Aldeburgh CONNECTION

THE Aldeburgh CONNECTION A Shropshire Lad in Ontario Walter Hall, Sunday, January 30, 2011, 2:30 pm This concert in honour of James Campbell McInnes has been generously supported by the Stratton Trust, to whom we are most grateful, as we are to its administrator, Stephen Clarke * We wish to thank most sincerely Sue Mortimer for sponsoring Michael Colvin and James and Connie MacDougall for sponsoring Brett Polegato and providing the flowers on stage * We are performing on the Edith McConica Steinway 1 A Shropshire Lad in Ontario The life story of James Campbell McInnes (1874-1945) Walter Hall, Sunday, January 30, 2011, 2:30 pm Michael Colvin, tenor Brett Polegato, baritone Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, piano As you well know by now, a significant anniversary is always a useful place for us to begin programme planning. This afternoon’s presentation began its life in such a way - and along the journey, we were visited by so many surprising events and lucky coincidences as to convince us that the spirits were moving and helping to create something important. It all began at Christmas 2009. Once again, we were consulting Bruce’s mother’s convenient little handbook of the dates and anniversaries of composers and their works. What caught our eye this time was the first performance in 1911 of George Butterworth’s Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad” - one of the earliest and greatest of English song-cycles which has always been a favourite of ours. We started to look into the circumstances of the premiere and discovered that the singer on that occasion was a baritone who subsequently emigrated to Canada, James Campbell McInnes. One of our favourite present-day baritones is Brett Polegato, who has made something of a speciality of the cycle - so the ball started rolling. Information began to flow off the internet and out of libraries. McInnes was found to have premiered other significant works, including several by Vaughan Williams. He was clearly a baritone of choice in the years before the Great War. But how did he end up in Toronto, performing and teaching for the remaining 26 years of his life? Another lead came from an unexpected direction. In the voluminous correspondence of Benjamin Britten, our eye was caught by a letter, obviously hurriedly scribbled, to his sister, Barbara, dated June 25, 1939, from Bala, Ontario: “Now we are spending two heavenly days up in the Moskaka [sic] lakes a singing teacher Peter wants to see lives up here by the side of the Lake - a grand spot.” A footnote tells that the teacher was Campbell McInnes, to whom Peter Pears had been recommended by a colleague back in England. When next in Aldeburgh, we made some enquiries. “But of course, my dears,” a friend there remarked. “McInnes had to go to Canada after his divorce from Angela Thirkell.” Now, that name 2 may ring a bell in the minds of those of a certain age; Thirkell was, one might say, the Barbara Cartland of her day, a phenomenally successful “lady novelist” with more than 35 books to her credit - she wrote one a year, sometimes more. Our Aldeburgh friend knew the son of her second marriage (to the Australian, Captain Thirkell) and told us stories of her grandmother, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Burne-Jones, and also of her cousins, including Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. Back to the internet, where we read of Campbell and Angela McInnes’s children: two sons, Graham and Colin. “A third child, Mary, was born and died in 1917, and Angela then divorced her husband for adultery, in a blaze of publicity.” By the mores of that time, Campbell McInnes’s career in England was shattered. Toronto provided the chance of a new beginning - and details of his life here gradually emerged. His elder son, Graham McInnes, wrote movingly in Finding a Father of journeying from Australia in 1934 and of calling his father, quite unannounced, from Union Station. His father’s surprise may be imagined! Details emerged of McInnes père’s house, 91 Dupont Street, and of his circle of friends and colleagues. He had strong links with Hart House, being crucial in the establishment of musical life there - Bruce remembered seeing a music cabinet with McInnes’s name on it in the Music Room at Hart House. This cabinet is now in the Faculty of Music library (just a few yards from where you are reading this) and contains music which he performed, both in England and in Canada. As well as much concertising in this country, McInnes did a lot of teaching, both privately and as a Professor of English