Newsletter no 20: Buckingham Summer Festival - Edith at York Late Music - Novanda Productions

As memories of summer start to fade and autumn slowly enfolds us, I thought I would take a moment to revisit the last Art Sung – Edith Sitwell performance. This took place at the Buckingham Summer Festival in July at the elegant neo-Gothic Radcliffe Centre. Built in 1857 as a nonconformist church, it is now owned by the University of Buckingham. It is also a perfect setting for an Art Sung performance: our images can be projected beautifully onto the back wall, the seating is tiered so everyone can see what is happening on stage clearly, and the acoustics are crystal clear.

Thank you to the Buckingham Festival for inviting us back for the second time! We all enjoyed ourselves enormously and the feedback was extremely positive. We were also hugely privileged to have Susanna Sitwell in the audience. She is the widow of Edith’s nephew, Francis and mother of the food critic, William Sitwell. Needless to say, being a Sitwell, she is very knowledgeable about the arts!

In other news, I was delighted to receive an email a few months ago from Claire Novello, the writer and producer of Novanda Theatre Productions, asking if Art Sung would like to collaborate on a project celebrating the 60th anniversary of Alma Mahler’s death. In October, Novanda Productions performed their play “The Dedication” set in the glittering hotbed of fin-de-siècle Vienna about Alma’ s stormy and passionate life, her thwarted musical career and the impact this had on her.

However, the play does not include any live music and Claire wanted to showcase the extraordinary music which was fundamental to the lives of Alma and Gustav Mahler, especially focusing on Alma’s songs which are still rarely performed. For those of you who have followed Art Sung for several years, you will recall that Art Sung – Alma Mahler was our very first production, and so it will be a great pleasure to revisit this wonderful music on Sunday 17th Nov, 3pm, at Pond Square Chapel in Highgate, London, in collaboration with Novanda Productions. I will be joined by the original Art Sung – Alma Mahler singers, soprano Alexandra Weaver and baritone Robert Rice to perform a recital of Alma’s songs as well as music by Gustav Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner, and Richard Wagner.  Linking this will be a narration read by the director of The Dedication, Kenneth Michaels. More details to follow in the next newsletter.

Newsletter No 19: Tenor James Robinson – Buckingham Summer Festival – BBC Music Magazine

“Due to unforeseen circumstances” is a phrase I now read with a raised eyebrow, a wry chuckle, and the knowledge of how much worry this can cause a small company. Due to our own “unforeseen circumstance” these last couple of months, we will be seeing a new face in the cast of Art Sung – Edith Sitwell at the next performance on Monday 1st July, 8pm at the Buckingham Summer Festival.

We are extremely lucky and very grateful to tenor James Robinson for jumping in at the last minute to replace our replacement tenor! James is in great demand with many of the country’s top ensembles, including Dunedin Consort, Solomon’s Knot, Ex Cathedra, Tenebrae, BBC singers, The Sixteen, and Siglo de Oro. He has also worked in Europe with Ars Nova Copenhagen, Le Concert D’Astree, and Theatre of Voices. As a soloist, he recently performed the Evangelist in St Matthew Passion with the Britten Sinfonia, and the St John Passion with Nivalis Barokk in Norway, as well as in Birmingham Symphony Hall with Ex Cathedra and Birmingham Baroque. Other recent solo projects include a recording of Michael Haydn’s Requiem with the Academy of Ancient Music.

The performance in Buckingham is also another opportunity to see the original Façade curtain created by the English sculptor Frank Dobson in 1922 for the very first performance of Façade by poet Edith Sitwell and composer William Walton. The first time it was seen in public in over 30 years was at our performance in March at the Barnes Music Festival.

The music critic Michael White was at the performance in Barnes and wrote a piece for the June edition of BBC Music magazine.

