Talisker Players Chamber Music

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

These remarkable aphorisms are taken from the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, an extraordinary figure in the culture of his native India, and a major force in world literature and the expanding understanding between East and West during the 20th century. A friend of Gandhi, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 (the first Asian to do so), and subsequently met and entered into dialogue with such prominent Westerners as Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells.

Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest son of a cultivated Brahmin family. He was educated in the traditions of the Brahmo Samaj, a deeply philosophical Bengali sect of Hinduism which emphasized the unity of the Divine. He studied briefly in England during his teens, managed his family’s estates, and became active in education and social reform, but was primarily a writer – a poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, diarist, and songwriter (composing the music for his own songs).

For the first fifty years of his life, Tagore was little known outside Bengal, but in 1912 he travelled to England; on the voyage, he experimented with translating his own poems (mostly from the collection entitled Gitanjali, or “Song-Offerings”) into English. A friend of Tagore’s learned of the project and persuaded him, with difficulty, to allow his notebook to be shown to William Butler Yeats. Yeats was deeply impressed with the beauty and spiritual force of Tagore’s lyrics, and was instrumental in the London publication of Gitanjali, to which he also wrote the introduction. He wrote of his response to the work:

Tagore’s fame spread rapidly, first in London and then throughout the West. He received the Nobel Prize, and was invited to give world lecture tours promoting inter-cultural harmony and understanding. He was knighted in 1915, but later resigned his knighthood in protest at British mishandling of the Indian independence movement. Although he supported Gandhi’s efforts, Tagore mistrusted nationalism, and concentrated on promoting a new culture of multi-culturalism, diversity, and tolerance, a project centred on Visva-Bharati University, which he founded. He continued to produce luminous poetry and prose, expanding the boundaries of Bengali poetic traditions with a lyrical naturalism and a universalist outlook. Two of his songs have become the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and his poems have inspired and attracted many subsequent composers, a small sample of whom are represented in this evening’s programme.

Frank Bridge, best known today as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, was nevertheless one of the most important English composers of the earlier 20th century. A student of Stanford, he moved rapidly away from his teacher’s rather Victorian manner to develop his own fresh – even radical – approach to harmony and tonal colour. His late works, while never atonal, reveal a high tolerance of dissonance, but his setting of Tagore’s Dweller in my Deathless Dreams represents the combination of harmonic sophistication and tonal comprehensibility which characterises his middle period. The vocal part moves, for the most part, in long, smooth waves, with larger and more active leaps at the climax “I have caught you and wrapt you, my love, in the net of my music”. The instrumental accompaniment is relatively complex, and the contrast between its motion and the sustained vocal line underlines the tension produced by the poetic subject’s admitted objectification and shaping of the beloved in his dreams.

A friend and colleague of Debussy, Caplet won the Paris Conservatoire’s Prix de Rome in 1901. He studied conducting (in Berlin) as well as composition, and conducted the Boston Opera from 1910 to 1914. As a soldier in World War I Caplet was severely gassed, and he was subsequently compelled by pleurisy to give up his conducting career; he died seven years after the end of the war as a result of his respiratory illnesses. He has sometimes been dismissed as a derivative follower of Debussy, but the works of his tragically brief career have their own distinctive style, tending more to archaism and to an ecstatic lyricism which is particularly evident in Écoute, mon coeur, and particularly suited to Tagore’s poetic expression. The extraordinary virtuosity of the flute part – itself the focus of the poem – evokes the shimmering of leaves and water, and frames the brief text and comparatively simple vocal part; its complexity reveals, in a paradoxical contrast, their profundity and density of meaning.

A close contemporary of Frank Bridge, Foulds was more radical in his exploration of musical techniques, and his works are even less remembered today – although in very recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in some of his major works, and this year saw the revival of his gigantic War Requiem, “in memory of the war dead of all nations”, at the Royal Albert Hall on November 11. His fascination with the literature and music of the East, especially India, reflect the spirit of the age, which saw such figures as Rabindranath Tagore become famous and respected in the West. This interest led him to experiment with “exotic” non-western scales (and even quarter tones), and eventually, in 1935, took him to India to collect folk music and to become the director of European music for All-India Radio in Delhi. His death from cholera four years later ended his individual quest for a synthesis of eastern and western musics, although the vision has been sustained by later composers from both cultures.

The songs I am going alone in this world and Ye dweller in the House were composed two decades earlier, for a London performance of Tagore’s play Sacrifice. They are sung in the play by the beggar-woman Aperna, and their style reflects Foulds’ conception of Indian music at that stage in his career. The sparse instrumental texture focuses attention directly on the vocal line, and the colourful interval of the augmented second (between E flat and F sharp) is treated as a structural element of the melody, rather than a mere orientalist ornament. The original arrangement was for solo voice with two violins and tambura, but Foulds also created the version for strings which is performed this evening.

