An English Summertime

Vaughan Williams

Stanford, Britten, Parry and Holst

Wednesday 9 July 2008 at 7.30 pm

St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London, EC2V 6AU [Transport links / Map]

£10 (full price), £8 (concessions)

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In the 50th anniversary year of Vaughan Williams' death, An English Summertime places his mass in G minor at the centre of a concert of English choral music from the first half of the twentieth century - music which draws on Tudor polyphony, folk song, the poetry of Shakespeare and an English pastoral tradition to present a romantic view of England and Britain.

Of the many musicians who helped to bring about the English musical rennaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Charles Stanford and Hubert Parry were among the most influential. Both were teachers of Vaughan Williams', and both feature in this concert: Stanford's joyous Coelos ascendit hodie (published in 1905) for unaccompanied choir is the first piece in the programme, and Parry's rousing My soul, there is a country (1916), one of his Songs of Farewell, and Music, when soft voices die (1897) open the second half.

Vaughan Williams' Mass in G Minor (1921) is the centrepiece of the concert: a moving work for unaccompanied double choir and soloists, full of the rich harmonies associated with the composer's pastoral works but also evoking sixteenth-century English polyphony. It is contrasted in the programme with a more whimsical work from the end of Vaughan Williams' career: his Three Shakespeare Songs (1951), with words taken from The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Although Benjamin Britten was far too electic and cosmopolitan in his musical outlook to be described as a pastoralist, his vocal writing was rooted in the same English choral tradition as that of the other composers featured in this concert. Londinium perform Britten's first choral work A Hymn to the Virgin (1930) - an extraordinarily mature work written when the composer was just 16.

The concert is rounded off with a selection of four Welsh Folksongs composed in 1930-31 by Vaughan Williams' close friend Gustav Holst: The Dove, The First Love, The Mother-in-Law and White Summer Rose. These charming settings of traditional folksong melodies for unaccompanied chorus convey the simple pleasures of a pre-modern age.

Musical Director: Madeleine Lovell