A sequence of poetry and music inspired by the world seen from a great height, the flight of birds and the romance of mountain tops.
Musical evocations of mountains by Sibelius, Strauss and Liszt sit with poems by Shelley and Petrarch. Anton Lesser and Lesley Sharp read works by Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda and EE Cummings which describe the world of birds in flight, and music by composers including Haydn, J.S. Bach and George Benjamin evokes the same subject.
Altitude
Anton Lesser
Lesley Sharp
Readers: Anton Lesser and Lesley Sharp
Producer's Note
In this programme I wanted to explore the idea of altitude, the world of mountain tops, flying through the air and viewing the landscape from above. I have tried to make this a poetic journey upwards from terra firma (albeit a terra firma several thousand feet above sea level) through the atmosphere and into space.
So we begin with evocations of mountains: Strauss's wonderful, brooding beginning to his Alpine Symphony, and John Evelyn's awestruck response to an alpine walk above the cloudline; and move on to descriptions of clouds in poetry (Shelley) and music (Rimsky-Korsakov). Thereafter we ascend into the realm of birds, with two of the greatest poets of the avian, Ted Hughes and Pablo Neruda, painting contrasting pictures of birds on the wing: one all rapid movement and agility, the other far aloft and still.
We go still higher into the stratosphere with a pair of lyrics about powered flight: Thom Gunn's poem about a plane above Kansas, and Laurie Anderson's delightfully off-beat song set on a commercial airliner. The sequence closes with a trio of poems looking up into the heavens.
Many of my music choices have explicit links with the theme: Liszt and Strauss spent much time in the Alps and reflected this in their music, while the Sibelius symphony, although abstract in conception, was written on a mountainside and is - to me, at least - hugely evocative of the Finnish landscape.
George Benjamin's piece for solo flute, Flight, inspired by the sight of a bird swooping and gliding above the Swiss Alps, was an obvious foil for the Neruda poem of the same title. In other cases the character of the music suggested a connection with the poetry: on reading Ted Hughes's poem A Dove I was reminded of the helter-skelter virtuosity of Peter Racine Fricker's Badinerie, while the Mondonville and Messiaen seemed complementary to the poetry they accompany.
Other connections are more playful: the inclusion of a Bach fugue plays on the fact that the word "fugue" derives from the Italian fuga ("flight"). The final poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins's intimate "I am like a slip of comet", seemed in my mind to blend naturally into the opening bars of Holst's Neptune, whose female chorus fading away into oblivion provides a suitably celestial close.
Thomas Morris (Producer)
Running Order
00:00:00
Richard Strauss
Eine Alpensinfonie (opening)
Berlin Philharmonic
Herbert von Karajan
Deutsche Grammophon 4000392
00:01:18
John Evelyn
Walking through the Alps (from Diaries)
Read by Anton Lesser
00:02:31
From The Cloud
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Read by Lesley Sharp
00:03:47
At Home in the Clouds
Benny Goodman Orchestra with Martha Tilton
The Benny Goodman Caravans: Jumpin' at the Woodside
Giants of Jazz GOJ 1042
00:05:52
Rimsky-Korsakov (Pushkin)
The Swift Parade of Clouds
Olga Borodina (mezzo)
Larissa Gergieva (piano)
Philips 442 780 2
00:09:34
Petrarch (trans. Barbarina Ogle Brand, Lady Dacre)
from Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte
Read by Anton Lesser
00:10:56
Schubert
Wanderer Fantasy (II: Adagio)
Maurizio Pollini (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon 447 451 2
00:17:24
from Beachy Head
Charlotte Smith
Read by Lesley Sharp
00:18:23
Franz Liszt
Au lac de Wallenstadt
from Annees de Pelerinage - Suisse
Stephen Hough (piano)
Hyperion CDA67424
00:21:26
John Adams
Tromba Lontana
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Simon Rattle
EMI CDC5550512
00:25:27
Percy Bysshe Shelley
from Mont Blanc
Read by Anton Lesser
00:26:58
Sibelius
Symphony no 6 (I: Allegro Molto Moderato)
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Neeme Jarvi
Deutsche Grammophon 00289 4775688
00:36:29
J.A. Baker
from The Peregrine
Read by Anton Lesser
00:37:54
Christopher Logue
Come to the Edge
Read by Lesley Sharp
00:38:10
J.S. Bach
Contrapunctus IX from The Art of Fugue
Emerson String Quartet
Deutsche Grammophon 474 4952
00:40:20
The Mountain
Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim)
The Mountain
KAZ CD 7
00:43:59
Ted Hughes
The Dove
Read by Lesley Sharp
00:44:33
Peter Racine Fricker
Wind Quintet (II: Badinerie)
Dennis Brain Wind Quintet
BBCL 41922
00:47:29
Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in D, Op 64 No 5 ("The Lark") - I: Allegro Moderato
Quartetto Italiano
Philips 4260972
00:54:08
Pablo Neruda (trans. Jack Schmitt)
Flight
Read by Anton Lesser
00:56:55
George Benjamin
Flight
Ingrid Culliford (flute)
Lorelt LNT107
01:05:31
E.E. Cummings
The Eagle
Read by Lesley Sharp
01:07:48
Richard Strauss (Eichendorf)
Four Last Songs: Im Abendrot
Philharmonia Orchestra
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/Otto Ackermann
EMI CDH5674952
01:14:59
Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville
Sonate no 5 (II: Aria: Gratioso)
Les Musiciens du Louvre
Marc Minkowski
Archiv 4576002
01:17:02
Thom Gunn
Small Plane in Kansas
Read by Anton Lesser
01:18:05
Nuages
Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France
Souvenirs
London 8205912
01:21:04
Laurie Anderson
From The Air
Big Science
Warner 7599236742
01:25:36
Sheenagh Pugh
The Comet-Watcher's Perspective
Read by Lesley Sharp
01:26:06
Walt Whitman
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Read by Anton Lesser
01:26:45
Olivier Messiaen
Concert a Quatre (II: Vocalise)
Catherine Cantin (flute)
Heinz Holliger (oboe)
Mstislav Rostropovich (cello)
Yvonne Loriod (piano)
Orchestre de l'Opera Bastille
Myung-Whun Chung
Deutsche Grammophon 4459472
01:31:03
Gerard Manley Hopkins
"I am Like a Slip of Comet"
Read by Lesley Sharp
01:31:53
Gustav Holst
The Planets: Neptune
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Sir Adrian Boult
EMI CDM 5669342
