PROGRAMME
Helen Neeves - Speak of the North!
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
John Ireland – The Hills
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë & Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Tõnu Kõrvits - The Night is Darkening Round Me
Poem by Emily Brontë & Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
Amy Beach - Peace I Leave With You
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Helena Paish – Life
Gerald Finzi - My Spirit Sang All Day
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Kate Bush arr. Charlie Perry - Wuthering Heights
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Sophie Nolan - Ira Vos Totos Consumet
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Cecilia McDowall - Snow
No coward soul is mine – Emily Brontë
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
Robert Pearsall - Lay a Garland
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
John Tavener - Funeral Ikos
I’m Happiest When Most Away – Emily Brontë
Words by Charlotte Brontë
Toby Hession - She Walks in Beauty
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Joan Szymko - Finding Her Here
—
Artistic Director & Co-Curator Ellie Slorach
Presenter & Co-Curator Sherry Ashworth
—
All words in the programme are taken from texts by the Brontë sisters and Elizabeth Gaskell.
Please note: one text contains a graphic description of violence and blood.
The programme will last around one hour and we kindly ask you to refrain from applauding until the end of the performance.
Programme Notes
“I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature.”
Join Kantos Chamber Choir as we examine the lives and passions of the mysterious Brontë sisters through the eyes of their friend and supporter, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Kantos will evoke the wild, exposed landscapes of a lonely existence on the moors for three exceptional women, who found escape and freedom in their imagined worlds. An hour-long programme of choral music and spoken word will immerse us in their isolated hilltop hive of creativity from where the sisters wove their intricate stories of desire, devotion, depravity and despair.
Elizabeth Gaskell expert, Sherry Ashworth, joins us to curate and present the programme for this unique performance.
In partnership with Library Live, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House & Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Helen Neeves - Speak of the North! (part iii)
I originally wanted to write a choral piece that was inspired by wintery weather. It took me a while choose the text, but I kept coming back to the Brontë sisters. Being married to a West Yorkshireman I have a familiarity with the area where the sisters lived, and I felt a real connection between their words and the landscape that inspired them.
The piece you are hearing today is the final part of Speak of the North! In the complete piece there are three poems: Spellbound by Emily Brontë, Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day by Anne Brontë, and finally, Speak of the North! a Lonely Moor by Charlotte Brontë. The musical setting of the first two poems creates a stormy and blustery scene echoing dark clouds, bending trees and crashing waves. The music for this final poem evokes the calm following the storm, imagining the still, cold, wintery night-scape, with snowy hills and starlight; a sparse, chilly, glimpse of the frozen landscape.
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
Right before the traveller … rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour…
John Ireland (1879-1962) – The Hills
John Ireland was an English composer and music teacher. He was born in Bowdon, near Altrincham, Cheshire. He lost both of his parents when he was a teenager and was described as ‘a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by memories of a sad childhood’. In fact, he was so self-critical that he destroyed all of his early works written before 1903. Ireland made a significant contribution to sacred choral music in Britain and taught for a long time at the Royal College of Music. He largely retired from composing and teaching in the 1940s but one occasion for which he came out of retirement was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; he was commissioned to write a madrigal for A Garland for the Queen. Ireland set a poem by James Kirkup, ‘The Hills’, which depicts various aspects of nature. It’s a gentle and calming piece which in many ways reflects the personality of its composer.
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë & Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
A high wind blustered round the house, and roared in the chimney: it sounded wild and stormy, yet it was not cold, and we were all together’
‘the [cold] winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating’
Tõnu Kõrvits (1969- ) - The Night is Darkening Round Me
Soloist: Joseph Judge
Tõnu Kõrvits (b. 1969) is one of Estonia’s most esteemed contemporary composers. This piece sets to music the text of a poem by Emily Brontë which uses imagery of the night and weather to reflect the speaker’s inner turmoil. The setting is for an alto solo line with mixed choir accompaniment; the melancholy intervals, clustered harmonies and surging dynamics create an intense and atmospheric soundworld.
Poem by Emily Brontë
When days of Beauty deck the earth
Or stormy nights descend,
How well my spirit knows the path
On which it ought to wend.
It seeks the consecrated spot
Beloved in childhood's years,
The space between is all forgot
Its sufferings and its tears.
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
Charlotte was short-sighted, very shy and nervous…
Emily was a tall, long-armed girl, more fully grown than her elder sister; extremely reserved in manner. I distinguish reserve from shyness, because I imagine shyness would please, if it knew how; whereas, reserve is indifferent whether it pleases or not.
