea Wolf, 1941) Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957, Austrian, then American) Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra, Erich Korngold (cond.) Another Jewish émigré musician was Erich Korngold. Instead of New York, however, he settled on the West Coast, becoming one of the most important composers in Hollywood. Despite actually being Austrian (he held several senior positions in Vienna’s musical establishment), the rise of Nazism was clear. Germany’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) would not occur until 1938, but Korngold and his wife left in 1931, two years before Hitler became Chancellor over the border. Korngold had already won two Oscars for film scores (the second was for the Errol Flynn swashbuckler, The Adventures of Robin Hood). The Sea Wolf (1941) starred Edward G. Robinson but was far from escapist; and the music richly evokes the dark claustrophobia of being trapped on a ship out at sea dominated by a brutal and brutalising captain. While the drama was set decades earlier, the musical narrative seems to reflect the wartime era, and perhaps could only have been composed by someone watching with mounting horror what was taking place in his homeland. This track especially illustrates the European émigré impact on Hollywood. It might feel dated now but this was the archetypal sound of those movies. How different things would have been had they not found sanctuary across the Atlantic. 5. On The Willows (from Godspell, 1971) Stephen Schwartz (1948- , American) Richard LaBonte, Steven Reinhardt, Jesse Cutler, Original Off-Broadway Cast A very different mood now, composed by someone born in the States, but like Weill and Korngold, also Jewish. It’s a surprise to find him writing a Jesus musical, based on Matthew’s gospel (though perhaps less surprising when we explore the musical’s emphases and themes). On the Willows is based on Psalm 137, surely the ancient world’s number one exile song, but now given a 60s/70s flower-power hippy turn. The musical is imprinted on my memory because I grew up in the 70s and Godspell was one of the few tapes we had in the car! I have always loved it (even after it quickly faded from coolness) so am glad to see it frequently revived nowadays. It is gentler and more wistful than Lloyd-Webber/Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) but they are fascinating to compare. [In my view, JCS and Evita (1978), are their true masterpieces, heights which Lloyd-Webber never again attained (especially once he and Tim Rice went their separate ways.)] Schwarz’s take on the psalm here is sublime, perfectly capturing the exile’s nostalgia (apt since it was itself an ancient Greek word formed by combing the words home(coming) and pain). I especially love the lilting rhythms which evoke Babylon’s rivers and the melody’s conflicting, 2s-against-3s, rhythm. There’s plenty of theology in that fact alone! Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’, Op. 4, 1899) Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951, Austrian, then American) Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Danusha Waskiewicz, Jean-Guihen Queyras & Christian Poltera So to our final exile, another Austrian Jewish genius who found safety in the USA. But his music is notorious and much of it is (I must confess) almost impossible to listen to. Devotees will no doubt accuse me of ignorant prejudice, probably justly, and to be fair, I’ve not given it a huge amount of time. He pioneered the 12-note system (which effectively abandons the notion of musical keys) and the principle of atonality. It’s hard work! I’m tempted to say that had the bitingly witty English Conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, been asked if he ever performed Schoenberg just as he had of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s, his response might have been similar. He said, “No, but I have trodden in some.” Harsh. So, imagine my wonder a few years ago when listening to BBC Radio 3 in the car (the UK’s main classical music station). I switched on early during a piece that was so overwhelming, I had to pull over to concentrate on it. It seemed emotionally tortured but utterly compelling and starkly beautiful. I couldn’t believe it when the announcer then said it was Schoenberg. Early in his career he was still working within fairly conventional, nineteenth-century rules (thus proving the adage that before you can learn to break artistic rules convincingly, you have to learn how to obey them). And this piece, written for String Sextet in five sections corresponding to a German poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, is a case in point. So even though this was composed fifty years before most of the others in this list, and long before Schoenberg ended up in exile, consider this simple point: how absurdly evil to reject and seek to murder people of such musical genius simply because of their religion or racial heritage… (for which substitute skin colour, politics, ethnicity, lifestyle or anything else).

I obviously don’t know how it is where you are reading this, but here in southern England, having enjoyed a small run of deliciously warm and sunny spring days, we are again marooned in full grey-cloud immersion. Not a shirt-sleeve in sight anywhere. No wonder April (and by extension, May) was Eliot’s cruellest month. A little escapism every now and then is helpful, especially for those of us whose equilibrium gets seasonally affected. I vividly remember a camping trip somewhere in southern France with my parents and brother (in perhaps ’78 or ’79). Such an adventure. But one lasting impression was the summer heat: the closeness of it, the inescapability of it, and weirdly, the sound of it. I just loved it. And still do. Working out in such heat is naturally a different matter but for this pasty Englishman, it’s always associated with holidays. I suppose that was the source of my lifelong Francophilia, studying the language right up to the end of high school and relishing French culture of all kinds. I love getting back whenever I can. And for the times that’s not possible, there’s always the music… Chants d’Auvergne: No 2. Bailero Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957, French) Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (soprano), English Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate (cond.) Just around the time that Vaughan-Williams and friends were scouring the English countryside to capture local folksongs, Canteloube was doing the same around his home in the Auvergne, southern France. It is a region with extraordinary history that stretches back to Roman times. (If you read Asterix books—and if you haven’t, you should—this is where the great Gallic rebel Vercingetorix originates!). Canteloube arranged many of the songs into this gorgeous anthology, of which the 2nd, Bailero, is the best known. It is a shepherd’s song in the local dialect of Occitan. Sit back and close your eyes. You will feel, smell, and hear the heat. Deux Novellettes: No 1 in C – Modéré sans lenteur (FP 47) Francois Poulenc (1899-1963, French) Pascal Rogé (piano) Poulenc could do big and brash, full of cubist angles and dissonance (as we heard last December). But he could also be tender and wistful, as with this little piece (the French word does not actually mean novelty, despite appearances; it’s more a short piece, a little thing). I fell in love with it when my piano teacher suggested it—and bizarrely, played it during a scene change for a school play. To my mind, this evokes not the heat so much as the light and joy of summer. Sitting on a park bench or stretched out on the grass in the garden, perhaps, with the sound of children happily playing somewhere (not too near, ideally!) and the general busyness of butterflies and bees. La Mer (1946) Charles Trenet (1913-2001, French) We’ve had languor and wistfulness so far; it’s time for some exuberance and you won’t find anything more quintessentially French than Charles Trenet’s timeless La Mer (‘The Sea’). You’d never know it was written immediately after World War II—but it was a hit because it was evidently just what France needed after the horrors and humiliations of occupation. This is a song about the anticipation of heading off to the beach, of larking about in the sunshine, diving and splashing in the water (preferably Mediterranean rather than Atlantic or English Channel). As he sings in last verse, “And with a love song the sea has rocked my heart for life.” But to be honest, it’s not really the lyrics that get the pulse racing; it’s the arrangement and Trenet’s own performance. How can it not make you happy in the first verse or two? But then, after about 2 and a half minutes, it changes gear completely. Trenet goes nuts and is suddenly joined by a cheesy choir, with the orchestra completely over the top. But after the year we’ve all had, it feels utterly justified. “We’re going to the beach,” it seems to say, “and c’est magnifique!” Long after the fade, I’m left grinning from ear to ear. Trois Gymnopédies: No 2. Erik Satie (1866-1925, French) Pascal Rogé (piano) You will all recognise number 1 of these gymnopédies by that great musical miniaturist, Erik Satie. So, I’ve deliberately gone for the second, which is very similar in form, mood, and style. It is in waltz time, but it is pensive, lethargic, listless almost. So, the title is incongruous since the word is borrowed from Ancient Greece, describing dances by groups of soldiers in formation, men who may have simply been unarmed or who were actually naked (just like all ancient Greek athletics). The music makes it feel as if the dancers are some distance away, perhaps with the summer scene shimmering in the heat-haze. It is trance- or dream-like. And in the heat, we can feel our eyelids getting heavier and heavier… Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (L. 86) Claude Debussy (1862-1918, French) Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth (cond.) If the previous track is hypnotic and even soporific, this one depicts the next stage, that of snoozing and dreaming, and subsequently coming to again. The title means ‘prelude to the afternoon of a faun’ and it is Debussy’s artistic response to (rather than a narrative depiction of) a poem by Mallarmé. He wants to evoke the faun’s afternoon’s sleepiness. Yes, we’re talking about a distant relation of Mr. Tumnus, but this faun is rather a rascal, having spent the whole morning chasing nymphs and naiads (beautiful, semi-divine creatures who live in fresh water and other places) without success. That has worn him out. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? What made this piece so revolutionary was that Debussy was primarily concerned with the sensory experience of the moment, with the power of orchestral sounds and colours to place the listener in the middle of a scene, rather than telling a story. But perhaps you already realised as you listened, without me having to point it out. L’Arlésienne Suite (1872) Georges Bizet (1838-1875, French) Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (cond.) Bizet is best known today for his opera Carmen, but of his other works, this suite of pieces is much loved concert regular. Bizet was commissioned to write the incidental music for a play by one Alphonse Daudet, L’Arlésienne (‘The Girl from Arles). The play was a flop and is very rarely performed—unsurprising when you discover that the eponymous girl never appears on stage while the drama revolves around her fiancé, Frédéri, after she has been unfaithful to him. That’s pretty depressing but things spiral for Frédéri thereafter, as he descends into insanity and eventually suicide. And a fun evening out at the theatre was had by all! Thankfully, Bizet’s music was not lost because it is wonderful. There were many short pieces, as one would imagine for a play with several scene shifts and mood changes. But the most famous were gathered together into two suites for orchestra. They stand on their own without the requirement of a theatre company. Frankly, I never had a clue how dark the play was until recently because the score barely hints at it! Instead, the music seems to conjure up a young, happy-go-lucky French teenager, who relishes the attention and wolf-whistles as she flounces through a town square. She might not appear on stage, but she’s a significant presence in the music. And it’s glorious. So allow these pieces sweep you away to a café terrace that looks out over a square in Provence or the Côte d’Azur; waiters whirl around the clientele, somehow elegant in their black aprons bulging with loose change and menus; the belltower of the parish church suddenly comes to life with peals of ringing; a farmer negotiates the narrow streets on his decrepit tractor to deliver another load of grapes to the nearby press. All while you sip your chilled apéritif and lazily observe the casts of local citizens carrying on with their day…

For years as an inveterate night-owl, the dawn has been one of those natural phenomena I mostly appreciate in the hypothetical rather than in experience. But as middle-age has set in, I have found myself waking earlier and unintentionally glimpsing its glories with greater frequency. It’s hard not to be moved, especially if, like the Psalmist’s watchmen, one has found oneself longing for the end of night (Ps 130:5-6). It never palls. No wonder then that composers have been stirred by the first flickers of the sun’s ‘rosy-fingered’ rays (to quote Homer) to capture the ineffable in the audible. We have already heard one of (if not) the greatest dawns in classical music: Strauss’ Alpine Symphony right back in the very first 5&1, so unfortunately that’s banned. But I do recommend you return to it. Turn all the lights off and the volume up high; then as the music grows, gradually open the curtains and/or turn on the lights. Then start air-conducting with abandon. Even better, get up early, go outside and accompany these heavenly glories from your headphones. Plus air-conduct. Introduction & “In the Beginning, God” (The Creation, 1798) Josef Haydn (1732-1809, Austrian) Neal Davies (bass), Chetham's Chamber Choir, Gabrieli Consort, Paul McCreesh (cond.) Haydn’s Creation is a musical epic, inspired both by Genesis 1-2 and by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If you don’t know it, frankly, this is a problem. It’s up there with the other choral masterpieces like Messiah by Handel and Requiem by Mozart. It’s also a huge amount of fun to sing if you ever get the chance. After the Overture, entitled by Haydn as The Representation of Chaos, the bass soloist flings us into the cosmic drama. Ostensibly, he is simply announcing the opening verses of the Bible. But I can almost guarantee that it is not until you’ve heard the Austrian composer’s setting of them that you will get a senses of how staggering it all is. There should be a health warning, though. I do recommend having the volume on 10 or 11, because it starts very quiet indeed. But make sure you fasten your seatbelts too because otherwise you’ll jump out of your skin. In fact, I suggest you don’t listen the very first time while driving. Four Sea Interludes: 1. On The Beach (Peter Grimes, Op. 33, 1945) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Colin Davis (cond.) Now, I realise we visited Peter Grimes’ beach at Aldeburgh in Suffolk (near where I grew up) in week 2. So, you might accuse me of inconsistency. In my defence, I previously chose the third sea interlude and this is the first. So there. But I adore all four. It really is so evocative of time and place. Suffolk isn’t on everybody’s itinerary when they come to England (thankfully!) but 5&1 readers are a cultural elite, so I give you permission to visit. The beaches are not archetypally great—most do not have expanses of sand but are narrow and pebbly; parts of this coastline are nicknamed Shingle Street for good reason. Because it also lies at Britain’s most easterly point (which is not saying very much, to be fair), it is always the first part of the country to see the sun every morning, creeping over the North Sea horizon. The sun makes all the difference in the world, whether it’s visible or not. And to my mind, this movement evokes a grey and overcast morning where darkness is supplanted by first light. The North Sea rarely offers idyllic views; it is usually battleship grey streaked by trails of muddy brown. But even this is transformed by daylight. And Britten’s depiction is perfection. Tableau III: Lever du jour (Daybreak) from Daphnis & Chloé (M. 57) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Marion Ralincourt (flute), Les Siècles, Ensemble Aedes, François-Xavier Roth (cond.) Fly a few hundred miles south, of course, and it’s a different matter entirely. Cloudless skies and summer heat—and oh! the glory of those first morning rays! Ravel’s depiction is spine-tinglingly beautiful. He takes an ancient classical story set about a young boy and girl from the Greek island of Lesbos. They had been abandoned at birth but get fostered by two neighbouring goatherds. They grow up and (inevitably) fall in love; they undergo various trials and tribulations; finally meet their birthparents; they end up happily ever after. Ravel was commissioned to write a new ballet by Serge Diaghilev, the famous Russian founder of the Ballets Russes in Paris. The result was a one-act composition, made up of three scenes (‘tableaux’), but lasting almost an hour in total. This track opens the third and we are transported to daybreak in a magical, mythical scene of grotto belonging to nymphs. The music reflects the whole of the natural world as it is gradually returns to life and the rays creep over the horizon. It’s wonderful. The dawn chorus of birds comes to life, sheep are being led out to pasture, and herdsmen can set out to find Daphnis after having previously abandoned the search at nightfall. This is truly the music of the sublime. Dawn (from the soundtrack of Pride and Prejudice, 2005) Dario Marianelli (1963- , Italian) Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano) From the waking natural world, we turn to a waking household. Jane Austen’s classic has inspired countless dramatizations, rip-offs and satires. But Joe Wright’s film (with Keira Knightley and Matthew McFadyen) is much loved and rightly so. Though I still think the BBC series (with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth) is far better, but perhaps this marks a generational divide (despite the fact that I couldn’t care less about blokes climbing out of lakes wearing baggy white shirts). I particularly love the soundtrack for its simplicity and artfulness. Marianelli is an Italian composer who studied in London for a number of years and who has worked with Wright a few times. He composed something that feels entirely in keeping with the classical sound worlds of a Mozart or early Beethoven in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yet, he brilliantly manages to avoid pastiche while creating something that feels authentically English and contemporary (perhaps largely because of his deliberate cross-rhythms). With the lead consistently given to the Fortepiano (a classical forerunner of the modern pianoforte and the great embodiment of the era’s domestic music-making so beloved of the Bennets), how appropriate to open the entire movie with a solo piano. It is performed by the superb French soloist, Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The movie’s opening images are of early morning fog floating on the fields just before as the sun creeps up accompanied by a simple melody of heart-breaking beauty. As the sun rises, the Bennet household seems to yawn and stretch and begin yet another day of fraught, domestic frivolity and chaos! Helios Overture (Op. 17) Carl Nielsen (1865-1931, Danish) South Jutland Symphony Orchestra, Niklas Willén (cond.) Nielson was Denmark’s greatest composer, but he was inspired to write the Helios Overture by a visit to Greece. His wife, the sculptor Anne-Marie, had been invited there as part of an award to study ancient artefacts in the Acropolis Museum. While she was working, Carl was given access to a piano and time to roam. The two would go on walks in the Achaean hills and beyond. He was thus inspired to write a piece of an orchestral work depicting the sun (helios in both ancient and modern Greek) rising over the Aegean Sea. However, in contrast to the other pieces in this list, Nielsen takes us to the other end of the day, with the light fading far to the west. Nielsen wrote above the score: Silence and darkness, The sun rises with a joyous song of praise, It wanders its golden way and sinks quietly into the sea. —Carl Nielsen This is another piece to set hearts racing. Prelude from Act I Akhnaten (1983) Philip Glass (1937- , American) Paul Esswood (Akhnaten), Milagro Vargas (Nefertiti), Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra & Chorus, Dennis Russell Davies (cond.) Our final outing takes us even further into back into history, far beyond the realms of Greek myth and Achaean sunrises. We are now in Ancient Egypt, albeit in the hands of an American composer still living. The Pharaoh Akhnaten (aka Amenhotep IV) was a highly controversial ruler over Egypt because convention holds that he sought to revolutionize a famously polytheistic society into one that was rigidly monotheistic. He is associated with the introduction of Atenism, the worship of Aten (the Sun) and Philip Glass’s opera features a modern translation of his Hymn to the Sun. Glass (alongside Steve Reich and John Adams, both featured in 5&1, Part 9 on the mechanical world) is one the best so-called Minimalists, whereby music develops primarily through small, incremental shifts. He was fascinated by individuals whose genius or brilliance enabled them to have a disproportionate impact on their generations and so wrote two other, related operas about Einstein and Gandhi. This track opens the opera, and, through repeated arpeggios that repeat in keys around A minor, we are immediately immersed into a sense of foreboding. Something ominous and unsettling is on the horizon. Now, normally, I would include a full composition as the final element of the playlist. However, minimalism is not everybody’s cup of tea, and most can only handle it in small doses (including me). So see how you go. If you love it, keep going. But while I don’t want to listen to it all day, Glass’s ability to convey something impending as well as grand and even majestic with very constrained musical tools is remarkable. As a side note, scholars have speculated in recent years (largely prompted by no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud) that this determination to turn to monotheism might have had something to do with the biblical Moses. The dates certainly seem to fit, more or less. Who knows? If true, it’s fascinating to find an entirely pagan parallel to, if not actual corroboration of, an ancient Jewish phenomenon. Genesis and Exodus would of course reject the idea of sun-worship; but how amazing that a culture whose polytheism was directly challenged by Moses actually attempted in time and space to do something about it.

