Always the highpoint of the festival, this year’s Royal Platinum Jubilee Gala concert opens with the Festival Te Deum by Ralph Vaughan Willams, a composer whose 150th birthday we celebrate this year. This dazzling work was written in celebration of of coronation of King George in 1937. Worcester-based composer Ian Venables has proved a worthy successor to Sir Edward Elgar, and his Song of the Severn is a poignant celebration of the natural wonders of Elgar Country. The concert sees the launch of the new Elgar Festival Chorus for a performance of Elgar’s powerful Spirit of England, and concludes with his brilliant tone poem, In the South.
Vaughan Williams – Festival Te Deum
Elgar – Spirit of England
– Elgar Festival Chorus
– April Fredrick, soprano
Ian Venables – Song of the Severn (world premiere)
– Marcus Farnsworth, baritone
Elgar – In the South
Ian Venables studied composition with Richard Arnell at Trinity College of Music, London and later with John Joubert, Andrew Downes and John Mayer at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Described as ‘Britain’s greatest living composer of art song’ (Musical Opinion) and ‘a song composer as fine as Finzi and Gurney’ (BBC Music Magazine), Venables has written over 70 works in this genre, including eight song-cycles. Beyond the world of art song he has written many chamber works that include a Piano Quintet Op. 27 and a String Quartet Op.32, as well as smaller pieces for solo instruments and piano. His most recent choral work is a Requiem, which has been recorded by both Gloucester Catheral Choir and Merton College Choir Oxford, the latter in its orchestral verion. Venables is President of the Arthur Bliss Society, a Vice-President of the Gloucester Music Society, Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society and an Honorary Fellow of Exeter University. His music is published by Novello and Co and has been recorded on the Regent, Somm, Signum, Naxos and Delphian labels. For further information about his music please visit www.ianvenables.com or www.wisemusicclassical.com
Hailed as ‘astonishing and luminous’ (Bachtrack), soprano April Fredrick grew up in rural Wisconsin and trained first as a violinist before studying voice at the University of Northwestern St Paul in Minnesota. She went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where she gained an MMus in Vocal Performance and a PhD on the late songs of Ivor Gurney, singing with the Historical Performance department under Laurence Cummings, premiering works by Academy composers, and frequently appearing as part of the Lyric Song Salon.
Her first two discs on the SOMM label, of Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Copland 8 Songs of Emily Dickinson with the Orchestra of the Swan and Earth’s Call, John Ireland songs with pianist Mark Bebbington, have been described as full of ‘humane and vulnerable’, with ‘creamy timbre and velvet strength’, (MusicWeb), where ‘not the slightest distance can be felt between her and the texts’ (Gramophone).
Other recent performances include Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Symphony 4 with the Warsaw Philharmonic, the world premiere of Philip Saywer’s Songs of Loss and Regret with the English Symphony Orchestra (forthcoming on Nimbus Records) in Hereford Cathedral, and Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder with the Blackburn Symphony Orchestra.
Ian Skelly is a well known voice on BBC Radio 3, having presented every daytime show on the station, from Breakfast and the mid-morning show, Essential Classics, to the Drivetime programme, In Tune. He now presents the afternoon show, Afternoon Concert from 2 each day.=
He also presents live concerts for Radio 3 from all the big concert venues in the UK and is one of the voices of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall each Summer.
He is also a filmmaker and writer and, for nearly two decades, has worked very closely with HRH The Prince of Wales, helping him articulate the detail of his ideas. As well as countless speeches, articles and video messages, he is the co-author of the Prince’s book Harmony, which set out the Prince’s integrated vision. The book led to them making a major documentary produced in Hollywood for NBC Television that was also shown in cinemas in the USA.
Ian has written and produced many documentaries on the arts and music for Radio’s 3, 4 and the BBC World Service, and has made documentary films in the UK, Canada and in the Middle East. He began his career as a reporter and news presenter for the BBC, spending a very happy three years at one point working not far from Worcester, in Shropshire which gave him a lifelong love of this part of the world.
