LESSONS FROM THE PAST - Online Programme

Welcome to tonight's concert

Thank you for joining us at Kings Place for this, our first in-person concert since the coronavirus lockdown. We are delighted to return to live music-making with this world premiere performance of a London Sinfonietta commission, featuring two of our long-term collaborators, Luke Bedford and Mark Padmore.

The London Sinfonietta is proud to return to live concert giving, and online events in June and July which includes 8 world premieres, 4 concerts with audiences, 5 online events and an commission performed with the power of cyclists. We are both championing new music and addressing the way society is now as it emerges from the lockdowns of the pandemic and faces up to the future of climate change.  We are – like all arts organisations – excited about the prospects of playing to audiences again and producing new music events which are relevant to contemporary society.  

We hope you enjoy this concert, and that you'll join us at our future performances.

Andrew Burke
Chief Executive and Artistic Director

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The London Sinfonietta is grateful for the support of the Arts Council of England which significantly invests in the work of the organisation. This concert is supported by The Golsoncott Foundation and presented with the friendly support of The Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation. In the Voices of the Living is a London Sinfonietta commission, supported by Britten Pears Arts and a generous group of individual supporters.  

Programme Notes

Peter Warlock / The Curlew (1920-22)

The first version of The Curlew was performed in 1920 and consisted of five settings of poems by WB Yeats. In 1922, in Wales, Warlock reconsidered the work. He dropped the original third and fourth songs, substituting the present long and complex third song. It was published in this revised form in 1922, receiving an award from the Carnegie Trust. 

The substantial introduction opens with the cor anglais giving out the cry of the curlew, taken over by the viola. This is followed by the rocking theme on the strings also used in the Serenade. The flute then has the peewit’s call, with its many repeated notes. After a brief climax the rocking theme returns, then a cello solo leads into the first song. This passionate outburst is succeeded by a short interlude based on the introductory material. The second song is self-contained; it appeared in both versions of The Curlew, and was probably written about 1916. After the next interlude, a recitative for cor anglais and some development of the rocking theme, comes the new song, a setting of Yeats’s The withering of the boughs, with three strongly contrasted verses, each ending with the words which could be considered the core of the cycle: ‘The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams’. 

The final interlude is dominated by chords built up from piles of fourths, and more flute calls. This leads into the last song, virtually unaccompanied, until the viola ends the work with a modified inversion of the cor anglais opening phrase, subsiding onto an empty, hopeless, bare fifth with the cello. 

Michael Pilkington © 1997, courtesy of Hyperion Records Ltd 

I. He reproves the curlew

O Curlew, cry no more in the air, 
Or only to the water in the West; 
Because your crying brings to my mind 
passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair 
That was shaken out over my breast: 
There is enough evil in the crying of wind. 

II. The lover mourns for the loss of love

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, 
I had a beautiful friend 
And dreamed that the old despair 
Would end in love in the end: 
She looked in my heart one day 
And saw your image was there; 
She has gone weeping away. 

III. The withering of the boughs

I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds, 
'Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will, 
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words, 
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.' 
The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill, 
And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams. 
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; 
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. 

I know of the leafy paths [that] the witches take, 
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, 
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake; 
I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind 
Wind and unwind their dances, when the light grows cool 
On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams. 
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; 
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. 

I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round 
Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly. 
A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound 
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind 
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by; 
I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams. 
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; 
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. 

IV. Interlude 

V. He hears the cry of the sedge 

I wander by the edge 
Of this desolate lake 
Where the wind cries in the sedge: 
`Until the axle break 
That keeps the stars in their round, 
And hands hurl in the deep 
The banners of East and West, 
And the girdle of light is unbound, 
Your breast will not lie by the breast 
Of your beloved in sleep.' 

Charlotte Bray / Midnight Interludes (2010)

Written to sit alongside ‘Midnight Closes’, my song cycle for soprano and piano, these three short pieces take inspiration from the Thomas Hardy poems set. Small fragments from the songs were used as starting points in the composition of each piece. 

I    ‘A minute more…’ 
II   Indecision
III  ‘… do I dare?’ 

© Charlotte Bray 

Luke Bedford / In the Voices of the Living (2017-19)

It begins and ends with Shakespeare. 

When first working on this piece, I spent some months trying to set some of the primary sources connected to his life. It was only when, by chance, I read Stephen Greenblatt’s words, which now make up the opening song, that the true focus of the piece became clear. I would find a series of texts, all concerned with how the past speaks to us, and how we speak with the voices of the past. This desire to speak across the centuries, and the simultaneous clear-eyed knowledge of its impossibility, creates the emotional charge of the piece. 

So following Greenblatt, we have Petrarch, writing in 1338, on how his books speak to him across time and space. And, importantly for us today: how fragile books are; how knowledge and culture can so easily be lost. The third song is a short sentence from Joyce’s Ulysses on the irreversibility of time. Then some fragments from Leopardi, who was writing in the nineteenth century about the first unearthing of ancient classical texts in centuries. And in the fifth and final song, a text created from Shakespeare’s words. These fragments were assembled from a search for the phrase "after the” in his works. There is a sense of aftermath here, but without an easy resolution. 

From early on, I knew that I wanted this to be an intimate piece. The finished work is for tenor and six instruments, made up of three pairs: violin and cello; flute and clarinet; piano and harp. The only additional instrument is the bass flute, whose low, haunting tone appears in the odd-numbered movements. 

I finished the work in May 2019, and had no idea that its premiere would be delayed by an event that meant almost all live culture was abruptly stopped for over a year. I feel humble that my work will be one of the first compositions premiered in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. And hope its theme of the voices from the past, and the fragility of culture in the present, will speak to you, the audience. 

© Luke Bedford

I

I began with the desire to speak with the dead. 

If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. 

Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespearean Negotiations

II

Quos michi de cuntis simul omnia secula terris
transmittunt…

Et multa canunt…

Limen aperture
Convictumque petunt…
Dum frigida cedant
Nubila, Pyeria studiorum estate reversa.

They come to me from every century and every land.
Sometimes they sing for me.

They ask but for a home. 

Till the clouds are gone, and the Muses rule again.

Petrarch, Letter to Giacomo Colonna, 1338. Translated by E.H. Wilkins

III

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

James Joyce, Ulysses

IV

E perchè tanti 
Risorgimenti? In un balen feconde
Venner le carte…

O scopritor famoso, 
Segui.

Why all these resurrections? Suddenly the pages wake and speak.

O famed discoverer, continue. 

Leopardi: Ad Angelo Mai. Translated by Jonathan Galassi

V

After the storm
After the moon
After the night’s shade

After the flesh
After the taste
After the slaughter

After the play
After the songs
After the last enchantment

Assembled from Shakespeare
 

London Sinfonietta Players

Karen Jones flute/bass flute
Melinda Maxwell cor anglais
Timothy Lines clarinet
Jonathan Morton* violin
Elizabeth Wexler violin
Paul Silverthorne* viola
Tim Gill* cello
Helen Tunstall* harp
Elizabeth Burley piano

*London Sinfonietta Principal Players

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