Music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. — Measure for Measure, Act 4, Scene 1 Music was crucial to Shakespeare’s plays throughout his career—not just to keep the groundlings (the standing-room-only ticket-holders) amused, but also to propel plots, capture moods, or heighten intensity. He understood, as Duke Vincent observes in this line from Measure for Measure, that music has extraordinary, even dangerous, power to affect us. Few modern productions would consider doing without some sort of musical accompaniment. So perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the Bard has inspired composers and musicians ever since. The surprise is how universal that has been: this very brief list features only one English composer. The rest are Italian, Czech, German, French, and Russian. The convention is to split his output into three main categories (although there is inevitably some overlap): Tragedies, Comedies and Histories. So, since there is just so much, let’s restrict this list to merely homing in on the first. It will then become clear that music might equally be the food of cathartic tears, despairing cries, and vented spleens. MACBETH “Fuggi regal fantasima” Act 3, Sc 2 (Macbeth, 1847) “Patria Oppressa!” Act 4, Sc 1 Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901, Italian) Sherill Milnes (Macbeth), Ambrosian Opera Chorus, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (cond.) The “Scottish Play” has it all: Witches and Ghosts! Hallucinations and Night Terrors! Treason and Regicide! Justice and Revenge! It was the perfect gift to that great Maestro of Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi. Macbeth would be the first of several Shakespearean plays he converted into operas and the result is a rather glorious (if perhaps unlikely) convergence of the wintry and rugged landscape of mediaeval Scotland with fiery Mediterranean temperaments. Even though it is not the most famous of Verdi’s operas, it was my first, helped by the fact that I had studied the play at school. It does help to have some idea of what’s going on, especially when everyone sings in a foreign language! We drop in with Act 3, with Macbeth on the throne but now terrified by the ghosts of Banquo and his successors, the eight future kings of Scotland. “Away, royal phantom! You remind me of Banquo…” he sings. We feel his shudders, even before the witches chime in with their gloating. Then fast forward to early in Act 4, with Scottish refugees singing of their plight as they gather near the English border. “Oppressed land of ours! You cannot have the sweet name of mother now that you have become a tomb for your sons…” We weep with them, rather as audiences did five years before in the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves in Verdi’s opera about Nebuchadnezzar and the Exile, Nabucco. THE TEMPEST Full Fathom Five; The Cloud-Capp’d Towers (from Three Shakespeare Songs) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) National Youth Choir of Great Britain, Ben Parry (cond.) The Tempest is one of those late plays that doesn’t quite fit with the trio of categories mentioned above. But it certainly has its tragic elements, as these two settings for unaccompanied choir by Vaughan-Williams demonstrate. They were written in 1951 for The Festival of Britain, an event designed to lift the country’s spirits after the horrors of World War II (much of London was still in ruins and most food rationing would continue until 1954). The lines are spoken by two of Shakespeare’s eeriest characters, Ariel and Prospero, respectively. Full Fathom Five is addressed by Ariel to Ferdinand about his father Alonso, presumed shipwrecked and drowned. Vaughan-Williams’s setting is mysterious, other-worldly, as if evoking through voices the murky, bluey-green depths far below the ocean’s surface. Deep down, a bell tolls for Alonso, perhaps from some long-past submerged church (like that of Dunwich not far from where I grew up—its drowned bells, according to legend, can still be heard…). Prospero’s announcement of the end of the play within the play is performed to celebrate his daughter Miranda’s wedding to Ferdinand. Note the word ‘globe:’ the theatre company has evoked the whole world through their art; but they have done so within The Globe Theatre where this was first performed. As with any performance, once the revels end, these conjured realities evaporate into nothingness. The stage has gone dark. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. —Act 4, Scene 1 OTHELLO Othello overture (Op. 93, 1892) Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904, Czech) Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado (cond.) Dvořák was a versatile composer, just a few years younger than Johannes Brahms. But the older man helped to give his junior some helpful nudges at the start and the two became firm friends. Their music shares many affinities despite each having a unique genius. By the time Dvořák wrote this overture, he was fully established and had, in fact, been invited to the United States to become the second director of the recently established National Conservatory of Music in New York. This is a standalone orchestral work inspired by the tragedy of The Moor of Venice, so is naturally full of high drama and pathos and culminates in an arresting but grand finale. The only disappointment is that the curtains do not then part to launch a whole opera! But fear not. The Italians had already got there, twice as it happens: Rossini’s Otello in 1816 and then Verdi’s masterpiece just five years before Dvořák’s overture. If you are familiar with it, you will certainly hear some similarities with his glorious 9th Symphony “From the New World” (Op. 95)—more about which at a later date—written at roughly the same time as this, together with his Cello Concerto. HAMLET 5 Ophelia lieder (W. 22, 1873) Johannes Brahms (1833-1897, German) Jessye Norman (soprano), Daniel Barenboim (piano) Wie erkenn’ ich dein Treublieb? (How should I know your true love?) Sein Leichenhemd weiss wie Schnee. (White his shroud as the mountain snow.) Auf morgen ist Sankt Valentins Tag. (Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day.) Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss. (They bore him bare-faced on the bier) Und kommt er nicht mehr zurück? (And will he not come again?) Poor Ophelia. Dad (Polonius) was a bit of a dolt; brother (Laertes) has skedaddled off to France just when he’s needed most; while love interest (Hamlet) seems completely off his trolley. She didn’t really have a chance. So, when it happens, Ophelia’s decline is rapid, witnessed by Queen Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) and her new husband and ex-brother-in-law, King Claudius (Act IV Sc 5). Shakespeare’s device for portraying her disintegration is a sequence of miniature songs and these form the basis of Brahms’ exquisite, filigree-light collection. He composed them for an 1873 production of Hamlet in Prague, but they would only get published thirty years later, after his death. Blink and you’ll miss them because together they only last six minutes. Brahms composes them as very simple, concise folk songs, but they are as stunning as they are agonised. For example, in the fourth, the constantly falling lines, suddenly interrupted by the terse ending, are heart-breaking. As we heard last week, here again is the great Jessye Norman. KING LEAR Fanfare-Ouverture and Le Sommeil de Lear, incidental music from Le Roi Lear (L.116, 1904) Claude Debussy (1862-1918, French) City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (cond.) Debussy is not a composer most readily identified with Shakespeare, not least because he seemed the epitome of Gallic sophistication. But he did find momentary inspiration from the plays and planned to write a sequence of incidental pieces to accompany a production of King Lear. In the end, he never finished, completing only two movements and leaving the rest to be filled out and orchestrated by a student. The Fanfare Overture feels a little derivative but the second piece, Lear’s Dream is mysterious and beguiling; it’s vintage Debussy, in other words. It wonderfully transports us to that netherworld between dreamless sleep and consciousness. ROMEO & JULIET Highlights from Romeo & Juliet Suites 1 & 2 (Op. 64, 1938) Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953, Soviet/Russian) Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Riccardo Muti (cond.) Prokofiev wrote a complete ballet based on the Shakespeare play in 1935, but the early years of its existence were fraught. Politics and rivalries, as well as deep-seated fears within the artistic community under Stalin’s regime, meant that it took some time before it could be performed in the USSR. Sections were heard in Moscow and New York; even stranger is that rejected Shakespeare’s original in favour of a happy ending! The whole would not be premiered until 1938, in Brno in Czechoslovakia. Prokofiev fully revised it further after this, so that the Soviet première in the form that it is best known today took place in 1940 in Leningrad. Some of the big themes are familiar no doubt, even though not everyone is able to identify their origins. It is scored for an orchestra on a grand scale and even if not a ballet fan, it is worth tracking the events of the drama along with each section. It is every bit as rollercoasterish as the original play. The selection of highlights on this recording goes as follows (reordered for a live performance to make more musical sense than it does narrative sense!). 13. Dance of the Knights (Montagues and Capulets) 10. Juliet as a young girl 16. Madrigal 11. Arrival of Guests 12. Masks 38. Romeo and Juliet 35. Romeo decides to avenge Mercutio’s death 28. Romeo at Friar Laurence’s 39. Romeo and Juliet Before Parting 50. Romeo and Juliet’s Grave

