Guildford Borough Council
Concerts 1977/ 78
West Gallery B
N°
83
£1
SATURDAY 4th MARCH 1978
at 7.30 p.m.
GUILDFORD
CATHEDRAL
(By kind permission of the
Dean and Chapter)
Guildford
Philharmonic
Orchestra
PHILHARMONIC CHOIR
MERYL DROWER
Meryl Drower
Meryl Drower was born in Wales in 1951. At
the age of seventeen she won a Foundation
Scholarship to the Royal College of Music,
where she studied singing with Meriel St. Clair.
While at college she won a number of prizes including the Leslie Woodgate Prize for oratorio,
the Major Van Someren-Godffrey Prize for
English Song, the Harry Evans Award, the
Cuthbert-Smith Award and the Agnes Nicholls
Harty Trophy in addition to obtaining her
A.R.C.M. On leaving the College she won the
Royal Society of Arts Scholarship for study
abroad.
Miss Drower has toured Wales and Northern
Europe as a soloist with the Welsh National
Youth Orchestra. She is now a concert artist of
great prowess and appears with choral societies
and at major festivals throughout the country.
She is also heard with increasing regularity in
the London concert halls and appears this year
in a variety of programmes on London’s South
Bank. Her first record “William Sterndale
Bennett Songs”’, has recently been released.
Her early operatic work included appearances
with Phoenix Opera as Polly in “The Beggar’s
Opera”, given on tour in Yugoslavia and
Austria, and also performed in London. In
1975 she made her major operatic debut in this
country as Gilda in Jonathan Miller’s
production of “Rigoletto” for Kent Opera. She
is now a member of Colin Graham’s English
Music Theatre Company, with whom she has
sung Clorinda in ‘“La Cenerentola” and
Serpetta in Mozart’s “La Finta Giardiniera”.
ROBIN LEGGATE
Last year her work with the Company included
Miss Wordsworth in the revival of ‘“Albert
Conductor:
Meryl Drower appeared with Vernon Handley,
the Guildford Philharmonic Choir and
Orchestra in 1976 in a performance of Bach’s
VERNON
HANDLEY
This performance is promoted by Guildford
Borough Council with financial assistance from
the South East Arts Association.
Herring”.
“St. John Passion”.
Robin Leggate
Winner of the 1975 Tauber Competition,
Robin Leggate was born in West Kirby,
Cheshire and was a Choral Bursar at Queen’s
College Oxford from 1964—67. In 1973 he went
to the Royal Northern College of Music as a
post graduate student. In 1974 he sang Nicias
in the College production of Thais and was
subsequently invited to sing in the premiere of
Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler at Sadler’s Wells
Theatre in which, at very short notice, he sang
the major role of King Richard II.
In January 1976 Robin Leggate became a
member of the Royal Opera House Covent
Garden and made his debut in February 1977
singing Cassio in Otello under Zubin Mehta.
In May 1967 he sang Tomino in The Magic
Flute with the Israel Philharmonic, a role he
had already sung earlier in the season with
Kent Opera. In July 1976 he made his debut
with the Glyndebourne Festival and in
September that year made his debut with the
English National Opera singing Nero in The
Coronation of Poppea.
Robin Leggate has sung concerts throughout
the United Kingdom and in October 1975
made his debut on the Continent with two performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in
Belgium. In January 1976 he made his Royal
Festival Hall debut with the London
Symphony Orchestra singing Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella Suite. He has since appeared in important concerts with the Huddersfield Choral
Society, sung frequently in Ireland and given a
lieder recital at the Wigmore Hall.
theme on the trumpets, and the whole noise is
suddenly cut into by the deep note of the
church bell.
“Moonlight”, the Interlude before Act III,
suggests a very calm and still atmosphere, with
the lower strings and wind setting a
background of rising and falling chords, against
which occasional flashes of light are
represented by octave drops in the flutes and
harp.
“Storm”, is built on the opening two bar figure
which recurs frequently throughout the piece.
The orchestra throws this figure about impetuously until the turmoil suddenly dies down
and there is a quiet lull followed by a strange
staccato passage. This is repeated, and then the
fury of the storm returns to bring the Interlude
to its violent close.
