GUILDFORD
PHILHARMONIC
ORCHESTRA
William Armon Leader
PHILHARMONIC CHOIR
Guildford Corporation Concerts
Vernon Handley Director of Music
THE EIGHTEENTH CONCERT IN
THE ENTERPRISING SERIES
Saturday 3rd May 1969 at 7.45 pm
GUILDFORD CIVIC HALL
CAROLINE FRIEND
Soprano
Is
CAROLINE FRIEND was born in Edinburgh in 1944. She lived in the
Guildford district for many years and attended the High School for Girls.
In 1965, she entered the Royal College of Music and has studied singing
with Meriel St. Clair. In her second year at the College she won the
Leslie Woodgate Oratorio Prize and also the Van Someren-Godfrey
English Song Recital Prize, as a result of which she was asked to make a
recording of English songs for the College archives. As well as taking part
in productions at the College, including a performance of Parry’s “Job”
under Sir Adrian Boult, Caroline Friend has appeared as soloist with
many choral societies in the country, such as the Harrow Choral Society,
the Cambridge University Musical Society, and the Tilford Bach Society
with whom she sang in Westminster Abbey. She has also broadcast and
given many recitals all over the country, and has been chosen to illustrate
Frank Howes’ nationally famous lectures on English folksong. Later this
year, Caroline Friend will be singing in the Edinburgh Festival.
Because of the amount of unfamiliar work that the Philharmonic Choir
undertakes, its training falls on a team of people, and the Musical
Director wishes to thank the assistant conductor, Mr. Kenneth Lank, and
those who have conducted and accompanied sectional rehearsals: Mary
Rivers, Patricia Finch, Elizabeth Lyon, Prudence Eddon, Stella Woodcock
and Kathleen Atkins. The Musical Director also wishes to thank Mrs.
D. W. Wren for the time she has given to a seating plan to accommodate
the Choir.
Guildford Corporation would like to express its gratitude to the Red
Cross organisation for its services at these concerts throughout the season.
OVERTURE “THE REHEARSAL”
GEOFFREY BUSH
This Overture was completed in 1943 and was given its first concert
performance in 1953 at the Cheltenham Festival by the City of
Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rudolf Schwarz.
The work originated in a reading of the Duke of Buckingham’s
Restoration comedy, “The Rehearsal”. This play (a precursor of
Sheridan’s “The Critic”) is an amusing satire both on the heroic drama of
the time and also on the first attempts at English opera. The principal
target of Buckingham’s ridicule was John Dryden, the Poet Laureate, who
is caricatured under the name of Mr. Bayes (a role corresponding
roughly to that of Mr. Puff in “The Critic’). Accordingly, the Overture
begins with a mock portentous slow section suggesting Bayes’
complacency and self-importance.
The following quotation is taken from a scene in the play which shows
Bayes instructing his dancers how to perform a ballet of his own
devising:
Mr. Bayes (lying down flat on his face): “Now mark my note Effaut flat.
Strike up Music Now”. (As he rises up hastily he falls down again). “Ah,
gadsookers, I have broke my nose”.
Mr. Johnson (a Critic): “By my troth, Mr. Bayes, this is a very
unfortunate Note of yours, in Effaut”.
Programme note by the composer.
FALSTAFF, SYMPHONIC STUDY Opus 68.
ELGAR
Elgar’s view of Falstaff was formed by a deep reading of Shakespearean
and Falstaffian literature, but the piece is really based on Shakespeare’s
histories, and, therefore, Falstaff is not a simple buffoon. He is “a knight,
a gentleman and a soldier”. Elgar portrays him “in the round” (literally
and metaphorically), “not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in
others”. The score which Elgar thought his finest orchestral work is rich
in different themes which represent different characters and experiences in
the work, and the brilliance of the score is that it never steps outside its
basic musical material to convey such diverse states as vulgarity,
ceremony, sleep and pastoral dreams.
