back to programme
| Morning |
To be announced |
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| Afternoon |
12pm Lunchtime concert NZ Trio Scintillatum
2pm ICOS Children's workshop in the Public Hall
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| Evening |
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'Façade' and 'A Soldier's Tale'
Ben Palmer conducts an ensemble from the Orchestra of St Paul's in this performance of both pieces.
Katie Derham and Richard Baker are the two reciters in 'Façade' at the Festival on Friday 2 August, the second of the two works presented on the same programme. The Cygnet Theatre Company performs in 'The Soldier's Tale' and the instrumental ensemble for both works is conducted by Ben Palmer.
Richard Baker began broadcasting for the BBC in 1950. He introduced the Last Night of the Proms for 32 years and has often compered the New Year Concert from Vienna . Richard read BBC television news for 28 years, hosted Start The Week on BBC Radio 4 for 17 years and has often commentated on the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall.
Richard presented Melodies For You for on BBC Radio 2 for several years and became the presenter of Radio 2's Your Hundred Best Tunes in 2003 following the death of Alan Keith. The final Your Hundred Best Tunes was broadcast on 21 January 2007. Richard has also presented regular weekly programmes on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, the latter including These You Have Loved and Baker's Dozen . Richard is also well known for his appearances on BBC 2's Face The Music .
Richard Baker received the Newscaster of the Year award on three occasions, and in 1984 was the Variety Club's Radio Personality of the Year. In 1979, he was awarded the OBE for services to broadcasting.
Katie Derham
Cambridge graduate Katie began her career in radio before moving on to television and she is currently Media and Arts editor and newsreader for ITV News, presenting the Lunchtime News and London Tonight.
Before going to ITN, Katie Derham researched, edited and presented radio programmes at the BBC as well being a consumer affairs correspondent on TV and a reporter for Film '96 and 'Film '97.
Katie Derham was an arts correspondent for ITN before becoming the youngest-ever newsreader on British national television at just 27.
Katie Derham also presents The Hall Of Fame Concert on Classic FM.
Ben Palmer is the conductor and musical director for the two productions this evening. He is Musical Director of the Orchestra of St Paul's (Covent Garden from whom the ensemble comes), Bartholdy Chamber Orchestra and the Manchester-based Sturm und Drang Chamber Orchestra. Recent engagements include concerts with Sinfonia of Cambridge (Mahler Symphony No.1 and Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto No. 3 with Matthew Trusler), Cheltenham Symphony Orchestra (Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 and Dvorák Cello Concerto in Tewkesbury Abbey), Vox Cordis (Mozart Requiem) and Forest Philharmonic Orchestra (Elgar The Dream of Gerontius ). His opera experience includes performances of Le nozze di Figaro for Birmingham University Summer Festival Opera, and The Rake's Progress and Die Zauberflöte for Dartington Festival Opera. He has conducted orchestral concerts throughout the UK and in Hungary, Germany, Poland, the Seychelles and a two-week tour of China as assistant conductor to the Amadeus Orchestra. He is also in demand as a choral conductor and is Musical Director of Kingston Orpheus Choir, South West Essex Choir and The Syred Consort.
Ben Palmer conducts two works, first 'L'Histoire du Soldat' (Stravinsky) and then 'Facade' (Sitwell/Walton). Firstly Façade:
Façade
Edith Sitwell
Music by William Walton
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)
Composition :
The original Façade was begun in late November and December 1921. An initial version was ready for performance in January 1922, but Walton continued to add, revise, and discard numbers for many years. All of the numbers had been composed by 1927, though revisions still continued. Only 21 numbers were incorporated into the definitive version of Façade in 1942. Walton revised several of the remaining numbers for performance in 1977, under the title Façade Revived . In spring 1978, Walton made extensive changes, re-titling the work Façade 2 .
First Performances :
First performance, Façade Revived :
Friday, 25 March 1977. Plaisterers' Hall, London. Richard Baker reciter , Sir Charles Mackerras conductor .