It doesn’t matter where you are in Great Britain (that is England, Scotland and Wales), you are always within striking distance of the sea. You are never more than 70 miles from it, as the crow flies, to be precise (which, alas, may have precious little to do with Google Maps-, traffic- and road-network-dependent journey times). So it’s natural for this island’s culture to be profoundly shaped by its relationship to the sea and no accident that the secret of the British Empire’s dimensions and longevity was the Royal Navy (not to mention both the spread and abolition of the slave trade). Inevitably, then, the sea looms large in Britain’s musical heritage. Sea Pictures: 5. The Swimmer (Op. 37) Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934, English) Dame Janet Baker (alto), London Symphony, Sir John Barbirolli (cond.) If people have an impression of Elgar at all (by no means guaranteed these days), it is that of a rather stiff, tweedy bastion of the imperial establishment (reinforced by his knighthood). The reality couldn’t have been more different. He always felt like an outsider, the combination of being the son of a provincial piano tuner and because of the Catholicism he learned from his mother. His music constantly seems to ache with a profound melancholy (even when at his most whimsical, as in Enigma Variations). But he also manages to evoke something indefinably British, and even particularly English. Somehow the Sea Pictures (even more than his Pomp & Circumstance marches associated in the US with graduation ceremonies) remind me how embedded my Englishness really is! This is the classic performance with the great Janet Baker, recorded in 1965 in Abbey Road studios (in the months between the Beatles’ recording Help! and Rubber Soul). Classics all! Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes 3. Sunday Morning by the Beach (Op. 33, 1945) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) Royal Opera House Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis (cond.) Britten was the greatest British composer of the 20th Century, and arguably the most versatile and creative one since Henry Purcell in the 17th Century. (I know, I know, you were all confused by that, but actually Handel was not English. He settled in London when he was 27 and remained until his death nearly 50 years later; but he was, of course, born German). Britten grew up on the Suffolk coast and never lived away from it for long (apart from 1939-42 when he and his partner Peter Pears lived in the States at the behest of W. H. Auden.) When he came across the book by George Crabbe called The Borough, he was gripped and would write one of his most stunning operas based on it: Peter Grimes. It is set in a village loosely based on Aldeburgh, the seaside town where Britten & Pears lived for over 25 years. The Sea Interludes powerfully evoke the ocean’s unpredictable moods but they have an even greater resonance for me. I spent the whole of the 1980s (my teenage years) growing up only 15 miles away (incidentally, very near to where BBC’s Detectorists was filmed). Fantasia on British Sea Songs (1905) Sir Henry Wood (1869-1944, English) BBC Concert Orchestra, Barry Wordsworth (cond.) If Britten’s Peter Grimes is serious, and even great, music, Henry Wood’s Fantasia certainly is not! It is a string of old sea shanties (sailors’ songs sung to keep them energised and working in sync while they managed the sails). Henry Wood is best known today as the founder (in 1895) of the Promenade concerts that take place every summer in the Royal Albert Hall (now known as the BBC Proms). This is arguably one of the largest music festivals in the world, with 2 if not 3 concerts happening daily for 8 weeks (Covid-permitting!). The Last Night of the Proms is a faintly absurd but fun jamboree, in which Wood’s Fantasia is an annual feature. During its performance, the promenaders (those with standing only tickets who get right in front of the stage) can be relied upon to bob up and down, make silly noises and generally try to put the orchestra off. Sea-Fever (a setting of John Masefield’s poem) John Ireland (1879-1962, English) Roderick Williams (baritone), Iain Burnside (piano) In complete contrast, we now follow a poet daydreaming about why he loves taking solitary cliff-top walks on the coast. John Masefield’s poem is greatly loved for good reason and it has been set to music many times, undoubtedly because of its musicality and onomatopoeic rhythms. This setting by John Ireland (who, ironically enough, was English of Scottish extraction, despite his surname) is heart-meltingly gorgeous and with simply a voice and piano, wonderfully evokes maritime flora, fauna and people. You can find the full text here. Tintagel (1917-19) Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953, English) BBC Philharmonic, Vernon Handley (cond.) On the north Cornwall coast, in the part of the country that stretches out into the Atlantic, sits the small village of Tintagel. It is a beautiful spot and draws tourists from all over the world. The reason (apart from the beauty)? King Arthur, of course! The stunning ruins of Tintagel Castle cling precariously to the cliff-face and it is on this site that Arthur was supposedly conceived (adulterously, after a cunning ruse of Merlin and Arthur’s biological father, Uther Pendragon), born and raised. What a gift to creative minds! Tennyson, Hardy, Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton were all inspired by visits, as were Elgar and Arnold Bax. In just 15 minutes of orchestral colours, Bax transports us across seas and centuries to a place of magic and wonder. It has it all. Symphony No. 1 ‘A Sea Symphony’ (1910) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) BBC Symphony, Sir Andrew Davis (cond.) This is a surprising but captivating symphony. It is long (at 70 minutes, it’s RV-W’s longest) and requires not only a large orchestra but also a choir and two solo singers. This is because he was inspired by several sea-themed poems by Walt Whitman around which he constructs the symphony. So here is an American inspiration of a very cosmopolitan symphonic composer but with the result of something that is uncannily evocative of the waters of the North Sea, English Channel, and Irish Sea, despite the composer’s insistence that it has resonance for all sea-faring cultures. And there can be no uncertainty at all about the theme —within the opening seconds, the chorus cries out: ‘Behold! The Sea!’ There are four movements: I – A Song for all Seas, all ships (ca 20 minutes!) II – On the Beach at Night alone (ca 10 minutes) III – The Waves (8 minutes) IV – The Explorers (ca 30 minutes!) That may seem very long and drawn-out. But I can assure you that there isn’t a dull moment! I find a spot of air-conducting hard to resist at various points, even if driving in the fast line of the motorway. That the sea continued to inspire RV-W is clear from his 7th Symphony, which he entitled Sinfonia Antarctica. But that’s to run before walking. There’s plenty to be getting on with before we head to the far south!

The Bard was hardly the world’s first literary giant to dramatize or narrate great historical moments; far from it. But no one was more methodical and systematic about it; none could conceive of such a brilliant and sustained narrative arc as the old Staff-Shaker. It is no wonder, then, that the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) devised The Hollow Crown, a production on a vast scale of his English History plays taking in all the plays from Richard II to Richard III, via the Henriad (namely, Henry IV 1&2, Henry V, Henry VI 1&2). The idea was for character continuity, with those in more than one drama to be played by the same actors (where possible). A triumph of the British and U.S. stage (even features as background to a West Wing episode!). Perhaps inevitably, the concept was then also filmed for a Sam Mendes-led joint BBC/PBS production from 2012. This could never have worked if the plays were merely of academic historical interest. It’s because they are compelling and brilliant, profoundly resonant for power politics still. That is why the history plays have inspired composers almost as much as the tragedies—as this week’s list will seek to prove. HENRY V “Non Nobis Domine” (finale from Branagh’s 1989 Henry V) Patrick Doyle (1953- , Scottish) Crouch End Festival Chorus, City of Prague Philharmonic We start with one of the greatest cinematic Shakespeares, the 1989 Henry V played and directed by Kenneth Branagh while still in his 20s! His go-to composer has always been Patrick Doyle (who often has cameo roles as singers and others). The entire soundtrack is thrilling (if you can track it down; it doesn’t seem to be streamable), epic in scale, altogether enhancing the film’s creative vision. Branagh sought to make this much more of a visceral war movie rather than the jingoistic morale booster that was Olivier’s (of which more in a moment). So, he preserved scenes like the play’s early unmasking of the traitors and did not shy away from the mud and gore of mediaeval battle. This track captures both the joy and sheer relief of victory after the Battle of Agincourt on “Feast of Saint Crispian”! But leaving aside the crude assumption that victory automatically rendered a war’s cause just, the mediaeval mind was ever-conscious of God’s presence and providence. Thus, as the king instructs, the whole cast is led into rapturous praise (using Psalm 115:1 and the ancient Christian hymn, the Te Deum): Henry: Do we all holy rites. Let there be sung Non nobis, and Te Deum, The dead with charity enclosed in clay, And then to Calais, and to England then, Where ne’er from France arrived more happy men —Henry V, Act 4, Scene 8 Incidentally, an old flatmate of mine, Steve, had an American friend studying over here for a while. This chap ended up working quite high up in the G. W. Bush administration, I think, and was as patriotic as they come. But Steve got him to watch Branagh’s film, after which he said, “Now that’s what real patriotism looks like!” At the king’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, he said, “This is making even me feel English!’ A nice irony is that Sir Kenneth (as he now is) never was English in the first place. He’s actually from Belfast in Northern Ireland! HENRY IV 1 & 2 Sonnet to Hank Cinq (from Such Sweet Thunder, 1957) Duke Ellington (1899-1974, American) Duke Ellington & His Orchestra I can almost guarantee you did not expect jazz to follow. But, in fact, the Duke put out an entire album inspired by a 1957 tour stop in Stratford, Ontario that coincided with their annual Stratford Shakespearean Festival (begun in 1952 because of the city’s English namesake where the Bard was born). He and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn created a 12-part suite, for which they devoured the plays and recent Shakespearean scholarship. It’s fantastic and has gone down as one of the great jazz albums, full of variety and invention. I love this track’s title. It says it all. Smooth and cool; and the music is too. After all Henry is very young, a cool cat about town when he is crowned. Prince Hal, together with his old partner-in-crime, the disreputable Falstaff, got up to all kinds of tricks (in the Henry IV plays). And Ellington has caught the bachelor prince’s swagger perfectly. But we know the fun and games cannot last. The prince must grow up if he’s to become king; his leadership will have life and death consequences. Which is why, as we learn at the very end of Henry IV, the young monarch must disown the old rogue with a heart-breaking “ I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.” (Henry IV part 2: Act 5, Scene 5). But as I listen to the piece, this is all far off in the future in Ellington’s mind. For now, the plan is simple: party! RICHARD II Sicut Cervus & “Of Comfort No Man Speak” Paul Englishby (1970- , English) Paul Englishby & RSC; David Tennant Plenty of music originates in the theatre; previous playlists have included some. But with so much on so many stages the world over, it is impossible to keep up. Most gets performed during a predocution then disappears. So I’m glad that the RSC records much of the original music for their shows. Here is a track from their recent production of Richard II. It is a choral piece, a setting in fact of Psalm 42, “As the deer pants for streams of water…” The king’s right to rule is a divine one and so it is an entirely appropriate accompaniment for one who derives his authority from heaven. Yet one of Shakespeare’s key concerns here is what makes a reign effective. Richard is too weak and irresolute to manage it. We watch him fatally make an enemy of Bolingbroke (son of the powerful John of Gaunt). As scholars have noted, Bolingbroke seems to have learned from Machiavelli’s The Prince (it first appeared in translation less than a decade before Shakespeare wrote Richard II). Richard is left flailing, losing his mental equilibrium as his power dwindles (David Tennant’s recital of the glorious Hollow Crown speech brings that out superbly). Bolingbroke seizes the throne, crowned Henry IV, prompting a toadying courtier to murder Richard, confined at Pomfret Castle. Englishby’s setting of Psalm 42 is extraordinary. It is eerie and unsettling, as apparently other-worldly as the rightful king. The (extremely) high soprano leaps and jumps serve to deepen that unease. A lesson perhaps that heavenly devotion rarely results in earthly success or power. RICHARD III Richard III: A Symphonic Poem (Op. 11, JB 1:70) Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884, Czech) Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, Theodore Kuchar (cond.) Richard is the king everybody loves to hate and every actor loves to play. If you got hooked on House of Cards (whether in the original UK series with Ian Richardson or the U.S. version with Kevin Spacey), you’ll have been transfixed by the times when the lead stares straight into the camera to explain his thinking. Or perhaps to justify himself. It’s known as breaking the fourth wall and done well, it can be incredibly powerful. But Shakespeare’s villainous ruler is the one who perfected the art. The Crookback Richard frequently takes the audience into his confidence; we thus become complicit. I’ve seen a few Richards over the years, but I’ll never forget Spacey’s in London years ago. I bet it was this that inspired him to get House of Cards made. Here is Richard’s opening speech, while still only Duke of York: Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the King In deadly hate, the one against the other; And if King Edward be as true and just As I am subtle, false, and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mewed up. —Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1 Smetana was a great Czech patriot and nationalist (his Má Vlast/My Fatherland is superb), so he isn’t perhaps the first composer one would expect to write about an English king. But he was clearly greatly taken with Shakespeare, and wrote music inspired by Twelfth Night and Macbeth as well as Richard III. In this single movement piece, we can hear Richard’s stealth and skulduggery from the very start. If Bolingbroke introduced Machiavelli’s wicked pragmatism to the English throne, Richard, Duke of York perfected it. ANTONY & CLEOPATRA The Death of Cleopatra (Op. 40, 1966) Samuel Barber (1910-1981, American) Esther Hinds (soprano) & Jeffrey Wells (bass), Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Christian Badea (cond.) Shakespeare, of course, was hardly restricted to English history. He was fascinated by Athens and Rome too, and his Antony and Cleopatra came eight years after his Julius Caesar. Both qualify as tragedies, as do Macbeth and Coriolanus despite their historical origins (though Coriolanus is now regarded as legendary). But as so often, great art is impossible to categorise. Samuel Barber is best known for his ethereal, melancholic Adagio for Strings (sometimes in its choral form, Agnus Dei). But he is by no means a one-hit-wonder! He was commissioned to write an opera for the Met in New York and so his Antony and Cleopatra (with text by none other than the great Franco Zeffirelli) was premiered in 1966. Unfortunately, it was a flop and closed after eight performances. It has subsequently been revised and has found new audiences. I only discovered it while researching for this playlist but was knocked sideways by its climax, the Egyptian Queen’s suicide. This too is eerie and dark, as befitting a story set in an alien and unimaginably remote world. HENRY V Henry V Suite (1944) Sir William Walton (1902-1983, English) Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir William Walton (cond.) (1963 recording) And so it’s back to Hank Cinq. The world was at war in 1944. The UK was no longer alone, now that Hitler had turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin, and the U.S. had been propelled into the fight by Pearl Harbor. But England’s morale had been battered and bruised like its Blitz-beaten cities. (Though we should never forget that the Allies would drop as many bombs on German cities in a single night as London suffered during the entire war). Who better to bolster the country’s resolve than the national poet himself, and which better character to turn to than Henry V, the king who sailed across the English Channel—known by the French as La Manche, or The Sleeve, a fact I’ve always found rather impertinent myself, but you can’t have everything—to claim a heroic victory? And who better to portray him than our finest thespian (at least, as far as he was concerned), old Larry Olivier himself? We won’t make too much of the fact that the enemy in question is French, because the Free French were our allies (sadly, the bard didn’t really anticipate a German foe). So as already hinted, the film clearly had propagandistic purposes (hence no traitors’ scene—we don’t really need reminding of that possibility now, do we?). And the fighting scenes are gripping but highly stylised and glory-focused. Olivier commissioned Walton to compose the soundtrack and he pulled off a masterpiece in its own right. His score wonderfully captures the film’s heroic spirit and few did more than Walton and his contemporary Ralph Vaughan-Williams to evoke what we now assume to be the sound of the late mediaeval and early Tudor periods. As you listen to it, even without seeing the movie, I’d be surprised if you failed to envisage scenes of chivalrous knight jousting and beautiful maids sorting fragrant herbs, spied through a blur of lead-latticed windows. Walton’s score became a kind of Hollywood template for the Middle Ages! The five movements in this suite (devised specifically for concert performances, of which there have since been thousands) are utterly compelling and exciting. A little teaser as I wrap up. I wonder if you can spot Walton’s musical inspiration for the 4th movement (“Touch her soft lips and part”—depicting the scene where Pistol and his fellow foot soldiers say farewell to his wife to leave for France)? Hint: we have had it in a recent playlist… Bonus extra: Henry V contains one of my favourite lines about tennis balls in the history of theatre.

