The Elements
Songs of the Earth, the Air, Fire and Water
Thursday 9 February 2012 at 7.30pm
Holy Trinity Sloane Square Sloane Street, London, SW1X 9BZ
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Tickets available on the door from 6.30pm on the day of the concert: £14 (full price), £10 (concessions)
The expressive power of the four classical elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – is explored in Londinium’s imaginative concert of contrasting motets and part-songs, by Victoria, Mendelssohn, Howells, Tippett, Lauridsen and others. Earth is the stony ground of burial, the dust of decay, in the spare melodic lines of Howells’ sombre motet Take him, Earth, for Cherishing; Air is the clear, bright sound of the trumpet in Tippett’s exuberant Dance, Clarion Air; Fire is the tempestuousness of human passion in Lauridsen’s extraordinary and rarely performed Madrigali: Six Fire Songs on Italian Renaissance Poems; and Water is by turns mellifluous (Victoria’s Super flumina babylonis), sonorous (Eric Whitacre’s Water Night) and serene (Stanford’s The Blue Bird, reinterpreted in Judith Bingham’s The Drowned Lovers). The place of the elements in nature is celebrated in Mendelssohn’s exquisite series of part-songs Lieder im Freien zu singen, a charming homage to spring and the beauty of the natural world.
The concert opens in virtuoso style with Michael Tippett’s modern madrigal Dance, Clarion Air (1952), a joyous and complex work written to mark the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In contrast, Stanford’s The Blue Bird (1910) captures a moment of stillness, punctuated only by the soaring flight of a bird above the cold, blue waters of the lake.
Water provokes a different mood in Victoria’s Super flumina babylonis, a setting of Psalm 137 whose rich sonorities and sinuous melodic lines depict the grief of the exile ‘by the waters of Babylon’.
After the profundity of this late Renaissance masterpiece, Mendelssohn’s rarely performed Romantic part-songs Sechs Lieder im Freien zu singen op.48 (1839) set a gentler tone, revelling in the delights of the open air. In Cecilia McDowall’s The Skies in their Magnificence (2008), a setting of Traherne, the vast open skies provoke a sense of wonder in the divine, the ecstatic poetry of the text matched by luminous and transparent choral textures.
Howells’ epic motet on the death of President Kennedy, Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing (1964), forms the centrepiece of the concert’s second half. Its open texture and chromaticism contrast with the rich sonority of Eric Whitacre’s Water Night (1995) – ‘night with eyes of water’ – and the intense drama of Lauridsen’s Six Fire Songs (1987), a cycle of modern madrigals based on Italian Renaissance love poems.
Judith Bingham’s The Drowned Lovers (1998) closes the programme: an intriguing setting of a text by the composer which leads us back ingeniously to the beginning of the concert.
Conductor: Stephen Farr
Londinium reserves the right to change the programme and performers without notice.