Ippolitov-Ivanov studied composition in St Petersburg with Rimsky-Korsakov, whose fondness for characteristically “Eastern” melodic colours and vivid orchestration were a lasting influence on the younger composer. His first appointment was in Tbilisi, in Georgia; there he became interested in the distinctive folk- and liturgical-music styles of the region, and the one work of his which remains popular in the concert hall is the “Procession of the Sardar” from one of his Georgian-flavoured Caucasian Sketches suites. He subsequently became a professor (later director) of the Moscow Conservatory, and a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre, but managed somehow to avoid the political controversies between “proletarianism” and “avant-gardism” which plagued the Soviet musical world in the 1920s and 1930s.

The settings of Four Poems by Rabindranath Tagore are characteristic of Ippolitov-Ivanov’s solo-song style; they are direct, appealing, and readily comprehensible, and their ornamental chromaticism never obscures their essential tonality. The melodic movement of the vocal line and the supporting figuration of the instrumental parts shift from languour to simplicity, and from somnolent tenderness to wistful playfulness to match the contrasting moods of the four poems. Fittingly, the composer wrote that one “should keep in mind that the language [a composer] speaks to the public must be clear... Art requires beautiful expression and does not tolerate the ugly”.

Composer, conductor and music critic Arthur Shepherd belonged to a transitional generation in American music, between such European-influenced musicians as Edward MacDowell and Charles Griffes and more self-consciously American composers like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. He considered Triptych, a set of three poems from Tagore’s Gitanjali: Song Offerings, to be among his most significant works. The pieces which Shepherd chose evoke mystical union in complementary ways. He It Is is direct in its portrayal of the soul’s self-forgetful devotion to the Divine; the mood and tempo indications move from the non-comittal moderato to sempre estatico, mistico, and divoto, with a climax of melodic arc and instrumental figuration on “in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow”. The text of The Day is No More uses more elusive language of natural description in its “intimations of mortality”, and while the central section is restless in its musical movement, the opening and closing are restrained and enigmatic. Light, my light unites these poetic registers in an ecstatic climax of soaring melody and rushing rhythmic activity. Throughout these three richly lyrical movements, the voice is treated less as a soloist with accompaniment than as a privileged equal in a unified ensemble.

Naresh Sohal comes from a literary family in the Indian part of the Punjab. While studying mathematics and physics, he began to learn and perform popular music, entirely by ear; it was an encounter with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony on the radio which led him to London to study western music in 1962. He studied privately with Jeremy Dale-Roberts, and expanded his experience enormously by working as a music copyist. Since the early 1960s, Sohal has lived in London, in Leeds, and in Edinburgh, and his works – for concert hall, theatre, dance, and broadcast media, many of them large in scale and challenging in their use of innovative compositional techniques – have gradually won him respect and success with both critics and audiences. Although he has not by any means restricted himself to Indian themes, these have played a large role in his output, and he has composed a number of works on texts by Rabindranath Tagore. In 1987, Sohal was awarded the Order of the Lotus by the Government of India, for his services to Western Music – the first non-resident Indian to be so honoured.

The Songs from Gitanjali were written for a performance by Sally Silver, the Dante String Quartet, and tabla-player Sanju Sahai in 2004, at the Spitalfields Festival in London. Both poems present a balance of faith and hesitation, of conviction and suspension; the settings avoid the austere experimentalism of some of Sohal’s work, remaining resolutely tonal, with gentle transitions from one key (or mode) to another, and instrumental contours which support the sustained and flexible lines of the vocal part. The only explicitly “Indian” element is the use of the tabla, which gives the songs a distinctive percussion colour, but the rhythmic patterns assigned to the tabla are ostinati of an entirely Western character.

This set presents four of Tagore’s melodies, composed for his own poems. The tunes work around the melodic conventions and scales (ragas) of Indian classical and traditional music in much the same way that Tagore’s lyrics expand the forms of classical Bengali poetry. The first of the songs, Baajey koruno shurey, is based on a South Indian Karnatak melody, with much use of augmented seconds and other colourfully chromatic intervals; the final piece, Ogo swapna swarupini, uses the same modal centre, with similar (but not identical) elaborations. The middle two songs use simpler melodic structures (or structures less alien to Western ears); Shaawana gaganey is from one of Tagore’s earliest works, the dance-drama Bhanusingher Padabali (ca. 1875), in which he wrote in Maithili, a language used by the medieval Vaishnava poets.

Suddhaseel Sen is a young Indian composer currently studying at the University of Toronto. He has created sensitive arrangements of these four songs of Tagore’s, giving the string quartet a largely supporting role, but allowing the flute, and occasionally one of the strings, to enter into dialogue with the voice. The tonal centres are firmly held, without any gratuitous modulation. All-in-all, these arrangements are very much in keeping with Tagore’s own ideals about the combination of the best elements from Eastern and Western tradition.

Programme Notes