Picasso said (allegedly), ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ Well, knowing a little bit about him, he probably stole it. Or was that Banksy? Anyway, the point is simple. Every creative person is forced to engage with the past, whether they like it or not, whether conscious of it or not. None of us lives in a vacuum. However, a problem arises because none of us can identify every single influence on us. What we sincerely believe to be innovative or peculiar to us might instead be a half-remembered, half-regurgitated soundbite picked up from a talk show while passing through a department store TV showroom. Or something. The ‘genius’ in Picasso’s quip is one who not only knows exactly where they steal from but also how to use it to make something truly innovative. Many presume that the worlds of symphonic halls and Music Halls of Fame are separated by light years of mutual ignorance and other cultural barriers. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Scratch the surface and there is much more overlap—or ‘cross-over,’ to be completely on-trend—than you might realise. Stealing proceeds with abandon. So here are a few fun examples (though not all are successful, in my view!). One of your go-to whistles just might have a far grander pedigree than you knew. Adagio Cantabile, Sonata No. 8 in C minor (Pathétique, Op. 13) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) Alfred Brendel (piano) The thief: Billy Joel on “This Night” (An Innocent Man, 1983) This is one of only a tiny handful of Beethoven sonatas that I learned in its entirety back in the day—and was utterly depressed when I went back to it last week after a gap of too long. Arhghgh. My left hand? Practically useless now. Oh well. It’s just as well the likes of Alfred Brendel made such great recordings. I find the whole of this sonata overwhelming (in a good way). Pathétique does not mean what you might assume. Beethoven is not declaring that this is a useless attempt at a composition; rather that it is full of pathos. It is heart-breaking. And that is especially true of this, the central of the three movements. It is no surprise that it has found its way into hymn books and psalters, funeral marches and, here, Billy Joel, no less. You think Billy’s just going down the tried-and-tested doowop road, and he does it pretty effectively. And then all of a sudden, he bursts into Beethoven in the chorus with ‘This night…’ To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced on this one—but you have to admire the pluck. Evidence of the rule (first coined by J. I. Packer, of the Christian gospel, I think) “To add [to it] is to subtract [from it]”. Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D (BWV 1068) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Gottfried von der Goltz, Petra Müllejans (violins), Freiburger Barockorchester The thief: Procul Harum - A Whiter Shade of Pale (1967) I don’t think Bach had much time for skipping light fandangos or turning cartwheels across floors—but it’s certain he would have felt pretty seasick if he had. But this ‘Air,’ which is gorgeous in its own right, inspired one of the weirdest and most successful singles of all time (vying with “Bohemian Rhapsody” on both counts). 10 million copies is not to be sniffed at. An ‘air’ might be a song (as in an anglicised form of an operatic ‘Aria’), or it could be a song-like composition, in that it might have the structure and melody of a song but without texts. (Mendelssohn would compose nearly sixty, which he called ‘Songs without Words’). So perhaps this is why Procul Harum’s ingenious appropriation of Bach’s work seems so much more convincing than Billy’s Beethoven burglary. But one thing we can state categorically: that brilliant believer in Leipzig had no need of narcotics to express his genius—it’s a moot point whether or not Procul Harum could have done so without them! The creation, though, seems to have gained many identities since its composition. It is much beloved of adolescent boys who find its alternative title (‘Air on a G String’) eminently snigger-worthy. For whole swathes of the British population it is indelibly linked with Hamlet cigars. For decades (probably) it was the soundtrack to many adverts depicting people finding themselves in awkward scrapes for which the only possible solace can only be a cigar. Trying to leave all of that to one side is tricky. But try. Because it is an exquisite piece of music in its own right. ‘Vesti La Giubba’ (‘Put on the costume’) from Pagliacci (‘Clowns’) Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919, Italian) Luciano Pavarotti (tenor), National Philharmonic Orchestra, Giuseppe Patane (cond.) The thief: Queen It’s a Hard Life (The Works, 1984) This is the only opera that Leoncavallo is known for today, and it is nearly always performed with the one that inspired it, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavallieri Rusticana. Neither is full length and both are in Italian and composed just a couple of years apart, so the combination is tried and tested. (By the way, to bluff your way with opera buffs, just wax lyrical about the last time you saw and were ‘utterly transported, darling’ by ‘Cav and Pag’.) This aria concludes the first act and is sung by Canio the Clown in his dressing room, just after discovering his wife’s infidelity. He is devastated but ‘the show must go on’ and there’s a paying audience out there. So, he forces himself into costume and make-up—the archetypal cheery clown who masks internal despair. Pavarotti shows how it’s done. But then, unsurprisingly (to us now especially if you’ve seen the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic), so does Freddie Mercury. Queen had referenced Pagliacci in their 1975 A Night at the Opera album, but in this song, they go full-on diva-fest (just dig up the song’s official video). Thematically, the song is entirely in harmony with Leoncavallo’s, which probably explains the success of this appropriation. As well as the fact that Freddie always was a diva-cum-tortured-clown himself… Prelude No. 4 in E Minor Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849, Polish) Martha Argerich (piano) The thief: Radiohead Exit Music For A Film (OK Computer, 1997) Chopin was a pianist of unique ability, both as a performer and composer, and his output prolific. Before his death at 39, he wrote nearly 250 individual pieces for piano, many of which are almost universally recognised as masterpieces. The 24 Preludes was Chopin’s homage to Bach, who himself had written 24 Preludes and Fugues. Why 24? Well, think of a piano. Take any note at random and then then go up the keyboard a perfect fifth at a time (in other words, 7 semitones, an interval fundamental to all western music). Keep doing this and you’ll find you eventually cover all 12 notes in a western scale. Since the two most common scales are the major and minor, when you combine them, you get a total of … woah… 24 different scales (or key signatures). Why Preludes? Fair question. In Bach they clearly prefaced the fugue written for each key. For Chopin, we can only imagine; as far as we know each is just a prelude to the next prelude…! But they are basic works in every professional pianist’s kitbag. And as well as presenting all kinds of challenges and difficulties (like most of Chopin—I can’t really play any of it properly), they are just toe-curlingly, exquisitely sublime. But even though I knew them well (or thought I did), and despite being in awe of Radiohead since being hooked on The Bends in 1995, I really didn’t catch the dodgy dealing with this OK Computer track. I had a niggling sense of familiarity but thought little more of it. Until I read something a few years later which exposed the theft. And what a superb job it is too. I think Frederic would have been happy (though the singing style would not perhaps have been to his taste). But what do I know? Allegro Molto (3rd movement), Symphony No. 5 (Op. 82) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis (cond.) The thief: Strawberry Switchblade Since Yesterday (1985) I can’t claim to be a big Strawberry Switchblade fan. In fact, I remembered their name and the fact that they were an English 80s girl band and that was it. Everything else I had to Wiki—including the fact that they were actually Scottish and just a duo. But I vividly remember hearing this song come on the radio and being totally gripped. Well, I was only 15. I suggest you listen to that first, before the symphonic movement. It wasn’t the song itself, but that synth brass intro. There was something about the intervals and joy it expressed. Listening to it now (for the first time in perhaps 30 years), it seems like classic disposable 80s pop. For which I’m now… well… meh. I didn’t know about Sibelius, Finland’s greatest composer, then. But Strawberry Switchblade did. And they stole from him, lock, stock and chord-sequenced barrel. At least, they preserved the composer’s orchestration for that sequence. Sort of. But once you get to know the Symphony as a whole, and this movement in particular, you’ll hopefully see why Sibelius’ triumphant score needed nothing extra. Strawberry Switchblade perked up my ears, so I’m grateful to them for that. But in all honesty, they did so by gilding the lily. If you didn’t know it, I hope the symphony grows on you, and in time, you come to see why his 5th is one of my favourite symphonies by anybody ever. And ever since I’ve known it, the temptation to ‘air conduct’ (even while driving) is overwhelming. Getting the final bars right is fiendishly tricky… but go on… resistance is futile. Lieutenant Kijé symphonic suite (Op. 60, 1934) Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953, Soviet/Russian) Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado (cond.) The thieves: Sting “Russians” (The Dream of the Blue Turtles, 1985) Greg Lake I Believe in Father Christmas (1975) Soviet cinema inspired some remarkable soundtracks. For all its propagandistic value (to its state commissioners), some wonderful music was produced. As I mentioned in #4, the more you get to know early 20th Century orchestral music (and Russian particularly), the more you hear the roots of modern Hollywood soundtracks. At the forefront of that extraordinary wave of creativity was Sergei Prokofiev. His score to the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky is stunning in its own right (written four years after the one in focus here). But Lieutenant Kijé was Prokofiev’s first film score and it is brilliant. He drew together the key elements into a concert suite of five movements for orchestra. The film is a biting satire about a bureaucratic slip of the pen that creates a fictitious soldier and thus exposes the idiocy of Tsarist rule along with the trembling courtiers too compromised or corrupted to speak truth. The political resonances haven’t exactly disappeared… Prokofiev captures the wit and pathos of the story beautifully. As a result, this little suite is one of his most popular works; you’ll probably recognise all kinds of moments. Both Sting and Greg Lake do grand jobs of incorporating Prokofiev’s music (from the 2nd and 4th movements respectively) without the remotest sense of contrivance. The Emerson, Lake and Palmer song is great (though I love Bono’s cheeky lyrical tweak in the U2 cover). But I remember being very affected by Sting’s song when it came out. The Cold War was still officially on the cusp of becoming hot and one half of the world threatened to nuke the other into oblivion. For a glibly cocooned western teenager, the notion that people in the Soviet Union might actually love their children seemed revelatory… Finally, a quick bonus. You will know, I’m sure, Pachelbel’s (in)famous “Canon in D.” Even if you didn’t know its name. The reason? Because it crops up everywhere. And I mean everywhere. This is has done the rounds, but I still love it. Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel Rant (disclaimer: there are a few not-safe-for-work words, but in the circumstances, I’m sure you’ll empathise)

Here’s the dilemma: you’re desperate to get a message out, but only to the right people. It’s imperative that the wrong people don’t hear it. So, what options do you have? How do you ensure it gets hidden in plain sight? Well, for those with ears to hear, music is the perfect medium. Forget about codenames, dead-letter-drops and Moscow rules (although friends well know I’m a sucker for good spycraft). Barlines and key signatures offer up even better possibilities. Overture, The Magic Flute (K. 620) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Claudio Abbado (cond.) Now, the first rule of Freemasonry club is (obviously) don’t tell a soul you’re a member of Freemasonry club. It’s Freemasonry 101. And then, whatever you do, you must never, ever, reveal Freemasonry Club secrets. But Mozart had an irrepressible and subversive impishness. He just couldn’t help himself, it seems. Conspiracy theorists (akin to those hooked on Peter Schaffer’s ingenious but seriously speculative play, Amadeus) will insist that the great composer’s untimely death (he was only 35!) was somehow masonic retribution for his indiscretions. That’s nonsense. And yet, the provocations in his final opera, The Magic Flute, must have infuriated fellow Lodge members. We’ve already heard one of my favourite moments in the opera (see 5&1 playlist #7). But now it is time for the overture. The house lights are dimmed but the stage curtain is still closed; the orchestra briefly has our exclusive attention as it heralds the imminent drama’s big themes. Now let’s face it, the story (written by Wolfgang’s friend and fellow Mason, Emanuel Schikaneder) is just plain silly. Just skim the wiki synopsis, if you need convincing. But it is brimming with all kinds of masonic tropes—such as solemn initiation ceremonies, priestly hierarchies and ancient Egyptian symbolism. Which is very strange since Mozart regarded membership of the Viennese lodge as far more significant than offering networking opportunities. He apparently bought into its philanthropic humanism. So, what on earth was he thinking to lacing the opera (and especially the overture) with masonic symbols and scenes? For example, listen out for the many types of 3, and the 3 x 3s. They just loved their symbolic numbers, the masons. Then after almost a minute, you’ll hear a fugato (a hurried fugue), whereby voice upon voice piles in to create an urgent, stunning whole: representative of the masonic ideal of the universal brotherhood of humanity. One might even think Mozart was relishing the chance to let the secrets out of the bag. Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor (BWV248) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Hilary Hahn (violin) Something that marks classical composition out from, say, jazz improvisation or a band’s work in the studio on a new album, is the desire to make performance replicable in some way. Why else try to capture it on paper, for all the many shortcomings of dots, scratches and accidentals? How else can it be performed again? But those dots and scratches offer the secret messenger other opportunities as well. The conventions of musical notation have little to do with the ‘sound’ of those notes, per se. There is nothing about 440hz (so-called ‘concert pitch’) for example, that means it must be called ‘A’ above ‘Middle C.’ It is just the convention. Because letters of the alphabet are used, the scope for codemaking fun is endless. And Bach knew it. He scatters his ‘musical signature’ across his works. Now, for reasons best known to themselves, German notation doesn’t exactly follow anglophone convention (weird, huh). Confusingly, what we call B flat, they call B; what we call B (or B natural) they call H. But look! Hey presto! Bach can now sound out the letters of his surname. Bach’s solo string compositions are demanding on the ear, especially if you’re not used to them. The solo cello suites are perhaps an easier way in, not least because of the popularising efforts of Yo-Yo Ma and others. But try to ‘hear’ the orchestral accompaniment that Bach is hinting at throughout, even at those moments when only one note is sounded at a time. The Chaconne (all 17 minutes of it) is breath-taking because so much is hinted at with so little. Then, on top of that, some powerful coding is taking place. As well as using the motif of his own name, Bach includes other elements. The use of the key of D minor was a common convention among composers to connote death and defeat; and that was fitting, because Bach’s beloved first wife, Maria Barbara had recently died. He is in mourning. But halfway through the Chaconne, it shifts into D major—symbolic of triumph and overcoming. And so on and so on. I’ve not even mentioned the complexity of its mathematical structures (mainly because I don’t understand them) and its profoundly Christian theology. Yehudi Menuhin called the Chaconne “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists.” Joshua Bell has said the Chaconne is “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.” In that famous experiment of him busking at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington DC rush-hour, this is one of the pieces he played. Largo, Quartet No. 8. (Op.110) Dmitri Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-1975, Russian) The Fitzwilliam Quartet Many composers after him would incorporate the B-A-C-H motif as a kind of homage to the master. Many also played around with the musical notations of their own names. Shostakovich did it frequently in his symphonies and concertos, for example. It’s a kind of autobiographical marker, suggesting that he himself inhabited the emotional force of a particular musical moment. The added ingredient necessary for understanding this one is the fact that E flat in German notation is called Es (rhyming with Bess)—hence written as S. Now, for Soviet composers, work really was a matter of life and death. And after decades of resisting pressure to join the Soviet Communist Party, Shostakovich finally relented. The self-loathing and despair that this prompted crushed him. And he poured it out in the 8th String Quartet, of which this is the opening movement. It is melancholy, dark and despairing… but exquisite. Each of the quartet’s movements contains the DSCH motif—but it is most obvious in the opening bars precisely because each instrument sounds it in turn in a fugue. Heart-breaking. Danny Elfman (Simpsons and Hollywood composer) described the 8th Quartet as “Simply one of the most beautiful, exquisitely sad, and soulful pieces of music I’ve ever heard.” But the most telling insight about it comes from this little anecdote which I included in my 2019 Hutchmoot seminar: Two years after the work’s premiere, in 1962, the Borodin Quartet played the work to the composer at his Moscow apartment, hoping for constructive criticism. Instead, Shostakovich buried his head in his hands and wept, at which the musicians decided that the best thing to do was pack their instruments and creep away. —How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, Steven Johnson Inspector Morse theme (full version) Barrington Pheloung (1954-2019, Australian) Original Soundtrack Now for something completely different. It is the mid-1980s and you’ve been commissioned to compose the music for a brand-new British detective show. It’s going to be set in and around Oxford and each episode will last two hours and draw on cinematic production values. Oh, and the copper in question is an opera-loving, cryptic crossword fanatic but curmudgeonly old goat called Morse. What do you do? Well, you incorporate Morse code into it, obviously. And, for good measure, spell out Morse’s name in code. So instead of tonal messaging, this is rhythmic. But what’s more—and this is the part that I really love—Pheloung occasionally beats out the killer’s name in the soundtrack halfway through; or he might throw in another character’s name purely as a red herring. Brilliant! But to top it all, it is a superb piece of music, perfectly capturing the show’s pathos and melancholy as the end credits roll. Allegro non troppo, String Sextet no. 2 in G (Op. 36, 1864-5) Johannes Brahms (1833-1897, German) The Amadeus Quartet, with Cecil Aronowitz (viola), William Pleeth (cello) Brahms never married. His life was dedicated (like so many other great composers before or since) to a relentless pursuit of musical creativity. But more than that, one might say he was unlucky in love. Or rather, fell for women who were unattainable, for whatever reason. Most famously, he adored Clara Schumann, wife of his good friend Robert Schumann, both of whom championed his music. And then there was Agathe von Siebold. Into this gorgeous piece of chamber music, one full of passionate intensity, Brahms smuggles his burning love, using A-G-A-H-E. They had actually been engaged in 1859, but for various reasons, it was called off. Here he is six years later and still agonised. Enigma Variations Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934, English) Hallé Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder (cond.) So here at last is the whole point of creating this list! Elgar wrote this theme and variations as a way of honouring his most precious friends, and it was dedicated “to my friends pictured within.” Each variation is given headed with a set of initials, so there is little mystery about identifying them. He is a little more opaque with a handful, though. CAE (I) is (Caroline) Alice Elgar, his devoted wife—the wistful musical fragment (of just four notes) in this variation was what Elgar would whistle whenever he arrived home! Ysobel (VI) is for his violin pupil Isabel Fitton, and the opening bar includes a phrase that crosses over the strings and is therefore quite difficult for the beginner; but it is glorious in its sense of musical yearning. Nimrod (IX) is perhaps most famous. It depicts Elgar’s great publisher and musical champion, Augustus Jaeger—it is obvious how indebted he felt to Jaeger by the exquisite pathos of the various. And the name is a play on words: Jäger is German for hunter, and Nimrod was of course the mighty hunter of Genesis 10:8. EDU (XIV) is actually a self-portrait. Edu was Alice’s nickname for him and the variation incorporates elements of both Alice’s and Jaeger’s variations, depicting them as his two most significant influences. None of this is especially enigmatic, however. So where is the enigma? Elgar himself wrote, “The Enigma I will not explain—its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played… So the principal Theme never appears…” He took the ‘solution’ with him to his grave and while ingenious suggestions have been made, nobody has cracked it… But what keeps me repeatedly returning to this piece is its exuberant joy in friendship. Each portrait is so distinct and alive. Each one clearly contributes so much to the composer’s life. And each time I find myself reflecting in deep gratitude on what each of my own friends bring. Elgar’s Enigma somehow encapsulates for me precisely what C. S. Lewis was getting at in his reflections after Charles Williams’ death: In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald… In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have. —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