This can be viewed on our Facebook and Instagram pages, and on our website – https://www.artsung.com/2024/06/20/art-sung-in-june-edition-2024-bbc-music-magazine/

Newsletter No 18: Frank Dobson’s Façade curtain – Tony Palmer – Façade cocktail

The performance of Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, Behind her Façade on Thursday 14th March, 2024 at the Barnes Music Festival turned into something beyond what any of us imagined after a chance meeting with the film maker Tony Palmer. On the evening of 7thFebruary 1922, poet Edith Sitwell and composer William Walton gave a private performance of “Façade”, their groundbreaking musical entertainment, at her brothers’ flat in London. What was even more mind-boggling for everyone involved was that she recited her poems to the accompaniment of his jazz-inspired music from BEHIND a huge curtain through a megaphone through a big hole in the middle of the curtain. Designed and drawn by the English Sculptor Frank Dobson, it has been presumed lost till now.

Enter Tony Palmer at this point 102 years later! He made an award-winning film about William Walton, “At the haunted end of the day” in 1981 when Walton was 79. Unsurprisingly, there is a part about Walton’s collaboration with the Sitwells which includes a short excerpt from Façade performed from behind a curtain.

https://youtu.be/nyUSk6kW0DA?si=C2bVo6OHX9jMv1sS

After our initial meeting I received an email from Tony asking if we would like to borrow the ORIGINAL curtain for our next performance at the Barnes Music Festival. Here is a small detail from a curtain which has not been seen in public in over 30 years and is over a 100 years old! This will truly be a historic event and I hope you can join us!

In his book, “Laughter in the next room”, Osbert Sitwell, Edith’s brother, remembers that at this same performance, “We had fortunately arranged for an ample supply downstairs of hot rum punch, an unusual and efficacious restorative.It had been brewed after an old recipe supplied by our friend, Barclay Squire, the learned archivist and historian of music, (at the British Museum). It included among its ingredients, as well as rum, green tea, sherry, China tea and the juice of a fresh pineapple. “

We are delighted that Joseph Zubaidy who was the senior bartender at the Conduit Club and then Head barman at Native restaurant will recreate a modern version of this cocktail which will be available during the interval at the performance. Amongst his secret ingredients are matcha and, well, I can’t tell you any more otherwise it wouldn’t be a secret! All will be revealed in the next newsletter.

Newsletter No 17: Performances 2024 – Composer Dominique Le Gendre – Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew – Link to promo video

2024 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Art Sung. Confirmed dates for Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, Behind her Façade are:

• Sunday 11thFebruary, 3pm, VocalFest24, Music in New Malden, New Malden Methodist Church, 49 High St, New Malden, Surrey, KT3 4BY https://musicinnewmalden.com/news/

• Thursday 14thMarch, 7.30, Barnes Music Festival –https://barnesmusicfestival.com/events/art-sung-edith-sitwell-behind-her-facade/

• Monday 1stJuly, Buckingham Music Festival. Details of the festival have not yet been released.
  https://www.buckinghamsummerfestival.org

Just before the end of last year, we were delighted to hear that funding had been granted by the Vaughan Williams Foundation for our third and final commission – a song by composer Dominique le Gendre.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Dominique has lived and worked in London for over 30 years. Her musical portfolio has encompassed composition, musical direction, teaching, curation, and producing music events. She has composed music for theatre, dance, art installation, film, television, and radio drama for BBC Radio 3 and 4. She composed and produced music for all 38 Shakespeare plays recorded for the audio CD collection, The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare. She is a former Associate Artist of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which commissioned her full-length opera Bird of Night.

Her song, Pavel…You…, (text by American poet, Olivia Diamond from her set of poems, “The Sitwell cycle”), gives musical expression to the pain and sorrow of Edith’s unrequited love for the homosexual Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. Edith and Pavlik, as he was known, met in 1927 at Gertrude Stein’s famous literary soirées in Paris. Stein warned Edith, “If I present Pavlik to you, it’s your responsibility because his character is not my affair”. And so, the stage was set for a tempestuous, passionate, but unconsummated relationship – he was, after all, in a relationship with pianist Allan Tanner and later, the poet and novelist, Charles Henri Ford.

