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CANTORUM CHOIRCANTORUM CHOIRCANTORUM CHOIR &&&

ORCHESTRAORCHESTRAORCHESTRA

“Great Britten”“Great Britten”“Great Britten” Glorious English MusicGlorious English MusicGlorious English Music

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Benjamin Britten and John RutterBenjamin Britten and John RutterBenjamin Britten and John Rutter

Music DirectorMusic DirectorMusic Director ELISABETH CROFTELISABETH CROFTELISABETH CROFT

Saturday 29th June 2013Saturday 29th June 2013Saturday 29th June 2013 Holy Trinity Church, CookhamHoly Trinity Church, CookhamHoly Trinity Church, Cookham

This concert is in support ofThis concert is in support ofThis concert is in support of Holy Trinity Church Restoration FundHoly Trinity Church Restoration FundHoly Trinity Church Restoration Fund

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CANTORUM CHOIR

Cantorum Choir is a dedicated and talented choir of approximately forty voices,

based in Cookham, Berkshire. Under the directorship of Elisabeth Croft, the ensem-ble continues to earn itself a reputation as one of the leading chamber choirs in the

area. The choir boasts a wide-ranging repertoire and performs professional-quality concerts across the year. Recent programmes include Mozart’s Requiem, the con-

temporary work of Eric Whitacre, and pop-song arrangements from Coldplay to the Beach Boys — we are always looking for new challenges!

Sopranos

Julia Bentley Dawkes, Elisa Girle Joanna Henwood, Sandy Johnstone,

Kirsty Kinge, Julia Millard Hilary Monaghan, Louise Smyth

Marianne Stork, Joy Strzelecki Eleanor Vale, Philippa Wallace

Altos

Bridget Bentley, Jill Burton Jami Castell, Sarah Evans

Anne Glover, Julie Hughes Elspeth Scott, Chiu Sung

Lorna Sykes

Tenors

William Branston, Philip Martineau John Pallot, Malcolm Stork

John Timewell

Basses

Derek Beaven, John Buck Gordon Donkin, David Hazeldine

Charles Luxford, Ed Millard Paul Seddon, Danny Smyth

CANTORUM STRING ORCHESTRA

Violin

Katie Sharp, Minor Atabeck Michiko Negami, Ayako Yamazaki

Haru Seyuka, Maddy Bentley

Viola Sue Black, Rebekah Brown

Robert Behrman

Cello

Anna Wagstaff, Lauren Steele

Bass Li Boberg

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Programme Notes

This concert marks the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth in the Suffolk fishing port of Lowestoft—on 22nd No-vember 1913. That day just happens to belong to St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. It is an appropriate coincidence: Britten’s status as the greatest English composer of the twentieth century is now beyond question.

We open the programme with his Hymn to St. Cecilia (1942). Although the work seems slight—about ten minutes long—it is very important. The piece was composed in mid-Atlantic as Britten was returning from America to wartime England. He was with the tenor, Peter Pears, established by then as his life long partner. The poem Britten set, however, was by W. H. Auden, whose profound and exacting influence had dominated the young com-poser for the previous seven years.

In 1936, for example, Britten and Auden had collaborated to supply words and music for the short Post Office documentary The Night Mail. The film achieved lasting popular distinction. They also collaborated on a song cycle: Our Hunting Fathers. But Auden was restless and politically active. A pacifist, he served briefly as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. Then, ever alert to the approaching convulsion in Europe, he famously left for America with Christopher Isherwood just as war with Germany was declared. Britten followed them, with Pears. In a Brooklyn ménage that included a number of other figures from the arts, there was the inevitable tangle of crea-

tive and personal emotions. By 1942, Britten and Pears felt compelled to come home—accompanied by the text of Auden’s poem.

Auden’s poetry is complex, playful and often ‘difficult’. The Hymn to St. Cecilia is a kind of mirror, an ironic farewell portrait for Britten to stare into during the voyage back to England. It is drawn perhaps from paintings of St. Cecilia by Raphael, or Poussin; and also from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. It is frank, hectoring, beautiful and tragic. It is also cruel—and possibly jealous. Conventionally, it invokes the saint as Muse, relating a little of her tale and asking her to ‘come down and startle composing mortals with im-mortal fire’. It goes on to suggest music as an abstract and free spirit—a child without a shadow, a neutral who takes no side, who only plays. Yet in the same breath the poem malevolently makes out the composer himself as a kind of prim ‘saint’ who, instead of wearing his tribulation ‘like a rose’, seeks to escape it in the facile playfulness of pure art—for Britten is almost as fast and effortless a writer as Mozart. Auden feels Britten is deserting a cause—Auden’s cause—and taunts him with his potent, well-aimed images.

