Birdsong
Sunday 10 February 2008 22:15-0:00 (Radio 3)
Claire Skinner and Hugh Bonneville are the readers in a celebration of nature's musicians. The poems include Milton's Nightingale, Hardy's Darkling Thrush and Tennyson's Blackbird, and the music includes Saint-Saens's Cuckoo, Rameau's Hen and Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela.
Duration:
1 hour 45 minutes
Birdsong
Claire Skinner (reader)
Hugh Bonneville (reader)
Producer's Note:
Birdsong has fascinated poets and musicians for centuries. Tonight's poetry selection spans 700 years, from Dafydd ap Gwilym's 14th-century hymn to the thrush to RS Thomas's more recent celebration of the blackbird, while the music ranges almost as far, from Renaissance composer Clement Janequin's cacophonous chanson to a section from Einojuhani Rautavaara's atmospheric Cantus arcticus, memorably enriched by the recorded sound of migrating swans.
I have included a few 'catalogues' (opening with Izaak Walton's inventory of the 'nimble musicians of the air'), but for the greater part have chosen to concentrate on those songsters who have inspired the most frequent creative effort. Most popular among them by far is the nightingale, the thrilling musician of the woods who reduces the other birds to silence with her brilliance in Blake's 'Milton', sings her traditional song of lost love in Richard Barnfield's 'As it fell upon a day', and offers encouragement to human lovers in a ravishing air from Rameau's opera Hippolyte et Aricie. For Leslie Norris the voice of 'the poet's bird' is both pleasure and torment, a spur to the creative act and a reproach to human inadequacy.
Not far behind is the skylark, whose ebullient airborne music - for many people the sound of the British summer - is here celebrated in an anonymous 17th-century poem and in music connecting its song to the cares of lovers from the English folk tradition and by Hoagy Carmichael.
Less virtuosic but no less irresistible to artists have been the cuckoo - the two-note herald of spring humorously imitated by Saint-Saens and argued over in words by Wordsworth and Bunyan - and the owl, whose comforting and disturbing contributions to the soundscape of the winter night are evoked by Edward Thomas and in Dominick Argento's setting of lines from Love's Labour's Lost. Rameau's La poule even manages an unlikely but surprisingly realistic harpsichord depiction of a clucking hen.
Other composers and poets have essayed more demanding birdsong imitations: Olivier Messiaen's intricately notated representations became a vital part of his own creative personality; Gerard Manley Hopkins ambitiously attempts a verbal characterisation of a woodlark.
Few of these skilful impressions would count for much without some wider resonance. We have seen that birdsong both marks out the seasons and reminds us of our humble place in the natural world. But above all, and as all the poets and composers represented in this programme have recognised, birdsong also touches something deep in our hearts, unstopping the streams of love, longing, memory, joy, laughter and melancholy that lie within us all.
