On Thursday we learned the sad news of the passing of Ronald Corp, a much-loved conductor and composer. Ronald’s worth to The London Chorus, where he was musical director for 30 years, can be felt in the warmth of the tribute on their website
Below is a link to a Tidal playlist including a number of Ronald’s colourful recordings for Hyperion and Epoch. For the former he recorded works by Satie and Milhaud that have aged incredibly well, and he was also responsible for a renewed interest in British Light Music – all through albums made with the New London Orchestra. In addition he showed his prowess as a composer through premiere recordings of his Piano Concerto no.1 and Symphony no.1 released by Epoch. The symphony appears at the end of the playlist:
Petroc Trelawny (orator), The London Chorus, New London Orchestra / Adrian Brown
Vaughan Williams Six Choral Songs (1940) Martinů Memorial to Lidice (1943) Walton Spitfire Prelude and Fugue (1942) Bliss Morning Heroes (1929-30) Holst/Rice I Vow to Thee My Country (1921)
Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, London Thursday 9 May 2025
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
The London Chorus and New London Orchestra have put on notable concerts in recent years, few more ambitious than this programme to mark not merely the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day but also the 50th anniversary of Sir Arthur Bliss’s death in appropriate manner.
The first half comprised an unlikely but effective sequence of pieces written at the start of or during the Second World War. Rarely revived as such, Vaughan Williams’s Six Choral Songs to be Sung in Time of War works well as a whole: settings of Shelley that touch on aspects of courage, liberty, healing, victory, then pity, peace and war – before A Song to the New Age characterizes its utopian leanings in subdued and even ambivalent terms which seem typical of its composer. Suffice to add that the London Chorus had the full measure of its aspiration.
Two succinct if otherwise entirely different pieces brought out the best from the New London Orchestra. Rarely so overt in emotion, Martinů was well-nigh explicit when commemorating Nazi atrocities in music of plangent harmonies and chorale-like fervency both evocative and affecting. Derived from his score to the film The First of the Few, Walton had come up with a showpiece whose ceremonial prelude is vividly countered by its incisive fugue – making way for a brief if poignant interlude before matters are brought to a head in the rousing peroration.
Although intimately bound up with the First World War, Morning Heroes is wholly apposite for the present context. Conceived as the exorcism of his wartime experiences, Bliss’s choral symphony elides deftly between a distant past and its present; the first of its five movements featuring an orchestral introduction to set out the underlying mood and salient motifs, before Hector’s Farewell to Adromache had Petroc Trelawny eloquently evoking that scene on the ramparts of Troy without excess rhetoric. Adrian Brown’s understated direction meaningfully pointed up the expressive contrast between this and The City Arming – the setting of Walt Whitman whose interaction of chorus and orchestra was powerfully sustained right through to the simmering unease at its close, with the onset of hostilities in the American Civil War.
The two parts of the central movement saw each section of the London Chorus come into its own: the women in Vigil, a confiding take on lines by Li-Tai-Po (Li Bai) such as relates the emotions of those left behind; and the men in The Bivouac’s Flame, plangently evoking life at the front with further lines from Whitman’s Drum Taps. Choral forces reunite in Achilles Goes Forth to Battle, a setting from later in The Iliad which brings about the work’s climax via The Heroes – a rollcall commemorating those of Antiquity. After this, the starkness of Wilfred Owen’s Spring Offensive is the greater for its sparse accompaniment – Trelawny’s oration a model of understatement as this segued into the setting of Robert Nichols’s Dawn on the Somme with those ‘morning heroes’ themselves evoked affirmatively if fatalistically.
A concert which ended in fine style with Holst’s stirring anthem had begun in subdued fashion with Dawn on the Somme – Ronald Corp’s elegy, given hours after his death was announced. Someone who had always given his all to this chorus and orchestra, he will be greatly missed.
Amy Carson (soprano), Harry Jacques (tenor), Christopher Purves (baritone), The Bach Choir, Philharmonia Orchestra / David Hill
Delius The Song Of The High Hills (1911) Blackford La Sagrada Familia Symphony (2022, world premiere) Walton Belshazzar’s Feast (1931)
Royal Festival Hall, London Thursday 8 May 2025
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Pictures (c) Chris Christodoulou
This imaginative concert presented three British works telling stories from overseas, their reach extending to Norway, Spain and Babylon respectively.
