Thank you Kenny.

In his spare time he composed. And in his 70s he composed this - his vision of the Heavenly City, Jerusalem. It’s hard to know what to say about it - because it goes beyond saying, into the area of experience where only music works - beyond explanation and description. In the rising and falling of its moods you feel the movements of your own soul in its search of tranquillity, and a yearning for reconciliation with the world of fear and anxiety that surrounds us.

Dyson endured the horrors of the First World War - lived in a world of fear far greater than we could ever know - and yet could still compose this affirmation of life, love and reconciliation.

Inspector Morse would have loved him.

The soprano is Valerie Hill. with the St Michaels’ Singers and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Rennert.

His collection of short piano pieces, ‘Along an Overgrown Path’, each with touching little titles (’Our Evenings’, ‘A blown away leaf’, ‘They chattered like swallows’) is full of an intense nostalgic longing for his childhood home in Moravia. It was also written in the shadow of the death, aged 20, of his daughter Olga, to whom he was deeply attached, and a deep vein of melancholy permeates them all.

The piece called ‘Goodnight’ is one of the most haunting. It starts with a little four note figure - crochet, two quavers, crochet - high up on the piano, sounding on two notes only. It’s like a distant bell sounding, or a call across a river. The figure is repeated throughout the four minutes or so of the piece, gradually and slowly moving downwards until, at the end it sounds in the bass. It’s as if it was subsiding through consciousness into sleep - and as the final four notes sound, perhaps into that final sleep into which Olga, at long last, subsided - leaving Janacek alone.

The pianist is Thomas Hlawatsch.

The soundtrack, by Michael Kamen, in noteworthy, in particular the final song ‘Take Me With You’ sung over the end titles. Here it is sung by Elisabeth Fraser.

This Elegy is a short piece. But it’s lovely, and melancholy. It was an encore played by the great South American pianist, Jorge Bolet, at a concert I was privileged to be at almost a quarter of a century ago, on 21 December 1983, at St John’s Smith Square, London. The applause is cut off at the end, which is a pity, for it was rapturous.

‘Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.’

The singer is Karl Erb, the greatest of all interpreters of Schubert’s songs.

“I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair floating like a zephyr on the soft summer air.”

A zephyr is a dragonfly, as we call it in England, which hovers and flickers over the flowers it searches for. You can think of her hair, new clean and clear, caught by a breath of wind, catching the light and hovering before it settles back, gently on her neck - like the dragonfly onto the flower.

Far away from the world of Gods and Heros, there is a more human connection between this gentle, lovely work and an awakening. It is recorded by Wagner’s wife, Cosima in her diary.

“Sunday, December 25 [1870] About this day, my children, I can tell you nothing - nothing about my feelings, nothing about my mood, nothing, nothing. I shall just tell you, drily and plainly, what happened. When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew ever louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! After it had died away, R. came in to me with the five children and put into my hands the score of his “Symphonic Birthday Greeting.” I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household; R.had set up his orchestra on the stairs and thus consecrated our Tribschen forever! The Tribschen Idyll - thus the work is called. - At midday Dr. Sulzer arrived, surely the most important of R.’s friends! After breakfast the orchestra again assembled, and now once again the Idyll was heard in the lower apartment, moving us all profoundly (Countess B. was also there, on my invitation); after it the Lohengrin wedding procession, Beethoven’s Septet, and, to end with, once more the work of which I shall never hear enough! - Now at last I understood all R.’s working in secret, also dear Richter’s trumpet (he blazed out the Siegfried theme splendidly and had learned the trumpet especially to do it), which had won him many admonishments from me. “Now let me die,” I exclaimed to R. “It would be easier to die for me than to live for me,” he replied. “

Here it is played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

Here it is sung by the Cambridge Singers conducted by John Rutter.

‘I desire only to rest upon your breast, and there transfigure you with the sunlight’s shining joy.’

It is touchingly sung by Geraldine McGreevy.

Here we start on a positive note. An English hymn, in the immensely popular version by Cat Stevens.

In December 1956, following his tour of Europe, Louis Armstrong entered the recording studios and over a period of two months re-recorded (or rather re-created) some forty or so classics from throughout his career - from his days in Chicago with King Oliver in the early 20s, through his classic Hot Five period and into the 1930s when he reached the peak of his early fame. Now, though, he was a young man no longer; he was in his mid fifties. For some reason, this exercise of re-creating his early hits seems to have inspired him - to the extent that some of his re-creations equal, and even better, their originals. When these recordings came out as a boxed set of four LPs as his ‘Musical Autobiography’, they were hailed as classics of their kind - a new peak, in his long career. He introduced each track with a spoken reminiscence. For this track, That’s My Home, he pays touching tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton who played it for him as his departing train pulled out of the station, on his way home to America.

Louis wasn’t the man he was in his youth. His trumpet had no longer the breathtaking technique of thirty years earlier. Yet it has something else - a majesty and poise that only maturity brings. And that trumpet tone - the sound of a golden sunset.

‘Dream, dream, flower of my love, of the quiet, blessed night, when the flower of his love changed forever this world into a heaven for me.’

It is beautifully sung by Gundula Janovitz.

“You who are from heaven, who assuage all grief and suffering, and fill him who is doubly wretched, doubly with delight, ah! I am weary of striving! To what end is this pain and joy? Sweet peace, enter my heart.”

In the dissonant chords behind the vocal there is mental pain and anguish, from which the singer yearns for rest.

The singer is Mitsuko Shirai, accompanied by Hartmut Holl.

Then the chorus. Here we float away from these memories; he asks what day and time it is and tells us that we must live now, in this time, fully. His hand trembles no more. In his soul the heavens have opened and here in his melancholy he sees everything filled with love. Courage returns.

Listen to how he sings it.

Jacques Brel died thirty years ago this month, not yet 50 years old. Here in memory of that majestic talent is one of his gentlest songs - L’Enfance (Childhood). Brel was admirably unsentimental and even here, when you might expect some softening of feeling, he never lets us forget that childhood is a preparation for the sadness of being grown up.

‘Childhood - who can tell when it ends, when it begins. It is nothing, a rashness, all that cannot be written down……… Childhood - the right to dream and to dream still. My father once was a seeker of gold; care is what he found.’

‘The day has wearied me, and now I long to be enfolded in the starry night like a tired child. Hands, leave off your work; brow, forget your thoughts. All my senses long to lose themselves in slumber. And my soul, on freed wings, yearns to soar at its will so to live a thousandfold more intensely under the magic arc of the night.’

It is sung here by Jessye Norman. In an earlier post I wrote about her interpretation of these last songs of Richard Strauss. This is what I said about her singing of this third song. ‘In…..“Beim Schlafengehen” there is a quite magical passage where, after the lovely violin interlude, she follows the line of the melody in almost imperceptible gradations, starting pianissimo then drawing her voice out into a crescendo, then retreating into head voice before building up the crescendo.’ It is unsurpassed.

‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night, hither speed thy airy flight! and his weary senses steep in the balmy dew of sleep. That when bright Aurora’s beams glad the world with golden streams, he, like Phoebus, blithe and gay, may retaste the healthful day.’

It is perfectly sung by Emma Kirkby.

Still this isn’t really the place to be in autumn - or the Fall as Americans so poetically put it. It is over there. A place, I sadly confess, I have never been to. But here’s how in my dreams it would be - in New York. A young Frank Sinatra singing, in 1947, this wonderful Vernon Duke song.