First Performances :
First private performance :
Tuesday, 24 January 1922. Edith Sitwell reciter , Robert Murchie flute , Haydn Draper clarinet , Herbert Barr trumpet, Charles Bender percussion , Ambrose Gauntlett cello , William Walton conductor . The Sitwell home, 2 Carlyle Square, London
First public performance :
Tuesday, 12 June 1923. Edith Sitwell reciter , Robert Murchie flute , Haydn Draper clarinet , F. Moss saxophone , Herbert Barr trumpet , Charles Bender percussion , Ambrose Gauntlett cello , William Walton conductor . Aeolian Hall, London.
First performance, definitive version :
Friday, 29 May 1942. Constant Lambert reciter , William Walton conductor . Aeolian Hall, London.
| Fanfare |
instrumental |
| 1. |
Hornpipe |
[Sailors come] |
| 2. |
En famille |
[In the early springtime, after their tea] |
| 3. |
Mariner Man |
[What are you staring at, mariner man?] |
| 4. |
Long Steel Grass |
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| 5. |
Through Gilded Trellises |
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| 6. |
Tango-Pasodoblé |
[When Don Pasquito arrived at the seaside] |
| 7. |
Lullaby for Jumbo |
[Jumbo asleep!] |
| 8. |
Black Mrs. Behemoth |
[In a room of the palace] |
| 9. |
Tarantella |
[Where the satyrs are chattering] |
| 10. |
The Man from a Far Countree |
[Rose and Alice] |
| 11. |
By the Lake |
[Across the flat and the pastel snow] |
| 12. |
Country Dance |
[That hodnailed goblin, the bob-tailed Hob] |
| 13. |
Polka |
['Tra la la la la la la la la!'] |
| 14. |
Four in the Morning |
[Cried the navy-blue ghost] |
| 15. |
Something Lies beyond the Scene |
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| 16. |
Valse |
[Daisy and Lily] |
| 17. |
Jodelling Song |
[We bear velvet cream] |
| 18. |
Scotch Rhapsody |
[Do not take a bath in Jordan, Gordon] |
| 19. |
Popular Song |
[Lily O'Grady] |
| 20. |
Fox-trot |
[Old Sir Faulk] |
| 21. |
Sir Beelzebub |
[When Sir Beelzebub] |
Dedication :
"to Constant Lambert"
Igor Stravinsky : The Soldier's Tale (L'Histoire du Soldat)
The story of Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for riches, power, youth wisdom - the legend takes various forms - strikes resonances in every heart. Underlying it is the Biblical text, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" In real life, it is not so much a matter of gaining "the whole world" as of the day-to-day decisions when we are tempted to compromise between ideals and ease or expediency - to do something that instinct says is not quite right (though it may not be very wrong) for the sake of quick reward. Stravinsky's lifelike Faust - the Soldier in ‘The Soldier's Tale' - is closer to our everyday experience than the heroic Faust of Marlowe and Goethe. HE is not vastly ambitious. He is not faced with one tremendous decision - to barter his fiddle, to have a go at winning the ‘Princess', to gamble away his remaining cash, to cross a forbidden frontier and see his mother again - almost casually. He gets good advice (from the Narrator) and gets bad advice (from the Devil). He gets cheated. It seems almost unfair that, at the end, the Devil should win.
But then ‘The Soldier's Tale' is not a cut-and-dried, consistent allegory. (“Do not forget,” Bernard Shaw once wrote, “that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty.”) The story was distilled from Alexander Afanasiev's collection of Russian tales, which had been the source for several other Stravinsky works. One of them was ‘Renard', composed in 1916 – a twenty-minute dramatic piece for fifteen players, four singers, and “clowns, dancers and acrobats.” It was not staged until 1922. ‘Renard' was a smaller work than the big-orchestra ballets that preceded it, but it was still unwieldy. Stravinsky's thoughts turned to something more practicable.