Pavlik wrote to her in the early days, “Nobody has ever understood you better, or come closer to you”. Edith was for him not only an intimate friend and patron, but a muse whose inner essence he captured on canvas in six paintings, stripping her of all the usual apparel she normally hid behind.

When Pavlik emigrated to the States in 1934, they maintained a very close correspondence. In 1948 Edith travelled to the States on the first of several literary tours and they were reunited. It was a disaster, but that is another long and complicated story! Their friendship never really recovered but Edith kept this painting on her wall until her death.

“Pavel…You…” by Dominique le Gendre will have its world premiere on Sunday 11th February, 3pm, at VocalFest24 in the Music in New Malden concert series.

Meantime, if you missed the premiere of Art Sung – Edith Sitwell at the London Song Festival in November, here is a short trailer from that performance to whet your appetite!

https://youtu.be/mzHA-HYstDg?si=nUQANyDVulTeJ_1-

Newsletter No 16: Flyer by Rachel Hunt – Tenor Michael Gibson – Edith Sitwell’s inventive poetry – London Song Festival 2023

The long-awaited Art Sung flyer is finally here!

Illustrator Rachel Hunt, who created the flyer for the Jane Bathori production in 2021, has surpassed herself. During our discussions over the previous months, she very quickly picked up on the element of playfulness inherent in both the poems and Edith’s personality.

She writes: As I researched Edith Sitwell, what became apparent is that she is as well known for her eccentric dress sense as she is for her poetry and her performances. She is always seen in fabulous hats and large rings, so I have pictured her in one of these hats, holding the book with her ringed fingers on display. This layout is a play on the title of your project, ‘Behind her Facade’.

To discover more of Rachel’s work please visit her website https://www.rachelhuntillustration.com where you can find her iconic Thames boat racing drawings as well as her incredibly detailed and colourful bird and animal drawings.

I am delighted that Michael Gibson, a very talented young Scottish tenor,  will be joining us for the performances at the London Song Festival and at the Barnes Festival in March 2024. He brings the number of Scots in the Art Sung ensemble up to three: myself and Polly Smith being the other two! He is in his second year at the Jette Parker Artists programme which gives him many opportunities to tread the boards at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This season sees him singing Borsa (Rigoletto), Young Servant (Elektra), and Normanno (Lucia di Lammermoor) as well as Pong (Turandot) in the Royal Opera House’s 2024 tour of Japan.

In Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, his song repertoire includes some wonderfully fun songs by William Walton from the song cycle, “A Song of the Lord Mayor’s Table” as well as Benjamin Britten’s sublime setting of Sitwell’s poem, “Still falls the Rain”. He will also be taking on the speaking role of the ubiquitous ‘critic’ – the bane of Edith’s life whom she dubbed the ‘pipsqueakery’. And finally, and most importantly, he will be tackling the tongue twisters in Edith’s fantastical Façade poetry!

Describing her poetic process in her autobiography, Edith Sitwell wrote:

..I have been experimenting with the effect on rhythm, on speed and on colour by placing assonances and dissonances not only at the end of the line, but at the beginning, and in different and most elaborate patterns throughout the verse.

Experiment she certainly did, creating virtuosic poetry which she likened to Liszt’s Transcendental Studies for piano. With a broad knowledge of history, the classics, and very well informed on current affairs of her time and an extraordinarily rich imagination, she was well equipped to dazzle her readers with liberal sprinkling of facts woven into her poetry. To give just one example, in the final poem of Facade, “When Sir Beelzebub” Sitwell makes references to such events as the Crimean War, historical figures (Queen Victoria’s poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson), mythological figures (Proserpine), and the French gendarmerie – all set against a background of Sir Beelzebub calling for a rum in Hell. Quite a cocktail!

Her personal life is also never far from the surface in her poetry: her childhood in Scarborough is surely the setting for the “Tango Pasodoble”. Walton underlined this by incorporating the tune of “I do like to be beside the seaside” into the accompanying music. In this poem, ‘Jo the bandito whose slack shape waved like sea’ is modelled on the Vorticist painter, the eccentric Percy Wyndham Lewis. During her Sunday portrait sittings for him, he would take on different characters such as the Spanish ‘macho man’ complete with sombrero, uttering ‘Caramba’ every so often! For those of you who fancy taking a stab reciting her poetry here’s a couple of lines which you need to say as fast as possible!

 Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is silver like the sea; the lovely cheat is sweet as foam;

 To see how it’s done, here’s a link to the amazing Canadian singer and conductor Barbara Hannigan performing the ‘Tango Pasodoble’ from Façade with Sir Simon Rattle conducting.

https://youtu.be/79ahguBURn4?si=qL_bIPYFo7gyVVMF

The London Song Festival runs from Friday, 20th October  until 1ST December. The theme this year is ‘City and Country’ and celebrates the contrasting delights of both locations.  Full details of programmes and tickets can be found here including tickets for Art Sung- Edith Sitwell on Friday 24th November, 7pm. We look forward to seeing you there!

https://www.londonsongfestival.org/concerts-1

Newsletter No 15: Composers Hayley Jenkins and William Walton – Poet Olivia Diamond – ‘Edith’ webpage

As we make the transition from summer to autumn, the work on Art Sung – Edith Sitwell picks up the pace: with the initial script in place, James Symonds, our video magician, is hatching exciting ideas and Roxani Eleni Garefalaki, our director, is already planning stage moves. Songs have been chosen, mainly with texts by Edith Sitwell herself, and, for those places in the programme where the script was crying out for a song to accentuate the drama and nothing fitted the bill, we have commissioned two songs by the young, Darlington-based composer Hayley Jenkins.

I first met her in 2019 when I was invited to perform a concert of new music with baritone Robert Rice at the Late York Festival. (For those of you who have followed the development of Art Sung, Robert was our original leading man, unflinchingly taking on the roles of Klimt, Zemlinsky and Mahler in our first production, Art Sung – Alma Mahler).

Hayley’s setting of the poem, “The Wrong Jacket” was impressive with her clear intuitive feel for the pithy, yet dramatic poem by York poet Carole Bromley. Her clever use of rhythmic passages juxtaposed with light ‘jazzy’ moments revealed a layer of emotional content which could easily have been overlooked.

https://soundcloud.com/jenkinsonare/wrong-jacket

For Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, Hayley will be setting poetry by American poet, Olivia Diamond. Olivia’s “Sitwell Cycle” explores and imagines Edith’s inner world in a deep and probing manner which fits in perfectly with our ethos of discovering the real ‘Edith’ behind her façade and taps into Hayley’s talent of looking beyond! Also, to discover more about Olivia Diamond and her extraordinary body of work please visit:  https://mountainofdreamsbooks.com/olivia-diamond-blog/

As we are talking about composers, let us turn to the composer most closely associated with Edith Sitwell, Sir William Turner Walton. Now considered to be one of England’s most prominent composers of the 20th century, Walton is famous for works such as “Crown Imperial” which has become staple repertoire for any major royal occasion since it was commissioned for the crowning of King George VI in 1937. Other notable works include his cantata, “Belshazzar’s Feast”, his viola concerto, and his many film scores, including ‘The Battle of Britain” (1969) starring Sir Michael Caine, and Lawrence Olivier’s “Henry V” (1944), and, finally and most pertinently, “Façade”.

In 1919, life for the young Oxford music undergraduate W.T. Walton changed dramatically the day he met Sacheverell Sitwell, the youngest of the literary Sitwell trio. Willy, as he came to be known, was invited to stay with Sacheverell and his older brother Osbert for a few weeks in their flat at 2 Carlyle Square in London. He ended up ensconced in their attic flat as their ‘composer in residence’ for the next 15 years! There he met the third of the Sitwell trio, Edith. Not only were their profiles so much alike in character and bone structure that many people thought they were brother and sister, but, through their collaboration on the musical entertainment “Façade”, their names would be linked together for posterity.

