This afternoon we welcome Martyn Brabbins to Salford for a programme of five 20th-century works by British composers.
Composer and critic Peter Warlock was born into a well-connected family of artists, but his own talent was often in some conflict with his rebellious streak and a taste for mischief. For a period in the late 1920s, he rented a cottage in Eynsford, Kent where he played host to some rather wild parties, attended by the likes of William Walton who we hear from this afternoon. Despite, or perhaps because of, those uninhibited weekends with friends, Warlock was highly productive in Eynsford, completing many of his most popular works, such as the lively Capriol Suite of 1926.
But first, we journey back to the start of Vaughan Williams’s career, with Heroic Elegy, which he wrote as a young man at the turn of the 20th century. Noble and heartfelt, it hints at some of the threads that were to weave themselves through Vaughan Williams’s illustrious career.
As a tutor at the Royal College of Music, Vaughan Williams helped nurture the next generation of talent. One of his students, Grace Williams (no relation) went on to make her name as a highly regarded and ground-breaking composer. Elegy, a work composed shortly after she’d finished her studies, sees Williams experimenting with a mix of modern musical language and the folk motifs of her native Wales.
Williams’s work has often suffered from unjustified neglect by the musical establishment. This is also true of Pamela Harrison, whose song cycle Five Poems of Ernest Dowson we hear today, with tenor Benjamin Hulett lending his vivid and valorous tones. Cynara, one of the poems Harrison set for the song cycle, inspired some of Cole Porter’s lyrics for Kiss me Kate, and even gave Margaret Mitchell the title for her iconic novel, Gone with the Wind.