What's On

Highlights of this year’s English Music Festival include world première performances of important works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Henry Walford Davies; a rare opportunity to hear Arthur Sullivan’s cantata The Golden Legend, masterpieces by Elgar, Moeran and Bax, and a ‘last night’ celebration concert boasting no fewer than eight new commissions.

The Seventh English Music Festival will take place in and around Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire over the weekend of 24th – 27th May 2013. Once again, the Festival showcases works which were box office hits during their day, but which have since fallen into unaccountable neglect.

The opening concert on Friday 24th May in Dorchester Abbey, featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates (and broadcast on BBC Radio 3), contains three significant world premières. The first of these is the previously unpublished early Serenade in A Minor by Ralph Vaughan Williams; a gorgeous work that Martin Yates has recently recorded for the Dutton Epoch label to great acclaim. This five-movement work, composed in 1898, was in fact the composer’s first for orchestra, and it gives a fascinating insight into Vaughan Williams’s early style prior to the influences of folk song and Tudor polyphony which permeated his later work.

The programme will also include Vaughan Williams’s early tone poem, The Solent (from the unpublished suite In the New Forest), dating from 1903-04. According to Vaughan Williams’s biographer, Michael Kennedy, one of the themes in this work appeared to be a favourite of the composer’s and re-appeared in his Sea Symphony and again, at the end of his career, in the Symphony No 9.

The second half of the concert features the first performance of the substantial Symphony No 2 by Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869-1941). The concert opens, in English Music Festival tradition, with Parry’s Jerusalem and also includes Britten’s effervescent Canadian Carnival and Holst’s atmospheric A Winter Idyll.

Saturday’s main evening concert gives the opportunity to hear one of the important and impressive works to have come from the pen of Sir Arthur Sullivan (usually more famously associated with WS Gilbert). A complete and rare performance of The Golden Legend will be performed by the English Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Andrews, with soloists Elena Xanthoudakis, Jean Rigby, Daniel Norman and Grant Doyle. This substantial cantata, setting words by Longfellow, was composed for the 1886 Leeds Music Festival, and its success was testified to by countless performances in Britain, America and beyond. Indeed, until the end of the 20th century it was so frequently given in Britain that only Handel’s Messiah was performed more often, as The Golden Legend surpassed even Mendelssohn’s Elijah in popularity. This English Music Festival performance will be the first professional revival since Sir Charles Mackerras conducted a centenary performance in Leeds in 1986.

Another notable performance will take place during the morning concert on Saturday 25th. In recent years Rupert Marshall-Luck and Matthew Rickard have given a succession of performances of neglected English pieces for violin and piano. This year the Sonata No. 3 by Harold Darke will be under the spotlight. Their programme will also include music by Havergal Brian, Britten, Delius and Howells.

The EMF has always been keen to showcase our country’s rich choral heritage and this year the Elysian Singers will perform a programme of choral works by Parry and Stanford in the beautiful Chapel at Radley College, near Abingdon on the afternoon of Sunday 26th May. The music will be set in context with readings, including extracts from letters by the composers.

For the evening concert back in Dorchester Abbey, Hilary Davan Wetton will conduct his City of London Choir in John Gardner’s Stabat Mater, as well as works by Britten, Dyson and Finzi, ending with Vaughan Williams’s ever-popular Five Mystical Songs.

The closing concert on Bank Holiday Monday, 27th May, will be devoted entirely to works commissioned for the occasion. This follows the success of our first New Commissions Concert which took place during the second English Music Festival in 2008. This year’s programme will include a Symphony by David Owen Norris and orchestral works by Richard Blackford, Paul Lewis, Christopher Wright, Philip Lane, and Ben Palmer who is also conducting the concert with his Orchestra of St. Paul’s. He will be joined by Rupert Marshall-Luck for two works for violin and orchestra; composed by Paul Carr and David Matthews. This is a unique and unmissable concert, and a fitting conclusion to this year’s Festival and to Founder-Director Em Marshall-Luck’s vision to continue to commission individual new works in the English tradition.

