CONCERT #5 TUESDAY 22ND JULY 2014 CREDITON CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH (DOORS OPEN at 6.45PM) Tonight’S Performers
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TIM MATTHEWS & PAUL VINCENT PROUDLY PRESENT The Music Makers’ CONCERT #5 TUESDAY 22ND JULY 2014 CREDITON CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH (DOORS OPEN AT 6.45PM) Tonight’s Performers Tim Matthews (piano/organ/accompanist) is co-host of The Music Nicola Wilkes (soprano) is Choral Scholar at Holy Cross Church, Makers’ events. He is an accomplished organist, piano teacher and Crediton, and has been a distinguished President of Exeter University’s musical director of The Alvington Singers, Kingsbridge, and The New Gilbert & Sullivan Society - starring in several productions at the Choir, Crediton - established in January 2014. Northcott Theatre. Having completed a degree in English and Drama, she is about to start a teacher training course. Isobel Tuffi n-Donnavert (piano) is a piano pupil of Tim Matthews, and also Head Chorister at Holy Cross Church. She will be starting at David Evans (recitation) graduated as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Exeter College this autumn. Theatre School in 1980. His acting work included a full season at the Bristol Old Vic before setting up his own experimental theatre Wenda Sully (cello) has played the cello for over thirty years, having company. Currently his role is in health promotion, bringing the determined to study the instrument from an early age. Having processes of drama to educational projects. studied to diploma level, she has played with a variety of quartets and orchestras. She is most at home playing chamber music. Jason Bomford (baritone) is a sought-after singer. Among other groups, he sings Alfi e Pugh (bassoon) is fi rstly a composer and arranger of music, and regularly with the choirs of Buckfast Abbey. has written for professional, university and county youth ensembles. He graduated from Bath Spa University in 2012 with a fi rst class degree in Music. Tonight’s work is a world premier performance. Zoe Fitzsimmons (viola) works for Devon Music Services, providing resources for schools. As well as playing the viola, she assists in conducting The New Choir in Crediton, and sings with the choir of Buckfast Abbey. THE MUSIC MAKERS’ PRESENT CONCERT #5 Ripples, by Bianca Ban • Quiet in July, by Sihplak An alternative tribute to 1914 – 1918, Tim Matthews, piano including some verses written during these years. Solemn Melody, by Walford Davies [1908] Prelude no. 1 in G minor (Opus 1), by Henryk Pachulski Tim Matthews, organ Isobel Tuffi n-Donnavert, piano Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas • Pain, by Ivor Gurney Sonata in D, by Archangelo Corelli recited by David Evans Vocalise, by Sergei Rachmaninoff Berceuse, by Gabriel Fauré Wenda Sully, cello; Tim Matthews, piano Severn Meadows, by Ivor Gurney [composed in France, 1917] Jason Bomford, tenor In the Footsteps of Storsteinen, by Alfi e Pugh Alfi e Pugh, bassoon; Zoe Fitzsimmons, viola; Tim Matthews, piano On Being Asked for a War Poem, by W B Yeats From a Full Heart, by A A Milne Two songs by Arthur Sullivan & W S Gilbert: recited by David Evans Poor Wandering One (from The Pirates of Penzance) Sorry Her Lot (from H.M.S Pinafore) Three short pieces: Moment Gracieux, A Sailor Dance, In the Hayfi eld, Nicola Wilkes, soprano; Tim Matthews, piano by Thomas F Dunhill [1916] • The Towpath, by John Ireland [1918] Tim Matthews, piano • • • INTERVAL • • • Cortege, by Cecil Coles, [composed in France, 1918] CD recording Some composers and poets during 1914-1918 Much of music education during the 1st World War was centred on London – the teeming national hub of the momentous and long-extended war effort. Soldiers embarked for the continent from London’s railway stations, and returned – many of them wounded, or worse. Hotels were turned into hospitals, exhibition centres into refugee or internment camps. As the war went on, there came the threat of zeppelins and aerial bombardment. There were blackouts and rationing, rousing patriotic messages and campaigns for moral improvement. But most of all people tried to get on with life as normal – musicians, writers and creative artists among them. Depending on their age in 1914, the war brought widely differing experiences including, for some, harrowing experiences abroad. Sir Edward Elgar, born in Worcester in1857, had long been acknowledged as the leading British composer. He had become a household name ever since the Enigma Variations (of 1899). A tune from his set of Pomp & Circumstance marches, set to verses by A C Benson, became the famous Land of Hope & Glory hymn in 1901. To many, Elgar’s work sums up the mood of the Edwardian era. But there were other, newer infl uences at work. In London the work of a generation of composers – both male and female – was heard in concert halls throughout the war. Many of these musicians were associated with the Royal College of