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Vaughan Williams: Anniversary Concert
11 May 2008
The Dome, Brighton
Gerald Finley, baritone
Catherine Wyn Rogers, mezzo-soprano
Matthew Brooke, bass
Sarah Fox, soprano
Gillian Keith, soprano
Brighton Festival Chorus
City of London Sinfonia
Conducted by Richard Hickox
Vaughan Williams:
· Overture: The Wasps
· Toward the Unknown Region
· Songs of Travel (orchestral version)
with Gerald Finley
· Riders to the Sea (concert performance)
with Catherine Wyn Rogers - Maurya
Matthew Brooke - Bartley
Sarah Fox - Cathleen
Gillian Keith - Nora
Concert to be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 at 7.00pm on Wednesday 14 May 2008
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/performanceon3/pip/c71f9/
What the critics say
Simon Lancaster, The Argus, 13 May 2008
In his lifetime, Ralph Vaughan Williams's folk-inflected oeuvre was damned as "cowpat music". Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, he is firmly established as England's favourite composer, thanks to the endearing prettiness of works such as The Lark Ascending.
For all that, Vaughan Williams has a dark side - he lived through two world wars - and so it was that Richard Hickox and his City of London Sinfonia presented a tribute that went from light to utter blackness.
After The Wasps overture, a sprightly Edwardian romp, baritone Gerald Finley performed Songs Of Travel with a sense of open-hearted naivety that these poems about love and the open road in a time before Kerouac require.
The mood became darker when the Brighton Festival Chorus joined the orchestra for a high-voltage rendering of Towards The Unknown Region.
But in the second half, the one-act opera based on JM Synge's Irish tragedy Riders To The Sea, Catherine Wyn-Rogers banished pretty thoughts as she movingly portrayed a mother whose only surviving son is drowned.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 13 May 2008
Richard Hickox is certainly doing his bit to mark the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's death. Next week, he embarks on a cycle of the symphonies with the Philharmonia - and, for this evening, he took his own orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, down to the Brighton festival for an all-VW programme that included a concert performance of Riders to the Sea, his one-act opera from the 1920s.
Based on J M Synge's play, it is a study in Irish misery; a bleak, unforgiving portrait of life in the Aran Islands at the turn of the 20th century, and of the stoicism of one matriarch - who loses all the male members of her family to the sea - in the face of all that life can throw at her. The gloom is sustained with restraint and a musical economy that has no place for extravagant vocal gestures, and puts a great expressive emphasis on lonely solo woodwind lines. Hickox certainly relished all that detail and his cast, headed by Catherine Wyn-Rogers' understated and eloquent Maurya, with Gillian Keith and Sarah Fox as her surviving daughters, was a good one - even if their Irish accents sometimes came and went.
Earlier, the Brighton Festival Chorus had made its contribution with the Whitman setting Toward the Unknown Region, an early transitional work with stylistic roots in Stanford and Brahms, while Gerald Finley was the soloist in Songs of Travel. So much about Finley's singing was utterly outstanding - the easy, perfectly measured delivery; the even, honeyed tone - that a tendency to sing just under the note stood out all the more oddly, though Hickox's accompaniments were always models of stylistic correctness.