Canterbury Music Club

February 23^rd 2025 3.00pm

Colyer Fergusson Hall Canterbury

Linda Hirst mezzo soprano/narrator
Matthew Rose bass/narrator
Anna Tilbrook piano/director

Grand Mansions Collective

Heledd Francis-Wright flute/piccolo
Ian Swatman clarinet/bass clarinet
Peter Cook saxophone
Martin Gove trumpet
Roan Kearsey-Lawson percussion
Julia Vohralick cello
Julie Peat cello

Introduction

Welcome to this very special recital as part of the Bayle Music and Canterbury Music Club 2024-5 seasons dedicated in memoriam Anne Hancox whose love of words and music manifested itself both in her dramatic performances and singing. The programme reflects the passion she displayed for the connection between words and music including songs that she loved, studied and performed whilst the Sitwell texts she narrated on three occasions in performances that we shared together. Additionally all musicians performing today were associated with Anne throughout our life spent together in Canterbury. It is both humbling and a great pleasure to have the opportunity to draw together these threads of a life well lived in words and music with today’s wonderful performers.
Grenville Hancox

Biographies

Matthew Rose studied at the Canterbury Christ Church University and Curtis Institute of Music USA before becoming a member of the Young Artist Programme at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Matthew's international career has seen him enjoy a close relationship with The Metropolitan Opera, for whom he gave his 100th performance in 2022. His roles there include Filippo II and Monk (Don Carlos), Raimondo (Lucia di Lammermoor), Claudio (Agrippina), Masetto and Leporello (Don Giovanni), Oroveso (Norma), Ashby (La Fanciulla del West), Talbot (Maria Stuarda), Bottom (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Night Watchman (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Frère Laurent (Roméo et Juliette) and Colline (La bohème).
The 2024/25 season includes returning to the role of Fasolt in Das Rheingold for the Bayerische Staatsoper, and performances of Rocco in Fidelio with the Opéra National de Bordeaux. On the concert platform, Matthew sings Bruckner's Mass No. 3 with the SWR Symphonieorchester, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and returns to Winterreise in performances across the United Kingdom.

Linda Hirst was born and grew up in Huddersfield and studied flute and singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her career began during the early music revival of the early seventies, with Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and David Munrow. From 1974-78 she was a Swingle Singer, she then co-founded Electric Phoenix. With both groups she travelled the world, leading to work with many living composers, and becoming internationally renowned, in particular for her performances of contemporary music.
She has performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras, conductors and chamber ensembles in festivals, broadcasts and recordings. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire has been a constant thread through the last 25 years, and she has just completed a series for the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House. Concerts have taken her to the Buenos Aires Festival of Contemporary Music to sing Berio and Scelsi, and to Taipei for performances of Benedict Mason’s Chaplin Operas with the Ensemble Modern and to Cologne and Huddersfield with Ensemble Recherche.

Anna Tilbrook has collaborated with many leading singers and instrumentalists including James Gilchrist, Ian Bostridge, Lucy Crowe, Sarah Tynan, Barbara Hannigan, Ashley Riches, Nicholas Daniel, Natalie Clein, Philip Dukes, Jack Liebeck, Guy Johnston and the Fitzwilliam, Carducci, Sacconi, Elias, Navarra and Barbirolli string quartets. Since her debut at Wigmore Hall in 1999 she has become a regular artist at all the major concert halls and festivals. She has also accompanied José Carreras, Angela Gheorghiu and Bryn Terfel in televised concerts.
Anna Tilbrook has performed at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York with Lucy Crowe, and at Wigmore Hall and St John’s Smith Square in London, deSingel in Antwerp, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Anima Mundi in Pisa and Wratislavia Cantans in Wrocław. She has appeared at the Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Oxford Lieder and West Cork Chamber Music festivals. She also regularly curates series of concerts for BBC Radio 3.
In 2017 Anna Tilbrook and James Gilchrist celebrated twenty years of their duo partnership. They have made a series of acclaimed recordings of English songs, Schubert and Schumann cycles, the songs and chamber music of Vaughan Williams, and most recently Solitude and a song cycle by Jonathan Dove, Under Alter’d Skies, written for them. They will conclude Canterbury Music Club’s 83rd Season together on 27th April 2025.

Grand Mansions Collective

These celebrated musicians have many things in common , but particularly their association with Canterbury Christ Church University where they were either students or teachers. This concert sees them come together as members of the Grand Mansions Collective, an ensemble which meets from time to time to make significant statements about the place of music in our world.

Programme

Songs of Travel                    Vaughan Williams

1.  The Vagabond.
2.  Let Beauty Awake.
3.  The Roadside Fire.
4.  Youth and Love.
5.  In Dreams.
6.  The Infinite Shining Heavens.
7.  Whither Must I Wander?
8.  Bright is the Ring of Words.
9.  I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope*

Three songs                          Gabriel Fauré

Chanson d'amour
Les berceux
Automne

Down by the Salley Gardens   Benjamin Britten

Sea Fever                              John Ireland

An die Musik                          Franz Schubert

Interval

Façade an Entertainment        Words by Edith Sitwell
                                              Music by William Walton

1.    Fanfare (Instrumental)
2.    Hornpipe
3.    En Famille
4.    Mariner Man
5.    Long Steel Grass
6.    Through Gilded Trellises
7.    Tango-Pasodoble
8.    Lullaby for Jumbo
9.    Black Mrs Behemoth
10.  Tarantella
11.  A Man from a far Country
12.  By the Lake
13.  Country Dance
14.  Polka
15.  Four in the Morning
16.  Something lies beyond the Scene
17.  Waltz
18.  Swiss Jodelling Song
19.  Scotch Rhapsody
20.  Popular Song
21.  Fox Trot (Old Sir Faulk)
22.  When Sir Beelzebub