The first section gives us a picture of Falstaff and Prince Hal; the second
represents the Boar’s Head and Gadshill, and all the revelry and sleep
;
the third, Falstaff’s recruiting march and the return through
Gloucestershire, the proclamation of Prince Hal as King and the journey
to London; and the fourth and last, the royal procession from
Westminster Abbey during which Falstaff amongst the enthusiastic
crowds, is repudiated. The work ends with his death.
Elgar’s intuitive grasp of form saw that this rich and colourful score
needed some relief, and within it there are two interludes. In the first, we
see the old knight asleep and dreaming of “Jack Falstaff, now Sir John,
a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk”. In the second,
we are in the pastoral atmosphere of “Gloucestershire, Shallows Orchard”,
with pipe and tabor, and a little figure for the strings, derived from
Falstaff’s themes.
The two interludes serve to set off the tremendous breadth of the more
full-blooded passages. Burnett James has said that there is “a ripe humour
and juicy vitality which are not really less than ShakespeareanTM. It is
because of this quality that Elgar is able to bring about the masterstroke
of the work, and one which makes it so moving: the repudiation of
Falstaff by his old comrade, Prince Hal, now the King. We hear fanfares
as the King approaches and we hear the cheering crowds and the sudden
collapse of Falstaff when he hails his old comrade who passes him by. We
live with him his memories which recall the different sections of the work.
Just before he finally dies, Elgar musically allows him to draw himself up
to his full height, every inch “a knight, a gentleman and a soldier”,
before he bids us goodbye.
INTERV
AL
Coffee will be served in the Surrey Room during the
interval by members of the Concertgoers’ Society.
CHORAL SYMPHONY
GUSTAV HOLST
Prelude: Invocation to Pan
|
Song and Bacchanal
II.
I11.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Scherzo—Fancy—Folly’s Song
IV.
Finale
Holst’s Choral Symphony was written for the Leeds Festival of 1925. He
called it his First Choral Symphony as a second one was planned, but his
untimely death in 1934 prevented it from being written. All the words of
this symphony are from Keats’s poetry, Holst having chosen the passages
he wished to set very carefully, and although some people have criticised
the choice of text for the last movement, when one realises that this is a
real symphony, one can see Holst’s wisdom. It is rarely performed,
although it is a most colourful and exciting work. One of the reasons for
its rarity is probably the size of the undertaking for a chorus, for they are
on their feet in every movement, but undoubtedly the main problem is for
the conductor, because structurally the symphony is most interesting.
Holst rings the changes of his moods brilliantly, as, of course, should be
so in a symphony, and the contrasts in the verses chosen demand very
different treatments. On the other hand, the work is a symphony which
also demands integrity and homogeneity, and Holst achieves this, a fact
invariably missed by his critics, by purely musical means. Each movement
has important material, both melodic and harmonic, made from fourths,
thus giving a unity of musical language to the whole piece, and then, in
each movement, melodic material will produce a rhythmic pattern or
sometimes the rhythmic pattern will be established first and a melody
founded on it: for example, in the Prelude, the altos and basses of the
choir sing the words on one note for 17 bars, while the strings of the
orchestra unfold a lugubrious chromatic fugue against them, but the
moment the sopranos enter they take over the tune that the strings had
introduced. In the second movement, each time a picture on the Grecian
Urn has been described we hear the motif that introduces the movement,
and this gives the strange feeling that one is moving round the Urn or
turning it in one’s hand. The Scherzo must be the fastest extended choral
scherzo ever written, and Holst makes it a classical Scherzo and Trio,
Folly’s Song being a musical and textual contrast to Fancy in that it is as
vulgar as Fancy is delicate. The composer’s choice of words for the last
movement seems haphazard at first, but when seen as whole is a Hymn to
Apollo whose name is never actually mentioned.
