Remembrance Sunday

[Beef Oven!]

Was good to see the minute silence observed respectfully and universally at all the premiership games yesterday.

The Queen led today's proceedings, and even Boris looks like he's behaving himself (although you don't know what he's thinking).

[Petrushka]

I watched it on the BBC Red Button channel 601 supposedly without commentary but that didn't stop a couple of occasions when it ruinously intruded

Also the sound of the band was hopelessly inconsistent as it kept on receding into the distance then coming back again. I watch it on the Red Button channel precisely in order to avoid the various twitterings and pointless interviews and to hear the Guards Bands in full. Having been there a couple of times it is wonderful how the buildings along Whitehall manage to amplify the sound of the Band to those further down. Something like the same goes for Bishop Chartres' wonderfully sonorous voice.

[EdgeleyRob]

Was good to see the minute silence observed respectfully and universally at all the premiership games yesterday.

and not just the Premiership games BeefO.

[Nick Armstrong]

Boris looks like he's behaving himself (although you don't know what he's thinking).

[Nick Armstrong]

To restore the tone slightly ... I had a quiet moment or five with Howells's 'Take him, earth, for cherishing' earlier to mark the day.

Now: Finzi's 'Requiem Da Camera'






"August 1914" - John Masefleld (Requiem da Camera, movement 2)


How still this quiet cornfield is to-night!
By an intenser glow the evening falls,
Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;
Among the stooks a partridge covey calls.

The windows glitter on the distant hill;
Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold
Stumble on sudden music and are still;
The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.

An endless quiet valley reaches out
Pat the blue hills into the evening sky;
Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout
Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.

So beautiful it is, I never saw
So great a beauty on these English fields,
Touched by twilight's coming into awe,
Ripe to the soul and rich with summer's yields.

[ ... ]

These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men,

Who, century after century, held these farms,
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard, as we hear, the rumours and alarms
Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.

And knew, as we know, that the message meant
The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends,
Death, like a miser getting in his rent,
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.

[ ... ]

Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind.


"Lament" - Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1918) (Requiem da Camera, movement 4)

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings -
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

.


.


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[makropulos]

I was in London for the "War Requiem" at the RFH, Marin Alsop conducting orchestra and chamber orch from the Royal Academy, the National Youth Choir et al, three terrific young soloists (Russian, British, German). I found it an outstandingly moving occasion, and the standard of the performance was breathtaking for the most part (superb brass playing throughout, a terrific chamber orch). Marin A. was at her best. We came away feeling that Remembrance Sunday couldn't have been commemorated in a more fitting way.

[Mary Chambers]

I was in London for the "War Requiem" at the RFH, Marin Alsop conducting orchestra and chamber orch from the Royal Academy, the National Youth Choir et al, three terrific young soloists (Russian, British, German). I found it an outstandingly moving occasion, and the standard of the performance was breathtaking for the most part (superb brass playing throughout, a terrific chamber orch). Marin A. was at her best. We came away feeling that Remembrance Sunday couldn't have been commemorated in a more fitting way.

At least one of the many performances of this work in Britain at the moment should be on Radio 3 or on television. As far as I can see, not one is. To my surprise, I'll have to go to Classic FM on Tueday evening - they're broadcasting today's Albert Hall performance.

[EdgeleyRob]

Morning Heroes never gets a look in

[makropulos]

I couldn't agree more. Glad that the RAH one is being broadcast though - I shall try to hear it.

Still reeling from it (in a completely good way), the youthful spirit of the RFH performance today struck me as something rather special, to say nothing of the consummate skill of the young players - they were stupendous.

[Mary Chambers]

I'd love to have heard it, makropulos.

[Beef Oven!]

Following Caliban's lead, I am playing Howells' 'Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing' and will fit in, before the night is out, Cyril Rootham's 'For The Fallen'.

I think that as Mary Chambers says, Britten's War Requiem is also fitting, so I shall play that in the week as part of my Remembrance Day reflections.

I'll also play some Tippett as a respect to a man who was prepared to go to prison for his beliefs on war - a broad church is this Remembrance day!!!





P.S. Am I the only one that can't get used to the Warner Classics brand on these time honoured EMI titles?

[makropulos]

Mary - it's a piece I've heard and performed a number of times (though I'm sure you've been involved in many more) and I suppose one of the things that made it so moving was the sense of discovery by these young musicians, which felt like an inspired kind of rediscovery for those of us who know it so well. Incidentally, good to see the RFH absolutely packed for the performance, and good too that all the tickets were £10.00, so there were many, many young people in the (rapt) audience as well as on the stage.

[ardcarp]

It [The War Requiem] was performed in Truro Cathedral twice this weekend...Saturday and Sunday. Is this a record?

[Petrushka]

I know it's being repeated again from tonight on BBC4 but why isn't the outstanding 1964 BBC series The Great War currently available on DVD except at ludicrous prices? I have it as a DVD set given away with a newspaper a few years ago but was looking to update it as a handsome boxed set.

The BBC should reissue this with urgency.

[ardcarp]

Without wishing disrespect to anyone [and I'm listening to one of my favourite St John's CDs right now...includes Howells' Reqiem and Take Him Earth] hasn't BBC TV overdone the Remembrance thing just a bit? Isn't it debased when almost every programme from The Antiques Roadshow to Countryfile has to be 'themed' around it, the presenters assuming a grave persona so much at odds with 'normal' as to becomes almost a caricautre?