IN 1918, he was in Switzerland, cut off by the Great War from his Russian family estates and the royalties of his Russian publishers. The Diaghilev Ballet, which did his ‘Firebird', ‘Petrushka', and ‘Rite of Spring', was stranded in Lisbon, without a prospect of further engagements. In a discussion with the Swiss writer C.F.Gamuz (who had made French versions of Several Stravinsky texts), an idea occurred: “Why not do something quite simple? Why not write together a piece that would need no vast theatre or large public? Something with two or three characters and a handful of instrumentalists.” And ‘The Soldier's Tale' came into being.
Stravinsky translated Afanasiev stories about soldiers and the Devil to Ramuz (who knew no Russian), and the scenario was worked out between them. Eventually, the collaborators decided on four characters: actors for the Soldier, the Narrator, and the Devil, and a dancer for the Princess. There would be only seven instrumentalists: representatives of high and low woodwinds, brasses, and strings (clarinet and bassoon, cornet and trombone, violin and double-bass) and a percussionist. Stravinsky bought a set of drums and learned to play them. The staging would be simple: a tiny stage raised on a central platform (the original one, Stravinsky said, was about the size of two armchairs), with the Narrator seated on one side of it and the band on the other.
It would be a compact, portable show, easy to tour. The first performance, conducted by Ernest Ansermet, was given in the Lausanne Municipal Theatre in September 28th, 1918, and it was a success. But the proposed tour had to be dropped: the participants one after another succumbed to the post-war epidemic of Spanish flu. In London in 1920, Ansermet conducted the concert suite that Stravinsky had extracted from the piece, but ‘The Soldier's Tale' was not staged again until 1924. That year, it was produced in several cities: Berlin, Paris (by Diaghilev), Frankfurt, and Weisbaden (conducted by Klemperer) among them. Ever since then, the performances have been frequent, and ‘The Soldier's Tale' remains as fresh as ever. Every young stage director, every enthusiastic music-theatre ensemble wants to tackle it.
It is worth recalling some of the things that went into its making. One was a dream: Stravinsky dreamt of a young gypsy sitting by the roadside and playing a fiddle to her child with long sweeps of the bow. On waking, he recalled the motif she played, and used it in the ‘Little Concert' section (played by the Soldier after he regains his fiddle); the score includes the instruction “with the full length of the bow.” Another was a memory: of standing in a street in Seville with Diaghilev and listening to a “bullfight” band – cornet, trombone, and bassoon – playing a ‘pasodoble' (a lilting Hispanic dance). Then a big band came blaring down the street and drowned out the little one. This lies behind the ‘Royal March'.
There are Lutheran chorales: There is a tango – a sexy dance that was becoming popular in Switzerland. And there is jazz: Stravinsky had never heard any jazz, but Ansermet had come back from an American tour with some sheet music, and from it Stravinsky – in the ‘Ragtime' and ‘The Soldier's Tale' – imagined what it might sound like. From folk tales (which are mirror of human experience), from dreams and memories, from diverse musical sources that span the ages, an inspired work was created – international, timeless. Its masterly economy, conciseness, and precision have made it unfading. It can be enjoyed and re-enjoyed on many levels – for its tunes, its bright instrumental colour, its cunning formal structures, and its curiously moving drama. They all work together. The piece gets under its listener's skin. On the simplest level, the fiddle represents the Soldier's soul and the percussion the machinations of the Devil. In the final number, ‘The Devil's Triumphal March', violin and percussion start out together. At the chilling close, the violin fades out, and only a dry drumming is heard.
Attribution to Andrew Porter
The Cygnet Theatre, based at the New Theatre, Exeter, is an ensemble company training professional actors and supplies the actors for this production; with Alistair Ganley, Adam Barfield and Harvey Robinson. The producer is Mary Evans. The dancer is Sylvie Pinder-White.
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Lunchtime Concert: NZ Trio Scintillatum
Winners of the ROSL Arts international competition this last year
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At Otterton Mill
On Saturday 2 nd August the Mill is proud to host a visit by Christene Le Doux , the outstanding American songstress. Christene hails from Austin, Texas and her haunting brand of country/folk music is redolent of that rich, hot desert country. Her gorgeous voice has often been compared to that of the late Eva Cassidy and her songs, mostly self penned, capture a rare depth of emotion.
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