1 July 2023, 7.30pm

Tickets

£20 General Admission, £15 Clare Hall members, £5 students and children – please purchase via Eventbrite:

Programme

• Grainger – Molly on the Shore (1907/11)
• Delius – Late Swallows (1916)
• Liz Dilnot Johnson – Tide Purl (2013)
• Jeremy Thurlow – Fantazia (2009)
• Jessie Montgomery – Strum (2006/12)
• Elgar – Piano Quintet in A minor, Op.84 – with Patrick Hemmerlé

Following on from the first half of our 5 February concert, we now devote a whole concert to, well, if not English composers, then English speaking ones! That embraces Jessie Montgomery from New York and Percy Grainger from near Melbourne – although he too eventually became an American citizen, but not before spending many years in the British Isles – busily collecting folk tunes (this one is from Cork). On the other hand, his dear friend and mentor Frederick Delius moved away from Bradford to Florida, and eventually to a quiet riverside village near Fontainebleau, where most of his greatest music was composed. That did not include his 1916 string quartet, written while exiled to England by the First World War. This exquisite tone poem in miniature is its slow movement, in which he gives vent to the nostalgia of his far away garden in France. It is deeply touching that Elgar – though never close to Delius – chose to visit the stricken composer there, towards the end of both their lives (they died within four months of each other, in 1934). However, the piano quintet of 1918 does share a certain nostalgia with the expressivity of his future friend: ‘…it is strange music, I think I like it, but it’s ghostly stuff’ (to be revealed on 1 July…). Finally, into the present century, we find both Montgomery and Thurlow dancing energetically: she explains the title of her increasingly popular work, ‘The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece’. Jeremy’s Fantazia was the third of the four pieces he has written for us (so far…): ‘In this little [tribute to Henry Purcell] I have taken as my starting point the vigorous dancing rhythms of [his] allegros’. Finally, one of our dearest composer friends (dating back to 1998), Liz’s Tide Purl is a characteristically delicate evocation of ‘the play of light on sand as river water flowed onto the beach one evening at Druidstone in Pembrokeshire’.