Anyone inspired to learn more, there is an interesting clip on Youtube – ‘William Walton remembers the Sitwells and the Roaring Twenties’ https://youtu.be/nyUSk6kW0DA?si=1C6cDT9cJlU9HdY9.

Finally, the ‘Edith’ webpage is up and running on the Art Sung website – http://staging.artsung.com/art-sung-edith-sitwell/

Newsletter no 14: Funding – A lovely way to spend an evening – Noël Coward

Great news! We are extremely grateful to have received funding for a second time from the Marchus Trust for the development of our latest Art Sung project, Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, Behind her Façade.

We now have 3 confirmed performances for ‘Edith’:

• London Song Festival on Friday 24th November 2023.

• The Barnes Festival on Thursday 14th March, 2024.

• Music in New Malden on Sunday 11th February, 2024 (shorter version).

More details closer to the time.

Meantime, our new leading lady, actress and singer Lucy Stevens is at the Edinburgh Fringe, performing her latest one woman show, A lovely way to spend an evening, about actress Gertrude Lawrence, Noël Coward’s favourite leading lady. If you are heading up to the ‘Athens of the North’ this month and wondering which shows to see at the Fringe, this one will certainly not disappoint! It’s fabulous and a ‘lovely way to spend an afternoon’ at the elegant Assembly Rooms in George Street, 4pm, 3rd – 27th August 2023. She is accompanied by her long-standing collaborator, pianist Liz Marcus.

A lovely way to spend an evening and Art Sung – Edith Sitwell cross paths in rather a curious way!  Noël Coward, the larger-than-life playwright, composer, singer, director and actor, was hugely influential in Gertrude Lawrence’s life, but played a rather more contentious role in Edith Sitwell’s story. Coward was in the audience when Façade was first performed at the Aeolian Hall in 1923, and it inspired him to create a satirical sketch called “The Swiss family Whittlebot” for his revue, ‘London Calling’. Hernia Whittlebot, together with her brothers, Gob and Sago, (based on Edith and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell) parodied Edith’s poetry with lines such as ‘Life is essentially a curve and Art is an oblong within that curve. My brothers and I have been brought up on Rhythm as other children are brought up on Glaxo”. Hernia even went on to have her own gossip column and radio broadcasts. Noel Coward had inadvertently given the Sitwells the publicity they craved! However, Edith felt very insulted and sharpened her claws on him publicly.

She wrote, ‘I admire particularly those photographs taken of him (Noel Coward) in the morning, looking more than ever like the lilies and langours of virtue, sipping his breakfast and obviously about to break into one of those heart breaking brittle little ditties (sung in a voice with a catch in it) in which an elephantine wit lumbers and scampers breathlessly aften an emotion frail and destructive as a clothes moth’.

Scathing or what!

Scroll forward to 1962 and after hearing that Coward had been promoting her work, Edith sent him a telegram, ‘Friendship never too late’. They met and he apologised for the Whittlebot episode. Afterwards, Coward wrote in his dairy: ‘How strange that a forty-year feud should finish so gracefully and so suddenly. I am awfully glad. She gave me her new slim volume of poems. I am fairly unrepentant about her poetry. I really think that three-quarters of it is gibberish. However, I must crush down these thoughts otherwise the dove of peace will shit on me.’!

I’m not sure quite how Edith would have felt if she knew that one of Coward’s ‘brittle little ditties’ is in our programme, but there we are!

Newsletter no 13: Clara Schumann revival – London Song Festival award – actress Lucy Stevens

On Monday July 10th at the Buckingham Summer Music Festival, we will be shining the spotlight on Clara Schumann. Until quite recently, she was mainly remembered as a distinguished pianist and the spouse of the quintessential Romantic composer Robert Schumann. However, the bicentenary of her birth in 2019 prompted new research and interest in her compositions and her life including our own Art Sung – Clara Schumann,  commissioned by the London Song Festival.