Other programmes include a piano recital by Duncan Honeybourne, featuring Bax’s Piano Sonata No 3 alongside works by Moeran, Fleischmann, Britten and Howells; evocative music for strings by Bantock, Alwyn and Ireland performed by the London Chamber Strings and conducted by Sir Granville Bantock’s Great-grandson, Bjorn Bantock; and late-evening light music by Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Elgar, Delius and Ketelby amongst others.

A convenient mini-bus transfer is available to/from Didcot station, Dorchester-on-Thames and other venues; see website time-table for details.

The Queen's Alman, 'Hugh Ashton's Ground'

William Byrd (1543-1623)

A Prayer for the Queen's most excellent Majesty

John Dowland (c1563-1626)

O peaceful England from Merrie England

Sir Edward German (1862-1936)

Long live Elizabeth

Sir Edward German (1862-1936)

Gloriana

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

The Vicar of Bray

Anonymous ()

Fairest isle, all isles excelling from King Arthur

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

God save the King from Coronation Anthem: Zadok the Priest

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Coronation Anthem: My heart is inditing

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Rule, Britannia

Thomas Arne (1710-1778)

I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls from The Bohemian Girl

Michael William Balfe (1808-1870)

Festival Te Deum

Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)

In loyal bonds united

Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

O taste and see

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Olympic Hymn

Christopher Idle (1938-)

Elizabethan Serenade (Where the gentle Avon flows)

Ronald Binge (1910-1979)

Our flute based programme opens with a rarity: the style of the Ferdinand Ries’ flute quartet is unmistakably influenced by his teacher despite its ‘Spanish ‘ finale. Having followed Beethoven to Vienna from Bonn, Ries became his pupil and amanuensis. Beethoven’s string trio displays a man full of bold optimism, bursting with ideas and impatient desire. Popular belief has it that Mozart was not enamoured of the flute yet his music belies this theory. A concert of otherwise classical flute music with the 20th Century sensuality of Debussy and South American flavour of Villa Lobos, in the the hands of star flautist Katherine Baker, is magic indeed.

Flute Quartet in C

Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838)

String Trio No 1 in G

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Syrinx for solo Flute

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Jet Whistle

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)

Quartet No 1 for Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello in D

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Duos for The Magic Flute from an edition of 1792

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Song in the City is an inventive series of concerts that brings talented young singers and pianists to the heart of the Square Mile. Our concerts profile both well-known and lesser-performed repertoire in the inspiring surroundings of the Hall at St Botolph without Bishopsgate.

This North American Duo weave together elements of classical song and cabaret, to present a sultry evening of satirical serenades, including William Bolcom and Erik Satie’s Cabaret Songs.

Composition Not Known

William Bolcom (1938-)

Composition Not Known

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

This concert marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten with performances of his spritely Te Deum and Jubilate before our attention turns to Johannes Brahms' finest choral work. Just 33 years old when he completed most of Ein deutsches Requiem, Brahms already had a very personal perspective on mourning, inspired as it was by the deaths of both his mother and his mentor Robert Schumann. Brahms’ text, which he compiled from Luther’s German translation of the Bible, seeks to create a tapestry of solace to comfort the living who must deal with and accept death - none of the fireworks or drama of Mozart or Verdi are to be found here. Brahms later wrote: “As for the title, I must admit I should like to leave out the word ‘German’ and refer instead to ‘Humanity’.”

The Edinburgh Royal Choral Union collaborates for the first time with the Tallaght Choral Society, one of Ireland’s most highly regarded choirs, for this performance of Britten and Brahms. The massed chorus is joined by the Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra, soloists Emily Mitchell and Trevor Bowes, all under conductor Michael Bawtree.

Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Te Deum in C

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Jubilate in C

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)