and Diction at Wycliffe and Trinity Colleges. Our friend, Elizabeth Walker, kindly introduced us at Wycliffe College a few weeks ago and we are happy to welcome members of the College to our concert. In the course of his teaching, Campbell McInnes met a talented young amateur baritone, Tom Jackson (whom several of our older friends remember as manager of the Seven Seas Gift Shop in the Eaton’s store). The two men became devoted to each other. Jackson came from a family in Bala, Ontario; McInnes bought a little house in the town and spent his summers there - where Britten and Pears visited in 1939. Two further serendipitous links may be mentioned. Knowing his family involve- ment in events at Hart House, we consulted Vincent Tovell (nephew of Vincent Massey) - who, it turns out, took singing lessons from Campbell McInnes at the house on Dupont Street! He reminisced warmly about the man, telling us that he still carries the rich, “bardic” quality of McInnes’s singing in his head. This aspect, too, was confirmed by the daughter of Healey Willan, Mary Willan Mason, for whom memories of his Christus in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with Sir Ernest MacMillan are extraordinarily vivid. The final link to mention is, perhaps, the most immediate. One day in November, the internet revealed the existence in Ottawa of Simon McInnes, our hero’s grandson. The very day that we were about to communicate with him, we sat at 3 an AGO event with our friend, the painter Enid MacLachlan. By chance, talking about something quite different, she mentioned, “But that was what Graham McInnes would have said . .” “Graham McInnes?!” we replied. “Not the Graham McInnes?” “Why, yes; my daughter is married to his son.” So we are delighted to welcome to this afternoon’s performance in honour of James Campbell McInnes his grandson, Simon McInnes, with his wife, Heather MacLachlan. A biography of Campbell McInnes by the English writer, Rolf Wilson, is eagerly awaited. Meanwhile, the autobiographical writings of his elder son, Graham McInnes, make fascinating reading, particularly Finding a Father (Hamish Hamilton, 1967). * Plaque on the organ in Wycliffe College’s Founders’ Chapel: In affectionate memory of James Campbell-McInnes who to a singular degree opened to Canadian students the beauties of voice and song and whom a great company with happy gratitude remember. * 4 BARITONE OF CHOICE Loveliest of trees (A.E.Housman) (tenor) Graham Peel (1878-1937) Alfred Edward Housman’s poems stand in much the same relation to English song as those of Heinrich Heine to the German Lieder repertoire, particularly by the enormous number of musical settings they inspired. Published in 1896 at Housman’s own expense, A Shropshire Lad initially sold slowly; but the experience of the 2nd Boer War (1899-1902) and, later, the Great War made the poetry’s evocation of rural life and the early deaths of young men strike a chord with English readers. This setting by Graham Peel (with whom Campbell McInnes lived for some years before the latter’s marriage) was published in 1911. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. Loveliest of trees (Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad”) George Butterworth (Housman) (baritone) (1885-1916) McInnes gave the first performance of Butterworth’s cycle, accompanied by Hamilton Harty, on June 20, 1911, in the Aeolian Hall, London. Chanson d’avril (Louis Bouilhet) (tenor) Georges Bizet (1838-75) April Song: Arise! Spring has just been born! Over those valleys a rosy mist is floating! Everything in the garden trembles and sings; your window is full of sunshine, like a joyful gaze. Around the bunches of purple-flowering lilac, butterflies and bees flutter and hum together, and the little shaking bells of lily-of-the-valley have woken up love, asleep in the woods. Now that April has scattered its white daisies, go without your heavy cloak and cold-weather muff! The birds are already calling you, and the periwinkles, your sisters, will smile in the grass when they see your blue eyes. Come, let us go! The stream is clearer in early morning. Arise! Let’s not wait for the day’s burning heat. I would moisten my feet in the dew and talk to you of love under the blossoming pear-trees. 5 Six Dukes went afishin’ (Lincolnshire folksong) (tenor) arr. Percy Grainger (1882-1961) “Lovingly and reverently dedicated to the memory of Edvard Grieg”, like all of Grainger’s folksong arrangements, this song was taken down from the singing of George Goldthorpe of Barrow-on-Humber, Lincolnshire.

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