Although born in Bradford, Frederick Delius spent much of his life abroad, living in America and then France – from where he would visit Norway for many a summer holiday with his wife. One such vacation in 1911 inspired him to write The Song Of The High Hills, a continuous sequence in three sections for wordless choir and orchestra capturing the mountain plateau, or ‘vidda’, that they found on their walks. Images from the plateau were shown on a screen behind the chorus as they performed.
Musically the work draws from Grieg and Debussy (his Nocturnes in especially) but inhabits a world all of its own, Delius achieving an unusual, rapt stillness when describing the high plains. David Hill, a long time exponent of his music, marshalled a strong performance, albeit one that didn’t quite sustain the rarefied atmosphere of the central section. It did cast quite a spell, mind, thanks to a beautiful oboe solo from Timothy Rundle on the approach, and some superbly controlled singing from The Bach Choir, headed by soloists Amy Carson (soprano) and Harry Jacques (tenor). The climax of the middle section was bolstered by three timpani, before the orchestra returned us to base camp. Speeds were on the fast side, but the Philharmonia Orchestra gave consistently luminous textures.
London-born composer Richard Blackford has shown considerable flair when writing for orchestra, and this was immediately evident in the world premiere of his La Sagrada Famila Symphony. Completed in 2022 and already recorded on the Lyrita label, it is a musical response to a 2019 encounter with Gaudí’s vision, concentrating on three great facades of the building – Nativity, Passion and Glory.
Blackford’s symphony was rich in colour but also vividly descriptive, his responses matched by an accompanying film, directed by the composer. Nativity began with awe-inspiring salvos from the brass but grew into a more intimate study, with elements of Hindemith and Berg in the orchestral writing, before a propulsive passage threw off the shackles. Passion was the emotional centrepiece, a vivid study in the brutality of the Good Friday story. Grotesque elements were emphasised by sudden closeups of Josep Maria Subirachs’s sculptures, their drawn expressions reflected in the music. The death of Christ was especially notable, marked by a solo of moving eloquence from cellist Martin Smith, then a sharp cry of dismay from Mark van de Wiel’s clarinet.
Glory was less obviously jubilant than might have been expected, mystical and reverent, but again it was an accurate response to the imagery as the film briefly went inside the massive structure. Blackford’s imagery danced in the listener’s mind on its own merits, with the thrilling surge at the end, bolstered by the organ, reminiscent of Messiaen or Scriabin. David Hill secured a fine performance from the Philharmonia, bringing the splendour of Gaudí’s cathedral to the concert hall. The emphatic finish brought with it a reminder of the building’s likely completion in 2026, a mere 144 years after construction began!
A British choral classic followed in the second half. Belshazzar’s Feast was initially denounced by Sir Thomas Beecham (a Delius fan, coincidentally) but Walton’s cantata has become a popular occasion piece. It is a vivid account of Babylonian decadence, before a human hand appears, writing on the wall of the banqueting hall to prophesy Belshazzar’s downfall. David Hill applied expert pacing to the storytelling, the Bach Choir on top form as the tension grew, spilling over into the exultant Praise Ye section. The paeans to the Babylonian Gods were starkly thrilling, contrasted by the terrifying unison shout of “Slain!” at Belshazzar’s death. The Philharmonia were superb, too, offstage brass bringing widescreen sound from either side of the stage and the percussion giving brilliant descriptions of the elements – iron and wood especially.
When the writing on the wall began, an ominous hush descended on the choir, the orchestra spreading a macabre chill through the hall – before the triumph of the closing pages, the Israelites free at last. Baritone Christopher Purves was a fine soloist, narrating the events and capturing the mood throughout. With 220+ in the choir, our ears were ringing long after the concert had finished, a timely reminder of a ruler whose inflated ego had brought about his downfall. Could there be any parallels in today’s world, I wonder?
