Old Fogey’s Favourites

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A month late, but still welcome, and forever evocative of my childhood. The Glasgow Orpheus Choir, founded by undertaker Hugh Roberton in 1906, finally folded in the year of my birth. But the sound of it seeped into my childhood, like gravy, in the same way as Kathleen Ferrier, Bing Crosby and Billy Cotton did, forever on the ether that was radio - the ‘wireless’ as we called it then.

I have a 78rpm record of this, but listening to it now is like listening to the sound of a distant choir of angels singing in a thunderstorm sifted through a fish fat fryer.

Here’s a recent recording, made in homage of the original, by the Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by David Temple.

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Songs wera a bit of a sideline for Beethoven. But this is one of his best. It is to a, frankly, rather crappy poem by Friedrich von Matthison. It’s just as well as Beethoven rides rather roughshod over the words. He wasn’t Schubert after all. Nonetheless the insistent calling of the loved one’s name - Adelaide -at the end of each verse in a five note rising phrase is heart rending.

The lover sees her face everywhere around him, in the springtime, in the light of the setting sun as it catches the snows on the mountain top, in the stars in the night sky. He imagines a flower growing out of his tomb, its roots in the ashes of his heart, and blossoming: Adelaide.

This is Jussi Bjoerling, recorded in 1939.

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Charles Villiers Stanford’s classic English Choral piece to words by Mary Coleridge.

‘The lake lay blue below the hill. O’er it, as I looked, there flew across the waters, cold and still, a bird whose wings were palest blue. The sky above was blue at last, the sky beneath me blue in blue. A moment, ere the bird had passed, it caught his image as he flew.’

It has that indefinable English quality, unmistakeable but impossible to explain, alluding to a world of lost content, forever out of reach, around the bend of a river, lost in the mists beyond the meadow, on the far side of the hill.

It is sung by the BBC Singers.

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This is an exquisite, short piano piece by the English composer, Percy Grainger. He wrote it as a wedding gift for a young woman he had once loved.  It is enchanting in its own right, but film buffs may recognise it from the soundtrack of the Merchant Ivory film ‘Howard’s End’, E M Forster’s novel. In the opening scene, Vanessa Redgrave, the doomed mistress of Howard’s End, wanders through the grounds at dusk, in a reverie of nostalgia for the life she has lived there. She moves through the grass in her long Edwardian dress, the sounds of the breeze and her skirt brushing against the long grass like the sound of a distant sea.  Behind her, shades moving across the lights of the house, are her family and friends, the sounds of their merriment carried on the summer breeze. The last sounds of joy and innocence, before tragedy falls.

In this version, I have taken the recording direct from the film, rather than the commercial recording. After dramatic opening chords from the soundtrack, foretelling the tragedy that is to come, we come back to the quiet summer evening and Grainger’s lovely theme; you can hear Redgrave moving through the grass and sounds of laughter from the distant house. It’s all the more poignant for it. The pianist is Martin Jones.

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Mozart’s Variation’s on the French nursery rhyme ‘Ah, vous dirai-je, maman’ is no such thing. It’s the English ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ stolen by the French.

It’s young man’s piece, written by Mozart when he was 21. Light and gay, frivolous and whimsical. Even in its melancholy moments, in a minor key, gaiety isn’t far beneath the surface. A mix of masculine vigour and feminine charm. It’s irresistible.

The pianist is Balazs Szokolay.

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This is the most moving of all choral versions of The Lord’s Prayer, in the Russian Orthodox rite. The opening chant, in the bass, is as cavernous as the cathedral it was recorded in. Instead of the English choral tradition of vibrato-free, neutered sopranos, we hear women’s voices floating over those dark basses, bringing real colour to the choral sound. It’s a sound that resonates with love and tragedy. Nothing compares with it.

This Bulgarian choir from the capital, Sofia, is conducted by Georgi Robev.

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This is a taste of one of Humphrey Lyttelton’s classic records, ‘Humph at the Conway’, recorded live at London’s Conway Hall on 2 September 1954. The band was in transition at the time. It was still fundamentally a traditional band but force of circumstances changed its line up. In place of the trombone, Bruce Turner came in on alto sax – to the fury of die-hard traditionalists who at a concert in Birmingham unfurled a banner “Go Home, Dirty Bopper”. In addition to Turner and Humph on trumpet, is Wally Fawkes on clarinet.

Good as Humph and Wally are, Bruce Turner is something else. Throughout his alto playing is magnificent – searching, allusive, firm and direct, by turns. The rhythm section chugs along as best it can.

Humph introduces this tune, written by Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington’s great alto player.

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