Lindsay Kemp (producer)
Playlist
00:00.00
Izaak Walton
The Compleat Angler (excerpt)
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:02.05
Camille Saint-Saens
Voliere (Le Carnaval des animaux)
Genevieve Amar (flute), Guher and Suher Pekinel (pianos)
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
Marek Janowski (conductor)
TELDEC 4509 974452. Tr 10
00:03.20
John Lyly
Song
Read by Claire Skinner
00:03.59
Benjamin Britten
The Merry Cuckoo; Spring, the Sweet Spring (Spring Symphony)
Alison Hagley (soprano), Catherine Robbin (contralto)
John Mark Ainsley (tenor)
Philharmonia Orchestra / John Eliot Gardiner (conductor)
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 453 433 2. Tr 2-3
00:07.36
William Wordsworth
To the Cuckoo
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:08.56
John Bunyan
Of the Cuckoo
Read by Claire Skinner
00:10.16
Camille Saint-Saens
Le Coucou au fond des bois (Le Carnaval des animaux)
Robert Fontaine (clarinet), Guher and Suher Pekinel (pianos)
TELDEC 4509 974452. Tr 9
00:12.32
John Heywood
The Cock and the Hen
Read by Claire Skinner
00:13.14
Jean-Philippe Rameau
La Poule
Sophie Yates (harpsichord)
CHANDOS CHAN 0708. Tr 11
00:18.20
William Browne
Britannia's Proposal (excerpt)
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:19.36
Clement Janequin
Le Chant des Oyseaulx
Ensemble Clement Janequin
HARMONIA MUNDI HM 901099. Tr 1
00:25.23
Dafydd ap Gwilym
The Thrush
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:26.42
Traditional Irish (arr. Matt Molloy and Stephen Cooney)
The Morning Thrush
Matt Molloy (flute) & band
(from album: Shadows on Stone)
VIRGIN CDVE930. Tr 1
00:29.18
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Blackbird
Read by Claire Skinner
00:30.31
RS Thomas
A Blackbird Singing
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:31.18
Olivier Messiaen
Le Merle noir (Petites Esquisses d'oiseaux)
Peter Hill (piano)
UNICORN DKPCD9144. Tr 5
00:33.37
Anonymous
The Lark
Read by Claire Skinner
00:36.05
Traditional English (arr. Vivien Ellis & Giles Lewin)
The Lark in the Morning
Alva (Vivien Ellis, voice; Giles Lewin, fiddle)
BEAUTIFUL JO BEJOCD-45. Tr 2
00:39.52
Hoagy Carmichael
Skylark
Hoagy Carmichael (voice) & band
PACIFIC JAZZ CDP746862 2. Tr 5
00:43.53
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Woodlark
Read by Claire Skinner
00:46.27
John Bartlett
Sweete birdes deprive us never
Emily Van Evera (soprano), Christopher Morrongiello (lute)
Susanna Pell (bass viol)
AVIE AV0045. Tracks 17-19
00:52.52
Edward Thomas
The Unknown Bird
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:54.42
Paul Reade
Birdsong (Aspects of a Landscape)
Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
LEMAN CLASSICS LC42801. Tr 9
00:55.27
William Blake
Milton (excerpt)
Read by Claire Skinner
00:56.44
Anonymous
The Dark is my Delight
Evelyn Tubb (soprano), Michael Fields (lute)
MUSICA OSCURA 070980. Tr 8
00:58.01
John Milton
Sonnet I
Read by Hugh Bonneville
00:58.52
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Rossignols amoureux (Hippolyte et Aricie)
Patricia Petibon (soprano)
Les Arts Florissants / William Christie (conductor)
ERATO 0630 155172. Disc 3 Tr 21
01:04.34
Richard Barnfield
As it fell upon a day
Read by Claire Skinner
01:05.52
Maurice Ravel
Oiseaux tristes (Miroirs)
Tzimon Barto (piano)
ONDINE ODE 1095-2 Tr 5
01:10.54
Leslie Norris
Nightingales
Read by Hugh Bonneville
01:13.55
Ottorino Respighi
L'usignuolo (Gli uccelli)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra / Edo de Waart (conductor)
PHILIPS 411 419 2. Tr 6
01:18.20
Edward Thomas
The Owl
Read by Hugh Bonneville
01:19.18
Dominick Argento
Winter (Six Elizabethan Songs)
Howard Haskin (tenor), David Triestram (piano)
DEUX-ELLES DXL 1098. Tr 3
01:21.04
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Owl
Read by Claire Skinner
01:22.49
Jean Sibelius
The Swan of Tuonela
London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
RCA 7432 1689452. Tr 2
01:33.30
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Dying Swan
Read by Claire Skinner
01:35.33
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Swans Migrating (Cantus arcticus)
Lahti Symphony Orchestra / Osmo Vanska (conductor)
BIS CD-1038. Tr 11
01:41.50
Thomas Hardy
The Darkling Thrush
Read by Hugh Bonneville
