Brighton Festival Chorus, with Brighton Festival Youth Choir, Arcadian Ensemble, conducted by James Morgan
Friday July 1st 2016, 7.30pm All Saints Church, The Drive, Hove, BN3 3QE
Brighton Festival Chorus presents a concert to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, including works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Herbert Howells, Tarik O’Regan, Hubert Parry, and Francis Purcell Warren.
It is believed that 133,000 British men died during the first Battle of the Somme, including 20,000 on the first day alone. A generation of British composers born between the 1870s and 1890s died in the Great War, including Francis Warren, who was reported missing on 3rd July 1916. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1910, where he became a firm friend of Herbert Howells. Warren enlisted as a private in September 1914 and was subsequently commissioned as an officer in March 1916, three months before his death.
The concert opens with Warren’s setting of Ave Verum, written in 1912 when he was 17 years old. A bfc member will then read a speech given by Hubert Parry in memory of Francis Warren at the RCM. Howells’ Elegy for viola, string quartet and strings was also written in memory of his young friend. The first half programme is interspersed with poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and William Noel Hodgson, who died at the Somme on July 1st, 1916.
There is an interesting link between the next composer featured and Sussex. The programme continues with Parry’s Jerusalem, written in 1916 whilst living in Rustington. This is followed by Elgar’s Give unto the Lord, written on the eve of the Great War in 1914. Brighton Festival Youth Choir will conclude the first half with a performance of Tariq O’Regan’s And There Was a Great Calm, inspired by the text of Thomas Hardy’s poem on the signing of the Armistice in 1918 .
The second half of the concert features Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem. Vaughan Williams was married in All Saints Church in 1897. He enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914 at the age of 42. He joined a Field Ambulance unit and served as a stretcher-bearer during the Somme offensive, a highly risky and grim role. Dona Nobis Pacem is a compilation of movements written at different times in the composer’s life, unified by a symphonic conception. It was written as a prayer for peace in the light of the threat from Nazi Germany suggesting the likelihood of a second world war. Its message resonates through to the present century.
Tickets: £20, £15 and £5 for students and under 16s available Dome Box Office, 01273 709709, or www.brightonticketshop.com
