THE LARK ASCENDING

Ensemble 360

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Wednesday 5 February 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s 

Past Event
String quartet players of classical music group Ensemble 360, with their instruments

I HOLST Phantasy String Quartet (10’)
HOWELLS Phantasy String Quartet Op.25 (13’)
BRITTEN Phantasy Quartet Op.2 (13’)
PURCELL (transc. Warlock) Three-part Fantasias 1, 2 & 3 (8’)
BRAY Bluer Than Midnight (11’)
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (arr. Gerigk) The Lark Ascending (15’) 

The violin soars melodiously above the rest of the string quartet in the gorgeous, pared-back arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s most popular work The Lark Ascending, which concludes this concert featuring English music for oboe and strings. Fantasy is a thread – from the Baroque gems of Purcell’s Three-part Fantasias (arranged for string trio) to Imogen Holst’s Phantasy String Quartet and Britten’s Phantasy Quartet, a dazzling early work that sees the oboe in playful, exuberant dialogue with the strings. 

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HOLST Imogen, Phantasy String Quartet

Imogen Holst (1907-1984) composed her Phantasy String Quartet in 1928 (although it wasn’t premiered until several years after her death, in 2007). The piece typifies the composer’s early style, blending the English pastoral tradition with her own unique talents for melodic development, contrapuntal writing, and idiosyncratic quartet-textures. It won the Cobbet Prize – an award founded by the wealthy industrialist Walter Willson Cobbett to encourage composers to write ‘Phantasies’, works of one movement in the tradition of 16th and 17th-Century English ‘fancies’, ‘fantasies’, or ‘fantasias’. These were short instrumental works which, like Holst’s, did not adhere to strict forms but rather developed in their own imaginative and unexpected ways. Beginning with lush pastoral harmonies, Holst’s Phantasy transitions fluidly through episodes of meditative introspection and spirited energy. 

BRITTEN Benjamin, Phantasy Quartet in F sharp minor

Andante con moto – Allegro vivace – Andante con moto

Bridge had already been successful in Walter Wilson Cobbett’s competition to write a ‘Phantasy’ – Cobbett’s reinvention of the Elizabeth Fantasy as new single-movement chamber works – and in 1910 he (along with Vaughan Williams and others) was commissioned by Cobbett to compose a Phantasy Piano Quartet. It’s a work in a satisfying arch form based on free-flowing musical ideas all of which derive from the powerful opening gesture. Bridge’s most famous pupil, Benjamin Britten, wrote in a programme note for the Aldeburgh Festival about this piece. He described the music as ‘Sonorous yet lucid, with clear, clean lines, grateful to listen to and to play. It is the music of a practical musician, brought up in German orthodoxy, but who loved French romanticism and conception of sound—Brahms happily tempered with Fauré.’

Nigel Simeone 2013

PURCELL Henry, Three-Part Fantasias

Henry Purcell (1659–1695) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the Baroque era. Among his remarkable works is a series of Fantasias (or Fancies), composed in 1680 when Purcell was only 21 years old. Showcasing his profound skill with contrapuntal writing – in which each of the instrument’s melodic lines work both independently and as part of the musical-whole – the Fantasias are considered among the finest examples of the form and are regarded by many to be the ‘jewel in the crown of English consort music’. This wasn’t always the case, however. When Purcell composed these works, the Fantasia was quite unfashionable. King Charles II is said to have had ‘an utter detestation of Fancys’. Out of favour in the Royal court, Purcell’s Fantasias were therefore likely intended to be performed in domestic settings. Originally written for three viols, they are here transcribed for string trio (violin, viola, and cello). 

BRAY Charlotte, Bluer than Midnight

The modernist abstract painter Yves Klein writes about his work L’aventure monochrome: ‘Blue has no dimensions. It exists beyond all dimensions, whereas other colours all have a dimension. They are psychological spaces… All colours are associated with concrete, material and tangible ideas, but blue recalls, if anything, the sea and the sky, the most abstract elements of touchable and visible nature.’ 

The title of the quartet is taken from Ezra Pound’s Canto CX: 

“waves under blue paler than heaven 

over water bluer than midnight” 

Both sources merged to form the inspiration behind Bluer than Midnight, a piece which explores a close connection with nature, its abstraction and simplicity. A slow, intimate first movement reflects this. Intensely quiet, the movement feels timeless with pulse suspended. Melodic and flowing, a duet-based central movement is the most narrative part of the piece. The third movement is alive and buzzing with nervous energy. 

© Charlotte Bray 

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Ralph, The Lark Ascending

Vaughan Williams began The Lark Ascending before the outbreak of the First World War, taking his inspiration from George Meredith’s 1881 poem of the same name. But he set this ‘Romance’ aside during the war and only finished it in 1920. The violinist Marie Hall gave the first performance of the original version for violin and piano in Shirehampton Public Hall (a district of Bristol) on 15 December 1920. Vaughan Williams dedicated the work to her, and she went on to give the premiere of the orchestral version six months later, when it was conducted by the young Adrian Boult at a concert in the Queen’s Hall in London. Free, serene and dream-like, this is idyllic music of rare and fragile beauty.

© Nigel Simeone

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