Holst’s other masterstroke in binding the work together is his use of the
solo soprano, who crystallises the message of a movement or is
responsible for its prelude or epilogue. Such diversity of moods and
ideas, although realised with great economy on the part of the composer,
present problems for anyone directing its performance, because much of
the subject matter is classical, and Holst matched its nature in interesting
but not overblown music, yet the moments of warm human emotion are
there woven into the score, and must be placed very carefully in
performance. Seen briefly, the varied moods of the work are an awesome
invocation, a boisterous riot, a contrast with this of great beauty, a
quicksilver lightening of the emotional weight, and then a deeply felt
ceremony.
PRELUDE:
INVOCATION TO PAN
CHORUS
O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth
hang
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life,
death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;
Who lov’st to see the hamadryads dress
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels
darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit,
and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds—
In desolate places, where dank moisture
breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx—do thou
now,
By thy love’s milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!
Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the
leaven,
That, spreading in this dull and clodded
earth,
Give it a touch ethereal—a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown—but no more: we humbly
screen
With
uplift
hands
our
And
giving
out
shout
bending,
rending,
a
foreheads,
most
lowly
heaven-
Conjure thee to receive our humble Pzan,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!
SONG AND BACCHANAL
SoLo
Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,
I sat a-weeping: in the whole world wide
There was no one to ask me why I wept,—
And so I kept
Brimming the water-lily cups with tears
Cold as my fears.
Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,
I sat a-weeping: what enamoured bride,
Cheated by shadowy woer from the clouds,
But hides and shrouds
Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?
And as I sat, over the light blue hills
There came a noise of revellers: the rills
Into the wide stream came of purple hue—
"Twas Bacchus and his crew!
The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills
From kissing cymbals made a merry din—
*Twas Bacchus and his kin!
Like to a moving vintage down they came,
Crown’d with green leaves, and faces all on
flame;
All madly dancing through the pleasant
valley,
To scare thee, Melancholy!
O then, O then, thou wast a simple name!
And I forgot thee, as the berried holly
By shepherds is forgotten, when, in June,
Tall chestnuts keep away the sun and moon:
I rushed into the folly!
CHORUS
“Whence came ye, merry Damsels? whence
came ye?
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
Your lutes, and gentler fate?—
‘We follow Bacchus! Bacchus on the wing,
A-conquering
.
Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide,
We dance before him thorough kingdoms
wide:
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our wild minstrelsy!’”
SoLo
Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood,
Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood,
With sidelong laughing;
And little rills of crimson wine imbrued
His plump white arms, and shoulders, enough
white
For Venus’ pearly bite;
And near him rode Silenus on his ass,
Pelted with flowers as he on did pass
Tipsily quaffing.
“Whence
came
CHORUS
ye, jolly
Satyrs?
whence
came ye?
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why1 lflave ye left your forest haunts, why
eft
Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?
‘For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath, and yellow
brooms,
And cold mushrooms;
For wine we follow Bacchus through the
earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping
mirth!
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy!’”
SoLo
Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,
With Asian elephants:
Onward these myriads—with song and
dance,
;
With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians’
prance,
Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,
Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,
Plump infant laughters mimicking the coil
Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers’ toil:
With toying oars and silken sails they glide,
Nor care for wind and tide.
CHORUS
S
Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide,
We dance before him thorough kingdoms
wide:
For wine we follow Bacchus through the
earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping
mirth!
We follow Bacchus! Bacchus on the wing,
A-conquering!
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
CHORUS
1
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our
rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and
cloy’d,
shape
A burning forehead, and a parching
loth?
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens
What
mad
escape?
pursuit?
What
struggle to
What pipes and timbrels? What wild
ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play
on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst
not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be
bare;
Boligi Lover, never, never canst thou
iss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not
grieve;
She fiall_nnot fade, though thou hast not thy
4
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands
drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
S
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of
thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other
woe
iss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be
fair!
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou
say’st,
“Beaultly is truth, truth beauty,”—that is
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your d_leaves, nor ever bid the Spring
adieu;
tongue.
a
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know.
