Remembrance Day Playlist

[Beef Oven!]

What will you play on Remembrance Day?

I'm going for Cyril Rootham - 'For The Fallen'

For our parents, grandparents and all those who went before.........

[MrGongGong]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7MwXniOD44

[EdgeleyRob]

Arthur Bliss - Morning Heroes
Ralph Vaughan Williams - Song of Thanksgiving
George Butterworth - English Idylls

[Lat-Literal]

An interesting thread. I have grown away from the poppy in recent years although I still have respect for its symbolism. Inevitably, one comes at it from a family and personal angle while seeing the broader picture. Somehow I should have seen the signs in an uncle in string vest on the sixth floor of a tower block who had risked his life for this country in Burma. The vest on account of the fact that he had to be dragged out of bed to say hello to us and barely saw daylight although no one would ever, ever, have even thought of the word depression, let alone accepted it. That didn't diminish an early political instinct with bright eyed hope and more than a dozen older political figures, who in truth would never have spoken to me, as being perceived by me as godlike. What was the thinking now? I would join them. We'd join them. We would be supported by them as carrying the mantle.

Some hope! I was lucky enough never to have been on battlefields but the system has been an unadulterated sadist to me, a betrayer and an enemy. I don't have the youth or fight to fight so consequently I do my best to avoid it. I'm not British but International - or I am British and modern Britain isn't British. Either of those lines. There was only one political generation which had any ability to care. It is long gone. It was far, far older than those in very old age now given that what it was forced to learn was in war and poverty.

I am very pleased that my parents and others - god knows those well into their seventies rather, actually, than those in their eighties are the luckiest generation of all time whether in the future or the past - have broadly reaped the dividends. But my middle aged generation of British has been an absolute disgrace - one felt it in the nuances in them even when in one's teens - and those younger are much worse but not of their choosing. Such was the framework that was handed from us to them that they can't contemplate there being any sort of problem with it although they have the clout which they use liberally. Boy, do they love clout in a way those who have to fight in war would never do! Male or female, wimps all, especially the well-paid and "professional". Tough actions in tougher times. Yeah, right. A mixture of the murderous and dripping wet. It's very regrettable.

At 19, I thought those who were extreme were going through some weird sort of phase which inevitably most of them were because they ended up so conventional it was beyond plausible. I was extraordinarily conventional and compliant given significant elements of unconventionality. If I were 19 now, I would be an unapologetic revolutionary on the basis of what history has told me. Those at the centre have shown they know those feelings. They watch the mildest of statements although they won't say it and I am delighted that they do. I hope they note this one. They know when they make an unprovoked attack on citizens who have a modicum of intelligence and disgruntlement that they then have to waste taxpayers' money in dealing with imaginary repercussions. It's the paranoid nation of course. Ill. Anyhow, RVW's 2nd because of the wonderful conversation we had in which the rhododendrons on Leith Hill did turn into poppies via London although I think I have now turned them back into rhododendrons. Otherwise, for Charlie, Fred and the millions, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZedhoqYdfTM

(It's also my manifesto so far as I am able)

[AmpH]

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

A Pastoral Symphony

London Symphony Orchestra / Andre Previn ( RCA )

[Bryn]

[vinteuil]

.

http://www.amazon.de/dp/B000034D3V

[Lat-Literal]

....or this one of course.

Strictly Parental Guidance but I believe the anarchist Alice Nutter who featured did have a play on R3. If ever there was a cynical undercurrent in a seemingly uplifting thing it was this one. Groteseque without the political insinuation. Clever with it as they knew exactly what they were doing. They also knew it was naively going to be a chav/terrace anthem.

I suppose they had to pay their mortgages.

It sold in big numbers. The so and sos!

Chumbabwamaba - Tubthumping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-zK1S5Dws

There is an issue with the poppy. Would war relatives be happy or furious if I bought one? Marginally displeased! I plant a few humble bulbs in my garden in their memory for them in the round. My godfather who helped to clean up Belsen still laughed a lot and enjoyed the countryside. Influential on me, he'd have been for UKIP which I understand but I'm not!