Weinberg String Quartet no.14 in B flat minor Op.122 (1978) Weinberg String Quartet no.15 in G flat major Op.124 (1979-80) Shostakovich String Quartet no.14 in F sharp major Op.142 (1972-3)
Wigmore Hall, London Tuesday 6 May 2025
by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Marco Borggreve
Quatuor Danel’s interrelated cycle of string quartets by Shostakovich and Weinberg reached its penultimate stage this evening, and a programme with two of the latter composer’s most oblique such pieces heard alongside what is the most accessible of the former’s late quartets.
Second in a quartet of quartets written in the years after Shostakovich’s death, Weinberg’s Fourteenth Quartet continues straight from the sombre equivocation of its predecessor. Its five continuous movements never progress systematically as lurch forwards from an edgily austere first movement, by way of a moodily impassive successor, then on to a scherzo and intermezzo that are not so much elusive as gnomic in character; prior to a finale where any attempt at overall synthesis gradually subsides to leave only the wanly resigned conclusion. An ending, moreover, whose fatalism feels the more dismaying as it withdraws into virtual silence, as if Weinberg’s self-communing may well be a defence or even escape. As with its successor, his replacing tempo headings with metronome markings only abets obfuscation.
The Fifteenth Quartet might appear relatively less stark in outcome yet is certainly the most radical of all these works in formal design. Its nine mainly brief movements are interpretable in various ways – but a speculative sonata design is implied by the aggressive ‘development’ of the central three movements as framed by respectively angular and thrusting ‘transitions’; surrounded in turn by a two-stage ‘exposition’ of almost secretive inwardness which is itself balanced by a ‘reprise’ whose incrementally more direct expression facilitates that eventual, albeit tenuous sense of closure. Other approaches are entirely plausible, though there was an undeniable culmination imparted to those middle movements as the Danel steered its secure course through this fascinating if always disconcerting instance of Weinberg’s later maturity.
After such obliquities, the seeming directness of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Quartet was the more affecting, though nothing should be taken at face value at this stage of its composer’s creativity. Allusions to earlier works (his own and others) abound and while the presence of serial elements is reduced next to its predecessors, sparsity of texture ensures a distanced or remote feeling even when this music is at its most active. As is true for most of the opening Allegretto, its lilting poise increasingly fitful as it nears a regretful if still inquisitive close.
By contrast, the central Adagio finds this composer at his most inward and confessional; its content allotted for much of its course to first violin and cello, so affording an austerity into which the eloquence of the ‘Angel Serenade’ by Gaetano Braga is a reminder Shostakovich was at time considering an operatic treatment of Chekhov’s story The Black Monk. The final Allegretto initially brings a more impetuous discourse, but this elides seamlessly into a coda whose pale radiance essentializes the work’s home key in a leave-taking of acute poignancy.
As always, the Danel gave its collective both here and in those miniatures which served as a welcome encore: two pieces from Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, arranged for string quartet by Sergey Samsonov with a sensitivity for those piano originals as was nothing if not idiomatic.
You can hear the music from the concert below, in recordings made by Quatuor Danel -including their most recent cycle of the Shostakovich quartets on Accentus:
InFiné have been extending their reach with a clutch of interesting digital compilations of late, including Club InFiné and InFiné Rewind 2024.
The French label is largely known for its experimental strands, but they have a far musical reach – as this cosmopolitan ambient collection shows.
What’s the music like?
The mix immediately reaches its goals through the soft beats of Murcof and the beautiful sounds of Brian Eno refracted through the piano of Bruce Brubaker, whose take on Music For Airports 2/1 will soothe any fevered brow. The same can be said for Vanessa Wagner’s piano, Struggle For Pleasure viewed through the hazy viewfinder of GAS.
There are some long form ambient epics here too, in the form of Gaspar Claus with the slightly disquieting Inside, and an epic take on Carl Craig’s At Les from Abul Mogard. Elsewhere Loscil takes the slowly oscillating piano of Murcof x Wagner’s Avril 14th (Aphex Twin), opening it out in timeless widescreen. The track leads seamlessly into Cubenx’s Human Dilemma.
Does it all work?
It does indeed, especially when experienced as a 13-track whole. As a bonus, if you visit the compilation’s Bandcamp page you get helpful biographies of all the ambiently inclined InFiné composers and musicians.
Is it recommended?
Very much so. InFiné know exactly what they’re doing with this compilation, providing aural balm whenever the listener needs it.
Arcana.fm 