Old Fogey’s Favourites

When I first went to University in 1964, I immediately joined the “Ballad and Blues” Club. It was actually a folk club, but the title was I suppose, meant to show wider sympathies. There I got to see Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Guy Carawan, the Liverpool Spinners (rather good but somewhat disdained later for their commercialism), the Clancy Brothers and more. Tony Rose was a stalwart of the club at the time.

One of the popular songs at the time was the Irish song “The Holy Ground”. This usually came in after “The Whiskey in the Jar” or some other roaring song, to lower the temperature. Like all the best Irish songs, it’s about longing for home - always the exile’s holy ground - here through the eyes of a girl longing for her lover to return from sea.

Here’s Mary Black singing it.

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Brought up a Catholic before the Second Vatican Council means that all my early experiences of worship are of the traditional Latin Mass - and almost ten years as an altar boy meant I officiated at one or more every week. But it must be forty years since I last went to one. The Latin Mass was replaced in the 1970s by the mass in the vernacular. Occasionally I attended versions of the mass on Sunday where some latin was allowed, mainly in the singing, but it was a weak and insipid thing compared with the original.

It’s heartening to see the blanket ban on the traditional Latin Mass being lifted by the present Pope, but I’m not sure if the art can have survived forty years of silence. Let’s hope so. And if they want altar boys over sixty, who remember it last time round, I’m available.

Here’s a moment of nostalgia to touch all Catholics of a certain age. It’s the Kyrie, sung by choir and congregation, at a late celebration of the Latin Mass on All Saints Day 1975, at Downham Market, England by Fr Oswald Baker.

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This is one of the Gershwins’ most unusual and beautiful songs. It is differently constructed from many of their other songs. The chorus is only 18 bars long, compared to the usual 32 bars of the standard popular song. In the standard popular song the 32 bar chorus is often the only thing we ever get to hear. In their original context, a show, revue or musical, they would have come with a verse, at least as an introduction to the song. Verses tend now to get left out. With ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’ the chorus itself, beautiful as it is, is not long enough to sustain a performance alone. It needs the verse to make sense of it. Because of this, and more than in any other song I know, the verse is totally integrated with the chorus. The lyrics are below - chorus in italics. The performance is by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins at the piano, from a recording made in 1950.

Hmmmmm I’ve got a crush on someone. Guess who

I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie

All day and night time hear me sigh 

I never had the least notion that

I could fall with so much emotion

Could you coo, could you care

For a cunning cottage we could share

The world will pardon my mush

‘Cause I’ve a crush my baby on you

How glad the million laddies from millionaires to caddies

Would be to capture me

But you had such persistence, you wore down my resistance

I fell and it was swell

You’re my big and brave and handsome Romeo

How I won you I shall never never know

It’s not that you’re attractive

But, oh, my heart grew active

When you came into view

I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie

All the day and night-time hear me sigh

I never had the least notion that

I could fall with so much emotion

Could you coo, could you care

For a cunning cottage that we could share

The world will pardon my mush

‘Cause I have got a crush, my baby, on you

I’m not sure what a ‘cunning cottage’ is, though. Am I hearing it right?

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This is Sophie Tucker, with a voice ten times larger than life, that hits you in technicolour. The song is more belted than sung  - the fruit of performing for years in all those large unamplified music halls. It’s not really blue - but as I listen to it images do flash in my mind of those Donald McGill postcards of big women dominating puny men. It’s about female sexual appetite, here at its most menacing.

I love the line “and if he’s never called for his mother, I guess he will tonight.”

Magnificent and terrifying.

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Organs weren’t introduced into most English churches until the middle of the nineteenth century. When they were they had a profound effect on church music. Before, church singing was simpler, rougher, and more homely. After, it became smoother and more solemn. The earlier style is now referred to as West Gallery music - on account of the choirs and musicians stationing themselves in the West Gallery. Choirs were accompanied by local bands - of violins, cellos, flutes, cornets and other assorted wind instruments, including the strange Serpent. These bands doubled for secular dances at local inns and halls -see the early dance scene in the BBC’s 1995 version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ which recreates such a band. In Thomas Hardy’s “Under the Greenwood Tree” too there is a memorable evocation of a West Gallery band and choir.

Over the last twenty years or so there has been something of a revival in West Gallery music - and a joy it is to hear. From recordings I have heard I suspect that modern recreations smooth out the roughness and off pitch intonation of the originals. Here, however, is ‘Come Let Us All’ . It is sung at Christmas time. I don’t know where I got this from, but it captures perfectly the original rustic, homely quality of the music, sung in a regional (Dorset?) accent, with delightful added aitches to make ‘hangels’ - a touching attempt to poshen up their style.

