Hear the U.S. Première of Gipps’ Symphony No. 2!

As reported previously (here, here and here) the first performance in the United States of Ruth Gipps’ second symphony was given on the 31st March this year by the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Adam Stern.  Now Mr. Stern has kindly written with the news that video recording of their rendition is now available on YouTube.  Here it is, capturing a contrast of flavour that I think is characteristic of Gipps’ music: that between romantic tenderness on one hand, and a light-footed liveliness, almost spikiness, on the other:

Many thanks to the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra for this performance!  It is wonderful to know that this music is being played and enjoyed on the other side of the Atlantic.  In fact, it is wonderful to hear it being performed like this at all, given the neglect in which Ruth Gipps’ music has been languishing, and from which it seems at last to be emerging.

And this is not the only good news about Ruth Gipps’ music.  In September a new disc was released on the Chandos label of recordings of this same work, the second symphony, along with Gipps’ fourth symphony and two other early works, ‘Knight in Armour’ and the Song for Orchestra.  It is the National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba who have rectified a long-lasting injustice: the almost total absence of proper commercial recordings of this under-performed and overlooked composer’s music.  The recording and the rendition are of the quality that Ruth Gipps deserves, I feel, and would certainly recommend them.  The fourth symphony is perhaps less accessible than the other works, but is pervaded by an otherworldly, rather nocturnal atmosphere, and repays listening.

It is fantastic that this recording has been made.  The only improvement I can think to suggest is to record the other symphonies, especially the third and fifth, to complement it!

Remembrance

War graves at Tyne Cot cemetery (Flanders)

The thing about evil is that it twists the knife.  As if it were not enough that nearly a million men and women of a single generation, in Britain alone, should have perished in the Great War, they had to die as they did, in mechanised massacre, or en masse at sea.  As if it were not enough that they should die in such indiscriminate, inhuman swathes, their bodies were never laid to rest: they had to be grieved for without a grave.  Or else the cruel converse is true: we have graves with no name to match to them.  And as if it were not enough for a woman to lose her brother or husband in one war, she might lose her sons in the next.

Catastrophe on a scale beyond computation can be apprehended only by piecemeal, inadequate measurements of the other, smaller catastrophes that it begets.  One mind can meditate on individual engraved names, but not many: barely a dozen at a time before it burns out.   Or there are particular kinds of memorials by which a particular category of soldier can be imagined: often passing the memorial for fallen students of my college, I could not miss, with their understated grief, the words ‘These Sons of This House Fell in War’.  And there are the miscellaneous narratives and vignettes that dispel the exhausting monotony of the names of the dead.  For instance, the dismantling for ever of the poets’ colony at Dymock as the war began, and the deaths of two of those poets in that war, is a tiny disaster compared to the sinking of the Lusitania or the Battle of the Somme.  But it is still a disaster in its own right, and by its scale in proportion to the whole we can glimpse, briefly, how far short we fall of understanding the whole cataclysm to which it is a miniscule footnote.  The disastrous ripples of war go on and on and on, resounding deep in the intangible things; we could hardly expect otherwise.  Has the world ever recovered from the demoralisation of the Great War?  Is this why we are so cynical, so cold-shouldered, so half-heartedly callous in our own day?  Are we still paying the price?  Philip Larkin, a man who could be cynical enough himself, thought so:

  Never such innocence,
  Never before or since,
  As changed itself to past
  Without a word — the men
  Leaving the gardens tidy,
  The thousands of marriages,
  Lasting a little while longer:
  Never such innocence again.

Most of those men hated war as much as I do.  I am in my mid-twenties: if I had been born a hundred years before I was, would I have reached my current age?

Now that the hundredth anniversary of the Great War’s end has arrived, the test of our remembrance really begins.  The grainy and stilted films of the conflict, the careful and restrained language of the time compared to our own, any actual living links with that era, are all receding into the past, and are given the occasional extra shove backwards, into deeper and deeper remoteness from the present day, by ever-crisper liquid crystal screens and taller, sleeker buildings.  If we are so concerned with relevance, and so tempted to assume that what is past is irrelevant, how shall we keep in mind, lest we forget, that we may need to learn from events and people not confined to our own age and era?  If it is so nearly impossible to meditate on the catastrophe, how will we make sure of keeping at it?  Will we maintain our remembrance even when most of us think no-one is watching?  We have forgotten much else about that time; will we, at least, remember that this old lesson must be learnt anew in every age?  And that the thing about goodness is that it radiates?

Names of missing British and Commonwealth soldiers at the Menin Gate, Ypres.  (Two panels of sixty-four in total)

Autumn Report

Kimbolton church and the Shropshire Hills, seen from near Hamnish Clifford.

My findings in Herefordshire the other week were these: red apples, blue hills, and all colours in between; oaks, August-laden still but tinged with first rust, and gold leaf in ardent proliferation at sunset.  In short, mid-October England illuminated like a manuscript.

