The English Music Festival will be in celebratory mood as it launches its tenth Festival with the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Martin Yates on Friday 27th May 2016 at Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire, with World Premières by Paul Lewis, David Matthews, and Vaughan Williams’s Fat Knight; the orchestral suite from his opera, Sir John in Love, realised by Martin Yates.
According to musicologist and author Lewis Foreman, to achieve performances of his opera, Sir John in Love, Ralph Vaughan Williams assembled a variety of extracts and suites. The suite Fat Knight was notated in two-piano score but never completed in full score, it consists of seven movements, largely taken from the orchestral music from the score (though including some music that was cut from the opera but retained or brought back for this suite). As in the opera, it is notable for its use of folk songs.
“Possibly originally intended for a two-piano play-through, it became in effect a set of instructions for realising what Martin Yates has now completed, explained Lewis Foreman, incorporating the orchestration from the opera full score.”
Of the three Norfolk Rhapsodies, written by Ralph Vaughan Williams between 1905-06, the third, although performed at the time, was subsequently lost. Tantalisingly, W.A. Morgan's programme note for the premiere in Cardiff in 1907, gives a detailed description and it is this which has lead David Matthews to reconstruct what is now entitled Norfolk March. Taking the form of a quick march and trio, four folk songs which were Vaughan Williams's inspiration are used in the piece: 'The Lincolnshire Farmer', 'John Raeburn', 'Ward the Pirate' and 'The Red Barn'.
"At first carefree, there are echoes of war with a grim funeral march and a 'last post', deliberately recalling the trumpet solo in the Pastoral Symphony, his own First World War statement", says David Matthews. The work was commissioned by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society with support from the RVW Trust and the John S Cohen Foundation.
In keeping with the ethos of making lost British music available to everyone, the four-day Festival programme contains a selection of suitably celebratory audience favourites and premières and will also feature performances of the complete extant music by composer George Butterworth, on the centenary of his death, in conjunction with Radley College on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th May.
The main evening concerts in Dorchester Abbey feature visits from the English Symphony Orchestra who will perform the Double Concerto by Percy Sherwood; the City of London Choir who perform Elgar Part Songs and Bliss’s Pastoral; Lie Strewn the White Flocks, and The Bath Philharmonia who debut at the Festival with a greatly anticipated first performance of Paul Carr’s Violin Concerto performed by Rupert Marshall-Luck.
Other visitors to the Festival include the award-winning Jaguar Land Rover Brass Band, and there will be intimate song and chamber recitals performed by Richard Jenkinson and Benjamin Frith, Richard Edgar-Wilson and David Owen Norris and Kathryn Rudge and James Baillieu, with some concerts including Shakespeare-themed works celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death.
A number of informative talks complete this year’s programme. A convenient mini-bus transfer is available to/from Didcot train station, Dorchester-on-Thames and other Festival venues.
Tickets are now available via the website and on the door subject to availability. For further information and to see the full programme, visit the Festival's website.
Pre-concert talk: 5pm Dorchester Village Hall: Aims, origins and successes of the EMF with Founder-Director, Em Marshall-Luck.