London Consorts of Winds

How to get there

• Edward Elgar - Serenade
• Antonin Dvorak - Legends 5, 8, and 10
• Sergei Rachmaninov - Vocalise
• Gordon Jacob - Wind in the Reeds
• Giles Brindley - The Four Temperaments
• Bela Bartok - Two Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm
• Alan Taylor - Voices
• Guillaume Machaut - Messe de Nostre Dame
• Josquin des Pres - Missa Pange Lingua
• Giovanni Palestrina - Pope Marcellus Mass
• Cedric Peachey - Fugal Fantasia
• Martin Read - ...no full legal advice - world premiere
• and more

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Programme Notes

Although not formally published until 1892, the Serenade is believed to be a reworking of a suite Elgar had written some years earlier, before he had firmly set his sights on a career as a composer. Apart from the Wand of Youth suites, it is therefore probably the earliest of his compositions to survive into the standard repertoire. Certainly, it has a youthful charm while at the same time displaying indications of the skills Elgar developed as he progressed towards musical maturity. It is reportedly the first of his compositions with which he professed himself satisfied.

The opening bars of the first movement will be familiar to most, particularly to listeners to a classical music station which uses it as introductory music. It is however the central Larghetto which is generally accepted as containing the finest and most mature writing. The work remains among the most frequently performed of all his music.

Dvorak was born in 1841, the son of the local butcher and publican in Nelahozeves. His exceptional musical gifts were recognised, and he studied in Prague from the age of 16, soon earning his living in the Czech National Theatre Orchestra, under Smetana's direction. Dvorak received the Austrian prize for composition and Brahms, one of the adjudicators, encouraged him and became a personal friend.

He first visited England many times between 1884 and 1896. He spent three years (1892-1895) in the USA, as director of the new National Conservatory in New York. Back home, Dvorak then became director of the Prague Conservatoire.

Dvorak's Legends have the opus number 59 which places them early in the 1880s. The Legends are full of a warmth and mellowness that speaks of a composer enjoying his maturity. Like the Slavonic Dances, the Legends were originally for piano duo, and were orchestrated by Dvorak himself. Graeme Kay has arranged the Legends for double wind quintet with contra bassoon. He has used Dvorak's own orchestration as a guide to tone colours.

Vocalise was the last of a set of 14 songs, Op.34, written by Rachmaninov in 1912 for voice and piano. Uniquely, it is wordless - a pure melody, unfolding at rapturous length over gently shifting harmonies. It's been transcribed for every imaginable solo instrument and is a wonderful reminder of just what a gifted miniaturist Rachmaninov was, aside from his epic symphonies and concertos - and how expressively he could shape a long melody. A haunting, indefinable mixture of radiant contentment and aching melancholy, "Vocalise" is a song in which words would truly be superfluous.

Gordon Jacob is one of the foremost composers of wind music in this country. This suite of pieces is in four movements: March, Humoreske, 'A Childhood Memory', and 'Ballet Russe'. It was commissioned by the British Federation of Music Festivals and first performed in Harrogate in 1993.

This piece consists of a 16-bar quotation from the 2nd movement of Schoenberg's first strictly serial work, the Wind Quintet Op.26, followed by four variations on it, representing the four temperaments. The theme is played twice. The first variation, Melancholy, is serial. The second, Choleric, is based on the harmonic minor scale with sharpened subdominant. The third, Phlegmatic, is serial. The fourth, Sanguine, is successively in the Phrygian, Lydian and Aeolian modes.

Bela Bartok began writing easy piano pieces for his son Peter around 1933 which eventually grew into his celebrated collection of piano studies Mikrokosmos. The final pieces in the set are not for beginners, however, culminating in the "Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm" featuring unfamiliar time signatures such as 2+2+2+3/8 and the like. Tonight we are going to hear versions of numbers three and two (in that order) played without a break. Dance three contrasts flowing folky motifs with declamatory fanfare-like material and dance two opens with a chugging rhythm (in seven) announced on the horns, alternating with spiky melodies and rushing scales.

The piece is based on a shifting drone consisting of two chords of a different character superimposed on one another, broken by sudden exclamations. The exclamations each use all the pitches found in the drones, and their rhythms are taken from the vocal rhythms of the words of torture victims describing their ordeals.

The words used are those of victims of torture in China; Rwanda; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Cameroon; Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq; and Iran. Most of the words were found on the web site of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.

Kyrie II and III, Agnus Dei

These are extracts from the earliest recorded musical setting of the Mass by one composer. Written in a way which draws on the stark beauty of plainchant, but using the new resources of harmony opened up a hundred years earlier by the development of musical notation.

Kyrie, Christe, Kyrie II

Josquin des Pres was recognisd as the leading composer of the early sixteenth century. His music draws on the Flemish and northern French traditions, and firmly established melodic imitation between the voices - heard clearly in the opening movement of the mass based on the plainchant Pange Lingua - as a fundamental method of constructing polyphonic music.

Kyrie, Christe, Kyrie II, Agnus Dei II

In the late sixteenth century the leaders of the Catholic Church were gathered for a Council at Trent in Italy, to purge the abuses which had grown up in the church and fight back against the Protestant Reformation. It was said that they might ban polyphonic music such as this. Palestrina certainly wrote this mass for the event, and it is said that, on hearing its beauty and clarity of word setting, they relented. The Mass was written for six voices. We will be playing an arrangement of three of the best known sections of the Mass.

This piece was originally written for a saxophone quartet. At the invitation of Stephen Penton, the piece has been arranged for clarinet septet. In doing so, the work has been partially re-written and expanded to achieve better pace and overall balance. The musical language is tonally ambiguous, building on and varying a sequence of three semitones, with frequent appearances of tritones and other dissonant intervals. Fugal imitation provides the energy and drive as the piece moves to its conclusion through sharp changes of mood and tempo.

...no full legal advice was written for the Southwark Consort of Winds. During the performance, fragments of an article - which appeared in The Independent newspaper on 11 March, 2005 with the headline Iraq war revelation: There was no full legal advice, together with fragments of another article - Iraq war is blamed for starvation - which appeared in The Guardian newspaper on March 31, 2005, are muttered by the players.

The main building blocks for the piece are i) the juxtaposition of three modes - dorian on F, mixolydian on Ab and aeolian on F. All three modes share most of the same notes [a pentatonic scale on Ab], however what colours each mode - and creates the tension in the piece, is the use of either Db or D and either Gb or G. This can be seen at the outset in the introduction, with alto saxophone and bass clarinet sometimes playing one note and then changing it in the next phrase; & ii) the fact that we 'like to belong'. The instrumental ensemble has been divided into three groups, each with an identity. Individuals can often be influenced by others - to a greater or lesser degree, or they never change.