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Solus for orchestra was written for the Last Night of the Proms and is a comment on the times we are living in, under the shadow of Covid-19. Many people have had to face loneliness during this period, and my piece takes its title from the Latin for ‘lonely’.

It begins with a dark tremolo in timpani, cello and double basses. Then a small ‘virus’ starts to develop in the flutes and clarinets while the brass, oboes and bassoons enter with a pulsating chord that billows back and forth. The ‘virus’ then transfers into the strings and the rest of the winds, and keeps growing as it is taken over by the whole orchestra. The music gradually grows through a large crescendo towards an fff (very, very loud) chord. And then at last, after the final burst, the music travels out into wild nature, where we hear the birds sing …

^{Programme note © Andrea Tarrodi}

Golda Schultz soprano

Hardly the first musical to be based on a film – Alan Jay Lerner based My Fair Lady (1956) on the screenplay of Shaw’s Pygmalion – A Little Night Music is, however, the only one (so far) to be based on a film by Ingmar Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night. Sondheim’s 1973 musical, written with librettist Hugh Wheeler, is a delicious confection, a nostalgic comedy of (bad) manners in love, set mostly on a Swedish country estate around 1900. To match the mood and period elegance of the setting, Sondheim cunningly chose to write the entire score (with the exception of a handful of bars) in variations on waltz-time. That much is clear from the dashing opening Night Waltz, which acts as the show’s overture – an orchestral introduction with consciously Ravel-like textures including spotlit woodwind dancing over strings and harp with horns promising plenty of intrigue.

Although the show is widely celebrated for Sondheim’s greatest hit, ‘Send in the Clowns’, the rest of the sophisticated score is also treasurable, not least for the song The Glamorous Life, in which the actress-heroine Désirée, her hope-filled daughter and her deeply sceptical mother swap wildly contrasting viewpoints. Hal Prince’s later film version (1977) was a legendary failure, thanks in no small part to Elizabeth Taylor being painfully miscast as Désirée. But one of the high points is Sondheim’s rewrite of the song as a solo for the daughter, which is the version sung tonight.

^{Programme note © David Benedict}

Like the Strauss song we heard earlier, Sibelius’s Impromptu for strings began life as a piano piece before being orchestrated. But, where the original version contrasts cascading ripple effects with declamatory chords and a defiant melody line, the string version achieves a much more unified, calm, even mournful tone. That’s especially clear in the outer sections that flank the more energetic central passage pitting flowing phases in the first violins against cello arpeggios.

This is one of Sibelius’s early pieces, but his command of string playing, a hallmark of his orchestral writing, is already apparent. Although a skilled violinist, he had given up on his dream of being a professional soloist to devote himself to composition. That swiftly paid off, since the Karelia Suite, one of his best-known works, appeared later the same year.

^{Programme note © David Benedict}

Nicola Benedetti violin

Long before Vaughan Williams was inspired by George Meredith’s 1881 poem ‘The Lark Ascending’, 12 lines from which are inscribed above his score, larks had long been associated with heralding the day. In his Sonnet 29, Shakespeare wrote: ‘the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.’

Chosen by listeners as the nation’s favourite piece of music in Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs poll, it is a unique piece that, once again, began life in a different form from the one we know best. Vaughan Williams wrote it in 1914 for violin and piano but, six years later, rescored it for solo violin and chamber orchestra. With a solo cadenza at the very first entry and another swiftly following, the violinist has extended passages of complete rhythmic freedom, highly unusual for the time. These not only express the bird’s song and flight but also allow for the soloist’s individual interpretations to metaphorically take wing, as Vaughan Williams’s slowly shifting accompaniment evokes the heat haze of morning shimmering over the countryside.

