Thursday 21 June, 7pm
St Giles-without-Cripplegate
Storm and Refuge
2019 Festival Programme
Words and Music
Voice and Verse
Thursday 20 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
A collection of treasured poems by authors spanning the centuries from William Shakespeare – who lived near St Giles - to Mary Coleridge, all set to music by equally beloved nineteenth and twentieth-century composers. The programme closes with Hubert Parry’s marvellous Blest pair of sirens with words by John Milton, whose 'harmonious sisters, Voice and Vers' from At a Solemn Musick give this concert its title. As the final chords fade away, spare a thought for the poet himself who lies buried in the crypt below.
Programme:
Finzi: My spirit sang all day (Robert Bridges)
Stanford: The blue bird (Mary Coleridge)
Sterndale Bennett: Come live with me (Christopher Marlowe)
Vaughan Williams: Three Shakespeare songs
Pearsall: Lay a garland (Beaumont & Fletcher)
Elgar: As torrents in summer (Henry Longfellow)
Vaughan Williams: Excerpts from Five mystical songs (George Herbert)
Britten: Rejoice in the Lamb (Christopher Smart)
Harris: Faire is the heaven (Edmund Spenser)
Elgar: The shower & The fountain (Henry Vaughan)
Parry: Blest pair of sirens (John Milton)
Artists:
City of London Choir
Richard Gowers, organ
Thomas Humphreys, baritone
Hilary Davan Wetton, conductor
Star Cross'd Lovers
Friday 21 June, 7.00pm (no interval)
Songs of true love and devotion by Campion, Dowland, Humfrey and Purcell performed with extraordinary purity of sound in the exquisite round of St Stephen’s Walbrook by renowned baroque specialist soprano Grace Davidson, accompanied by lutenist David Miller. With its circular, white marble Henry Moore altar bathed in the light of a lantern-like dome, this church provides one of the City’s most spectacular venues.
Programme:
John Dowland: Awake, sweet love, thou art return'd;
Come again, sweet love doth now invite
Thomas Campion: Never weather-beaten Saile; Author of Light
John Dowland: Preludium; The Frog Galliard
John Dowland: Now, oh now I needs must part; Come away, come sweet love
Anon: Miserere, my Maker
John Dowland: A Fancy; In this trembling shadow
Pelham Humfrey: Sleep downy sleep, come close mine eyes; Hymn to God the Father
Henry Purcell: Not all my torments; If music be the food of love; Sleep, Adam, Sleep, and take thy rest; An Evening Hymn
Artists:
Grace Davidson, soprano
David Miller, lute and theorbo
Mad Dogs & Englishmen
Saturday 22 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
From green, rolling hills to thrilling, historic London; from seaside to stage... this is a celebration of the peculiarly English way of life - and love. With music by composers including Henry Purcell, Noel Coward, Lennon and McCartney, Benjamin Britten, William Walton and Elton John; and words by T.S. Eliot, John Masefield, W.H. Auden, John Dryden, Don Black and William Shakespeare.
Programme:
William Walton / Traditional: Rhyme
A. Emmett Adams / Douglas Furber: The Bells of St Mary’s
John Ireland / John Masefield: Sea Fever
Traditional / Benjamin Britten (arr.): O Waly Waly
Ivor Novello / Dion Titheradge: And Her Mother Came Too
T. W. Connor: At My Time O’ Life
Lionel Monckton / Arthur Wimperis: Charming Weather
Sandy Wilson: I Could Be Happy With You
Andrew Lloyd Webber / T. S. Eliot: Gus the Theatre Cat
Noel Coward: Mrs Worthington
Noel Coward: Mad About the Boy
Noel Coward: London Pride
A London Scrapbook:
Stephen Sondheim: No Place Like London
John Williams / Leslie Bricusse: London Is London
Tony Scibetta / John Wallowitch: My Love Went to London
George Gershwin & Ira Gershwin: A Foggy Day
Carroll Coates: London by Night
Trad.: Greensleeves & Scarborough Fair
Benjamin Britten / Traditional: Oliver Cromwell
Benjamin Britten / W. H. Auden: Johnny
Nigel Hess / William Shakespeare: Feste’s Songs
George Shearing / William Shakespeare: Live With Me and Be My Love
George Shearing / William Shakespeare: Fie on Sinful Fantasy
Henry Purcell / John Dryden: Music for a While
John Lennon / Paul McCartney: Eleanor Rigby
Kate Bush: The Man With the Child in His Eyes
Elton John / Bernie Taupin: Your Song
John Barry / Don Black: Diamonds Are Forever
Anthony Newley / Leslie Bricusse: Who Can I Turn To? / What Kind of Fool Am I?