The mysteries of the variations in flavour between the different shires and stretches of Britain, their particular characters by which each part is kept not quite like anywhere else, and their elusive boundaries that stubbornly veil where one part ends and another begins, will never be exhausted by the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen or walkers’ conversation.  They are as intangible, as fine, as endlessly surprising and as defiant of definition as the changing of the seasons.  What is it makes this part of the world so poetic, these English counties nearest Wales?  How is their character made?  Perhaps I will never work it out!  It has the tenderness of arable lowland England, but, lent a Welsh inflection, is hiraeth-tinged, by those ranges of high hills, beacons into the distance beckoning.  England and Wales mingle and shimmer against and with each other, like two misty, chromatic chords.  This is bittersweet borderland, neither quite one nor the other.  Those mythical lands, the distance and the past (the land of lost content, the blue remembered hills) are brought enticingly near.  They are almost within reach…

I am sure this is not just fancy.  Others have seen the same.  A list I once compiled of favourite composers and writers from these counties ran to two dozen.  And look at the land itself: to the north are the Shropshire hills, which are Malcolm Saville and Housman country; to the south is Gloucestershire, the land of Herbert Howells, F. W. Harvey and Ivor Gurney, along with Dymock of the five poets; to the east lie the birthplaces of Masefield and Elgar, and westwards — well, out in the west is the heart of Wales, where all speech is song.

If I had come to Leominster in search of a retreat, I was not the first: St Edfrith found it a suitable place for a priory in the year 660 A.D.  It was at the priory church — at least its second incarnation, having been suppressed not long after the Norman Conquest and refounded in the twelfth century —  that I found this anonymous poem waiting to greet me in the porch, mounted on the inside door:

  Pause — ere thou enter, traveller — and bethink thee,

  How holy, yet how homelike is this place:

  Time that thou spendest humbly here shall link thee

  With men unknown who once were of thy race.

  This is thy Father’s House: to Him address thee

  Whom here His children worship face to face.

  He at thy coming in with Peace shall bless thee,

  Thy going out make joyful with His Grace.

Peace and prosperity to all towns whose church doors are adorned with poetry, especially if the words wear their careful craftsmanship as lightly as these!

Holy and homelike indeed was the church, large as it was (the north aisle was once the Norman nave, which gives an indication of the enlargement it underwent in the Middle Ages).  I had been there for a quarter of an hour when the organist, in suit and tie, came out for practice.  It was practice which he did not really need: I found myself eavesdropping on some fine music, a serene prelude by Gordon Slater, some full-throated Bach, and some other pieces.  Some people had been around at the beginning but they had disappeared.  The music played and the sunlight streamed generously through the south windows.

Across the nave and north aisle of the priory church of St. Peter and Paul, Leominster.

Many things are good and right about the town of Leominster: its size, its nearby railway station and the easy reach of unruined countryside from the middle of town.  I fell into conversation with a few townspeople, who were very friendly.  On the other side of Eaton Hill, eastwards along the Herefordshire Trail, lies a definitive escape from the growl of the A44 and A49, land rising and falling, and boughs laden with summer-sweetened apples, for this is cider country.  And this homeliness is always ringed by the ‘blue high blade’ of hills: Titterstone Clee Hill and Shropshire are particularly visible to the north.  And no noise, apart from a hidden tractor, and one or two pheasants exploding ludicrously out of hedgerows.  On my way back westwards I came through an orchard at just the moment that the setting sun was aligned with the rows of the trees, and the rays shone straight down the aisles of apples.

Gold leaf in proliferation.

Even apart from this, it would have been worth going all the way there just to make the journey back to London.  Not via Newport, Bristol Parkway and Swindon, but by “the pretty way”, as a fellow visitor called it, from Leominster to Hereford, and then by direct train from there to London.  It took an hour longer than the Newport route, but what does an hour matter?  The start of the journey was all in mist, but a few miles east of Hereford we burst out of it into sunlit clarity, where we remained for the rest of the journey (Ledbury, Colwall and Campden tunnels excepted).  This was not only the ‘pretty way’ but the poetic way: past apple-orchards towards Ledbury, the home town of John Masefield, then tunnelling directly under the Malvern Hills, onwards through Worcestershire, within a few miles of Edward Elgar’s birthplace at Broadheath, dramatically high over the river Severn into Worcester and then, turning along Brunel’s line, past Evesham, Honeybourne, Morton-in-Marsh, over the north Cotswolds and actually through the old Adlestrop station of Edward Thomas’s famous poem, down to Oxford, thence shadowing the Thames via Reading and the high-rise-block-choked route to London.  

Great Malvern and the North Hill of the Malverns.

I have the honour, then, to report that in the manuscript of England many old things linger and are still to be seen.  What St. Edfrith, many poets and ordinary folk sought and almost found is still there for the almost-finding: something like the mythical realm of Deep England, something like the Land of Lost Content, something like home.  It might have been just over the next hill.

The river Avon near Evesham (Worcs.).

Fanfare for Allhallowstide

A poem reposted from last year:

As we must one day die they also died, 
But live now as we hope we too shall live:
O keep in prayer all souls; O gladly give
Your saints your greeting at Allhallowstide!

(D. Newman, Feast of All Saints, 1 November 2017)