Portland Chamber Music Festival opens with first-rate interpretations
PORTLAND – The Portland Chamber Music Festival, Aug. 11-20 at the Abromson Center at the University of Southern Maine, began rather tamely Thursday night compared to programs featuring contemporary composers. But the interpretations, as usual in the 18 years since the festival's founding, were informed and first-rate, with not a little virtuosity.
The program began with a pleasant, if inconsequential, Sonata in C Major, Op. 3, No. 3 for two violins, by Jean-Marie Leclair, played by Min-Young Kim and Frank Huang.
Full of ornamentation and rapid passage work, it requires virtuoso performers with a knowledge of French baroque style. Both were in evidence, plus a rapport that kept the part exchanges lively and individual.
I was intrigued by the opening adagio section, which for some reason of harmonics, or differences in texture between the violins in unison, sounded like a giant harmonica.
Ralph Vaughan Williams never ceases to surprise. His "On Wenlock Edge," based on six poems by A.E. Housman from "A Shropshire Lad," reveals a quintessentially British composer using French impressionist techniques to set poems by a fellow countryman who combined classical Greco-Roman sensibility with Anglo-Saxon English.
All very cosmopolitan, but it works beautifully as music.
The work is full of passion and despair but also has moments of wry humor, as in "Oh, When I Was in Love with You." The dialog between a dead man and his successor, in "Is My Team Ploughing," is chilling.
Tenor John McVeigh did a masterful job with both rapid and gradual changes of mood and sang the poems more intensely than in most interpretations. He was ably supported by Dena Levine, piano, and a string quartet of Jennifer Elowitch and Miranda Cuckson, violins, Carol Rodland, viola, and Marc Johnson, cello. One could almost see the hills and valleys of England and hear the church bells in "Bredon Hill.
A Shropshire Lad Poet - News
His enduring popular reputation over the years is partly because of his ability to express emotions of a certain universally appealing kind (The Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since 1896) but also testifies to a remarkable style,
The book explores how although Housman had never set foot in Shropshire when he wrote his best known work A Shropshire Lad, it became a touchstone for notions of 'Englishness.' Porter said the book "promises to be 'a small masterpiece'; an expansive
His "On Wenlock Edge," based on six poems by AE Housman from "A Shropshire Lad," reveals a quintessentially British composer using French impressionist techniques to set poems by a fellow countryman who combined classical Greco-Roman sensibility with
A Shropshire Lad (unabridged)
, A.E. Housman recreates a nostalgic world of lost love, lost youth, thwarted friendships, unfaithful girls, male bonding, untimely death and the uncertain glories of being a soldier. The poems deal with the exuberance of youth – its aspirations and disappointments, its naïve certainties and tragic mistakes. Though written in 1895, it struck a chord with the generation of young men who fought in World War I. It was said that every ‘Tommy’ had a copy in his knapsack. It has never been out of print. Find out more about A Shropshire Lad was in fact not written in a rural retreat at all, but many miles from the ‘blue-remembered hills’, in Highgate, London. When he could not find a publisher, Housman had the collection privately printed in 1895. Though not an immediate success, by 1898 the melancholic and nostalgic tone of the poems had struck a chord with the Victorian public, who were feeling that the 1890s had marked the end of a glorious era, and the beginning of an uncertain future. Themes of lost love, lost youth and early death suited the Victorians’ inclination for morbidity exactly. But the theme of A Shropshire Lad that was to strike a chord with the next generation, so many of whose young men were to die on the battlefields of Flanders, was the militarism that recurs throughout the poems. Housman’s youngest brother Herbert had enlisted in 1889, and died in the Boer War in 1900. He was the model for the young men in Housman’s poems who become soldiers, recklessly seeking death and glory in war.
It was said that every ‘Tommy’ in World War I had a copy of A Shropshire Lad Terence is the ‘lad’, and is our guide through the narrative that loosely links his verses. He talks of the untimely deaths of other young lads, thwarted friendships, unfaithful girls, male bonding, of losing one’s sense of self in London, and the uncertain glories of being a soldier. Above all, the poems deal with the exuberance of youth – its aspirations and disappointments, its naïve certainties and tragic mistakes. An adolescent obsession with death overshadows the verses, and the death-count, whether by suicide, hanging, murder, or on the battlefield, is high. It appeals to young and old, and the collection has never been out of print.