If the challenge behind last week’s 5&1 was the relative scarcity of music to fit the topic (although perhaps not as rare as some might assume), this week’s is the opposite. Christmas has inspired composers to reach new heights for centuries. There’s just too much. So, I’ve tried to pick out a few items that will be very familiar to choral enthusiasts but less widely known. I can leave you to enjoy the profound wonders of Messiah by Handel and the iconic nine Lessons and Carols from King’s Cambridge for yourselves (although several of these will have undoubtedly appeared in the latter over the years). Christmas Oratorio: 1:1 Jauchzet, frohlocket! Auf, preiset die Tage (BWV248) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Stephen Layton (cond.) The events of that first Christmas were deeply puzzling. I suspect that none of those involved really understood what was going on. Indeed, it would take Jesus’s own mother at least three decades. What those first on the scene would have grasped, however, is the grounds for joy. Joy at the miracle of a new life. That’s a source of wonder every single time, in itself. But 2,000 years ago, it was so much more. This was a miraculous new life who would usher in new life for all, including those not yet alive. Bach opens his Christmas Oratorio (in fact, his own combination of several cantatas—see 5&1, Part 8 on Advent) with an evocation of the angels calling the shepherds. With rousing drums (anyone who complains about drums in church would need to take the matter up with the great JSB first) and glorious brass. This is eighteenth-century music to get people off their backsides and into town to see the newborn. Incidentally, cast aside images of stables and cowsheds—if you want to know what really happened at his birth, check out this post from my friend Ian Paul, a fascinating NT scholar. Hodie Christus Natus Est (FP 152) François Poulenc (1899-1963, French) Cambridge Singers, John Rutter (cond.) So, you’ve trekked from your sheep paddock into the seething metropolis that wasn’t Bethlehem, and what do you find? What’s the big deal? This brief burst of unaccompanied choral exuberance from the quirky but brilliant François Poulenc informs us, setting the Latin text of a seasonal Gregorian chant. For this baby is actually a king. No newborns, even royal ones, have much to set them apart from others, regardless of proud parents who insist otherwise. They’re always very needy, with unrestrained combinations of bodily functions to which all but the most parentally biased will go, ‘Ewww’. And I have little doubt that Jesus bar-Joseph was the same. For he was fully human, fully enfleshed. He was one of us. And yet, he is also the Christ—God’s yearned-for King, for whom all heaven rejoices. And I’m sure this eternal joy will have even some echoes at least of Poulenc’s Alleluia… O Magnum Mysterium (1994) Morten Lauridsen (1943- , American) Chamber Choir of Europe, Nicol Matt (cond.) But that’s just the start. There are depths to the significance of this birth that we will never plumb. And this track takes another Gregorian chant text for Christmas to lead us in meditation on those depths. For it is not just the Christ who has been born, but the Lord: Latin ‘dominum,’ Greek ‘kyrios’ / Hebrew ‘adonai.’ It is the latter which the Old Testament regularly uses as a substitute for Yahweh / YHWH / Jehovah, the revealed name of God, deemed (by tradition but not scriptural warrant) too holy to utter. For yes, this is the claim. Yahweh has been born. Remember, in the bible, a mystery is not something spooky or scary (necessarily) but something only God knows, and therefore something only God can reveal. Because he’s God, mysteries tend to shock and surprise. So, the fact that animals witness this caper is only the start. A great mystery indeed. Listen out for Lauridsen’s sublime articulation of the words’ varied emotional force. This birth is far greater than anything the world had seen or ever will see. Yet its joys, that in this setting seem to unfold and escalate organically, would still be pricked by pain, a pain which only a grieving mother could truly know. Stars ‘Alone in the night’ (2011) Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977- , Latvian); text by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933, American) Voces8 This one isn’t a carol at all, per se. And the fact that the composer and Latvian Baptist seminary graduate uses water-tuned wine glasses to accompany the choir makes this quite unusual! But the very last lines of Sara Teasdale’s gorgeous text tie perfectly into the themes we have considered, not least because the experiences she evokes would have been experienced by all that first Christmas, but with even greater wonder. Those of us who live in or near cities are denied them by pesky light pollution. But this, for me, superbly evokes the true light-bringer, the one (famously described by Graham Kendrick) who with “hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered.” Legend (‘The Crown of Roses’) (1883) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893, Russian) The Queen’s Six This precious miniature by the great Russian composer gives us further insight into a mother’s concern as she watches her son grow up. The original poem was written by the American Richard Henry Stoddard, translated into Russian in the 1870s, and it was this that caught Tchaikovsky’s imagination. It tells of an imagined incident in Jesus’ childhood, when he is found by a group of children in his garden. They mock him for the roses he cares for and from which he makes garlands. When they decide to make their own crown for him, stripping theirs of petals but leaving the bare thorns, it spoke truer than they could have known. A Ceremony of Carols (Op. 28, 1942) Benjamin Britten (1906-1976, English) Westminster Cathedral Choir, David Hill (cond.) Several months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Britten and his partner Peter Pears left Britten for the United States. They were committed pacifists and could see the storm clouds of war building. But on the back of English incomprehension and hostile reviews of his music, they were encouraged by the American reception their friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had enjoyed. Once war broke out, the UK embassy in Washington urged them to remain as ‘artistic ambassadors.’ In the end, after some of the darkest years of the war, they felt they must return and set sail in 1942. It was while onboard that Britten started writing this glorious piece—a collection of eleven movements, with words mainly taken from the English of Chaucer and a bit later. It is unusual—set just for treble voices (unbroken boys’ voices) and harp—but the effect is magical. The boys process in and out singing a plainsong chant (we have already heard Poulenc’s setting of that text)—and in between, true glories are contained. Each movement is a fragile but precious jewel. And I’ll never forget the time I heard ‘This little Babe’ live—electrifying. Who knew that boys + harp could convey both the seriousness of, and deadly threat to, this newborn’s mission so effectively? Follow the full text here. Just as Dickens evokes (and probably invented) the Victorian Christmas, for me Britten’s Ceremony just is the mediaeval Christmas! BONUS: Fantasia on Christmas Carols Ralph Vaughan-Williams (1872-1958, English) Sir Thomas Allen (baritone), Corydon Singers, English Chamber Orchestra, Matthew Best (cond.) Well, it’s Christmas and I couldn’t resist a bonus. It’s too long to include in the 5, but I really wanted Britten to get the 1! Some will have felt short-changed without traditional carols on the list. So here they are (or some at least). As a master of folksong and orchestration, Ralph Vaughan-Williams weaves them altogether and thus invites us into a kind of classical Behold The Lamb of God gig!

A requirement to create art that is ‘relevant’ can be a curse. After all, today’s relevance is tomorrow’s obsolescence. Not only that, the requirement itself, however well-intentioned, can push the artist uncomfortably close to the precipice into full-blown propaganda. No wonder so many prefer to be stimulated to create by their experiences and observations of life. At the same time, few, if any, actively set out to be ir-relevant! Why would anyone bother to communicate then? So, what makes the difference? Well, I just wonder if the crucial ingredient is that these observations of the mundane provoke spontaneous and heart-felt responses. How much more when the provocation is not mundane at all—such as the Nazi bombardment of the Spanish town of Guernica that so incensed Picasso, or the horrors of the Holocaust which lurks darkly behind one of today’s pieces? The creations that came out of these agonies were located within very specific moments and places and yet they somehow maintain a relevance that transcends time and cultures. The industrial and post-industrial world has affected us all, in many ways of which we are blithely unaware. It is a machine world, whether analogue or digital. So, inevitably, it has provoked composers. Pacific 231 “Mouvement Symphonique No. 1” (H.53, 1923) Arthur Honegger (1892-1955, Swiss) Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariss Janssons (cond.) Not much of Honegger’s music is played these days. Except this piece. A short blast that might be played at the top of an orchestra’s evening programme, one to blow out cobwebs from ticket-holders’ ears and expunge the brain-detritus from a day in the office. It was written a century ago, can you believe it!? As so often, the clichés of film and TV soundtracks derive from the pioneers of classical music. So if asked to imagine music for a train pulling out of a station and picking up speed—as in, for example, one of the countless versions of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express or that classic Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor double act that I so loved as a kid, Silver Streak—then, it might sound a bit like Honegger’s piece. Intriguingly, it wasn’t called Pacific 231 when he composed it. He wasn’t actually thinking of trains at all. Instead, despite being a train-buff, he had set himself the task of writing a piece of music that gained momentum while simultaneously losing speed. But when he completed it, he gave it the name of a particular class of steam locomotive. Hopefully, you’ll be able to hear precisely why. A short ride in a fast machine (1986) John Adams (1947- , American) New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur (cond.) The great poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge all decried the advances of industrialisation. But there’s no denying the thrill and majesty of some machinery. Wonder and amazement are natural responses to, say, a vast hydroelectric dam or a massive freighter aircraft lumbering towards take-off. John Adams invites us to buckle up in the passenger seat and get psyched for the G-force assault. Ready? It’s quite a short ride. But boy, can it motor… The Iron Foundry (Op. 1919, 1927-8) Alexander Vasilyevich Mosolov (1900-1973, Soviet/Ukrainian) Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly (cond.) But sometimes, propaganda is precisely what is expected of creators. If you presume that this is something indulged in by enemies foreign and domestic only, then get real. I’ve recently been fascinated by two books that describe firstly what five Hollywood film directors did during the Second World War (Five Came Back by Mark Harris) and secondly by what was expected of writers on both sides of the Cold War (Duncan White’s superb Cold Warriors: Writers who Waged the Literary Cold War). Composers couldn’t escape either. So Alexander Mosolov, like all Soviet composers, was expected to serve the interests of ‘the people’—and especially during the Stalin era, the Soviet Union was propelled from essentially agrarian peasant economy to a fully industrialised one within only three decades. It was an astonishing achievement. And Mosolov conveys something of that in this piece, originally written to be part of a ballet simply called—wait for it—Steel! We can hear the mechanised chaos of the foundry. But is there more? Is there not an inherent human, not to mention environmental, cost to this aggressive programme? Perhaps it is just our 2020 sensibilities that colour our listening…I’ll leave you to decide. Belshazzar’s Feast. IV. Praise Ye The God of Gold (1931) William Walton (1902-1983, English) Sir Bryn Terfel (bass), BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis (cond.) You’ll think this piece the odd one out. Far from being set in an industrial landscape we know too well, Walton’s piece casts us back millennia to the world of Israel’s Babylonian Exile. What machinery there was is primitive to say the least. But this excerpt from the cantata (whose text was selected from Daniel and Psalm 137 by Osbert Sitwell) does fit on this list. Because this movement is a magnificent, inspiring, heart-stopping hymn of praise… to idols. The words are simple: Praise ye… the God of Gold… of Silver… of Iron… of Wood… of Stone… of Brass… It is utterly pagan. But it is exuberant and joyful, is it not? And totally absurd. Has our era learned nothing? We’re not as crassly idolatrous perhaps (that’s a big perhaps); but how many these days simply add supplementary verses to… the gods of silicon… of digits… of bytes… of gigahertz. I would love you to listen to the whole of Walton’s masterpiece—for it certainly is that. But it is an example of brilliant musical story-telling. The music as the famous words are mysteriously inscribed on the wall is chilling. And as for the moment when the king was slain… I don’t know a musical moment like it. But that’s all for another day! On we must go with our list. Toccata in D minor (Op. 11, 1912) Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev (1891-1953, Soviet/Russian) Martha Argerich (piano) Some will have seen the title of this piece and recognised it. But this is not Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, so beloved of schlocky horror movie organists. This is a pianistic tour de force and is one of those that only the truly brilliant can pull off. In fact, Prokofiev himself (apparently) struggled to play it well enough to perform it—and he was a gifted pianist! But it is more than keyboard fireworks. Its complexity is mechanistic. So is its violence. There seems barely any room for the human. Which is kind of the point. Different Trains (1988) Steve Reich (1936- , American) Kronos Quartet But the true human costs of mechanisation have been under the surface so far in this list. It is now that the appalling ends to which mechanisation can be put are explicit, albeit in a brilliant and deeply unsettling way. It has three movements and is written for a string quartet and tape (made by Reich himself of various voices and industrial sounds). America, Before the War (movement 1) Europe, During the War (movement 2) After the War (movement 3) Steve Reich (pronounced Rysh) was born in New York to Jewish parents who divorced when he was just one. So much of his childhood was spent travelling between New York and Los Angeles, which naturally enough, meant a lot of time spent on trains. So we hear the voices of people like his governess Virginia and of Lawrence Davis, a retired Pullman porter looking back on the era. We can sense Reich the boy, staring in wide-eyed-wonder at these enormous machines. But as he looked back from his 50s, it occurred to him that had he lived in Europe, as a Jew, his experiences of train travel would have been entirely different. Three Holocaust survivors (identified as Paul, Rachel and Rachella) thus speak in the second movement. In the final movement, all the voices come together back in America. The philosopher Theodor Adorno said, ‘After Auschwitz no further poems are possible, except on the foundation of Auschwitz itself.’ There’s a lot going on in that sentence. And room for debate. But what is surely true is that any artform, especially one involving words, will struggle to come even close to being an adequate response to the Holocaust. Once acknowledged, however, it sharpens the mind. And Different Trains is an astonishing attempt at doing just that. It is precisely because it is so oblique, and yet simultaneously personalised via voiceover track, that Reich’s work is so heartbreakingly effective. Click here to listen on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music. This playlist will be updated each Friday with new music recommendations from Mark Meynell.