Anne, like her eldest sister, was shy;
‘They put away their work, and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down,—as often with the candles extinguished, for economy's sake, as not,—their figures glancing into the fire-light, and out into the shadow, perpetually. At this time, they talked over past cares and troubles; they planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans.’
Amy Beach (1867-1944) - Peace I Leave With You
Amy Beach was one of the first prominent female composers in the United States. Her contributions to the world of classical music were ground-breaking, particularly in a time when women were often excluded from professional composition. Composed in 1923, Peace I Leave With You, sets to music the serene and uplifting text from the Gospel of John (John 14:27). The work features lush, flowing melodic lines, with a gentle interplay between voices, creating a meditative atmosphere. Beach uses chromaticism and delicate dissonances to deepen the emotional resonance of the text, allowing the words to unfold with an organic, natural grace.
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
‘the sound of a cough close behind me made me turn my head. I saw a girl sitting on a stone bench near; she was bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seemed intent: ……The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl … dismissed in disgrace from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large schoolroom. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl—she looked thirteen or upwards. I expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my surprise she neither wept nor blushed…She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment—beyond her situation: of something not round her nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams—is she in a day-dream now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it—her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart: she is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present.’
Helena Paish - Life
Soloist: Eleonore Cockerham
To mark International Women’s Day 2020, BBC Radio 3 commissioned seven different composers to write a movement each of an a cappella choral work entitled Seven Ages of Woman. Each composer represented their own decade. Helena Paish, aged 17 years old at the time, wrote ‘Life’ as the first movement of this project. ‘Life’ is a setting of a Charlotte Brontë poem which is about how life’s pitfalls often lead to better times and that we should enjoy every moment.
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) - My Spirit Sang All Day
Finzi was born in London on July 14, 1901, and spent his early childhood in London. His father died when he was just seven and following the outbreak of the First World War, Finzi moved with his mother to Harrogate, in Yorkshire. There, Finzi studied composition with the composer Ernest Farrar and from 1917 with Edward Bairstow at York Minster. This part-song is from a set of seven part-song settings of poetry by Robert Bridges. It depicts elated emotions as the speaker realises their love is their ‘joy’. As it happens, Finzi’s wife was called Joy!
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
‘I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him. I know I must conceal my sentiments: I must smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence, and his spell to attract; I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered:—and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.’
Kate Bush arr. Charlie Perry - Wuthering Heights
Kate Bush wrote this iconic song in one evening aged 18, having just watched a BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights. In Bush’s adaptation, we are flung between Catherine on the wild and windy moors and her dreamy indoor fantasies with Heathcliff through some completely bizarre changes of harmony (A major to Db Major) and irregular phrase lengths (no bar is ever the same length in the chorus). The vocal performance on the original is something quite extraordinary, but I know the Kantos sopranos can capably don their 80s wigs and and bring the legend herself into the room with us. - Charlie Perry
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’
Sophie Nolan - Ira Vos Totos Consumet
Ira Vos Totos Consumet is a piece about wrath, and highlights the hypocrisy of Christian wrath when wrath is one of the seven deadly sins. Imagery of hell, damnation and despair is prevalent throughout, and it is inspired heavily by Dante's Inferno and the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem. A saturated harmonic texture, juxtaposition of time signatures and a hyperfocus on the text all contribute to a feeling of unease and mounting tension. A prominent theme is that of those in glass houses not throwing stones, and the wrathful elements of the piece eventually break apart in a shattering climax.
Ira vos totos consumet
Salva me
Cito appropinquit mundum devorabit
Dies lucis
Dies tribulationis et angustiae
Dies calamitatis et miseriae
Dies tenebrarum et caliginis
Dies nebulae et turbinis
Dies veritatis prope est
Anger consumes you entirely
Save me
It is fast approaching and will devour the world
Day of light
Day of trouble and difficulty
Day of calamity and misery
Day of darkness and gloom
Day of clouds and storms
The day of truth is near
Words from Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
“Who are you?”
“Catherine Linton,” “I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!”
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, “Let me in!” and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
“How can I!” “Let me go, if you want me to let you in!”
The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer.
Cecilia McDowall (1951- ) - Snow
In the remote Haworth Parsonage on the Yorkshire moors the Brontë sisters were greatly influenced and inspired by nature, ‘weather’ and the changing seasons. Snow features much in all their writings and Emily, in particular, was entranced by it. She describes snow as a ‘transient voyager of heaven’. In her poem, Fall, leaves, fall, she urges autumn to give way to winter so she will ‘smile when wreaths of snow blossom where the rose should grow.’ This short work opens and closes with a slow cascade of voices to the opening phrase of the poem, ‘Fall, leaves, fall’. This evening’s performance is the premiere of Snow which is dedicated to Ellie Slorach, artistic director and conductor of Kantos Chamber Choir.