At the heart of this dramatized recital are her songs, alongside works by her husband Robert, her great friend, Johannes Brahms, her colleague Felix Mendelssohn, and her lifelong friend, singer Pauline Viardot. Clara’s piano composition, Variations on a theme of Schumann, acts as a leitmotif scattered throughout, binding the programme together. This, together with Mendelssohn’s gracious “Spring Sonata” from his many “Songs without Words” which accompanies Clara’s first ever trip to Russia in 1844 with a somewhat petulant Robert in tow, gives Elizabeth Mucha, our pianist, an opportunity to indulge in some solo piano playing!

Accompanying the recital is a rich kaleidoscope of projected images: artwork by German Romantic painters, letters, diary entries, newspapers clippings, original manuscripts, live film and voice-overs. Linking these are images of flowers, especially those from Clara’s ‘Book of Remembrances’ – a beautiful collection of pressed flowers that she collected during the time that Robert was confined to the asylum in Endenich. She believed optimistically that he would recover from his mental illness and that the meaning of the flowers would build a bridge from the past to the present for him. The narrative is drawn from her many letters, diary entries and, the most intimate of all, the wonderful marriage diary which she and Robert kept in the early years of their marriage.

Clara’s colourful and eventful memories are beautifully narrated by the well-known actress Gay Soper whose extraordinary career in theatre, operetta, pantomime and on TV spans over 50 years.

Portraying the young Clara is award-winning soprano Lorena Paz Nieto. She was recently featured in the online classical music magazine Interlude in a beautifully heartfelt interview –  https://interlude.hk/soprano-lorena-paz-nieto/

The two most important men in Clara’s adult life, Schumann and Brahms, are expertly negotiated by baritone Malachy Frame. His depiction of Schumann’s descent into madness at the premiere in 2019 is still remembered vividly.

The story of Clara and Robert’s legendary marriage is well known but what of Brahms’ infatuation for Clara! You will need to come to the performance to find out more! https://www.buckinghamsummerfestival.org/events/art-sung-clara-schumann

All of us at Art Sung are thrilled to hear that the London Song Festival has been chosen as the ‘Small Performing Arts Event of the Year 2023 by the 7th annual ‘Greater London Enterprise Awards 2023’. The London Song Festival’s mission has been to ‘fly the flag’ for the wonderful genre of Art song since 2007. Nigel Foster, the director, works tirelessly to create imaginative, meticulously researched and inventive recitals which combine song and narrative, often uncovering music by forgotten or neglected composers. The London Song Festival also gives audiences the opportunity to hear both young ‘up-and-coming’ singers as well as prizewinners and internationally acclaimed singers. This year, in addition to the usual autumn LSF Festival, there will be a mini summer festival this August entitled “Summer Love”. https://www.londonsongfestival.org

Finally, we are delighted that actress/contralto Lucy Stevens will be taking on the role of Edith Sitwell in our latest project, Art Sung – Edith Sitwell, Behind her Façade. This will premiere at the London Song Festival on Friday 24thNovember 2023 with further performances planned in 2024!

Meantime if you would like to catch a glimpse of Lucy Stevens, you can catch her performing her latest show “A lovely way to spend an evening” about Noel Coward’s favourite leading lady, actress Gertrude Lawrence. She is accompanied by her long-standing collaborator, pianist Liz Marcus at the Phoenix Arts Club in London on Monday 19th June and Monday 9thJuly, 7pm.

https://phoenixartsclub.com/events/gertrude-lawrence-a-lovely-way-to-spend-an-evening/

Anyone heading up to Edinburgh for the Festival can see her at the Assembly Rooms in George Street at 4pm, 3rd – 27th August 2023. We saw the show when it first premiered in London in April and it really was a lovely way to spend an evening. Highly recommended!

Newsletter no 12: The London Piano Duo – Façade – Renishaw Hall and Gardens

“Shall we play piano duets?” asked pianist and London Song Festival director Nigel Foster after the successful premiere of ‘Art Sung – Clara Schumann’. This was at the end of 2019 so it took a while for us to get going as sitting next to someone at a piano keyboard wasn’t an option for quite some time! Scroll forward a couple of years and Nigel and I (as the ‘The London Piano Duo’) have performed in Colchester, Waltham Abbey, and at the stunning Reform Club in Pall Mall. Our next concert is in St John the Baptist Church, Peterborough on Tuesday, May 16th at 1pm with a lovely programme of early 20th century French and English music. http://elizabethmucha.com/?event=piano-duets-2

Which brings me neatly to our current project, Art Sung – Edith Sitwell.

