THE BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY OF NORTHERN IRELAND UM AR in association with IIAI MA I M THE ARTS COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND and THE MUSIC DEPARTMENT, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY 201 and businslys o Bernadette Greevy (mezzo-soprano) Havelock Nelson (piano) Fisherwick Presbyterian Church 7.30 p.m., 17 April 1982 sadi

MUSIC FOR A WHILE HARK! THE ECHOING AIR WHEN I AM LAID IN EARTH Henry Purcell (1659-1695) During the last years of his tragically short life Purcell composed a great deal of music for the stage as incidental numbers for plays, as semi-opera, and as opera proper. This evening's recital begins with a representative of each of these three areas. 'Music for a while' is a song written for the tragedy Oedipus (1689) of Dryden and Lee; it is ternary in form, the outer sections being constructed upon a three-bar ground bass, while the middle section (which contains some vivid word- painting concerning the snake-haired Fury Alecto) is perfectly integrated into the whole, both rhythmically and thematically, by the constant quaver motion of the bass line. 'Hark! the echoing air' is a brilliant and triumphant show-piece aria, from the semi-opera The Fairy Queen (1692), whose trumpet- like coloratura vocal line shows clear evidence of Italian influence. 'When I am laid in earth', the poignant climax of Purcell's only pure opera Dido and Aeneas (1689 ?), also has Italian ancestry, which can be traced back to 'Lasciatemi morire in Monteverdi's lost Arianna (1608), a lament whose impact upon the musical community was so great that almost every serious opera of the seventeenth century contained a similar feature. The structure of Dido's deservedly famous lament, built on a five-bar ground bass, is reminiscent of Cavalli; but the daringly inventive harmony and the tragically expressive vocal line are quintessential Purcell.

- 2- KINDERTOTENLIEDER br Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) ago (i) Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n lige sit (ii) Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen av mind (iii) Wenn dein Mütterlein tritt zur Tür hereinivauč ods (iv) Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen! (v) In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus sisw veda Although the death of children was vastly more common- place in previous centuries than it now is at least in the more fortunate parts of the globe there is little reason to think that it was less traumatic those in whose families it occurred. Gustav Mahler was one of twelve brothers and sisters, five of whom died in infancy and another (his favourite brother Ernst) in boyhood, so his own experience of it was direct and indelibly impressed. The poet Friedrich Rückert, in an attempt to give vent to his feelings about the deaths of his own children (one of whom had also been named Ernst), wrote several hundred poems, none of which was published during his lifetime. Mahler selected and set to music five of these three during the summer of 1901 shortly before he met and married Alma Schindler, and two in 1904 after the birth of his daughters to create a song cycle, Kindertotenlieder, whose extraordinary beauty sublimates and transcends the mortality which is its source. the melewib ongoos Tub ni To The cycle traces the stages by which a bereaved parent (normally the father, although the songs are more often sung by a woman) tries to come to terms with his loss. It begins ('Nun will die Sonn'') with the dawn that ends the night of death, as the poet, stunned, drained of feeling, tries to comprehend both the return of light to the world and the extinction of that light which will not rekindle. Here there is no overt outpouring of sorrow, apart from a brief instrumen- tal surge someone else's grief? - before the final couplet; merely an aching emptiness, emphasized by the accompaniment's 792

3- stark austerity and punctuated by a repeated high D like the chime of an abandoned toy. The spiritual anaesthesia passes, and the next two songs brim over with unbearable poignancy. In 'Nun seh' ich wohl' the Surviver is haunted by the memory of his children's eyes ('0 Augen! 0 Augen!'), the intensity of whose gaze he now seems, retrospectively, to understand as a farewell, as a warning that they were returning to the Source of all light, to become the stars that would gaze down on him from future skies. He addresses his thoughts directly to the children, as if they were present, in this song and also in 'Wenn dein Mütterlein' which tells of how his grief is continually renewed, whenever his wife enters the room, by his instinctive glance at the spot by her side where he expects to see his daughter and where indeed he seems at times to sense her presence. The three short verses of 'Oft denk' ich' give us three glimpses of the protagonist at later stages as he takes refuge in self-delusion. First, it is as if the children have merely gone out for a long walk, soon to return. Then, that they have gone for a walk on the sunlit hills. The third verse, however, sees this fantasy begin to crumble, with the realiza- tion that they will not come back from those uplands: it is we who must go to seek them there. The illusion collapses in the final song ('In diesem Wetter') and the cathartic storm depicted in the instrumental introduction takes place as much within the parent's mind as in the outside world. His obsessive anxiety at the children being out of doors in such weather is thrice crushed to futility by the memory that they have been taken away. Serenity returns with this eventual acceptance of reality; the D major tranquillity of the concluding pages of the score shows the poet calm in the understanding that they are beyond the reach of the tempest, at rest in God's care as if in their mother's house.

Kindertotenlieder was given its first performance in January 1905. Two years later, Mahler's elder daughter Maria died of scarlet fever. BEAU SOIR) MANDOLINE ) LA PROCESSION - 4- L'AMOUR DE MOI ********************* INTERVAL ********************* (allded at arod a Claude Debussy Vanse noodsididxs (1862-1918) ads sildwozic1sqst sdt i sd q veevlode yasadil o dau César Franck (1822-1890) 16th century French carol 011933. The early Debussy songs were strongly influenced by the French operatic style of Massenet and Gounod, and give little indication of the revolution to come. 'Beau Soir', written to a poem of Bourget when the compose was still in his teens, is for the most part a placid and idyllic picture of a river at sunset, momentarily darkened by a premonition of death at the final cadence. 'Mandoline' (1882) is one of Debussy's to first Verlaine settings, an indulgently ironic portrayal of amorous serenading. 30 agnos of "La Procession', originally scored for voice and orchestra, dates from 1888. The text (by Brizeux) describes a religious ceremony in which the Host is taken through the fields in procession to bring a blessing on the crops. Franck makes ingenious use of the plainsong melody 'Lauda Sion' - a far cry from his basic idiom of rich Wagnerian chromaticism. The subject of 'L'amour de moi' (which appears in the Bayeux manuscript) is the age-old one - dating back at least as far as the Song of Solomon of tracing parallels between the loved one and a garden of flowers.

THE FAIRY LOUGH A SOFT DAY AN IRISH LULLABY THE BOLD UNBIDDABLE CHILD - 5 - Although it now appears that Stanford's principal contributions to the musical life of the British Isles were made as a teacher (his pupils included Holst, Bliss, Vaughan Williams, Howells and Ireland) he was highly esteemed as a composer in his own lifetime. His basically Germanic training was leavened from time to time by his experience of Irish folk-music (he was born in Dublin) especially in the songs, many of which exhibit a keen sense of atmosphere which has kept them in the repertoire while the plethora of large-scale works gathers dust on library shelves. CANCIÓN DE CUÑA PARA DORMIR A UN NEGRITO PASTORCITO SANTO DE LOS ALAMOS VENGO MADRE Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) Xavier Montsalvatge (1912- Joaquin Rodrigo (1901- The programme concludes with three twentieth-century Spanish songs. The Catalan composer Montsalvatge's interest in West Indian musical style, which he viewed as being originally Spanish, resulted in the song cycle Canciones Negras (1945) from which the 'Canción de cuña' (lullaby for a negro baby) is taken, and is clearly seen in the gentle habanera rhythm. The songs of Rodrigo ('Pastorcito Santo' - Holy Shepherd boy; 'De los alamos' - I have just been down by the poplars, Mother) are more traditional, as might be expected of the creator of the famous Guitar Concerto. Programme Notes by Brian McMaster