Past Events

CV Stanford The Blue Bird
Edward Elgar There is sweet music
R Vaughan Williams Silence and Music
Herbert Howells The Summer is Coming
R Vaughan Williams Bushes and Briars
R Vaughan Williams The winter is gone
James MacMillan The Gallant Weaver
Percy Grainger Brigg Fair
R Vaughan Williams The Turtle Dove
Jonathan Dove Who killed Cock Robin?
Percy Grainger The Three Ravens
Benjamin Britten The Evening Primrose
Peter Warlock All the flowers of Spring
Edward Elgar Owls (An Epitaph)
R Vaughan Williams Rest

“The object of my music is not to entertain, but to agonise … it is the contrast between the sweet and the hard that is heart-rending.” Percy Grainger

This moving sequence explores that vast 20th century secular English choral repertoire which goes under the generic title ‘part-songs’. Buried amongst vast quantities of slightly twee pastoralism – the much-derided ‘cow-pat’ school – are to be found many settings of glorious poetry, forming a corpus of sublime 20th century madrigals at least as fine as their famous renaissance forebears. At the heart of these is the complex relationship between man and nature, the bitter-sweetness of a radiant and beautiful dawn creating the same unbearable sadness of a ravishing song, both with intimations of sublimity and mortality.