IT1
SCHERZO
FANCY
CHORUS
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
"Tis the early April lark,
Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw:
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
Through the thought still spread beyond
her:
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.v
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer’s joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn’s red-lipped fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter’s night;
When the soundless earth is muffled,
And the caked snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy’s heavy shoon;
When the Night doth meet the Noon
In a dark conspiracy
To banish Even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw’d,
Fancy, high-commission’d : —send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn’s wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment—hark!
White-plumed lilies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst
Shaded hyacinth, alway
Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf, and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its celled sleep;
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering,
While the autumn breezes sing.
Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Everything is spoilt by use:
Where’s the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gazed at? Where’s the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where’s the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where’s the face
One would meet in every place?
Where’s the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond
her:
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
FOLLY’S SONG
When wedding fiddles are a-playing,
Huzza for folly O!
And when maidens go a-Maying,
Huzza for folly O!
When a milk-pail is upset,
Huzza for folly O!
And the clothes left in the wet,
Huzza for folly O!
When the barrel’s set a-broach,
Huzza for folly O!
When Kate Eyebrow keeps a coach,
Huzza for folly O!
When the pig is over-roasted,
And the cheese is over-toasted,
When Sir Snap is with his lawyer,
And Miss Chip has kiss’d the sawyer,
Huzza for folly O!
FINALE
SoLo
Spirit here that reignest!
Spirit here that painest!
Spirit here that burnest!
Spirit here that mournest!
Spirit! I bow
forehead low,
My
Enshaded with thy pinions!
Spirit! I look,
All passion-struck,
Into thy pale dominions!
CHORUS
God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire!
In thy western halls of gold,
When thou sittest in thy state,
Bards, that erst sublimely told
Heroic deeds, and sang of fate,
With fervour seize their adamantine lyres,
Whose chords are solid rays, and twinkle
radiant fires.
Here Homer with his nervous arms
Strikes the twanging harp of war,
And even the western splendour warms,
While the trumpets sound afar.
SoLo
Temple
wide,
Then,
through
thy
melodious swells
The sweet majestic tone of Maro’s lyre:
The
soul
delighted
on
each
accent
dwells,—
Enraptured
dwells,—not
daring
to
respire,
The while he tells of grief around a funeral
pyre.
CHORUS
"Tis awful silence then again;
Expectant stand the spheres;
Breathless the laurell’d peers,
Nor move, till ends the lofty strain,
Nor move till Milton’s tuneful thunders
cease,
And leave once more the ravish’d heavens
in peace.
Thou biddest Shakespeare wave his hand,
And quickly forward spring
The Passions—a terrific band—
And each vibrates the string
That with its tyrant temper best acocrds,
While from their Master’s lips pour forth
the inspiring words.
A silver trumpet Spenser blows,
And, as its martial notes to silence flee,
From a virgin chorus flows
A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity.
"Tis still! Wild warblings from the Aolian
yre
Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly
expire.
SoLo
Next thy Tasso’s ardent numbers
Float along the pleased air,
Calling youth from idle slumbers,
Rousing them from Pleasure’s lair:—
Then o’er the strings his fingers gently
move,
And melt the soul to pity and to love.
CHORUS
But when Thou joinest with the Nine,
And all the powers of song combine,
We listen here on earth:
The dying tones that fill the air,
And charm the ear of evening fair,
From thee, great God of Bards, receive
their heavenly birth.
Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-liv’d in regions new?
Yes, and those of heaven commune
With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wondrous,
And the parle of voices thund’rous;
With the whisper of heaven’s trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian’s fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.
Thus ye live on high, and then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumbered, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim.
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.
SoLo
Spirit here that reignest!
Spirit here that painest!
Spirit here that burnest!
Spirit here that mournest!
Spirit! T bow
My forehead low,
Enshaded with thy pinions!
Spirit! T look,
All passion-struck,
Into thy pale dominions!
CHORUS
Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Ye have souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new!