^{Programme note © David Benedict}

Golda Schultz soprano

Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, written on 10 March 1916, was commissioned by Fight for Right, an organisation dedicated to boosting morale in the Armed Forces. After its first performance, however, pacifist Parry withdrew his support. In response to a request for the piece from influential feminist Millicent Fawcett, to whose causes he and his wife were strongly sympathetic, he replied, ‘I wish indeed it might become the Women Voters' hymn, as you suggest. People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily.’

Composer Errolyn Wallen played ‘Jerusalem’ regularly for her school and has loved it and Elgar’s arrangement, a Last Night of the Proms mainstay, ever since. But Covid-19 has meant her new work based on the hymn utilises a much-reduced orchestra. As she told Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s Front Row, ‘I don’t have a tuba, a bass trombone or a bass drum … but I do have the organ.’ Not to mention soprano Golda Schultz. 

Holding firm to Parry’s celebrated tune, Wallen has added a blues feeling and African rhythm. Subtitled ‘our clouded hills’, her piece is dedicated to the Windrush generation and encourages a communion of Commonwealth nations in a short interlude, to her own words, introduced between the second and third verses. ‘The people coming over from the former British Empire were probably even more patriotic than people living in the United Kingdom, so the hymn would have been known to them.’

^{Programme note © David Benedict}

Â鶹ԼÅÄ Singers

Elgar was so pleased with it – he described it as ‘a tune that comes once in a lifetime’ – that he considered saving it for a symphony. But he soon jettisoned that idea and used it instead at the heart of his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1. The tune, of course, is now known as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Elgar’s march, the first of a projected set of six, premiered successfully in Liverpool on 19 October 1901 and arrived two days later at the Proms, where it so ignited the audience that it was immediately encored. Twice.

Of her new arrangement Anne Dudley says: ‘In studying and transcribing Elgar’s score in great detail, as I have done over these past few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate anew his genius and his complete mastery of the orchestral tutti.’ The challenge was to keep the sonority and majesty of Elgar’s original, while writing for an orchestra about half the size. ‘The single percussionist has to be something of a one-man band to cover the side drum, cymbals, bass drum and tambourine, all usually allocated to separate players.’

^{Programme note © David Benedict}

Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee
Who are born of thee?

Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.

^{A. C. Benson (1862–1925)}

Golda Schultz soprano
Â鶹ԼÅÄ Singers

‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ The career of composer Richard Rodgers stands as a stern rebuke to that famous assertion by F. Scott Fitzgerald. After well over a decade of substantial hits with lyricist Lorenz Hart, Rodgers teamed up with librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to even more successful effect. Their first show, Oklahoma!, was a runaway hit whose musically sustained seriousness of purpose changed musical theatre history for ever. Two years later, in 1945, they opened their even more formally daring Carousel, which includes the supremely comforting, hymn-like ‘You’ll never walk alone’. In 1963 Liverpudlian band Gerry and the Pacemakers turned it into a hit single, which led to it being adopted by Liverpool FC. Since then, it has become a hugely popular anthem of hope and support, not least for medical staff during the current pandemic.

When you walk through a storm,
Hold your head up high,
And don’t be afraid of the dark.
At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky,
And the sweet silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone;
You’ll never walk alone.

^{Oscar Hammerstein II}

Â鶹ԼÅÄ Singers
Richard Pearce organ

The honours accrued by Parry – being made a baronet, becoming head of the Royal College of Music and the only composer to be elected as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron – suggest a man dedicated to the preservation of convention. Yet his daughter Dorothea described him as ‘the most naturally unconventional man I have known. He was a Radical, with a very strong bias against Conservatism.’

It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that he is most remembered not for his grander, idiosyncratic compositions including five symphonies and his deeply moving, unaccompanied choral masterpiece Songs of Farewell, but for two beloved unison songs: the hymn tune for ‘Dear Lord and father of mankind’ and his setting ‘Jerusalem’. He died in 1918 of Spanish flu in the global pandemic. The plaque in Gloucester cathedral in his memory includes the line: ‘Long these familiar walls shall re-echo thy song.’

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

^{William Blake (1757–1827)}