: /
,
<
PROGRAMME
Guildford Philharmonic Choir
MIDSUMMER MUSIC
Saturday 21 June 1997
at 7.30 pm
Holy Trinity Church, Guildford
Gershwin
Highlights from Porgy and Bess
Lambert
The Rio Grande
Vaughan Williams
English Folk Songs
Pianos Jeremy Filsell & Francis Potts
Conductor Jeremy Backhouse
-
GUILDFORD PHILHARMONIC CHOIR
HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, GUILDFORD
SATURDAY 21 JUNE 1997
PROGRAMME
Five English Folk Songs
Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872-1958
i) The Dark Eyed Sailor
i) The Spring-time ofthe Year
iii) Just as the Tide was Flowing
iv) The Lover’s Ghost
v) Wassail Song
Fiesta
Lionel Sainsbury
b. 1958
The Rio Grande
Constant Lambert
1905-1951
INTERVAL
of about 15 minutes
Porgy and Bess
Concert Version by Robert Russell Bennett
Zoé Peate soprano
Jeremy Finch baritone
Jeremy Filsell piano
Francis Pott piano
GUILDFQRD PHILHARMONIC CHOIR
conducted by
JEREMY BACKHOUSE
George Gershwin
1898-1937
Vaughan Williams: Five English Folk Songs
i) The Dark Eyed Sailor
i) The Spring-time ofthe Year
iii) Just as the Tide was Flowing
iv) The Lover’s Ghost
v) Wassail Song
Written and published in 1913, these five arrangements are widely regarded as the choral culmination
of Vaughan Williams’ lifelong involvement with the folk song. The Folk Song Society (as it was
known at its inception in 1898) had recruited Vaughan Williams as a member in 1904 and he threw
himself enthusiastically into the task of collecting and collating material. He studied and thoroughly
absorbed the music, and, with the help of Cecil Sharp (a leading light in the folk song movement) and
others, published annotations of sixty-one folk songs in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (Vol.Il,
Part 3). Inevitably, the folk song style began increasingly to influence his own compositional output, in
particular the freedom of tonality and melodic idiom. The “folky” tag that accompanid Vaughan
Williams was one of which he was proud, not embarrassed.
The arrangements of the Five Folk Songs are elaborate and free in the treatment of each tune. This
reflected the composer’s own distinctive view on each tune: “There is no original version of any
particular tune ... in one sense any particular tune is as old as the beginning of music; in another sense
it is born afresh with the singer of today who sang it”. In these arrangements, the composer and, more
especially, the choir become the “singer oftoday”.
Lionel Sainsbury: Fiesta
Linoel Sainsbury was born in Wiltshire in 1958. After winning the major prizes for composition at the
Guildhall School of Music he was awarded the prestigious Mendelssohn Scholarship at the age of 21.
Since then his reputation has spread steadily, with his music drawing highly enthusiastic acclaim from
audiences up and down the country and also in Europe and the Far East. In 1995 Lorraine McAslan
gave the first broadcast performance of his Violin Concerto on BBC Radio 3 with the BBC Concert
Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth, and in 1996 the premiere of his South American Suite was given
by the pianist Jack Gibbons. Other performers who have recently programmed his music include
Tasmin Little and Piers Lane, Claire and Antoinette Cann, and the English String Orchestra conducted
by William Boughtcn. Lionel’s Twelve Preludes for piano have been featured in his own performance
on Classic FM, and in 1996 Jeremy Filsell gave a number of performances ofthese pieces, prompting
one reviewer to write: “a voyage of discovery for the audience ... and important contribution to the
instrument’s repertoire, and a splendid highlight to the evening”.
Fiesta for two pianos is a vivid and colourful piece featuring virtuoso writing for both players.
Following recent performances by Francis Pott and Jeremy Filsell it was described as “displaying wit
and ingenuity in its kaleidoscopic dance rhythms”, and has been hailed in Musique et Concerts (Paris)
as “a future two-piano classic”.
© Lionel Sainsbury, 1997
Constant Lambert: The Rio Grande (1927)
Lambert’s life presents a cautionary tale of one to whom many things, including great early success,
came too easily, and whose career ended prematurely in broken relationships, troubled alcoholism and
the bitter awareness of wasting himself, in more senses then one.
The early success in question was The Rio Grande, written with astounding audacity and assurance at
the age of 23. The sensation it caused can best be understood in two ways: firstly, it landed like a
bombshell on a compositional scene still cautiously edging towards a national identity through
assimilation of folk song. This was only four years on from the death ofthe tyrannical Stanford (just as
well, in view of his likely comments). The effect of exhilarating emancipation, and of masterly union
between jazz and a sort of wicked extension
of the time-honoured Oratorio tradition, must have been
like a sort of huge aesthetic raspberry - which sums up much (not all) of Lambert himself. It also
points to the flavour ofthe times: facetious, nonchalant, hungry for the exotic, yet ultimately very selfconscious.
Secondly, one should consider the text. There once existed, wrote Lambert in a letter: .. a French
translation by myself, which makes considerably more sense than the original English, ifI may say so”.
But Sacheverell, widely esteemed the most original of the three Sitwells, was later to raise travel
writing to an almost poetic art form (on a level, say, with the books of Patrick Leigh Fermor). Travel
was, by our standards, startlingly cheap - certainly available to the only modestly gilded of
Bloomsbury: the likes of Lambert, Cyril Connolly, the Sitwells, Lord Berners (he seriously rich,
admittedly) or Peter Quennell seem to have drifted serenely between Naples, the South of France,
Amalfi, Toledo and other parts of Italy and Spain. Lambert and Sitwell were thus in a position to
purvey to the masses a credible escapism rooted in the real experience. No wonder, perhaps, that
headlines after The Rio Grande premiere screamed “Queen’s Hall in a Frenzy!”.