No coward soul is mine – Emily Brontë
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear…
…There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
But Emily was growing rapidly worse… Yet, to the last, Emily adhered tenaciously to her habits of independence. She would suffer no one to assist her. Any effort to do so roused the old stern spirit. One Tuesday morning, in December, she arose and dressed herself as usual, making many a pause, but doing everything for herself, and even endeavouring to take up her employment of sewing: the servants looked on, and knew what the catching, rattling breath, and the glazing of the eye too surely foretold; but she kept at her work; and Charlotte and Anne, though full of unspeakable dread, had still the faintest spark of hope. On that morning Charlotte wrote thus—probably in the very presence of her dying sister:—
"Tuesday. I should have written to you before, if I had had one word of hope to say; but I have not. She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use. He sent some medicine, which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known. I pray for God's support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it."
The morning drew on to noon. Emily was worse: she could only whisper in gasps. Now, when it was too late, she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now." About two o'clock she died.
Robert Pearsall (1795-1856) - Lay a Garland
Robert Lucas de Pearsall was an English composer best known for his madrigals and part-songs as contributions to the revival of Renaissance polyphonic music in the 19th century. Among his most celebrated pieces is Lay A Garland, a hauntingly beautiful part-song for eight voices. Composed in 1840, Lay A Garland sets a text from The Maid’s Tragedy, a Jacobean play written by Beaumont and Fletcher. The text mourns the death of love and the sorrow of betrayal. Pearsall’s setting of this text showcases his mastery of Renaissance-style polyphony, interwoven with a rich Romantic sensitivity. Scored for an a cappella double choir, Pearsall creates a sound world that is both ethereal and deeply expressive; the piece unfolds with long, arching phrases, gently overlapping lines, and exquisite suspensions that slowly resolve.
Words by Elizabeth Gaskell
Charlotte saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her.
"Oh!" "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy."
Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.
John Tavener (1944-2013) - Funeral Ikos
Funeral Ikos was written in 1981 when Tavener was 37. It is a serene setting of words which are probably unfamiliar to most of us and which a simple statement of the reward in Paradise for the Righteous Ones. The music shows the influence of Stravinsky, who used a similar homophonic style for some of this religious settings, but Tavener's music is, in this piece, much simpler harmonically. Indeed much of it is in unison allowing the full impact of the words to shine through. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the sensitive musicality, in which the sounds are almost just an accompaniment to the words, can only have been achieved by an extraordinary sensitive composer of deep religious conviction.
I’m Happiest When Most Away – Emily Brontë
I’m happiest when most away
I can bear my soul from its home of clay,
On a windy night when the moon is bright,
And my eye can wander through worlds of light-
When I am not and none beside,-
Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky-
But only spirit wandering wide
Through infinite immensity.
Words by Charlotte Brontë
My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her;— out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was—liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished.
Toby Hession (1997- ) - She Walks in Beauty
Written for, performed, and recorded by vocal ensemble VOCES8, this beautiful a cappella work has flowing and independent vocal lines as well as mixed meters that accentuate the Lord Byron text. This piece was the Winner of the inaugural Voces8/VCM Foundation Composition Competition, 2017.
Words from Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
Joan Szymko (1957- ) - Finding Her Here
Jayne R. Brown's delightful, soulful ode to finding herself older and wiser and precious—just as she is, has been widely anthologized for good reason: It is an antidote for the daily bombardment of marketing messages and cultural pressure that tell women that they are "not enough." The opening line, "I am becoming the woman I've wanted" serves as an ostinato through much of this finely wrought celebration of women for women's chorus.
THE CHOIR
SOPRANO
Eleonore Cockerham
Lindsey James
Megan Rickard
Dominique Saulnier
Lucy Vallis
ALTO
Louise Ashdown
Alison Daniels
Joseph Judge
Louise Wood
TENOR
Hugh Beckwith
Alex Kyle
James Savage-Hanford
Joseph Taylor
BASS
Jonathan Ainscough
James Connolly
Harry Mobbs
Henry Saywell
THE TEAM
Artistic Director Ellie Slorach
General Director Claire Shercliff
Communications Coordinator Eve Powers
Design Sam Gee
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