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The Royal Choral Society after 140 years
An Appreciation compiled by James Palmer
May 2012 sees the 140th Anniversary of the first appearance by The Royal Choral Society at the then newly-opened Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. We are pleased to carry this Appreciation of the Society, largely based upon research by Peggy Wilson MBE, a choir member from 1954 to 1997.
‘It's an honour to be Music Director of the RCS in its 140th year. The choir has been conducted by some of the world's musical greats, including Verdi, Gounod, Dvorák and Elgar, and by Sir Malcolm Sargent, who was its conductor for nearly 40 years.’ Dr Richard Cooke, Musical Director, The Royal Choral Society.
If Choral societies have been a popular feature of the British musical tradition for several hundred years, The Royal Choral Society is one of the oldest to claim an unbroken record of performances and concert-giving, not only to British audiences but also overseas.
The Royal Albert Hall, seating 7,000 patrons, was opened on March 28th 1871, in the tenth anniversary year of the death of Queen Victoria's Consort, Prince Albert. The Queen had laid the foundation stone of the Hall in 1867, and was to have spoken at the inauguration but found herself overcome with emotion. At once, her eldest son, Prince Edward, later Edward VII, made a spontaneous speech and the Royal Albert Hall was thereupon officially opened.
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Berlioz - 'Les Troyens' (The Trojans)
Christopher Follett
The great composer's operatic masterpiece is to be revived in a new staging at Covent Garden. The Berlioz authority Christopher Follett traces the background to the work and places it in context.
There is a long way from the fiery arch-Romantic Berlioz of the 1830s - the world of the Symphonie fantastique with its grotesque March to the Scaffold and Witches Sabbath music - to the serene, dramatically expressive Gluck-inspired classicism of the composer's towering opera Les Troyens composed almost 30 years later, towards the very end of his career - the pinnacle of Berlioz's achievement.
With Les Troyens - The Trojans - it could be said that Berlioz returned to his roots, even if the opera was to suffer the sad fate of never being performed in its complete form during the composer's lifetime, after suffering a humiliating rejection by the Paris Opera. As Gounod, a student of Berlioz, aptly put it at the time: Berlioz died beneath the walls of ancient Troy just as his namesake Hector, the legendary Trojan warrior prince in Greek mythology, had done.
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My New Music - Arthur Butterworth on his Symphony No 7 Opus 140
The distinguished composer writes on his latest Symphony, completed last year a few months before his 88th birthday, which is to receive its world premiere on April 28 at Huddersfield Town Hall, opening the 150th Anniversary Concert of the Huddersfield Philharmonic Society. The programme, conducted by Nicholas Smith, will also include Beethoven's 'Choral' Symphony. The concert coincidentally marks the 50th Anniversary of Arthur Butterworth's first appearance as conductor with the Society.
The nature of the symphony for long remained as a conventional musical form, its beginnings developing out of the simple and much earlier baroque instrumental suite, eventually reaching a high point in the classical age of Haydn and Mozart.
With Beethoven's 'Eroica' however and even more so with the 'Choral' Symphony such formerly easy-going, conventional ideas changed, so that the very nature of symphonic design and purpose took on a new stature and significance.
European society was itself beginning to change profoundly after the Napoleonic Wars. All the arts, music not least, reflected these often disturbing changes. In place of the somewhat bland and conventional music, the purpose of which was hardly more than to entertain wealthy patrons - such as Prince Esterházy's patronage of Haydn - musical performance was beginning to be directed towards wider and more public audiences. The burgeoning manner of the newer music came to be more intellectually and emotionally rousing, stimulating a greater awareness of how society itself was changing.
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Kathleen Ferrier - a centenary tribute
Peter Feuchtwanger
Shortly following my arrival in England, I was taken to hear Bach's 'St Matthew Passion' with Kathleen Ferrier as one of the soloists. The singer was unknown to me then. After one or two notes, that voice brought tears to my eyes. As a result, whenever possible, I attended her performances in England and Europe. The only other musician who made such an impact on me was the Romanian pianist Clara Haskil.
On the first occasion I met Kathleen Ferrier it was backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. I managed to mumble some complimentary remark to her. She acknowledged me with a radiant smile. Before me, the same woman, equally beautiful off stage as on. She shook my hand warmly, and told me, in her modest fashion, 'I'm so glad you liked it, luv.'
At the Tonhalle in Zürich, where he had just conducted, Bruno Walter was being interviewed backstage, and in the course of the conversation I overheard him state that the two greatest experiences in his life were to have known Kathleen Ferrier and Gustav Mahler (in that order).
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Hugh Wood - an 80th birthday appreciation
The young composer Thomas Hyde offers his personal reflections on the work of his distinguished older contemporary, who celebrates his 80th birthday on June 27.