There is a deep-rooted logic to the church calendar. It doesn’t always feel like that, granted, but I’ve often found that its apparent peculiarities provoke some helpful meditation. After all, how weird to celebrate Christ’s birth with a meal devised to memorialise his death! Then within less than three months, we’re preparing for that death with Lenten glooms. It’s all over so quickly. Then, how odd to spend half the year in so-called ‘ordinary time’ without anything specific to focus on at all. There is method in it, however. So it is profoundly helpful that Advent, a time of preparation, has a double focus on both comings of Christ. It is about expectations and hope; it is about nurturing that most irritating of virtues, patience. Who enjoys being patient? Not me, that’s for sure. But music definitely helps me wait with a little more patience. Matin Responsory, I Look From Afar Anon (after Palestrina) Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford; Bill Ives (cond.) This track is full of happy memories. I was perhaps 9 or 10, a treble in the school choir, and we would kick off our annual Advent Carol service with it. Usually, the choir will start in church off-stage somewhere. Just like John the Baptist, it begins with an unaccompanied voice, coming out of nowhere. Different soloists respond with the choir chiming in occasionally, expressing eager anticipation of the joyful news to come. Ideally—though, to be fair, it’s tricky to do this well when singing acapella—they start processing in and reach the piece’s resounding climax just as they get to their seats. So for me, the Matin Responsory is precisely how Advent is supposed to start. Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland: 3 Aria (Cantata BWV 61) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) Antony Rolfe Johnson (baritone), The Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner (cond.) How can any classical playlist not have Bach? The more one learns about him and familiarises oneself with his music, the more astonishing he becomes. And he was a supremely theological composer (quite apart from the fact that he was able to compose incredibly mathematical music which managed simultaneously to be very affecting). So I’m embarrassed that he’s not featured on 5&1 until now. No matter. This excerpt from one of his cantatas will rectify the situation more than adequately. A cantata was a setting of the liturgy in church, often composed specifically for a day in the calendar. When Bach was working for the church in Leipzig, he pulled off the most astonishing feat—producing a cantata for soloist(s), choir, organ and orchestra every week for several years. Many are masterpieces. This is a solo in the middle of an Advent cantata, reflecting the fact that Advent marks the start of a new church year. Come, Jesus, come to this thy church now And fill with blessing the new year! Advance thy name in rank and honour, Uphold thou every healthy doctrine, And bless the pulpit and the altar! This is the record of John Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625, English) Fretwork, Rogers Covey-Crump, (tenor), Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, Bill Ives (cond.) The effect of the Reformation on sixteenth century Europe was colossal. Its reverberations are felt still. So it is hardly surprising that music, and especially church music, was revolutionised. After all, Luther himself was a more than competent musician (and Bach respected his musicianship almost as much as his theology). One of the big shifts in choral music was the need to pay close attention to words. Much pre-reformation choral music had sought a sense of the ethereal with words a means to an end by providing singers with some nice open vowels! And it did this very effectively (just listen to some Palestrina masses, for example). But the reformers were committed to the Word and therefore to words. So music had to reflect that. Orlando Gibbons was a brilliant Elizabethan composer in England. And here, he does the most obvious thing—he sets texts taken from the Word. But it is far from pedestrian. This is music as story-telling and it is just gorgeous. Magnificat (Gloucester Service, 1946) Herbert Howells (1892-1983, English) Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Andrew Nethsingha (cond.) Dial forward two hundred and fifty years to one of my favourite composers that you’ve never heard of (probably)! Herbert Howells wrote mainly, but not exclusively, for cathedral choirs and so his work, especially his settings of Anglican liturgy, are the pinnacle of the English choral tradition (to my mind). He’s not for the faint-hearted singer, mind you—some of it is complex and exhausting to sing, with scrunchy harmonies that take ages to master. But when you do… just wow. It is a staple of the Anglican daily office that several canticles (biblical songs, essentially) are said or sung. In the afternoon/evening, at Evensong, the prayer book stipulates the Magnificat (Mary’s song at her annunciation in Luke 1:46-56) and the Nunc Dimitis (Simeon’s song at Jesus’s presentation in the Temple, Luke 2:28-32). So we’ve got to have a Magnificat in this Advent list—and this is one of my favourites from Howells. He wrote many, usually identified by the cathedral or chapel for which it was originally composed. The Gloucester service is epic. Listen out for the word-setting (follow along with your bible, perhaps)—notice how he brings out the great biblical reversals, especially for the proud and worldly wealthy. Then in the Gloucester Gloria (tacked onto the end of all the canticles and psalms in this ‘service’), is overwhelming in its triumph. Sublime. Es ist ein Ros entsprungen Michael Praetorius (1571-1621, German) Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, Graham Ross (cond.) Praetorius was a contemporary of Gibbons, over in Germany. He was an organist and extremely versatile composer. I’m only familiar with a tiny proportion of his output, but he is especially known for his development of the Lutheran hymn tradition. This track is a case in point. Here he took a mediaeval, advent text about Mary, the one through whom Jesse’s line will be carried (see Isaiah 11:1), and added some gorgeous harmonies. Here is a literal translation: A rose has sprung up, from a tender root, As the old ones sang to us, Its strain came from Jesse And it has brought forth a floweret In the middle of the cold winter Well at half the night. The little rose that I mean, Of which Isaiah told Is Mary, the pure, Who brought us the floweret. At God’s eternal counsel She has borne a child And remained a pure maid. or: Who makes us blessed. The floweret, so small That smells so sweet to us With its bright gleam It dispels the darkness. True man and true God, It helps us from all trouble, Saves us from sin and death. This recording is unusual, though. I’ve been trying to dig out more information but failed so far. Perhaps you can help out in the comments. But Graham Ross directs the choir to sustain the harmonies and lines in surprising, even unsettling, ways. It is a wonderful twist on words that ought to inspire deep meditation. Veni, Veni, Emanuel (Percussion concerto, 1992) Sir James MacMillan (1959-, Scottish) Evelyn Glennie (percussion), Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka Saraste (cond.) Now. I hope you’re sitting comfortably. Because this will come as a shock. It is not choral, and at several points, it’s definitely not ‘nice’ or ‘comfortable.’ But this piece is by one of the finest composers still working on this side of the Atlantic. James MacMillan is a committed Catholic who seems as versatile musically as he is imaginative. It is a percussion concerto (of all things), written for the unique Evelyn Glennie (MacMillan’s fellow Scot). She went profoundly deaf at 12 but this didn’t stop her performing to the highest standard (google her performances and her TED talk). She simply ‘hears’ through other parts of her body (as she describes it) and often performs barefoot as a result. In common with all concertos, it is designed to show off the potential and glories an instrument (or in this case, instrument section) and this one does so in spades. So what on earth has this got to do with Advent? Well, yes, the clue is in the work’s title. But listen carefully. The orchestra at times appears to be going completely nuts, as if out of control (hint: it isn’t). But as the piece progresses through its eight separate sections, the storms gradually, if unevenly, clear and we begin to get the point. All the way through, as if trying to find a space to be heard in the cacophony, is the centuries-old melody that we still sing today. O Come, O Come Emmanuel! This is an orchestral depiction of the world’s darkness and chaos, through which the light fights for its rightful, and ultimately triumphant place. So please—give yourself the 30 minutes or so to listen to the whole thing. It’s as epic a musical depiction of the gospel’s triumph as you well ever hear!

You’re probably unaware if reading this in the States, but we don’t really do Halloween in Britain; or at least, we didn’t until Hollywood instructed us and the rest of the world how to do it. I remember seeing E.T. in the cinema when it came out (jeepers—I can’t believe that it was 38 years ago!) and being totally confused about everyone wandering around as Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. Just weird. But I totally get that it might be fun. And since composers have gone to town over the centuries with the ghoulish and macabre, it’s as good a time as any to pick out a few chillers from the archives. So in recognition of Snoopy’s contribution to great literature, this is the kind of music to play on a dark and stormy night: Night on Bald (or Bare) Mountain Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881, Russian) Vienna Philharmonic, Valery Gergiev (cond.) A brilliant but troubled prodigy who published his first composition aged only 12, Mussorgsky died at only 42 having never been able to break the grip of alcoholism and insanity. His musical legacy is remarkable, though (his opera Boris Godunov, a Russian Macbeth-type story, is one of my favourite pieces). This is a tone poem (a musical depiction of a scene or narrative) which evokes some very dark goings-on to commemorate St. John’s Eve (June 23rd). He completed the composition on that very day in 1867. But it would take the orchestration by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov for it to become really well known. Shivers… Peer Gynt Suite: In the Hall of the Mountain King Edvard Grieg (1843-1907, Norwegian) Iona Brown (violin), Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) The great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, asked his compatriot Grieg to compose incidental music for his satirical play Peer Gynt. It is a staging of the fairy-tale about a character who sets off from Norway’s mountains and travels south all the way to the deserts of Northern Africa. The result is some of Grieg’s most popular music. ‘Mountain King’ is the English name, even though the original Danish (the language of Norway at the time) means something like ‘Troll King.’ As it happens, the king is just a figment of Gynt’s imagination, which explains why the music conveying the dangers from the troll is slightly tongue-in-cheek. Erlkönig, D. 328 (Op.1):Wer Reitet So Spät Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone), Gerald Moore (piano) Schubert could evoke charm, lightness and happiness one moment, but the next could witness him plumbing the depths of horror and despair. Here in his setting of Goethe’s poem, we find him making the hairs on your neck stand up with just a singer (who voices several characters) and fairly simple accompaniment. You can hear the breathless pace of a father carrying his son through the night on his horse in the music. But our fears intensify as the boy vainly tries to convince his father that the Erlkönig (the Elf King) is coming for him… Read a translation of the poem here. The Return of the King (The Complete Recordings disc 4): 1. Mount Doom Howard Shore (1946- , Canadian) Renée Fleming (soprano), London Philharmonic, Howard Shore (cond.) Howard Shore uses all the idioms and techniques of the great classical composers who went before him. The way he uses leitmotiv (musical ideas associated with individuals, locations or themes) is something that Wagner’s operas are famous for (especially The 4-opera Ring cycle, which Tolkien insisted, perhaps a little too vociferously (!), had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Middle Earth). Shore uses the technique brilliantly—as well as the whole range of aural colour available to an orchestral composer. I think he is particularly effective in the LOTR films when things get darker… Danse Macabre (Op. 40) Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921, French) Kyung Wha Chung (violin), Philharmonia Orchestra, Charles Dutoit (cond.) There was an old French legend that Death would appear at midnight on Halloween each year to rouse the skeletons of the dead in a sinister dance (hence “Danse Macabre”), leading them with his violin. They would continue all night until the crowing of the cockerel at dawn (heard in the orchestra on an oboe). Its first performance in Paris apparently provoked widespread feelings of anxiety. So imagine the vast Parisian catacombs suddenly coming to so-called life and echoing to the jangling of old bones and be afraid . . . very. Isle of the Dead (Op. 29, 1908) Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943, Russian) Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy (cond.) Rachmaninoff was inspired to write this stand-alone so-called ‘symphonic poem’ by seeing one of a series of paintings (of the same name) by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. The latter’s baby daughter had been buried near Böcklin’s studio, at the English Cemetery in Florence, and the series seems loosely based on that place despite of course being on land. In the music, we can hear the lapping of the water and the relentless movement of the oars as we approach this strange and sinister island. There is lightness and even a little levity in the music from time to time, perhaps as we look at the natural beauty all around us. But we can’t escape the inevitable, and the closer we come to our destination, the more menacing and overwhelming the music becomes. We can never escape our mortality, however much we try to avoid going gently into that good night. Memento mori as the ancients constantly reminded us: remember that we die. Previous generations were far better at doing this than ours is, because we have believed the lie of eternal youth or that ‘it will never happen to me.’ That’s why we want to avoid being ‘morbid’ at all costs. But here’s the original purpose of All Hallows’ Eve (from which the word Halloween derives): Hallows is an old term for saints (holy ones) and All Saints’ Day (November 1st) was set aside for remembering those loved ones in Christ who have died before us and therefore represent a model for our own discipleship. But because the night before became associated with some practices like praying for the dead or seeking protection from evil, it developed a paganistic life of its own when shorn of its Christian moorings. Perhaps this piece might challenge us to reflect as our ancestors have.