[Lat-Literal]

I have held back from Elgar as he is used for overtly nationalistic purposes and hence at the other end of the scale from Britten/Tippett's conscientious objection. I'm not the biggest fan of any of them. For example, Fascism needed fighting directly but I don't like post-war grandeur. I will, though, take both ends of that scale - briefly - for musical reasons, posting the gamelan collaboration with McPhee later this week and clearly the sensible answer to the OP today is Nimrod. Also, I think, Lloyd for all he went through. This comment of Lloyd's is a blot on "R3"'s direction in the 1950s, whatever it's high standards: "I sent scores off to the BBC. They came back, usually without comment". Ruth had the same!

Edward Elgar - Nimrod - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE
George Lloyd - Symph 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBsMfn8fy8

I'll re-post Gipps as in 2015 we do need to discuss who was Britain's best female composer. I'm going Gipps. It was just the wrong place and time - but I am biased in her favour:

1948

Ruth Gipps - Concerto 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krfbm3ePmRw

[cloughie]

Keep the Home Fires Burning - I guess most of us know the chorus to this but how many of us know the verse(s)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Home_Fires_Burning_(1914_song)

[greenilex]

As one of the oldies on the moon looking down, I intend to play the last movement of Beethoven IX.

Someone has to embrace the millions....

[BBMmk2]

I always watch the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance but I have also played Elgar's "The Spirit of England"(which includes the setting of the poem "To The Fallen", RVWs Symphony no.3(A Pastoral Symphony), and Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad, and Delius's Requiem

[Serial_Apologist]

For me it would have to be something by Mike and Kate Westbrook - Mike's big band "Marching Song" of 1969, "Blighters" from his and Kate's "London Bridge is Broken Down", or "The Westbrook Blake" to lift all the despondency.

"Blighters":-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z9EosTz_pY

"Glad Day" (I was there for this!):-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm73l3GZNps

But I think that in order to unreflect the view held by many in my father's generation that no one questioned the British Empire, Bryn's choice of Brian's anti-war, anti-Establishment 1917 opera "The Tigers" has to be choice of the day.

[EdgeleyRob]

I have held back from Elgar as he is used for overtly nationalistic purposes and hence at the other end of the scale from Britten/Tippett's conscientious objection. I'm not the biggest fan of any of them. For example, Fascism needed fighting directly but I don't like post-war grandeur. I will, though, take both ends of that scale - briefly - for musical reasons, posting the gamelan collaboration with McPhee later this week and clearly the sensible answer to the OP today is Nimrod. Also, I think, Lloyd for all he went through. This comment of Lloyd's is a blot on "R3"'s direction in the 1950s, whatever it's high standards: "I sent scores off to the BBC. They came back, usually without comment". Ruth had the same!
Edward Elgar - Nimrod - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE
George Lloyd - Symph 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBsMfn8fy8

I'll re-post Gipps as in 2015 we do need to discuss who was Britain's best female composer. I'm going Gipps. It was just the wrong place and time - but I am biased in her favour:

1948

Ruth Gipps - Concerto 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krfbm3ePmRw

Hi Lat.

George Lloyd is an appropriate composer for remembrance day.

I'd suggest the 4th Symphony which is a reaction to his harrowing times on HMS Trinidad

http://www.exroyalmarinesbandsmen.net/lambert/trinidadI.htm

The quote about the returned scores from the BBC always makes me angry

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It turned out to be Bruckner's Mass in D minor - the Dona nobis pacem ending very appropriate.

I avoided the "official" parades (something about "officialdom" preening themselves on these occasions rather distracts me from the proper thoughts and feelings I would prefer to have) but went up to the village War Memorial at 2:00. The local dignitaries had spent no expense on getting the cheapest, plastic Poppy wreathes, which, three hours after the ceremony, had blown down and scattered around the foot of the Memorial. I gathered them up and laid them flat at the base, so that there would be less chance that they'd get blown away again.

Last year, in the Village Hall, there'd been an exhibition of letters and artefacts from the young men who enlisted and their families - so many teenagers and lads in their early twenties; so many women widowed at an age when I was still at University; so many kids growing up never remembering what their father looked like; it seems so criminally ungrateful that their memorial day should be treated so perfunctorily.