In these four pieces Britten is concerned mainly
with effects, although the music of them is used
elsewhere in the Opera. His brilliance and atmospheric illustration is nowhere better than in
these Interludes.
Four Sea Interludes from
“Peter Grimes”’
Britten 1913-1976
Dawn
Sunday Morning
Moonlight
Storm
“Peter Grimes”’, which was composed in
1944/45, is held by many to be Britten’s best
Opera. It is a very dramatic piece and certainly
very successful in capturing the atmosphere of a
small fishing town and the town’s relationship
with the hardest of protagonists, the sea. Sea
Interludes are played before or between the
scenes into which they lead without a break.
“Dawn” is based on three short themes: a
bleak tune for violins and flute, surely
suggesting the cold morning breezes and the
cries of sea birds; harp and clarinet runs, and
quiet brass clashes. It is a masterly piece of
musical illustration and one can read all sorts
of sea pictures into it: the slow swell of the
waves and the receding of water down the
beach.
“Sunday Morning”’, which is the prelude to
Act I1, suggests a very bright day. The horns, in
thirds, begin with forte piano chords, which are
followed by a syncopated staccato woodwind
theme. When the strings have stated this
sparkling tune, a broad melody from the violas
and ’cello takes over. This tune it is that works
up to a brilliant statement of the woodwind
Fantasia on a Theme
of Thomas Tallis
Vaughan Williams 1872-1958
Thomas Tallis (about 1505-1585) was a
“Gentleman of the Royal Chapel” under
Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth
I. Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia is based on
material from the third of eight tunes that
Tallis wrote in 1567 for the metrical psalter of
Mathew Parker, the then Archbishop of
Canterbury. “Fantasia” has come to mean
something quite different from the form that
was popular in the time of Tallis, and which
was undoubtedly in Vaughan Williams’s mind
when he wrote this work, and although the
word carried the idea of fancy, it did not
necessarily mean something uncontrolled in
form. Vaughan Williams’s work does not con-
tain a single bar that is not directly related to
the material he chose. The work is laid out for a
solo string quartet and two string orchestras,
the second much smaller than the first (it
becomes a sort of echo) and directed to be placed some distance from the orchestra. The whole
group is subject to a great deal of divisi writing,
and the two orchestras are variously subdivided
antiphonally as the work proceeds. The work
begins with a setting of the scene harmonically
on long held quiet chords. Then the theme is
played pizzicato; the first orchestra takes up
the tune, and the Fantasia begins to unfold.
Another phrase of the tune receives treatment
stated that in the new choral-orchestral version
on the solo quartet, and the different phrases
are brought together in a huge climax, which
the Prudentius poem and of much of the
shows Vaughan Williams’s understanding of
the
string
medium.
Indeed,
it
is
as
much
because of the writing for strings in this work,
as for the worth of the material itself, that the
piece has been such a success, for it is another
example
of
an
English
composer
writing
he sought retention of the mood and temper of
thematic and harmonic thought of the setting:
but the poem itself is excluded from the present
work.
“Hymnus Paradisi” is best regarded as twofold.
magnificently for string orchestra, and takes its
place beside the Elgar ‘“Introduction and
tinuous. In general this part is contemplative,
Allegro” as one of the most remarkable string
but not wholly so. There are moments of in-
works in the literature. That these two works
tense feeling even in the brief concentrated
must,
in
some
sense,
have
inspired
Bliss’s
“Music for Strings” and Tippett’s “Concerto
for Double String Orchestra” is certain.
Part One (movements I, II and III) is con-
Prelude (I) as well as in the choral “Requiem
aeternam dona eis”’ (II) to which that Prelude
is linked. And the twenty-third Psalm (III) is
itself touched by the brooding, darker colours
of the
INTERVAL
orchestral
Prelude.
The
last-named
presents three or four brief themes that have
place,
under
many
variants,
in
all
the
succeeding movements (except (V)).
Hymnus Paradisi
Herbert Howells b.1892
Part Two (movements IV, V, VI) comprises
“Hymnus Paradisi” is a six-movement work for
Soprano and Tenor soli, mixed-voice Chorus,
and Orchestra.