My first encounter with the music of Hugh Wood was when I bought the NMC recording of his Symphony played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Davis. As the furious tumult of the opening 'tempesta' movement rushed past I was completely gripped. It was clear from the logic, rigour and pacing of this music that we were setting out on some great journey, and the sudden revelation of a quotation from Wagner's Die Walküre (the motif for Siegmund's first flowering of love for Sieglinde) on four solo cellos, suggested that something personal was being evoked. But as I was soon to discover, this music will not offer up all its secrets, even on repeated hearings: that is part of its great strength. I could not have guessed as the storm gave way to the slow movement that this Symphony would end on a triumphant root position A major chord.
It surprises most listeners, not least Hans Keller who wrote to the composer following the premiere, 'Is the A maj. end prepared from the outset? No doubt it is - but I missed it.'
Edward Venn, in his study of the composer, has made a convincing analytical explanation for how this ending is prepared. But what concerns me here in these personal reflections, is the expressive effect of such moments, for it was these that first unlocked Wood's music for me. The composer likes to quote Keller's remark that 'Intellectual music is emotional music before it is understood'. I discovered Wood's music the other way round: before anything else, it grabbed me emotionally
As it turned out, my introduction to Hugh Wood's music was a fortuitous one, for the Symphony is one of his finest works.
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What larks!
Suffolk Philharmonic Orchestra - a new professional orchestra in East Anglia
Leslie Olive, Founder and music director of the newly-formed Suffolk Philharmonic Orchestra, which gives its inaugural concert in St Edmondsbury Cathedral on May 23, explains the background and aims of this exciting musical prospect - the fulfilment of a long-held ambition.
On Friday August 26, 1958, I was standing at the corner of the draining board in the kitchen of my two unmarried Aunts when the news of Vaughan Williams' death was announced on the wireless.
It was a little after my eighth birthday and a little before I saw my father die in the heatwave of June 1959. I cannot to this day explain why, at the age of eight, I felt the death of Vaughan Williams to be portentous. Not, of course, as distressing and disorienting as the death of my own father: but important in a way I could not describe. Perhaps it was the mention of Dorking, which was only a short distance away. Perhaps it was simply that he was an English composer, and I already knew that music was to be the passion of my life, and that I wanted to conduct.
Now, half a century later, creating a new orchestra in and for Suffolk, I find that Ralph Vaughan Williams has re-appeared for me throughout that time, like a refrain to my musical life, and indeed he reappears now.
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Kathleen Bruckshaw (1877?-1921) - a forgotten pianist and composer
Valerie Chancellor
In our last issue (January-February 2012) we included a feature on the unknown Norwegian composer Pauline Hall (1890-1969) by Tove Trćsdal, and now turn our attention to a lost British composer and pianist of an earlier generation, courtesy of Dr Chancellor's research.
Kathleeen Bruckshaw was 'an able pianist who made some mark in composition', as the entry for her in the 'Old Grove' Dictionary of Music and Musicians (fourth edition, 1948) states. New Grove seems to have overlooked her, though she merits an entry in the International Biography of Women Composers, edited by Aaron T Cohen (Volume I, page 116). It would be wrong to forget such a charming and talented woman, who forged musical links between Britain, Germany and the United States before the First World War, but who showed a patriotism moderated by concern for working people when it broke out.
Kathleen Bruckshaw gave an interview to the Musical Standard, published in November 1921, which appeared very soon after her death on October 10. Her health had already given cause for concern, though she was still full of plans for future concerts of her chamber music in the English provinces. From her account, we know that she was half-Irish and began performing 'small ones' on the piano at the age of six. Her family, based in London, was musical, and her father Charles Bruckshaw was a composer of romantic songs, such as 'Sunlit Waves' and 'Fond Heart Lyrics', in the 1880s.
Family contacts in the musical world assisted young Kathleen to make a successful debut at the age of12 when she played the solo part in Anton Rubinstein's Fourth Piano Concerto in D minor in 1889.The conductor was Sir August Manns and the venue the Crystal Palace in south London. It is possible that she was a little older than her parents admitted at the time.
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The Last Train to Tomorrow
Carl Davis
The composer writes on his new work, 'The Last Train to Tomorrow', the premiere of which is to be given on Sunday June 17 at 3.00pm at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall, in a concert given by the Hallé, with the Hallé Children's Choir, conducted by Shirley Court, and young actors from the Manchester Metropolitan University, directed by David Shirley. Also in the concert are works by Smetana, Humperdinck, and Britten.
As I write, the June 17th 2012 premiere of 'The Last Train to Tomorrow' still seems very far away. And yet the underlying theme of the work - children abandoned and saved by a quirk of history, the Kindertransport of 1938-9 - seems very present.
John Summers, Chief Executive of the Hallé, rang - the orchestra had been commissioning works for their whiz-bang children's choir, would I like to write something? My answer was an immediate yes and an idea followed swiftly. The shape of the choir stalls at the Bridgewater Hall seemed to echo the dimensions of a railway carriage. When filled with a hundred odd children it could resemble an historical reconstruction of the critical scenes from the Kindertransport story - the rescue by train from three key cities, Prague, Vienna and Berlin, of thousands of Jewish children from inevitable death at the hands of the Nazis, to safety in England.
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