Afterthought: Listening to it again I realise that in among the strings and woodwind there is an organ, sounding the death knell of the band - and making the singing more poignant.

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One of the most remarkable recitals I went to at Wigmore Hall was on 2 April 2001. The pianist was Joanna MacGregor and she was giving a recital of twentieth century works by Samuel Barber, George Crumb and Stravinsky. Ms MacGregor is not conventional - either in appearence or musicianship. She has long twisted, black hair. She wore a trouser suit. In the George Crumb piece you saw her dive into the belly of the piano to pluck and strum the strings inside.

In her prelude to Stravinsky’s Petrushka she plays a snatch of Russian melody (I missed the beginning). This is followed by a charming little waltz. Then you can hear her wind up a music box. The music box plays the Russian song. For a while she accompanies the music box on the piano. She falls silent and lets the music box run down. You hold your breath.

Then she thunders into Petrushka.

The effect is magical.

There is a moving encore.

An American couple had wandered in out of the rain and sat near me during the recital. I talked to them about it afterwards. They were as stunned as I was.

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Last month, on one of the rare blssful summer evenings we have had this summer, I sat at my desk with the door open overlooking the garden listening to an old tape recording I had of a concert from St John’s Smith Square in 1981 of the Archduke Trio, played by Gyorgy Pauk, Ralph Kirshbaum and Peter Frankl. It was a piece which I used to play on my journeys up to Manchester to see my mother in the last year of her life. Here’s the lovely Andante from that concert. It is indelibly linked with my memories of her.

See my other blog here for a fuller appreciation.

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This is a carry over from my other blog, where I have been running a series on moments in music where time seems to stand still. It is Gigli singing Caccini’s Amarilli mia bella. It’s in the top ten of your 100 Best Tunes – and rightly so. Gigli sings this lovely tune perfectly – romantically and inauthentically. At the end he sings Amarilli three times and falls away to the home note. You think it’s all over but it’s not – here time does stand still. It isn’t finished. He lifts his voice into his head and repeats Amarilli as if you weren’t expecting it – and you weren’t. It’s heavenly – and no-one does it quite like Gigli.

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Wigmore Hall used to run lunchtime concerts where new young musical talent got the opportunity to perform in public. Entrance fee was nominal, and the audience would normally be not much more than a hundred including Mums and Dads and the rest of the family. 

In April 1993 I strayed in during a damp lunch hour. The concert started with a chamber group of young instrumentalists. Their first piece was a new modern work – all squeaks and bumps and farts and sounds of scraping wire – and no worse than others I had “listened” to by more eminent figures, such as Pierre Boulez. They also did the Siegfried Idyll – a lovely, gentle piece belying Wagner’s image as bombastic and overbearing.  In between there was a young singer, a tenor. He was thin and a little gaunt, angular, all knees and elbows. He sang Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”. I have the image of him now, in my mind’s eye, body thrust forward, singing full of passion, without inhibition, lovely clear voice, especially at the top (a touch weaker at the baritone end of things in the last song). There was something so utterly English about him; almost innocence. His hands and arms seemed to move involuntarily with his singing, as part of its expressiveness. It was forceful and vigorous. It was Ian Bostridge’s debut.  Several weeks later I was flicking through the channels on the wireless and, by chance, came across a commercial music station, which usually played Easy Listening, broadcasting the very lunchtime concert I had been to at Wigmore Hall. I taped it.  Here, from my tape, is Ian Bostridge singing the third song in the cycle “Ich hab ein gluhend Messer in meiner Brust”.   

Several weeks later I was flicking through the channels on the wireless and, by chance, came across a commercial music station, which usually played Easy Listening, broadcasting the very lunchtime concert I had been to at Wigmore Hall. I taped it.  Here, from my tape, is Ian Bostridge singing the third song in the cycle “Ich hab ein gluhend Messer in meiner Brust”.   

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Written and sung by Kate Rusby, from her last album “Awkward Annie”. She is accompanied by John McCusker, her former husband. Their separation was painful.

You can’t help reading the biographical in this song. The Bitter Boy is the one she gives her heart to. To her, he is indifferent but still he  “came to take the gleaming treasure. He reached in my chest, deep in my breast and took the heart away forever.”  A bitter song to a sweet melody.

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