Classical music is so stuck up, isn’t it? All prim and proper in its white tie and tails—no wonder it gets a wide berth. Yet, as with any other section of society, composers have ranged from the ultra-serious and self-important to the irreverent and shameless. So in the face of so much cultural weirdness and anxiety at the moment, it’s good to let our hair down occasionally. We need to take having fun far more seriously than we do! Now I could have picked out moments where classical musicians have fun on stage; there are plenty out there if you look. If you have never encountered the wonders of Victor Borge, the musical gags of Dudley Moore—yes, that Dudley Moore—or more recently the genius of Billy Bailey on Downton Abbey here or U2 here, then you’re seriously missing out. Or I could have chosen examples of composers satirising their fellows (which is not that rare either). But that feels like cheating. Instead, I’m looking for pieces that put a smile on your face just because of what they are. Composing humorous music is quite the art. For discerning precisely what makes particular combinations of notes and harmonies funny is harder and less funny than explaining one-liner gags. I defy you not to find yourself smiling after at least one of these… (but no answers on postcards, please). Symphony No. 94 ‘The Surprise’ in G ma: 2. Andante (H 1/94, 1791) Josef Haydn (1732-1809, Austrian) Concertgebouworkest, Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cond.) One of Hadyn’s so-called London symphonies was written for his first major stadium tour of Britain. Well, not exactly. But he was one of the biggest stars of his era. Haydn was known for his sense of humour (as well as writing symphonies—he wrote over 100. Take that, Ludwig). The second movement of his 94th is the source of this one’s nickname. I wonder if you can tell what the surprise is… The “Cat’s” Fugue in G minor (K30, L499) Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757, Italian) Elaine Comparone (harpsichord) Scarlatti never used this piece’s nickname, so it could be a complete fabrication. But the legend is fun, so worth including. Fugues open with a sequence of notes (sometimes a subject or motif) and then build on it by repeating that sequence unchanged in different lines or voices (apart from starting on different notes). Imagine other instruments picking it up, or parts of a choir. It takes remarkable skill to do it with three or four voices. Bach did it with up to six! Anyway, Scarlatti’s motif is definitely weird. So the story is that it was originally ‘composed’ by his cat walking up the keyboard. See what you think… A musical joke: 4. Presto (K. 522 Divertimento for 2 horns & quartet) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Concentus Musikus Wien, Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cond.) Okay, I did say I’d exclude composers ribbing other composers and Mozart does seem to be doing that in this four-part ‘Musical Joke.’ He pokes fun at the various musical clichés of the day. But my justification is that in the last movement, he’s having a giggle at the expense of incompetent performers. When I was growing up in the UK, there were only three TV channels (I know, right—serious deprivation). Sometimes I’d be so desperate for a bit of telly-therapy that I’d sneak in a bit of viewing at odd times. So this piece will be familiar to millions because it was used as the theme for BBC2’s Horse of the Year show. (I told you I was desperate). Because it would simply fade post-titles, I had no idea about Mozart’s actual ending… Masquerade suite: 5. Galop (1941) Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978, Armenian/Soviet) Moscow RTV Large Symphony Orchestra, Karen Khatchaturian (cond.) Khachaturian’s five Masquerade pieces (gathered into a suite so that they could be performed separately) were originally composed for the Russian playwright Mikhail Lermontov’s play of the same name. The glorious opening waltz is one of those pieces that will perhaps be familiar without you realising why. But it’s not funny. The 5th really is. It’s not directly depicting wild horses pelting as fast as they can (that would be a gallop); a galop was often the final dance at grandest balls in the nineteenth century. All caution is flung to the wind and speed is of the essence. This recording was conducted by the composer’s nephew. The Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance (1879) Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900, English) / book by W. S. Gilbert George Rose (Maj-Gen Stanley), Joseph Papp (prod.), Wilford Leach (dir.) Now this is just plain silly. Gloriously silly. Gilbert and Sullivan were the perfect antidote to British Imperialistic hauteur, and this ingenious tongue-twister is lyrically and musically sublime. Need I say more? This recording was quite the discovery, though. Rather than the traditional option of the D’Oyly Carte Opera company in London (for whom G&S would create), here is a Broadway production whose cast featured Kevin Kline, Angela Lansbury and Linda Rondstadt, believe it or not! The Major-General is played by a Brit though, George Rose, who made the part his own throughout his career. Jazz Suites 1 & 2 (1934 & 1938) and Tahiti Trot Op. 16 (1927) Dmitri Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-1975, Russian/Soviet) Russian State Symphony, Dmitry Yablonsky (cond.) If Schubert is my 19th century musical hero, Shostakovich is my guy from the 20th. He could do practically anything. Symphonies—check (all FIFTEEN). Concertos—check. String Quartets—check (also FIFTEEN). Solo instrumental stuff—check. Operas—check. Ballet—check. Songs—check. Film scores—check (Incidentally, you’d be amazed how small the list of composers who laid the foundations for modern film music is—for everyone from Bernard Herrmann or Erich Korngold to John Williams and Danny Elfman, James Horner and even Hans Zimmer—and Dmitri is definitely on it – perhaps a 5&1 for another day). You name it, he could write it. And brilliantly. There are widely accepted masterpieces from each of these genres. It was simply incredible—not least because he wrote it all under the sinister gaze of the Communist Party (which he was eventually compelled to join in the ‘60s), and for thirty years, that of Stalin himself. But jazz? Like a number of composers in the century’s early decades, he was fascinated by African American musical forms, and by jazz in particular. So he wrote a number of individual pieces in jazz style (they probably sound a bit more like dance band music now)—and they’ve been grouped together in two suites, although there isn’t full consensus about which bits go where, so this recording has the lot! And after them comes the Tahiti Trot. This was written in answer to a bet from the conductor Nikolai Malko after he played Dmitri the tune on the piano. 100 roubles completely to reorchestrate (i) in under an hour (ii) from memory. He took just 45 minutes! So here it is. I’m sure you’ll recognise the melody… Strictly speaking, these pieces are more fun than funny but I can’t help but think there’s a wink and a grin throughout.

Most artforms are essentially con-tricks. A painting is a fixed, two-dimensional image designed to give the illusion of three dimensions and movement in time. A novel constructs universes out of words into which a reader is immersed. And music is a fleeting and dynamic form that moves through time to evoke and provoke emotion. But sometimes, it seems to make time stand still as if the music itself can transfix us in sublime suspension. String Quintet, The ‘Cello’: 2. Adagio (D. 956, Op. posth. 163) Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Mstislav Rostropovich with the Emerson Quartet Called the ‘cello’ quintet because Schubert adds an extra cello to the more conventional string quintet (2 violins, viola and cello). The whole work of 4 movements is one of Schubert’s most astonishing and poignant compositions (and probably in my top 10!). It was published posthumously because he completed it just two months before his desperately young death at 31. If ever a piece qualified for the claim to being sublime it is this second movement. ‘Soave sia il vento’ Trio from Act 1, Così Fan Tutte (K. 588) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Miah Persson, Angela Brower (soprano), Alessandro Corbelli (baritone), Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Yannick Nézet-Séguin (cond.) Opera is not everybody’s cup of tea! One needs a gentle initiation to get what all the fuss is about. This is an ideal entry point, from one of Mozart’s best loved. Imagine harbour walls as an old man and two young sisters sing their gorgeous send-off to the women’s fiancés. They are sailing away to war. However, nothing is quite what it seems—the fiancés have devised a cruel trick with the old man’s help to test the sisters’ fidelity. Yet the music for this trio betrays not a hint of that deception. It’s a sincerely meant blessing on the soldiers and their journey. Let yourself be wafted by the orchestra’s lilting, breeze-like accompaniment—a perfect fit since the words mean ‘May the wind be gentle’. Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) Arvo Pärt (1935 – , Estonian) Vladimir Spivakov (violin), Sergej Bezrodny (piano) The first years of Pärt’s life (pronounced ‘Pairt’) were spent living under Communist rule in the USSR, although he managed to get permission to leave with his family in the early 80s. He converted from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodoxy in his late twenties and was fascinated by mediaeval choral music. He has a unique style, often termed minimalist, and this is one of his most well-known compositions (beloved of movie-makers looking to give their soundtrack added atmosphere). It is very simple, musically, with the violin’s stretched out melody accompanied by broken triads on the piano. Different patterns of notes are played and then inverted—thus literally portraying the piece’s title: mirror in mirror. In Paradisum from Requiem (Op. 9, 1948) Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986, French) King’s College Cambridge Choir, English Chamber Orchestra, Stephen Cleobury (cond.) It is probable that you will know Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem (even if you can’t put a name to it). Less well known is that of Duruflé who had been Fauré’s student, yet I would argue that it’s a far richer and more profound work (as well as a lot more fun to sing!). This is the final movement of the mediaeval Latin requiem mass: May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once a poor man, may you have eternal rest. It is too brief, but in its brevity it conveys (to my mind at least) the closest thing in music to the setting sun streaming through stained glass windows. And here’s the conundrum. How do you convey eternity without going on forever? Duruflé’s genius merely suggests it with just one plucked harp string in the final bar. The whole Requiem closes with a suspension (F#7), itself suggesting more. But the effect is hauntingly magnified when a harp (or organ when there is no orchestra) plays a G# and leaves it hanging (a note which has no place in the chord). Yet it does not seem out of place. It merely points us beyond… Piano Concerto no 2 in Fma, 2. Andante (Op. 102 1957) Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975, Russian) Dmitri Shostakovich Jr (piano), I Musici de Montreal, Maxim Shostakovich (cond.) If Schubert is my 19th Century musical hero, Shostakovich is my 20th Century musical hero. He was a survivor of the insanity of Stalin’s 3-decades-long rule of the Soviet Union but the psychological cost was severe. In the midst of it all, though, he was able to create the most astonishing musical balm for a brutalised population. This middle movement of his 2nd piano concerto is a case in point—it seems to pull the melody of the ether like a string of feathers. The concerto was written as a 19th birthday present for his son Maxim who gave its first performance. But this recording is a treat. Maxim’s son, Dmitri Jr, is in the hotseat as soloist, while he himself conducts. Three Shostakovich generations in one recording! Symphony No 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Op. 36, 1976) Henryk Górecki (1933-2010, Polish) Dawn Upshaw (soprano), London Sinfonietta, David Zinman (cond.) Few people outside the minute world of avant-garde composition had even heard of Górecki (pronounced GoRETski, with short ‘o’ as in box!) before this symphony became a CD sensation in 1992. Much of his music prior to this 1976 composition was obscure and what’s known in the trade as ‘difficult’. But this symphony is a revelation – and to date over a million recordings have been sold. Like many symphonies, this has 3 movements, the first longer than the other two combined. Uniquely, however, all three are marked Lento (slow). That by itself gives a strong indication of the work’s tone and mood. Then, in contrast to almost all his 20thCentury composer contemporaries, Górecki manages to avoid all but the tamest dissonances throughout the symphony. Lento – Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile (sustained but lyrical peace) Lento e Largo – Tranquilissimo (slow and long – very peaceful) Lento – Cantabile semplice (simple, songlike/lyrical) But the most notable feature is the fact that each movement includes a part for soprano soloist, because Górecki gathered an astonishing trio Polish of songs to set to music. Mary’s lament from a 15th Century Polish monastery. “Oh my son, beloved and chosen, share your wounds with your mother.” A young girl’s prayer to Mary that was found scratched onto the walls of a Gestapo prison cell at Zakopane. “Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, you support me always.” A song from the Silesian (southern Poland) uprisings of 1919-21, in which a mother sings “where has he gone, my dear young son?” The theme of female suffering at man’s inhumanity is clear, and many have suggested meanings to the whole (including, a Holocaust memorial, the horrors of fascism and communism, the suffering of Poland over the centuries, a pacifist appeal, and so on). This is what the composer said: Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it is between Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German too—and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has his place on this little earth. That’s all behind me. So the Third Symphony is not about war; it’s not a Dies Irae; it’s a normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. —Bernard Jacobson, A Polish Renaissance (1995)

How do you articulate to others an experience so searing, so crushing that one is left gasping and flattened? For many of us, our own words are simply too puny, too ephemeral. That’s why so often we resort to those of true wordsmiths, those who, with the pen, refine, sharpen and pinpoint. But even the greatest of these fall short, tumbling into incomprehensibility, into grunts rather than words. Which is why, when words fail, music takes their place; or perhaps more commonly, serves to ignite or amplify those words that seem fruitless without it. So, like so many, music has uniquely sustained me during the pandemic and previous dark times. And I’m all too aware of those who suffer physically, mentally and spiritually, not least because of loved ones lost to Covid-19. Now I’m not picky when it comes to musical genre or era or forces. I just search out music that combines excellence with beauty, integrity and reality, whether from ancient choirs, singer-songwriters at open-mic nights or 120-piece orchestras. But since this is specifically a classical playlist, here are some works that have evoked the pain of grief when I’ve most needed them, expressing the inexpressible (or, as the late English philosopher Roger Scruton put it, they serve to ‘eff the ineffable’!). Mélisande’s Death from Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 46, JS 147) Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan (cond.) Pelléas et Mélisande, an 1892 play by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck (who won the 1911 Nobel for Literature), profoundly affected a number of composers. It depicts the classic trope of the love triangle and would inspire Debussy’s famous opera, symphonic music by Schoenberg and then one William Wallace (a Scottish composer, but not Mel Gibson’s revolutionary), as well as incidental music for the play by Gabriel Fauré. But I’ve got a real passion for Sibelius. He plumbs extraordinary depths—and this, the final movement from his suite, is subtle but unfailingly moving. We’re in a similar sound world to Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite (from which we heard an extract for Halloween). But this really does it for me (like pretty much anything Sibelius wrote). Just astonishing. ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ (Act 2 Sc. 4, The Magic Flute, K. 620) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) Sandrine Piau (soprano), Freiburger Barockorchester, Gottfried von der Goltz (cond.) Pamina pours out her broken heart because her true love, Tamino, has spurned her. We saw them earlier on stage full of love’s ecstasies, but now, he stubbornly refuses even to acknowledge her. What a cad! Mozart is at his most tender and empathetic, the orchestra lending her a musical arm round the shoulder as it gently strokes her searing, sinuous lament. Listen out for the wind instruments that weave in and out of her melody from time to time. Just glorious but deeply affecting. Now, as so often in opera (especially Mozart’s), nothing is what it seems. I was first taken to see The Magic Flute aged 8 or 9 and it’s the perfect immersion for a kid. The plot is completely and utterly bonkers, involving magic, goodies who are actually baddies (and vice-versa), wicked queens, giant serpents, high priests and bird-catchers. Oh, and, Freemasonry. So naturally, Tamino is undergoing some dumb initiation trials, one of which is silence. All is not lost; he still loves Pamina; they can end up happily. But Mozart’s genius is such that even for a comic opera, he can come up with the most poignant and heart-breaking music. Lesser composers would have reserved such a masterpiece as this for a context far more weighty. But then they’re not Mozart. (Click here for the text in translation, scrolling down to #17.) Dido’s Lament “When I Am Laid In Earth” (from Dido & Aeneas Z. 626) Henry Purcell (1659-1695, English) Véronique Gens (soprano), Les Arts Florissants, William Christie (cond.) Purcell was perhaps England’s first truly great composer, and his Dido & Aeneas perhaps his greatest masterpiece. The story is from Virgil’s Aeneid Book 4 (by the way, if you want to save a bit of time reading the whole Aeneid, a top tip is to leave out the odd-numbered books!). Aeneas dumps poor Queen Dido of Carthage because of his determination to fulfil his fate of founding Rome (could that be a justification for being a rat?). Of course, Virgil is writing a political Just-So story to explain the centuries-old hostility between Rome and Carthage (remember Hannibal and his elephants?). In this aria, Dido also pours out her heart, broken by grief and betrayal. Purcell’s melody is so simple—essentially going up and down scales. But the artistry is stunning, both in word-setting and harmonies. Follow the text here. When David Heard Eric Whitacre (1970- , American) Eric Whitacre Singers, Eric Whitacre (cond.) When Henry, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King James (I of England, VI of Scotland)–yes, he of King James Bible fame—died from typhoid in 1612, there was national mourning. Two contemporary musicians composed settings of King David’s reaction to hearing of his son Absalom’s death (2 Samuel 18:32-33): Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Weelkes. Both are beautiful. But to my mind, they have been eclipsed by a new setting by the rock star of choral music, Eric Whitacre. I personally do not find myself drawn to everything he writes (which says more about me than him probably). However, this is choral gold. He employs all kinds of musical and vocal effects that send shivers down the spine. The first time I heard it was an overwhelming experience. And it hasn’t palled. This truly is mourning with those who mourn. Parce Mihi Domine Cristóbal De Morales (1500-1553, Spanish) Jan Garbarek (saxophone), Hilliard Ensemble Who knew that some plainsong settings of the office (the Catholic cycle of daily prayers) would become one of the biggest selling records of 1994, a disc of ecclesiastical music transformed into a uniquely arresting sound-world through the addition of a solo saxophone? But that’s precisely what happened when the renowned Hilliard Ensemble (an English all-male singing quartet) joined forces with Jan Garbarek (a Norwegian jazz saxophonist). This was aural alchemy. This track is not lament for a lost loved one; it is a lament for our sin, with the text crying to God for forgiveness. But the extraordinary effect created by four singers and one saxophonist is overpowering—somehow creating hope in the midst of grief. It does not play down the darkness; but nor does it indulge in wishful thinking. To my mind and heart, it conveys a sense of both realism and expectation in the very presence of God. Stabat Mater (1736) Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736, Italian Papal States) Julia Lezhneva (soprano), Philippe Jaroussky (counter-tenor) & I Barocchisti Pergolesi wrote his 12-part Stabat Mater just a year before TB robbed him of life at only 26. Who knows what wonders could have resulted had he lived longer? This is a stunning work, scored for orchestra, choir and two soloists, one of whom is a soprano or boy treble, the other a (female) contralto or (male) counter-tenor depending on preference. It narrates the crucifixion story from the perspective of the Lord’s mother, Mary, initially as she was standing (‘stabat’) at Golgotha. The piece was controversial initially, accused of scandalously transporting forms and styles from the operatic stage into church, which was deemed entirely inappropriate. But part of its wonder is that it brings the pathos and agony of that scene to dramatic life, while using words and music alone. The chilling dissonances and long-sustained suspensions (especially between the two singers) pierce right to the marrow. It fully deserves the 30 minutes of full attention it demands. Follow the translation from the Latin here.