Music - where they had studied under Parry and Stanford in the 1890s. Among others were Walford Davies, Thomas Dunhill and John Ireland. Too old, too unsuitable for military service or too useful in other ways, they helped maintain the musical life of the country through the war. Davies (1869-1941) was organist at the Temple Church near Fleet Street until 1917. The following year he was appointed director of music to the newly created Royal Air Force, and later became known for his BBC radio broadcasts on music. Dunhill (1877-1946) was attached to the Irish Guards as a bassoonist in 1915, but continued to teach Harmony at the Royal College of Music, and travel the country as an examiner and adjudicator at music festivals. He produced several albums of easier piano music, during the war, to be played for pleasure in the home. THE MUSIC MAKERS’ PRESENT CONCERT #5 Ireland (1879-1962) lived in Chelsea, where he had been organist at St Luke’s Church since 1904. He achieved his greatest fame during the war, when his 2nd Violin Sonata was given a rapturous reception in 1917. Meanwhile an even younger generation of talented composers had joined up and gone to the Front - among them the composers Ivor Gurney and Cecil Coles. Gurney, born 1890 in Gloucester, was wounded and later gassed. Never mentally stable, he lived out the latter part of his life in a psychiatric institution in Dartford. Coles, born in Scotland in 1888, was killed in France in 1918 - though not before he had sent back (to his mentor Gustav Holst) the scores of music written just behind the battle-lines. Among writers of the time, Edward Thomas, born in London in 1878, was a literary critic who turned his attention to poetry only in 1914. The next year he enlisted - and was killed in action soon after reaching France in 1917. His poem Adlestrop, written in June 1914, seems to refl ect the azyh calm before the confl ict. The Irish poet W B Yeats, born in 1865, spent many years in London where his work provided inspiration for several composers, but he had mostly scorn for Britain’s imperial progress - he was a good deal more concerned with the struggle for Irish Home Rule. A A Milne, a Londoner born in 1882, was a playwright and contributor to Punch magazine before being recruited during the war to write government propaganda. He was to become much more famous in the 1920s - for the tales of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh. Milne longed for the end of tedious war service, but the escapism of his poetry is of the lightest and most fanciful sort. Music itself was in fl ux as new modern infl uences confl icted with late Romanticism. Besides the start and end of The Great War, two dates could be singled out as even more signifi cant for British musicians. On 17th January 1914, Arnold Schoenberg conducted his Five Orchestral Pieces at the Queen’s Hall, London – a work of ‘total chromaticism’ which seemed hardly credible to those trained in the late-Romantic tradition. On 7th October 1918 Sir Hubert Parry (born 1848), the composer of such works as Jerusalem and Blest Pair of Sirens, died (just a month before the end of the war) having succumbed to the fl u epidemic of that year. He had been Director of the Royal College of Music since 1894. The Daily Telegraph noted that the packed funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral was like an affair of state, with no parallel since the death of Arthur Sullivan in 1900. To musicians and many others it seemed like an era was slipping away. The composers Bianca Ban was born in Zagreb in 1986. She graduated in 2010 from the Zagreb Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 - 1943). The Russian composer and international Academy of Music with a Master’s degree in Applied Composition. As well as solo, pianist studied at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating with distinction in both orchestral and chamber works, she writes music for television, video games, theatre composition and piano studies. After the October Revolution of 1917 he moved and fi lm. Her music has been performed at concerts and fi lm festivals in her with his family to New York where he lived mostly thereafter, being active as native Croatia and internationally. a concert pianist on both sides of the Atlantic, but never returning to Russia, although his musical style remained loyal to Russian Romanticism, inherited from Sihplak : this American ‘underground’ composer describes himself as an eccentric Tchaikovsky and others. He composed a signifi cant body of work, underpinned by percussionist-composer whose interests include the music of the Hungarian melancholy and nostalgia. composer Bela Bartok. Stripped-down fragments of Bartok may be detectible in this modern piano piece. Gabriel Faure (1845 - 1924) became Composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire (his pupils included Ravel and Nadia Boulanger) and he became its The Polish composer and pianist Henryk Pachulski (1859 -1921) spent most Director in 1905.