Our piano duet programme ends with four very witty and clever pieces by William Walton from ‘Façade’, a unique and avant-garde ‘entertainment’ which he created with Edith Sitwell. Her exotic and colourful poetry was declaimed through a megaphone via a hole in a curtain over his jazz-inspired music. The public premiere took place 100 years ago in 1923 at the Aeolian Hall in London and caused quite a stir! It also put the then unknown young composer William Walton on the road to fame. It seemed like a fitting time to tell this amazing story and so, in collaboration with the London Song Festival, the research, scriptwriting and song exploration is well under way for the premiere on at the end of November (date to be confirmed). Meantime here is a link to a very short excerpt of us playing the opening of “Popular Song” from Façade – https://youtu.be/a3Dng_dFGvQ. Some of you may recognise this as the theme tune for the BBC TV programme, ‘Face the Music’ which aired from 1967 to 1984!

At Easter, my research took me on the road north to the family seat of the Sitwells, Renishaw Hall and Gardens, just south of Sheffield in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside. The sun was shining, the daffodils and the magnolias were in full bloom and the lambs were gambolling in the fields – (oops, got a little carried away – but it was a perfect day!).

After an early morning’s exploration of the beautiful Italianate gardens, I eagerly dove into the small but fascinating Sitwell Museum where I found a treasure trove of Sitwellian memorabilia including photographs, heirlooms and literature extracts.

Especially exciting was an original programme from the premiere of Façade in 1923!

Also on display a handwritten copy of Edith’s poem, ‘Aubade’:

Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.

To top this, we were extremely lucky to have Renishaw archivist, Chris Beevers, as our house tour guide. She regaled us with stories, past and present, about the Sitwell family as she led us through several extraordinary rooms packed with history and character! A must for anyone in the vicinity. https://renishaw-hall.co.uk

Incidentally the photo above of Constant Lambert’s arrangement of Walton’s Façade for piano duet, which I picked up in a second-hand music shop many years ago and is dated 1926, is the same edition that is under glass at the Sitwell Museum. When I got home, I put mine back in a very safe place!

In other news, as I mentioned previously Art Sung – Clara Schumann will be revived at the Buckingham Music Festival on July 10th. Our two wonderful soloists, soprano Lorena Paz Nieto and baritone Malachy Frame can be heard singing in Rossini’s La Cenerentola at Nevill Holt opera in June –https://nevillholtopera.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows

Newsletter No 11: New project Edith Sitwell – painting by Roger Fry – The influence of Erik Satie’s ‘Parade’ – Revival of Art Sung Clara Schumann

Spring of 2023 brings an exciting new project for Art Sung. We are exploring the amazing life of the gloriously eccentric poet Dame Edith Sitwell. Despite her notorious and iconic literary status on the world stage for much of the 20th century, she has become largely overlooked in recent years. Her collaboration with the young composer William Walton on her poems resulted in the musical entertainment, “Façade”, which premiered in 1923, and is the prism through which we begin our journey of exploring behind her ‘façade’.

There are so many images of Edith Sitwell, both paintings and photographs, created over the course of her lifetime (1887- 1964) but one of my favourites is the painting by Roger Fry from around 1916. A painter but also an art critic, Roger Fry was associated with the Bloomsbury Group. He introduced the works of painters such as Cezanne, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso to the British public in 1910 and coined the term post-impressionism.

In her autobiography, “Taken care of”, Edith writes that she ‘was wearing a green evening dress, the colour of the leaves of lilies’. There is a vulnerability and gaucheness in this painting which the painter captures before she embarks on a lifetime of using clothes and jewellery as armour to conceal an unloved and unhappy childhood.  More of that in future newsletters….

You might remember our last project was about French mezzo-soprano Jane Bathori who championed the works of composers such as Caplet, Ravel and Satie. We briefly touched on the ballet, ‘Parade’ which brought together the artistic who’s who of Paris in 1917 including music by Erik Satie. Imagine my delight when I discovered that a performance of Parade in 1919 at the Alhambra theatre in Leicester Square, which sent shock waves through artistic and cultural circles, was a huge inspiration for William Walton and the Sitwells in creating “Façade”. We are planning to include a short, choreographed section from Parade accompanied by Satie’s own piano duet arrangement.

Built in 1854, the extravagantly ornamented Alhambra Theatre dominated Leicester Square until it was demolished in 1936 as the popularity of music hall entertainment declined. It was replaced by the Odeon flagship cinema.

Our other news is that we will be reviving Art Sung – Clara Schumann for the Buckingham Music Festival on Monday 10th July. We’d love to see you there! Tickets will be available on their website https://www.buckinghamsummerfestival.org. Meantime here is the link to a short video from our premiere at the London Song Festival in 2019 – https://youtu.be/-GxSXb3pg6M

Newsletter no 10: Tenor Christopher Lemmings – Le Dit des Jeux du Monde by Arthur Honegger – Roxani Eleni Garefalaki

I’m over the moon that tenor Christopher Lemmings has agreed to join us for Art Sung-Jane Bathori at the London Song Festival.  Christopher and I were students together at GSAMD back in the day! It’s a great pleasure to be working with him again.

He is rarely heard these days in the UK as he has forged a very impressive international career for himself. He has a particular leaning towards the genres of the 20th and 21st century and has worked with some of the leading composers of our day, in many instances creating roles that were written for him. Renowned for his versatility, he will take on the role of many characters who inhabited Jane Bathori’s world including the theatre director Jacques Copeau, who entrusted her with the management of the Théatre du Vieux Colombier while he went to America to promote French theatre in 1917. He will be singing songs by two composers of Les Six, the most well-known, Francis Poulenc, and the ‘forgotten’ composer, Louis Durey. He makes an appearance as Bathori’s husband, the operatic French tenor Emile Engel, and the charismatic composer Reynaldo Hahn who sent Bathori music from the front. http://christopherlemmings.com

Although Bathori was renowned in her time as a singer who, in the words of Louis Durey, “premiered or interpreted so to speak all the contemporary vocal music, without expecting anything in return, put her immense talent at the service of youth. She opened to us the doors of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier which she rented to make music there. All our first works were born there”, there was another side to her, deeply interested in contemporary literature and theatre, especially the revolutionary work of French director Jacques Copeau.

At the beginning of her second season at the Vieux Colombier in 1918, she commissioned an evening’s entertainment, “Le Dit des Jeux du Monde”, from the Belgian writer Paul Méral and the composer Artur Honegger. It was neither a ballet nor musical theatre, but a combination of both, and at its heart, true to Copeau’s vision, was movement and gesture. Although fundamentally Art Sung – Jane Bathori is a song recital, this was such an important happening on the Parisian cultural scene and, also, deeply symbolic of the artistic vision she shared with Copeau, that we felt it was necessary to present something from this spectacle.

I’m delighted that Roxani Eleni Garefalaki will be performing in this short extract. Roxani has been the stage director for all the Art Sung productions up till now, including this one, but this will give us all an opportunity to enjoy her skills and talents as a physical theatre performer.

https://www.mindfulness-inmotion.com/performing

To see a short taster of our new production we invite you to watch a short video which we created during lockdown thanks to a research grant from the Royal Northern College of Music. https://youtu.be/PnJKblRBQGM

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we regret that Olivia Ray is unable to take part in the concert on 10th December at the London Song Festival and we are very grateful to Lorena Paz Nieto, who sang in both Art Sung – Alma Mahler and Art Sung – Clara Schumann for stepping in at short notice. https://www.lorenapaznieto.com