To judge by the last three concerts before the Christmas break, the Lunchtime Series is at the moment on something of a roll. All three in very different ways succeeded in producing an hour’s music full of delight. The last of the three, given by Nicholas Daniel, oboe, and Antonio Oyarzabal, piano, largely featured, on the centenary of her birth, the music of the 20c English composer Madeleine Dring, a name that had hitherto escaped me, though, as I will explain later, I must have heard some of her music in my youth. The programme suggested that her musical voice was distinctive enough to warrant an attention which in her life-time and in particular afterwards it has not had, despite the efforts of her husband, the famed Roger Lord, principal oboist of the London Symphony for many years.
Well, by the end of the concert I found myself very much in agreement with the suggestion that her music was at the very least worthy of attention. I warmed to it firstly because it was highly accomplished yet without any obvious pretension. There was no suggestion that it aimed at being groundbreaking. Instead of that bane of some contemporary music in which the pretentious and sometimes obscure title of the piece aims to convince the hearer of the music’s depth before a note has been heard and when heard fails all too often to connect the title to the music, the titles of these short pieces told one exactly what in musical form the ear was to hear and left the music to do its work. That the music which reached the ear was self-evidently a product of the title, was beautifully written yet conveying a quirky personality assured one that there was enough variety to make the hour slip by. It was hugely refreshing to hear music that did not pretend to be earthshaking but in recognizing its compass ironically provided a profound pleasure not to be found sometimes in the supposedly deep.
In character with the music, it is perhaps not really appropriate to solemnly attempt to assess each short piece in detail. I have a number of scribblings on the programme which I think will convey the pleasure given by many moments in the music and will communicate the blithe character of the concert as a whole. Of Three Piece Suite I noted its bounding start,its wit, I found the ending of the second movement Romance magical and the finale had me writing ‘jolly and playful’. In Danza Gaya, a Cuban dance, the response was particularly to the beguiling lilt of the playing and in an equally short piece that followed entitled Valse Francaise I thought how expertly the composer captured the atmosphere of melancholy sometimes to be found in French Impressionist music. That ability to capture the atmosphere of various styles was also abundantly evident in Mazurka and in Three Pieces -Tango , Sarabande WibWaltz +Italian Dance which brought the concert to a thoroughly rousing and virtuosic finish by two great artistes who played as if fully believing that this was music very much deserving of attention. And I am not about to disagree.
I have deliberately left to the last any comment about the two other works which made up the concert, Madelaine Dring’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s In the Still of the Night arranged further by Nicholas Daniel for oboe, and the one work on the programme not by her, Vaughan William’s Six Studies in English Folk Song. In regards the first, the programme notes awakened me to the fact that I must have heard some of Madelaine Dring’s music in my youth since she was active in the theatre. My parents loved musicals and revues and the family not infrequently found itself in a London theatre in the 1950s listening to same, such as Kiss Me Kate, Airs on a Shoestring and Flanders and Swann. The first needs no further comment but in the latter two there were songs of considerable quality, sometimes of penetrating satire, which should not be forgotten.
The Vaughan Williams, though, raised thoughts of a rather different compass, firstly because this caused me to ponder the nature of genius and the way even it can fail to be appreciated as it should be. I happened to read an article last week that, noting the absence of twelve-tone music in concert programmes these days, declared that we now live very much in a post Schoenberg era and that composers who were sneeringly denigrated in the middle of the last century for their interest in folk music, referred to on one occasion as cow pat composers, are right back in the limelight. Indeed, one shudders to think of what would have been lost had musicians and collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Holst , Bartok and others not saved for posterity this priceless music of the people. Perhaps, the greatest legacy, though, lies in the music of some of those very same collectors which opened up and continues to open up for composers sources of inspiration arguably much more fruitful than those of the supposed revolutionaries of the 20c. Nothing could have illustrated that more vividly than Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folk Song. In a performance of incandescent beauty Nicholas Daniel, this time on the cor anglais, and Antonio Oyarzabal gave the audience an unforgettable experience with which to ring down 2023.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 