For The Rio Grande Sitwell used his magpie imagination to transplant direct experience of Latin
Europe to South America. The setting is a busy seaport on carnival day. Although Brazil is mentioned,
the sense of hazy location is deliberate: we catch the whiff ofthe banana republic, with even a hint of
New Orleans/Mardi Gras from the North; all this knowingly stuffed with journalistic icons of sheer
foreign-ness. There is no intrinsic reason for the jazz element which Lambert introduced: the poem is
simply a convenient vehicle. In Richard Shead’s excellent Lambert biography the pianist Angus
Morrison is quoted thus: “It was always Constant’s idea that the solo piano should be like the “I" of
a
novel ... reflecting upon the varied episodes that occur ... and binding them ... into one subjective
experience” (the main reason for the lengthy piano Cadenza in the middle).
A letter by Lambert himself throws further light: “I have always had negro voices (sic) in mind ... as
the idea came from seeing Florence Mills in Dover St. to Dixie (Florence Mills was the vocal star of
the celebrated ‘Blackbirds’ jazz ensemble which had appeared to great acclaim in London. After her
early death in 1927 Lambert had dedicated the piano solo ‘Elegiac Blues’ to her memory.)
The Rio Grande was originally scored for piano solo, chorus and orchestra without woodwind, with a
brief alto solo at the end of the work which ultimately hovers like a disembodied memory of all that
has been seen and heard. Tonight the orchestral parts are played on a second piano.
© Francis Pott, 1993
INTERVAL of about 15 minutes
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Concert Version by Robert Russell Bennett
Gershwin’s operatic masterpiece was composed in 1935 to a libretto by his brother Ira and DuBose
Heyward, after a play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Porgy. The first performance in Boston has
been followed by some memorable revivals, most notatly on Broadway in 1953 and more recently at
Glyndebourne in 1989 under Simon Rattle. Gershwin’s intention to unite American vernacular styies
with the norms of opera succeeded brilliantly and created a unique work, the originality and freshness
of which has rarely been matched. This concert version draws together all the most famous numbers
from the opera.
:
Synopsis
ACT I
Scene: Catfish Row, a negro tenement on the waterfront of Charleston, South Carolina
Half
a dozen couples dance a low-down blues to piano Introduction. Clara sits rocking her baby and
singing a lullaby, Summertime. As the baby remains awake, Jake takes over and administers some
paternal advice, A Woman Is A Sometime Thing. When this also fails to send the baby to sleep,
Clara takes it home.
[Crown, high on drink enters with Bess on his arm. An argument with Robbins develops into a fight in
which Crown kills Robbins. Crown flees leaving Bess to find another man. Shunned by everyone else,
the only door that is open to her is the cripple, Porgy who has always had a soft spot for Bess.]
In her room, Serena mourns her dead husband, Robbins (Gone, Gone, Gone), while her neighbours
place donations for the funeral in a saucer on the dead man’s chest, with the exhortation to Fill Up De
Saucer Till It Overflow). The chorus is followed by Serena’s lamentation My Man’s Gone Now.
ACT I
Jake and other fishermen repair their netting. Porgy, now with Bess, sings of his contentment: Oh, I
Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’. This, in turn, leads to the duet between Porgy and Bess: Bess, You Is My
Woman Now. The scene moves to Kittiwah Island where a picnic is in full swing. The mood of
exuberance is caught in the chorus Oh I Can’t Sit Down. Drink has been flowing in profusion and
Sporting Life, high on “happy dust” as well, now leads the party in a song poking fun at Bible stories:
It Ain’t Necessarily So.
[Crown has been hiding on the island and now accosts Bess. She tells Crown that she is now with
Porgy, but Crown dismisses this with a sneer and drags Bess into the undergrowth. When she returns
to Catfish Row after two days, Porgy realises with whom she has been. During a storm Crown bursts
in to claim Bess from Porgy. Later, Porgy stabs and kills Crown. Despite the silent loyalty of his
friends in not exposing the killer, Porgy is jailed for a week for contempt of court in refusing to
identify the body of Crown
]
While Porgy is away, Sporting Life takes his chance in trying to persuade Bess to come away with him
There’s A
Boat Leavin’ Soon For New York. A brief piano interlude, a reprise of the opening
prelude, here covers the return of Porgy from jail in a state of fevered anticipation at seeing his Bess
again. He is eventually told that Bess has gone off with Sporting Life to New York. If Bess is alive, he
will find her, even if it means travelling a thousand miles. As he sets off in his goat-cart, all Catfish
Row join him in the spiritual Oh Lawd, I'm On My Way
GUILDFORD
PHILHARMONIC CHOIR
presents
CHOIR BOY & CHOIR GIRL
OF THE YEAR
COMPETITION
Prizes of £100 for the two winners
£50 for the runners up
plus other prizes
-
The winners have an opportunity to sing at the Civic Hall in
~ concert with the Guildford Philharmonic Choir
on Saturday 8th November 1997
SEE YOUR TEACHER/CHOIR DIRECTOR FOR DETAILS
COUNTIES!
. RADIO
Price
£7
00
HOLY
TRINIIY
Guildford
Philharmonic
CHURCH
Choir
Presents:
Midsummer
Sat
=
=21
€
F
=
1T Aal
l S
<)
Music
i
L=
R
&0
001
32100
401
050697
165620A
0153487 (i