We all know about the classic Quest. It’s a literary staple from Homeric epic to contemporary fantasy. The hero must undertake a long and hazardous journey to rescue damsel/destroy artefact/carry message/save soul. From Odysseus to Aeneas, Mallory to Tolkien, Spielberg to Shrek, they’re all at it. These plots may or may not get advanced by a MacGuffin, a term popularised by Hitchcock for plot-driving objects such as rings, maps or antidotes. But whatever the ingredients, the reader/listener/viewer is gripped by the need to complete said quest in the face of great jeopardy. And if there’s no jeopardy, there’s no grip. For three centuries of English readers, the definitive quest narrative has been John Bunyan’s. Second only to the Bible in importance for a person’s formation, everybody used to read The Pilgrim’s Progress. Dr. Johnson, no less, declared that “the great merit of the book [is] that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.” What sets it apart, however, is this simple fact: rather than a plot to participate in vicariously, perhaps as a distraction or enchantment, Bunyan contended that his was truly a universal quest, designed to set up the primary contours of the saved life. Inevitably, the book has nothing like its former influence today, but it still has a significant legacy. My sense is that this can be detected even in a hit movie like 1917. A Quest: Into the Wild 1917 compresses its entire quest into just twenty-four hours but the ingredients are all there. Unlikely heroes, an absurd mission, lethal odds, and a binary outcome lead to mission accomplished…or not. Here, there is no “try.” Mendes’ film is further intensified by its celebrated full immersion-technique of appearing to use only one take. The cinematic experience is visceral, doing for World War I what Saving Private Ryan did for the D-Day landings. Two young, English soldiers, Blake and Schofield, are sent on a do-or-die mission by the jaded General Erinmore (Colin Firth). Communications are down so they must deliver a message to two battalions of the 2nd Devons (currently nine miles away) by hand. German forces had withdrawn but it was now clear they were by no means in the disarray that the Devons hoped to exploit. It was a trap, evidently weeks in the planning. They had retreated to heavily fortified lines—the Hindenburg Line. The Devons’ Col. MacKenzie simply has to call off their dawn attack. “If you fail,” says Erinmore to the two men, “it will be a massacre.” Now, some artistic licence comes into play here. Historically speaking, the Germans did retreat (in Operation Alberich). They left the intervening territory scorched and studded with mines and booby-traps. Anything of potential use to the allies’ cause was systematically destroyed. It was a hell of Isengardian proportions. Furthermore, director/co-writer Sam Mendes pieced the story together from his grandfather Alfred’s tales from the trenches as well as the wider historical record. Alfred Mendes was indeed required to run through no-man’s-land with a message—for which he was later awarded the Military Medal in 1918. We discover early on that Schofield has already won his, and it is clear that success in the narrative’s mission would easily warrant the award. Finally, the weeks of Spring 1917 were undoubtedly a chaotic and terrifying phase of the war for Britain and France. However, the likelihood that the fate of nearly 2,000 men depends on just a couple of squaddies (as in the film) is slim, although not unthinkable. Furthermore, how a large detachment found themselves so far ahead by the time the enemy’s ruse was rumbled is never clear; nor is the reason why others in the original British line (led by Andrew Scott’s character, Lt. Leslie) are still attacking the evacuated German trenches. Communications, even when lines got cut, were constantly attended to and supplemented by other methods (such as carrier pigeons). It seems the greatest Quest narrative of them all is as relevant, and needed, as ever. Mark Meynell Still, these pedantic quibbles are small-fry. 1917 is all about the vivid and traumatic experience of war’s chaos, horror, and absurdity. With Blake and Schofield, we are thrust into the horror of trenches and no-man’s-land, and it all feels very real: the mud and gore, vermin and stench, tree stumps and bloating corpses. No one knows what is happening. One moment, the man standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you marches forward, the next he is face down in a blood-streamed puddle. It was just the luck of the draw. Like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Schofield must prevail over appalling obstacles. For both, the temptations to abandon the mission are legion. Schofield must persevere despite his stunned grief at Blake’s death, anxiety about infectious wounds, trauma of being buried alive, and the constant threat of snipers. Nor can he afford to recuperate in the sanctuary of the cellar where he finds a young woman and orphaned baby. The quest is all. On his life depend two thousand lives. He must continue. Like Pilgrim’s before him, this journey has value only if completed. Otherwise, it is futility. But of course, Schofield succeeds. And we are with him all the way. So far, so archetypal, and the film is none the worse for that. It is a remarkable experience. But then something weird happens. A Cycle: There and Back Again The film’s closing image is of Schofield leaning against a tree. He has been looking at photos of his family; it’s the first time we discover he even has one. And then, at last, he closes his eyes. He sleeps. Fade to black. But the thing is, we have been here before. This is where the film began: Blake lying asleep under his helmet in a beautiful field full of spring flowers. The camera then pulls back to his companion, Schofield, also asleep but up against a tree. Schofield’s sleep thus brackets the entire film. It is an elegant device, common, in fact, in the Bible (termed inclusio by commentators). But its significance is quite profound. Dial back a few scenes. How does Schofield first chance upon the 2nd Devons? He’s been propelled downriver by overwhelming torrents, having just escaped another sniper in Écoust. It is the one stage of his journey entirely beyond his control but it results in him being washed up in rocky shallows, defeated and despairing. He then glances up, catching intermittent billows of muffled singing. It’s ethereal, angelic almost. But the music has a strange familiarity and we soon realise that, of all things, they’re intoning that classic, lamenting African American spiritual, The Wayfaring Stranger. It is almost a minor-key lullaby. Schofield scrambles up the bank and into the forest where he finds hundreds of soldiers resting. We could almost be in Elysium, ancient Greece’s Underworld resting place for heroes. Schofield sits with them and relishes this scene of almost unimaginable balm and beauty: I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger Travelling through this world below There is no sickness, no toil, nor danger In that bright land to which I going I’m going there to see my Father And all my loved ones who’ve gone on I’m just going over Jordan I’m just going over home I know dark clouds will gather ‘round me I know my way is hard and steep But beauteous fields arise before me Where God’s redeemed, their vigils keep I’m going there to see my Mother She said she’d meet me when I come So, I’m just going over Jordan I’m just going over home. —”Wayfaring Stranger” It is the perfect song choice. Schofield has just crossed over a river, for one thing. And he has been “travelling through this world below”, which of course originally refers to our world, even though Schofield’s experiences might more reasonably be associated with the world below ours. He is not a member of this battalion and so is unknown, a wayfaring stranger who is passing through. He too is spurred on by hope through both the hard and steep way and the beauteous fields. Yet despite his grief for the “loved ones who’ve gone on” (Blake is the primary example) we know by the end that it is a different hope that sustains him: reunion with his wife and children. And Blake’s last words? “Will you write to my mum for me? Tell her I wasn’t scared.” The film’s agony is that the river Schofield crossed is no Jordan River. It grants none of the finality that Bunyan’s Pilgrim receives when he crosses the River of Death into the Celestial City. For he does not enter a “bright land”; instead he is funnelled into another war zone. Even though he can rest against his tree after completing his mission, we know that this cycle will be repeated. This thought is made explicit by Col. MacKenzie’s response (played with searing economy and latent violence by Benedict Cumberbatch) once he accepted Gen. Erinmore’s command to stand down: I hoped today would be a good day. Hope is a dangerous thing. He goes on There’s only one way this war ends: last man standing. For Erinmore’s communiqué doesn’t actually protect soldiers from the fight; it merely postpones it. Schofield can rest from his heroics, but there is no knowing what tomorrow will bring. This is what makes it all seem so futile. There is such little progression; it is more like an infernal hamster-wheel. Or consider the nightmarish Merry-Go-Round painted just the year before the film’s setting in 1916 by London artist Mark Gertler. What should be a source of innocent delight and joy, especially for the young, has mutated into an instrument of torture. The individuals depicted are dressed in stylised military uniforms, their faces suspended in rictus grins. This circus-favourite is in constant motion, so dismounting is impossible. There is no escape. To my mind, this is one of the most powerful images from the period: Merry-Go-Round by Mark Gertler (1916). A nightmare is surely Mendes’ intended effect of the surreal and stunningly shot night scene in the blazing Écoust. Before the end of this war, countless thousands more will die. Bravery in such circumstances is absurdly unbearable. As Andrew Scott’s embittered Lt. Leslie comments on learning of Blake and Schofield’s task, “Nothing like a strip of ribbon to cheer up a widow.” We now better understand Schofield’s unexpected disposal of his medal early on. Just what on earth was the point? Who wouldn’t rather return home in person than have his family receive a medal in his place? 1917’s narrative inclusio is cinematically and emotionally satisfying. In the grand scheme of things, however, its vision of reality is anything but. A Trajectory: From Here to Eternity Now it should be said that Mendes does not leave his audience entirely adrift. There are glimmers, but that is probably the best that can be said of them. The film takes place on 6th April, two and a half years since the outbreak of World War I. But for American viewers, it should have special significance. That was the day on which the USA declared war on Germany. It was thus the war’s last significant turning point. But only history buffs could possibly know that! Nothing on screen even hints at it. So we must conclude that, for all its individual cases of heroism and self-sacrifice, this war of attrition leaves little grounds for true hope. Of course, the spiritual sung in the forest holds out hope for life after life. And for the majority of those soldiers preparing to go over the top, they would have taken comfort from that, chiming as it did with the Christian worldview that permeated pre-World War I culture. They might never have given it any thought previously, but with their mortality brought to the forefront, many would have sought solace in precisely this reality. Yet that is not the way most people today think, especially on this side of the Atlantic. They simply lack the intellectual substructure that makes the hope on offer seem even remotely plausible. This is because most in the West still live with the residue, if not the furniture and framework of Modernism. This has slyly appropriated the structure of a Christian worldview but shrunk it by removing the divine elements: Where there was Divine Providence, there is now an arbitrary commitment to human progress. Where there was sin to be rescued from, there is still a liberation required, but it is couched in terms of liberation from the so-called superstitions of religion and the mystical. Where there was a rescue made possible by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, there is now the self-sacrifice of revolution (in which, as Stalin would say, eggs must be cracked in order to make the omelette). This is what will usher in that liberation. Where there was a hold-out for a new society in an other-worldly kingdom (as articulated in the “Wayfaring Stranger” spiritual), now the best that can be offered is some heaven on earth, a utopia built on capitalist or communist foundations. In these and many other ways, then, the Christian worldview has been contracted, shrink-wrapped and desiccated. But here’s the horror. The “war to end all wars” blew any nineteenth century utopian aspirations to smithereens. For many, the possibility of a divine providence—as well as personality at the heart of reality—now seemed utterly implausible, obscene even. Yet many others came to believe, not just despite the horrors of the trenches, but through them. Oxford’s Inklings were a case in point. Tolkien and the Lewises (both Jack and Warnie), Barfield and Dyson all endured and survived the trenches. Many of their dearest friends did not. But in their various ways, each grasped that despite the noxious evidence of their senses while on the fields of France and Belgium, this was not the totality of reality. They had come to see that Bunyan had articulated truth, that the Bible reveals a trajectory for life that transcends all these horrors. We really are wayfaring strangers in this world, just as Peter describes the Turkish recipients of his first letter (1 Peter 1:1). Or as Paul can say without any glib deprecation of the torments that life can subject people to—remember, he himself endured many of the worst of these—“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). A modernist living within a shrink-wrapped and reductionist reality can never say that. Certainly not with any confidence. Sam Mendes doesn’t seem to be offering the possibility. But, with the prominence of “Wayfaring Stranger” in the film (whose melody is in fact prefigured in the soundtrack from the start), it is nevertheless offering it. So it seems the greatest Quest narrative of them all is as relevant, and needed, as ever.