Four of the choral movements (Il
to
V) are
settings of Latin and English texts. These are
drawn from the Psalms, the ‘““Missa pro defunc-
tis”, and the Book of Common Prayer, and are
the immemorial reflections upon the transient
griefs and indestructible hopes of mankind. All
are appropriate to the mood and purpose of a
Requiem. Movement VI is a setting of lines
from the Salisbury Diurnal, used here in the
translation by Dr. G. H. Palmer appearing at
the end of Robert Bridge’s Anthology, ‘“The
Spirit of ManTM.
three separate sections. These — especially IV
and VI — mark a new level in the work: one that
is
more
dynamic,
higher-charged,
further-
ranging. The rhythmic drive of the middle
phrases of “I will lift up mine eyes” and the
gradual
subjugation
of the
hundred-and-
twenty-first Psalm by the “Sanctus” (in IV, at
the first major climax of the “Hymnus”) are
the chief factors in the changed mood of the
work. This simultaneous setting of a double
text (one English, the other Latin) is a point of
departure, at which the work turns for a time
away from its initial brooding contemplation
and takes on an almost defiant activity. In
movement IV (a union of Psalm 121 and the
“Sanctus”)
there is a constantly increasing
It is clear, therefore, that the work is not strictly
heightening of colour. The semi-chorus, the
a Requiem; equally clear, that the essential
two soloists, and the main chorus all move
nature of such is preserved throughout.
towards a climax in which the Sanctus for a
This work springs directly from a Mediaeval
poem by Prudentius — ‘“Hymnus circa exsequies defuncti’’ — that opens with the lines
“Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum,
These lines now appear in the dedication of
“Hymnus Paradisi” to the memory of the com-
poser’s only son, Michael Kendrick Howells,
whose untimely death turned the composer’s
mind to the Prudentius poem. There is, in fact,
a kindred and earlier work related to “Hymnus
Paradisi”’. When “Hymnus Paradisi’’ was first
at
Gloucester
Three
Choirs
stretches in which the Psalm is again taken up
and completed do not essentially diminish the
new luminous quality of the choral and
orchestral texture.
Gremioque hunc concipe molli”.
heard
time supersedes the Psalm. And the long quiet
The fifth movement (““I heard a voice”) is a
temporary easing of tension and elimination of
complexities.
Placed
between
two
big
movements (IV and VI) its restraint and quiet
give it the character of an Interlude. In the
scheme of the work it is , in function, a tranquil
preparation for the final section that follows.
Festival
The sixth and last movement is as a gradual on-
(September 1950) under the direction of the
composer, a programme note of his referred to
coming of ‘“‘the true light”” and “‘radiance’ that
will issue in the “unfailing splendour” of those
that first unaccompanied version. The note
who have “endured in the heat of the conflictTM.
S
\
It is as if personal grief, itself spent, is merged
and lost in a general pervasive light and
warmth of consolation. To the translated text
from the Salisbury Diurnal, the composer has
added a series of “Alleluias”. These finally
prepare and launch the climax of the “unfailing
splendour wherein they rejoice with gladness
evermore’’.
Thereafter a return to the immemorial
‘“Requiem aeternam,
Requiem dona eis sempiternam”
is both retrospect and ending, in terms of com-
plete tranquility.
University of Surrey — Great Hall
COLLEGIUM MUSICUM
Saturday 11th March at 7.30 p.m.
Faure — Pavane
Holst — Double Violin Concerto
Martin Pring, Tim Callaghan — Violins
Berlioz — Harold in Italy
Jonathan Barritt — Viola
Conductor: Simon Robinson
ADMISSION FREE
SUNDAY 12 MARCH at 3 p.m.
Civic Hall
Celebrity Recital
JOHN LILL
Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt
£2.50; £2.00; £1.50; £1.00
Obtainable in advance from Public Library,
North Street, Guildford and at the Civic
Hall on day of concert
SUNDAY 19 MARCH at 3 p.m.
Civic Hall
Peer Gynt Suite No.1- Grieg
Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and
Viola — Stamitz
Piano Concerto No.2 in B flat —
Brahms
Jonathan Strange
James Walker
Vernon Handley
Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra