Out of the Shadows

Alessandro Fisher (tenor)

Gareth Brynmor John (baritone)

William Vann (piano)

Navarra String Quartet

A stellar line-up of musicians come together to mark the 70th birthday of composer Ian Venables. At the heart of the programme are two powerful works for tenor, string quartet and piano. Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge is a deeply evocative setting of poetry from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad - with its themes of homesickness, lives cut short, and lost love, and its conjuring of Shropshire landscape. Ian Venables’ ethereal Portraits of a Mind, was commissioned by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society in honour of that earlier composer’s 150th Anniversary in 2022 and premiered by the musicians who perform it tonight.  Inspired by the musical language of Vaughan Williams and his artistic credo – ‘the object of art is to reach out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty’ – Venables references music from The House of Life to The Lark Ascending, in a highly atmospheric cycle.

The concert opens with the London premiere of Out of the Shadows, which was commissioned by Robert Venables KC in 2023 to celebrate Gary Morris and he having been together for 30 years. Works by Howells and Butterworth complete the lavish programme.

Venables: Out of the Shadows
Vaughan Williams (arr. Vann): Fantasia on Greensleeves
Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge

Interval

Vaughan Williams: Love Bade me Welcome
Butterworth: Love Blows as the Wind Blows
Venables: Portraits of a Mind
Howells: An Old Man’s Lullaby

Duration: 1 hr 45 minutes (including interval)

Sponsored by The Morris-Venables Charitable Foundation