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Andrew Barratt

Musical Director

 

Soloists for
Our Next Concert

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FY8 3NQ

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If you regularly attend our concerts then you will be able to make considerable savings on the cost of tickets over a season by becoming a Patron. For details, or to become a Patron, Please contact Hilary Bradshaw

Patrons save £1 on tickets for each concert
(a saving of over 15%).

MUSIC SCORES FOR HIRE

Haydn Paukenmesse
(100 copies)
Haydn Nelson Mass
(100 copies)
Faure Requiem (100 copies)

Please email Phyllis Taylor
for details.

COMPOSER BIOGRAPHIES

Benjamin Britten1913-1976

After two hundred years with no major composer to speak of, English music, beginning with Sir Edward Elgar, has enjoyed a great renaissance through the 20th century. At the centre of the admirable talent stands Benjamin Britten. While Elgar and Vaughan Williams wrote mainly for the concert hall, Britten concentrated more on vocal music and especially opera. Britten had a way of subtly distorting familiar harmonies and rhythms, so that they sound strangely but attractively new. From opera and song to concerto and string quartet, nearly all of his music grips the ear and the imagination in this same fascinating and quite haunting way.

Benjamin Britten was born on 22 November, 1913, in Lowestoft, Suffolk. Britten was a child prodigy. He wrote his first music at the age of four. In 1924 he began his formal music studies with composer Frank Bridge, and by the time he was twelve he had composed a dozen large-scale works. In 1930 he entered the Royal College of Music in London, and by the age of twenty-one he was self-supporting as a composer, chiefly from writing film-scores and incidental music for radio plays. The sensational success of his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge at the 1937 Salzburg Festival clinched his reputation.
In his early twenties he was a member of a group of left-wing intellectuals centred on the poet W.H. Auden. These left-wing views were based on a conviction that the 'ideal state', where everyone would be well cared-for and happy, lay just around the corner. Britten's ideals were brutally shattered by the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism.

In 1939 Britten took flight, first to the USA, then to a fishing village on the Suffolk coast, where he finally settled. It is impossible to overestimate the effect on his character of this crushing of his youthful optimism: throughout this life he preferred isolation to public fame, and his work consistently shows an anguish at the dark side of human nature, a pessimism paralleled only in Mahler and Shostakovich. The opera Peter Grimes written toward the end of War World II, is a prime example of this. An international audience immediately hailed Peter Grimes as a masterpiece. This piece, together with the operas and other works that followed, all written in his own dramatic, yet simple style, put Britten in the front rank of English composers and made him one of the few to attract a world-wide audience.

Another key to Britten's work is his understanding and love of poetry: Inspired by the shape and sound of words, Britten shares Schubert's ability to penetrate to the heart of a poem in a handful of ordinary-seeming notes. In addition to his composing, he was a perceptive and inspirational pianist and conductor.

In spite of the major heart surgery in 1973 that reduced Britten's activities, he was the first musician to be made a life peer of the British Empire (partially in recognition of the annual festival of music he established and supported in Aldeburgh, Suffolk). Benjamin Britten died in Aldeburgh on 4 December, 1976.

Karl Jenkins

Karl Jenkins was born in Wales and educated at Gowerton Grammar School before reading music at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He then commenced postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music, London.

It was in jazz that he initially made his mark. In those days of ‘Jazz Polls” he was a prolific poll winner, playing at London’s famous Ronnie Scott’s club before co-forming Nucleus, which won first prize at the Montreux jazz festival and appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival, Rhode Island.

This was followed by a period with Soft Machine, one of the seminal bands of the 70’s. Through many incarnations, ‘Softs’ defied categorization playing venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall, the classical ‘Proms’ at the Royal Albert Hall, the Reading ‘Rock’ Festival.

In the field of advertising music he has won the prestigious D&AD award for best music [twice], the ‘Creative Circle Gold’ and several ‘Clios’ [New York] and ‘Golden Lions’ [Cannes]. Credits include Levi’s, British Airways, Renault, Volvos, C&G, Tag Heuer, Pepsi as well as US/global campaigns for De Beers and Delta Airlines and Bafta ‘gongs’ for his scores for the documentaries The Celts and Testament.

After this period as a media composer, his return to the music mainstream was initially marked by the success of the Adiemus project. Adiemus, combining a classical base with ethnic vocal sounds, ethnic percussion and an invented language, topped classical and ‘pop’ charts around the world, gaining 17 gold or platinum album awards while performing in Tokyo, Madrid, London, Helsinki, Munich etc.

The Armed Man; A Mass For Peace, commissioned by the Royal Armouries for the millennium and premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, London has had over four hundred performances recent years while the CD, featuring the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, has gained “Gold Disc” status in the UK.

Works include the harp concerto ‘Over The Stone’ commissioned by HRH the Prince of Wales for the Royal Harpist, Catrin Finch, the concertante, ‘Quirk’, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Sir Colin Davies as part of its 2005 centenary season, Tlep written for virtuoso violinist Marat Bisengaliev and based on Kazak themes and In These Stones Horizons Sing, featuring Bryn Terfel, Catrin Finch with the WNO Orchestra & Chorus which was premiered at the Royal Gala opening of the Welsh Millennium Centre in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen.

In the summer of 2005 he scored the feature film, River Queen starring Kiefer Sutherland & Samantha Morton, the soundtrack of which won the Golden Goblet award for best score at the Shanghai Film Festival

Recent CD releases include Requiem, which went to No1 in the UK classical charts, “Kiri Sings Karl” with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. and This Land Of Ours, a musical celebration of Welsh culture featuring the Cory Band [winners of the 2007 British Open Championship] and the male choir, Only Men Aloud. Stabat Mater was released by EMI Classics on March 9th prior to the premier at Liverpool Cathedral on March 15th, while Quirk, a collection of concertos, will be released on Oct 4th 2008.

Karl has been subject of the ITV South Bank Shows by Lord [Melvyn] Bragg as well as being a ‘castaway’ on ‘Desert Island Discs’.

In 2004 he entered Classic FM’s ‘Hall of Fame” at no 8., the highest position for a living composer and has been the highest placed living composer since, as well as, in 2006, no. 4 amongst British composers.

Karl holds a D.Mus [Doctor of Music] degree from the University of Wales, has been made both a Fellow and an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, where a room has been named in his honour, and has fellowships at Cardiff University, the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Trinity College Carmarthen, Swansea Institute and was presented by Classic FM with the ‘Red f ‘award for ‘outstanding service to classical music’

He was recently awarded an honorary doctorate [music] from the University of Leicester, the Chancellors Medal from the University of Glamorgan and two Honorary visiting Professorships, one at Thames Valley University/London College of Music and the other at the ATriUM, Cardiff.

He was awarded an OBE, by Her Majesty The Queen, in the 2005 New Years Honours List “for services to music”.