Noel Coward: Mad Dogs and Englishmen
Artists:
Mary Carewe, soprano
Michael Dore, baritone
Philip Mayers, piano
Shakespeare: Take Him For All in All
Sunday 23 June, 2.30pm
Walking Tour
Tickets £12 (concessions £9)
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
(Hamlet Act One, Scene Two)
While Shakespeare is the stuff of legend, he was in so many ways a typical Londoner. Though an incomer, he became part of the London scene; though he rarely wrote about London, his plays are full of characters and situations his fellow citizens would recognise from their own daily lives.
In fact, to explore the story of Shakespeare in London is also to appreciate an exciting time in the City’s development, a time of social advancement and international development, with London at the centre of England’s coming of age.
Choral Evensong: One Equal Music
Artists:
The Choir of St Bride's Fleet Street
Robert Jones - Director of Music
Matthew Morley - Organ
Programme:
Choral Evensong with Sermon in music
Responses: Smith
Psalm 57
Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis: Stanford in B flat
Hymns:
Who would true valour see (words: John Bunyan; tune: Monk's Gate, R. Vaughan Williams)
All my hope on God is founded (words: Robert Bridges; tune: Michael, H. Howells)
Sermon in Music:
At the round earth's imagined corners (words: John Donne; music: Hubert Parry)
Litany to the Holy Spirit (words: Robert Herrick; music: Peter Hurford)
Bring us, O Lord (words: John Donne; music: William Harris)
Let Us Garlands Bring
Monday 24 June, 6.45pm (no interval)
St Lawrence Jewry
Tickets £15
In the magnificent setting of Wren’s most lavish restoration - the church of St Lawrence Jewry - husband and wife musicians Thomas Humphreys (baritone) and Raya Kostova (piano) perform an evocative and romantic programme in this early evening concert. The five English composers were direct contemporaries (1870s-1960s) and in this recital we hear their magically lyrical settings of Shakespeare songs along with poems by some of our favourite poets, including John Masefield and Rupert Brooke.
Programme:
Includes:
Vaughan Williams Silent Noon (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Finzi Let us garlands bring; Five Shakespeare Songs
Quilter Blow, blow, thou winter wind (Shakespeare)
Ireland The Soldier (Rupert Brooke)
Ireland Sea Fever (John Masefield)
Artists:
Thomas Humphreys, baritone
Raya Kostova, piano
All The World's A Stage
Tuesday 25 June, 1.00pm (no interval)
Tickets £15
This perfect lunchtime concert offers immersive aural respite from the visual glare of the modern working day. The exciting young Italian pianist Nicola Losito performs a ravishing programme including two well-known ballet adaptations: Prokofiev’s own dramatic piano version of his ballet suite Romeo and Juliet and piano master Mikhail Pletnev’s version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. With a nod to Dame Myra Hess and friends’ famous capacity lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery held throughout the Second World War, Nicola also plays Hess’s own adaptation of Bach’s profoundly moving Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.
Nicola Losito is supported by the Keyboard Charitable Trust
Programme:
J. S. Bach/M. Hess: 'Jesus bleibet meine Freunde' BWV 147
Brahms: Ballade Op.10 No.1, 'Nach der schottischen Ballade: Edward'
Liszt: Après une lecture du Dante. Fantasia quasi Sonata, S. 161
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet Op.75
Tchaikovsky/Pletnev: The Nutcracker Suite
Artists:
Nicola Losito, piano
Echoes of Shakespeare I
Tuesday 25 June, 2.30pm
Walking Tour
Tickets £9 (concessions £7)
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18)
While Shakespeare referred in this most famous of his sonnets to the power of poetry to immortalise the beloved, the City of London itself bears a wealth of reminders to the presence of William Shakespeare. This tour explores a small part of the City which - with the help of readings - evokes the life and work of arguably the greatest writer in the English language. As his friend and contemporary Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, 'He was not of an age but for all time!'
Meet outside the entrance to St Giles, Cripplegate (at the Barbican Centre; nearest station Barbican). The tour will take approximately 90 minutes, and finishes near St Paul's Underground Station.
