Your events at Classical Events
Details
Perrins Hall - The Royal Grammar School
Upper Tything
Worcester
Worcestershire
WR1 1HP
England
Programme
Ian Venables – Five songs of War and Remembrance, Op.46: 'Through These Pale Cold Days'
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Four Hymns for Viola and Piano: no.3, Come Love, come Lord
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Four Hymns for Viola and Piano: no.1, Lord! Come away
Robert Schumann – Marchenbilder, Op.113
Ivor Gurney – 5 Elizabethan Songs: Sleep
Gerald Finzi – Since we loved
Gerald Finzi – To Joy
Gerald Finzi – Budmouth Dears
Roger Quilter – Now sleeps the crimson petal, Op.3 no.2
Benjamin Britten – Last rose of summer
Benjamin Britten – Sally in our alley
Benjamin Britten – Oliver Cromwell
Performers
Nick Pritchard – Tenor
Benjamin Frith – piano
Louise Williams – viola
Programme Note
Ian Venables’s 1st World War commemorative song cycle, has been commissioned by The Limoges Trust for the City of Worcester. The work will form the centerpiece of a recital given by Nick Pritchard, Louise Williams and Benjamin Frith on the eve of the Battle of the Somme.
In a programme note about the work the composer has written, “Once I had decided upon the cycle’s instrumentation for voice, viola and piano, the usually enjoyable task of finding suitable texts began. I say, usually enjoyable, because the more war poetry I read the more I realised how challenging writing such a work might be. The main difficulty is that the vast majority of war poetry is so starkly realistic and uncompromising. Perhaps, this is why there have been few WW1 poems set to music. It is for this reason I began to question whether setting such words to music might be an affront to the poetry itself. Fortunately, these thoughts were soon dispelled when I found a number of poems that dealt with ‘themes’ that might have resonance for a contemporary audience – one that is looking back on an event that has now passed into history. These ‘themes’ touch upon the universality of loss, love, and personal identity and so lifts the poetry out of the arena of war and brings it within the compass of personal experience."
