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Programme Notes for the 2006/2007 Season

Anton Bruckner
(Te Deum)
Concert date : Saturday 18 November 2006

Anton Bruckner was born in the small rural town of Ansfelden, Austria, in September 1824.   His initial musical training came from his father who was a schoolmaster and organist in the local church, the young Anton deputising for his father on the organ by the age of 10.   His strong Catholic upbringing and faith were to be major influences on his composing but did little to prepare him for the reaction he would get later in life.

His musical abilities soon drew him to Vienna, Austria’s political and cultural capital where his dedication to his art was something his Viennese contemporaries had difficulty grasping.   For them, music was as much about politics as it was about art.   For Bruckner, though, his world simply revolved around his faith and music.   In addition, he soon found himself at odds with the musical elite when he began to champion the musical talents of Richard Wagner, much to their disgust as they were opposing anything to do with Wagner and busily championing the music of Brahms.

Bruckner, therefore, often became a target for high-placed criticism simply by association and in some cases found his new compositions being dismissed even before they were performed, with bad reviews guaranteed.   And yet, just by listening to his music, it is clear that it has its own distinct and rich tapestry and bears little resemblance to Wagner’s style.   What he may have lacked in Viennese cultural and society connections were easily balanced by the magnitude of his composing, particularly his symphonies, which could only have been written with a mind that could grasp and manipulate extremely complex concepts.   Fortunately the level of politics in the music world today is nowhere near the level it was in Bruckner’s time and he can now be appreciated fully as a major contributor to the world’s musical heritage that he was.

Although his output was largely symphonic and orchestral, his religious upbringing played a significant role in influencing his choral compositions.   His Motets are sung by choirs of all sizes across the world and include such favourites as Locus Iste, Christus Factus Est, Ecce Sacerdos Magnus and Os Justi.   He also wrote a number of Masses, notably those in D minor and E minor.   His Te Deum, completed in 1884, is a wonderful showpiece combining his understanding of the art of choral writing with the skill of a strong orchestral accompaniment supporting the whole piece.

Anton Bruckner died in Vienna in 1896 before completing his Symphony No.9 which is why usually only the first three movements are performed in concert, although some scholars have attempted to reconstruct a final movement based on notes and sketches from Bruckner.

 

Karl Jenkins
(The Armed Man)
Concert date : Monday 24 November 2003 &
Saturday 18 November 2006

Born in 1944 in Wales, Karl Jenkins studied music at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and then at the Royal Academy of Music.   Like Bruckner, he received his initial musical training from his father, a schoolteacher and organist.   For a while he played oboe in the National Children’s Orchestra.

Although he is best known today for his classical music, it was the field of jazz in which he made his first mark.   A regular winner in various music polls at the time, playing in venues such as the famous Ronnie Scott’s club in London, he co-founded the jazz-rock group Nucleus with Ian Carr which went on to win the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1970.   He then went on to play in the progressive rock band Soft Machine during the early 70s with whom he won several awards and gained recognition within the rock world.

Jenkins established himself as a composer within the advertising industry on campaigns including those for Levi’s, British Airways, Renault, Volvo, De Beers, Cheltenham & Gloucester, Tag Heuer, and Pepsi, again being the recipient of several awards, notably the prestigious D&DB award for best music.   His breakthrough as a composer, however, came in the form of the innovative crossover project called Adiemus, from which spawned several albums, the first one being Adiemus : Songs of Sanctuary, released in 1994 and which went on to become a huge commercial success.   This was also used in advertising to great effect for Delta Air Lines.   One of the soprano voices used on many of the Adiemus albums was that of Mary Carewe who will be performing with the choir in the Christmas Classics concert with the RPO in December 2006.

Jenkins’ output since then has been extensive, stretching its reach to audiences all over the world.   Amongst it is a work that was commissioned originally by the Royal Armouries as a Millennium project, The Armed Man : A Mass for Peace, in memory of the victims of the Kosovo crisis.   In essence, it is an anti-war piece - much like Britten's War Requiem.   Although based loosely on the Christian setting of the mass and using the 15th century folk song L'homme armé as its root, it draws its texts from a wide variety of sources, including the Bible, Kipling, Swift, Tennyson, Malory, Dryden, the Hindu Mahàbharàta and even the Koran, in the form of a müezzin's call to prayer.   The whole work is a highly accessible piece of music which can be performed by music groups of all types and sizes.   This will be the second time that Wimbledon Choral Society has performed it, the first time being in partnership with Dulwich College in the Fairfield Halls, Croydon in November 2003, shortly after the vocal score had been published.

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams
(Serenade to Music)
Concert date : Saturday 18 November 2006

Looking at Vaughan Williams’ family tree reveals that Charles Darwin was a great uncle and his mother was the great granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood.   Following his father’s death in 1875, when the young Ralph was only three years old, his mother relocated the family from Down Ampney in the Cotswolds to the Wedgwood family home at Leith Hill Place on the North Downs.   Although born into a privileged and intellectual upper middle class environment, Vaughan Williams retained a strong belief in his democratic and egalitarian ideals and never took his background for granted.

Educated at Charterhouse and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, he went on to the Royal College of Music where he was taught initially by Charles Stanford and then studied composition with Hubert Parry, who was to become a close friend.   It didn’t stop there, though, and he spent further time with Max Bruch in Berlin and later learnt to develop his orchestral writing style whilst studying with Maurice Ravel in Paris, who is quoted as having said “… the only one of my pupils who does not write my music”.

Somewhat surprisingly, Vaughan Williams’ first publication (the song Linden Lea) wasn’t published until he was 30.  His working life at that time was a mixture of lecturing, conducting, editing music (notably editing and publishing the first edition of the English Hymnal in 1906) and a little composing.   He also loved collecting and editing English folk songs which became a life-long passion.   It wasn’t until around 1910 that his compositions started to get noticed by a wider audience after the acclaimed success of his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and A Sea Symphony (his Symphony No.1), the latter an astonishing choral work which captures in musical form both the power of sea tempests and the tranquillity of calm waters.   Wimbledon Choral Society is planning to perform this work in November 2007.

Even though his age and background could have meant avoiding war service, Vaughan Williams volunteered to serve in the Field Ambulance Service in Flanders for the 1914–1918 war, during which he was deeply affected by the carnage and the loss of close friends.   His compositions after the war took on a more mystical nature at first and then developed into a mature lyrical phase and it was during this period that he wrote the Serenade to Music, based on scene 5 of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and written for 16 soloists and orchestra.   It was written as a tribute to mark the 50th anniversary of the first concert of conductor Sir Henry Wood, both men to become Presidents of Wimbledon Choral Society at later dates.

Despite his substantial involvement in church music, and the religious subject-matter of many of his works, he was described by his second wife, the poet Ursula Wood, as "an atheist … [who] later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism."   There’s no doubting, however, that Vaughan Williams is regarded by many as having been on the top tier of Britain’s greatest composers.   In his lifetime, he eschewed all honours with the exception of the Order of Merit which was conferred upon him in 1938.   He died in August 1958 and his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcell.

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