Events 2016
The 2016 Annual Lunch was held at the Ellenborough Park Hotel, Cheltenham on Monday 25 January and was attended by forty two members and friends, including our President, Ian Venables.
English Music Festival On Saturday 29 May, members and friends from Cheltenham travelled by coach to Dorchester-on-Thames to hear an evening concert in the Abbey. where the City of London Choir and the Holst Orchestra were conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton. A wonderful performance of Bliss’s Pastoral: Lie Strewn the White Flocks was enthusiastically applauded by the audience as the conductor waved his score aloft. An extra bonus was the afternoon talk on the life and achievements of Ivor Gurney given by our President Ian Venables.
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The AGM Concert was held on Saturday 9 July at St. Andrew’s Church, Cheltenham. Pianist Maria Marchant’s programme by British composers included the Bliss Triptych, Holiday Diary (Britten), Peter Grimes Fantasy (Stevenson), Toccata (Holst) and Caprice (Venables). A pre-concert talk was given by Andrew Burn (Chairman of the Bliss Trust) on the music to come in the afternoon’s programme. Roger Jones’s detailed review of the concert for Seen and Heard International can be accessed by clicking HERE.
Maria Marchant’s own insights on the selection of works for her recital were in the Autumn Newsletter: she opened her performance with Britten’s Holiday Diary with its “startling onomatopoeic descriptions”, followed by Stevenson’s Peter Grimes Fantasy, a “kaleidoscopic palette of sonority” in its evocation of Peter Grimes. Then: “Given that we were in Cheltenham, Holst’s Toccata was a must, with its witty interpretation of Newburn Lads that he heard played on a hurdy-gurdy”. The next work, Caprice Op 35 (Venables), she found to be “an intricate tapestry of suspensions”; Ian Venables was in the audience that afternoon and, for Maria, meeting the composer was a “highlight” of the occasion. She chose the Bliss Triptych, a “triple art form with the persuasive central ‘dramatic recitative’… one of my [Maria’s] favourite Bliss moments”, as the climax of the recital, and admitted that she “couldn’t resist playing Bliss’s One Step… the most cultural interpretation of the Punch and Judy Ball at the Savoy” as the encore.
The audience enjoyed her delightful well-chosen performance.
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