Britten, maybe to draw the sting, maybe because Auden understands him better than anyone else, maybe in awe of a poem extraordinary in itself (he does not mail it back torn up, as he did a subsequent letter), turns the Hymn into an an-them in the tradition of Purcell or Handel. Auden’s voice, however, domineering and confusing, continues to haunt him throughout the rest of his life. The poet holds a key to his music; Britten once said there was something of Auden in all his operas.

Now though, in 1942, his thoughts were set on home, on Pears and on a specific opera, Peter Grimes, to a text by the then relatively unread 18th Century poet George Crabbe—like Britten from the rough sea air of the Suffolk coast. Britten and Pears immediately retreated there, to Snape and then Aldeburgh. Particularly, it was Britten who retreated, looking even to hide, as Auden had suggested, in art. He licked his wounds. Then, like the mythical smith, he made it his lifetime’s task to hammer his personal pain, his guilt (‘Of things you did, O hang the

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PROGRAMME (After consideration, we feel you will enjoy the continuity of these works the more without applause between individual sections.)

Hymn to St. Cecilia Benjamin Britten (1913—1976)

In a garden shady this holy lady With rev’rent cadence and subtle psalm,

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire:

I cannot grow; I have no shadow To run away from, I only play.

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire:

O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall, O calm of spaces unafraid of weight,

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire:

Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Benjamin Britten

Tenor Joshua Owen Mills

Horn Jesse Durkan

Prologue

Pastoral from The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton (1630—1687)

Nocturne from The Princess by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—1892)

Elegy The Sick Rose from Songs of Experience by William Blake (1757—1827)

Dirge The Lyke Wake (funeral) Dirge anonymous 15th century

Hymn Hymn to Diana (Ode to Cynthia) from Cynthia’s Revels by Ben Jonson (1572—1637)

Sonnet To Sleep by John Keats (1795—1821)

Epilogue

INTERVAL

Five Flower Songs Benjamin Britten

To Daffodils Robert Herrick (1591—1674)

The Succession of the Four Sweet Months “

Marsh Flowers George Crabbe (1754—1832)

The Evening Primrose John Clare (1793—1864)

Ballad of Green Broom Anonymous

Suite for Strings John Rutter (b. 1945)

A-roving; I have a bonnet trimmed with blue; O Waly Waly; Dashing away

Birthday Madrigals John Rutter

It was a lover and his lass William Shakespeare (1564—1616)

Draw on, sweet night possibly by John Wilbye in 1609

Come live with me Christopher Marlowe (1564—1593) &

possibly Sir Walter Raleigh (1552—1618)

My true love hath my heart Sir Philip Sidney (1554—1586)

When daisies pied William Shakespeare &

George Peele (1556—1596)

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Elisabeth Croft (née Toye)—Music Director

Elisabeth is a graduate of Birmingham University and also of the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the 2004 Michael Head Prize for English Song and the 2005 Arthur Bliss Prize for twentieth Century music. In 2008, she won the A.E.S.S. Patricia Routledge National Prize for English Song and has subsequently built a busy and successful career as a professional soprano, vocal coach, and choral trainer. She has for some years been working with Berkshire Maestros (The Young Musicians Trust) and is currently director of Berkshire Young Voices, the county training choir. She is also a regular tutor for the National Youth Choirs of Wales.

Joshua Owen Mills (Tenor)

From Neath in South Wales, Joshua is now recognised as one of Wales’s most promising young tenors. He obtained his

BMus (1st class Hons) from the Guildhall School of Music &

Drama, and has recently returned from Rome where he re-hearsed Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with

Sir Antonio Pappano and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, under-studying Ian Bostridge for three performances. Joshua has

enjoyed success at numerous UK competitions including the Glass Sellers Prize in the prestigious Guildhall Gold Medal

Competition at the Barbican Hall in May. He is already in-volved with a variety of operatic roles. Recent recital high-

lights include Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the Guildhall Chamber Orchestra directed by Candida

Thompson and Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle conducted by Stephen Cleobury.