There is a second chance to take this tour on Thursday 27th June: Echoes of Shakespeare II
Beethoven: The Man Revealed
Tuesday 25 June, 6.45pm
Free admission
Writer and broadcaster John Suchet introduces the evening's concert with a talk on Beethoven the man: the complex, tortured, passionate man behind some of the greatest music ever written.
Beethoven Piano Concertos
Tuesday 25 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
St Giles Cripplegate provides the backdrop for this extraordinary opportunity to hear two of Beethoven’s majestic piano concertos in their arrangements for piano and string quintet. His last piano concerto, No.5 or 'The Emperor', is one of the piano repertoire’s most demanding but glorious works here performed by renowned French pianist Elizabeth Sombart.
Artists:
Elizabeth Sombart, piano
Principals of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Programme:
Beethoven Piano Concertos No. 1 and 5 (‘Emperor’) in the string quintet arrangement
Elégie: Rachmaninoff, A Heart in Exile
Wednesday 26 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
Programme:
Elégie: Rachmaninoff, A Heart in Exile by Lucy Parham
Artists:
Lucy Parham, piano
Tim McInnerny, narrator*
Capturing the Castle
Thursday 27 June, 1.00pm (no interval)
St Lawrence Jewry
Tickets £15
A lunchtime programme of evocative works for solo piano with eclectic literary connections. John Ireland's haunting portrait of Guernsey is laced with references to Pomponius Mela, Swinburne and Victor Hugo, while Robert Matthew-Walker conjures in music perhaps the greatest of all Shakespearean tragedies. Bach and Debussy are the soundtrack to growing up and falling in love in heady high summer for Cassandra Mortmain, heroine of Dodie Smith's coming of age classic, I Capture the Castle.
Artists:
Mark Bebbington, piano
Programme:
Egon Petri/JS Bach: Sheep may safely graze
Debussy: Clair de Lune
Debussy: Prélude ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’
Matthew-Walker: Piano Sonata ‘Hamlet’
Ireland: Sarnia - an Island Sequence
Echoes of Shakespeare II
Thursday 27 June, 2.30pm
Walking Tour
Tickets £9 (concessions £7)
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18)
While Shakespeare referred in this most famous of his sonnets to the power of poetry to immortalise the beloved, the City of London itself bears a wealth of reminders to the presence of William Shakespeare. This tour explores a small part of the City which - with the help of readings - evokes the life and work of arguably the greatest writer in the English language. As his friend and contemporary Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, 'He was not of an age but for all time!'
Meet outside the entrance to St Giles, Cripplegate (at the Barbican Centre; nearest station Barbican). The tour will take approximately 90 minutes, and finishes near St Paul's Underground Station.
Façade & Carnival of the Animals
Thursday 27 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
St Lawrence Jewry
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
Displaying a wonderful and vivid musical imagination, Saint-Saëns wrote his light-hearted suite Le carnaval des animaux in 1886 with an unusual scoring for two pianists, a sparse string section, glass harmonica and a xylophone. His imagined sounds from elegant swans, roaring lions, rattling dinosaur bones to a fishy pellucid underwater world are now often heard interspersed with the witty poems of Ogden Nash who wrote these companions to the music in 1949. By contrast, Edith Sitwell’s near nonsense poems entitled Façade: An Entertainment provided the starting point for William Walton’s accompaniments. The two are cleverly interwoven and performed together with the spoken words fitting amusingly over rhythm and melody.
Artists:
Samuel West and Rosalind Dobson, narrators
Ben Pope, conductor
London Mozart Players
Programme:
Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals
Walton: Façade - an Entertainment (words: Edith Sitwell)
A Midsummer Night's Serenade
Friday 28 June, 7.30pm (with interval)
Tickets £20 (includes interval drinks)
Fittingly, a veritable banquet of Shakespeare concludes the 2019 festival in this most special venue, his local church. In 1842, Felix Mendelssohn wrote the ravishing incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream which is here performed alongside words (excerpts in abridged form) spoken by the multi-faceted actor Tama Matheson, whom we also hear in Walton’s Henry V Suite.
Vaughan Williams adapts text from The Merchant of Venice for his Serenade to Music; fans of his composition The Lark Ascending will rejoice in his scoring, in particular the solo violin, but here with the added power of chorus, soloists and profoundly beautiful words:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Artists:
London Mozart Players
City of London Choir
Hilary Davan Wetton, conductor
Tama Matheson, narrator
Rebecca Bottone, soprano
Maya Wheeler-Colwell, mezzo soprano
Programme:
Walton: Henry V Suite
Finzi: Love’s Labours Lost
Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream