“How many things by season season'd are/ To their right praise and true perfection!” sings the alto soloist to at the climax of Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, the piece that ends our summer programme devoted to times and seasons. They are lines from the final scene of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, part of a discussion about the ‘music of the spheres’, music that is best sensed when the time is right in the “soft stillness” of the night. The composer applied some of his best harmonic and melodic invention to the portrayal of this ideal setting.
For times are also tunes and they are abundant in our summer programme, starting with three favourite. ‘seasonal’ madrigals by Weelkes and Morley and Elgar’s As torrents in summer.
Time finds expression in Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year in the form of a dialogue between the seasons of the year and the human lifecycle. Dove’s music is direct and highly approachable, sustained by layers of rhythmic pulses and short, memorable tunes to words by Blake, Dickinson and Tennyson.
The first half ends with the buzz of time imagined by Frank Bridge from the point of view of The Bee.
John Rutter described his Five Childhood Lyrics as “a kind of 'homage' to the world of children”, rhymes and verses remembered from his earliest years, tunes easily learned that say prayers, tell fortunes or repeat nonsense.
Mendelssohn's 6 Lieder, op. 59, subtitled Im Freien zu singen (To be sung outdoors) take us to the heart of the Romantic preoccupation with the self at one with time experienced in Nature and the painful realisation that if there is such a thing as a vale of peace (Ruhetal) it will only be found among the mountainous shapes of the clouds. Key to our programme, Goethe’s Nightingale contains a simple message, “The nightingale was far away/ The Spring has called her back/ She didn’t learn anything new/ She sings the old, dear songs".