Jesse Durkan (French Horn)

Born in London in 1976, Jesse Durkan studied at Trinity College of Music from 1996—1998 and also at the Royal

College of Music from 2000—2001. He was co-principal

horn of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia in Spain from 2003—2004, with whom he twice participated in the Ros-

sini International Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy. As a freelance musician, Jesse has worked with various orches-

tras including the Royal Opera House, Ulster Orchestra, Philharmonia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Lon-

don Mozart Players. Most recently he has been principal Horn of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Yucatan, returning to

the UK in 2010. His own concerto for four horns and or-chestra, entitled “Concerquarto”, was performed with the

Dorking Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003. In January 2013 he took up the post of third horn with the Ulster Orchestra

and is currently settling in to life in Northern Ireland.

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Continued from Page 3

head’), his on-going torment of lost innocence (‘O weep, child, weep away the stain’) into something rich, strange and stunningly beautiful. It was a lifetime that would revitalise English music and shake it free of its nostalgia, its ‘blue remembered hills’, its self-absorption in the modes of folk melody. It was a lifetime that would also make the Eng-lish pay attention to their own neglected poetry!

Briefly hospitalised—with measles—he diverted himself from Peter Grimes with the song cycle masterpiece Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943). Our second item tonight is an act of defiance. It is defi-antly for Pears and defiantly not to texts by Auden. It is stunningly

beautiful—and profoundly original. Britten, sensitive to words as no other composer, went for poems previously thought impossible to set, certainly not together: a 17th century Pastoral by the obscure Cotton; The splendour falls (Blow, bugle blow!) from Tennyson’s The Princess; Blake’s The Sick Rose; the anonymous Lyke Wake Dirge; Ben Jonson’s Hymn to Diana; and Keats’s sonnet To Sleep. Pears is his voice. But how is this a serenade? That remains mysterious.

We recognise instantly, nevertheless, Britten’s musical finger-print, its daring melodic lines and unfamiliar harmonies. We are forced into the twentieth century—there is no doubt of that. But Britten’s music is never straightforwardly modernist. He is not a serialist like Schoenberg or Webern; nor a neoclas-sicist, like Stravinsky. He never ventures to the extremes of Stockhausen or Berio; nor does he look, as did Bartok, for a primary inspiration in rough folk rhythms; nor in the apparent musical anarchy of birdsong, for example, like Messiaen. He eschews, too, the harsh industrial ‘machinery’ of Shostakovitch, though he admires it. Britten’s concerns are always with pure music—Auden was right in this—and with what contemporary music could be whilst still being music. For this reason, he loved Purcell and the English choral tradition.

The Serenade song cycle was actually suggested by the virtuoso horn play-er Dennis Brain—perhaps the first ever virtuoso in the instrument. Hence, we find a fascinating musical feature in Britten’s deliberately confrontational use of the horn’s perfect intervals. All Western music since Bach had been to specifically ‘equal temperament’ tuning: ‘well tempered’, or in other words very slightly compromised. But a conical brass tube will naturally play the perfect harmonics of its fundamental note. And so in the Serenade we hear a Prologue in which the horn sings alone, and is allowed to sound strangely out of tune. From such a little fact springs the suddenly eerie sense that we might be on the edge of some enormity—just as in the sub-ject matter itself. For at the centre of the cycle, after the dreamy landscape start, comes Blake’s The Sick Rose, followed by the The Lyke Wake Dirge.

The one is shocking; the other terrifying. Illness, lost innocence and the nearness of death—it takes the moon goddess Diana (Cynthia) and Sleep to soothe the agitation somewhat. But then the horn sounds again, and we are left with its haunting solo Epilogue, sounding disconcertingly awry against the remembered chords of the orchestra.

By the late 1940s, Britten was at least established, if not entirely at peace with himself. He was recognised as the leading British com-poser, and Pears’s idea of an Aldeburgh Festival—a vehicle both self-protecting and self-promoting for Britten—was flourishing. Britten was flourishing, too. Flowering, you might say. The Five Flower Songs (1950) are quite glorious pieces of choral writing, where the rhythmic energy and ravishing harmonies counterbalance the still-troubling hints of lost innocence. Once again, Britten mined some of the more overlooked seams in English poetry: two little throwaway gems by the Cavalier poet Herrick; a piece of realism by Crabbe

Maggi Hambling’s memorial sculpture to Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh: ‘I hear those voices that will not be

drowned’ (from Peter Grimes)

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again, about the Aldeburgh marsh plants and seaweeds; a lyrical, yearning look at the evening primrose by the lyrical and tormented country boy John Clare; and a contrived happy ending in a witty folksong about cutting the green broom, where an apparently un-tormented country boy marries the rich lady who fancies him. All are delightful, and completely unsentimental. All are a joy—and a challenge—to sing; Britten does indeed seem to embody the very essence of St. Cecilia. We are proud to offer this tribute to him.

John Rutter needs almost no introduction. One of the most success-ful and popular composers of recent years, he is particularly known all over the world for his Christmas music, enthusiastically sung by choirs of all shapes and sizes—including our own. If in Britten we find pain at the heart of things, in Rutter we find sheer natural pleasure. The pieces we offer tonight are some of Rutter’s best, most demand-ing and enjoyable compositions.

Rutter was born in London in 1945 and received his first musical edu-cation as a chorister at Highgate School. He went on to study music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he wrote his first published composi-tions and conducted his first recording while still a student.

His compositional career has embraced both large and small-scale choral works, orchestral and instrumental pieces, a piano concerto, two children’s operas, music for television, and specialist writing for such groups as the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and the King’s Singers.

His larger choral works, Gloria (1974), Requiem (1985), Magnificat (1990), Psalmfest (1993) and Mass of the Children (2003) have been performed many times in Britain, North America, and a growing number of other countries. Cantorum performed the Mass of the Children recently with one of the Taplow choirs, and we took the Rutter Requiem to Venice with us in 2006.

In 1980, Rutter formed his own vocal group, the Cambridge Singers, as a professional chamber choir primarily dedicated to recording. He continues to divide his time between composition and conducting. He has guest-conducted or lectured at many concert halls, universities, churches, music festivals, and conferences in Europe, Africa, North and Central America and Australasia.

In 1996 the Archbishop of Canterbury conferred a Lambeth Doctorate of Music upon him in recognition of his contribution to church music, and he was honoured in the 2007 Queen’s New Year Honours List, being awarded a CBE for services to music.

The Suite for Strings is a four movement piece, with each section based on a well-known English folk song. We have: A-roving, I have a bonnet trimmed with blue, O waly waly (The water is wide) and Dashing away with the smoothing iron. It really needs no more comment. Enjoy!

Rutter’s jazzy Birthday Madrigals were written in 1995 at the invitation of Brian Kay, conductor of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of George Shearing, the great jazz pianist. (Shearing himself had also set jazz versions of some of the poems—Cantorum has on occasion performed them.) Rutter’s first song, It was a lover and his lass, was actu-ally composed rather earlier. He simply wrote the four other items using similar ‘madrigal-like’ texts from the Elizabethan golden age to make up the birthday collection. We hope you will like them as much we do.

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Future Cantorum Concerts:Future Cantorum Concerts:Future Cantorum Concerts: Date:Date:Date: Saturday 12th October Saturday 12th October Saturday 12th October

Event:Event:Event: Bach Concert with OrchestraBach Concert with OrchestraBach Concert with Orchestra

Venue:Venue:Venue: All Saints’ Church, Marlow SL7 2AAAll Saints’ Church, Marlow SL7 2AAAll Saints’ Church, Marlow SL7 2AA

Date:Date:Date: Saturday 14th DecemberSaturday 14th DecemberSaturday 14th December

Event:Event:Event: Orchestral Christmas ConcertOrchestral Christmas ConcertOrchestral Christmas Concert

Venue:Venue:Venue: Holy Trinity Church, Cookham SL6 9SPHoly Trinity Church, Cookham SL6 9SPHoly Trinity Church, Cookham SL6 9SP

Date:Date:Date: Saturday 29th March 2014Saturday 29th March 2014Saturday 29th March 2014

Event:Event:Event: Spring ConcertSpring ConcertSpring Concert

Venue:Venue:Venue: St John the Baptist Church, Cookham Dean SL6 9PDSt John the Baptist Church, Cookham Dean SL6 9PDSt John the Baptist Church, Cookham Dean SL6 9PD

Grateful thanks are due to:Grateful thanks are due to:Grateful thanks are due to:

Our rehearsal pianists: Jozef Janik & Jo HutchinsOur rehearsal pianists: Jozef Janik & Jo HutchinsOur rehearsal pianists: Jozef Janik & Jo Hutchins

The Stationery Depot, Cookham Rise ParadeThe Stationery Depot, Cookham Rise ParadeThe Stationery Depot, Cookham Rise Parade

All others who have helped in the production of this concert.All others who have helped in the production of this concert.All others who have helped in the production of this concert.

And thanks to you, our audience, And thanks to you, our audience, And thanks to you, our audience,

for your continued supportfor your continued supportfor your continued support

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