Autumn Thoughts

Autumn Thoughts was Programme VII of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2016 Songs of Apollo season. Devised by Cordula Kempe, it set classical and contemporary poetry about autumn – from Shakespeare, Keats and Goethe to Wang Wei, Sarojini Naidu and members of the Society’s own writers’ group – among music for woodwind trio by Milhaud, Martinů, Dornel, Stanley, Tansman and Mozart, played by Trio Poetico of Zurich, with the actress Karen Drury reading. It took place on Sunday 16 October 2016 at 5.00 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

Performers

Trio Poetico, Zurich – all three had been members of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under Rudolf Kempe’s artistic directorship, and for many years toured a rarely heard woodwind repertoire around Europe, interweaving it with poetry.

• Hans Martin Ulbrich – oboe and cor anglais
• Heinz Hofer – clarinet and basset horn
• Florenz Jenny – bassoon

Karen Drury – reader. A versatile actress of stage and screen: she won a best actress award for touring as Celia in Brief Encounter, played in the West End in Alan Ayckbourn’s Time of My Life, was a series regular in Brookside and in A Bit of a Do, and appeared in Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom. She had read in several Songs of Apollo programmes for the Society.

Programme

Part I

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning – from The Autumn
• Darius Milhaud – Pastorale
• Jenna Plewes – Woodwind Voices
• Bohuslav Martinů – Madrigaux: I. Allegro moderato
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Autumn: A Dirge
• Martinů – II. Lento
• John Keats – from To Autumn
• Martinů – III. Poco allegretto
• Susan Davies – Migration
• Martinů – Trio: Allegro
• R. S. Thomas – A Day in Autumn
• Martinů – Poco allegretto, da capo
• Emily Dickinson – Autumn – overlooked my Knitting –
• Antoine Dornel – Sonate: 1. Pas trop vite
• Hazell Hills – Windfall in Leamington
• Dornel – 2. Fugue: Gayment
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Autumn Feelings
• Dornel – 3. Lentement; 4. Vivement
• Sarojini Naidu – Autumn Song
• John Stanley – Trio: Prelude (Andante)
• Wang Wei – A Song of an Autumn Night
• Stanley – Siciliano (Andante)
• William Blake – To Autumn
• Stanley – Vivace

Interval

Part II

• Rainer Maria Rilke – A Day in Autumn
• Alexandre Tansman – Suite: 1. Andante sostenuto (Dialogue)
• Friedrich Hölderlin – Halfway through Life
• Tansman – 2. Scherzino: molto vivace
• Siegfried Sassoon – Autumn
• Tansman – 3. Aria: Largo
• Carl Sandburg – Autumn
• Tansman – 4. Finale: Vivo – Lento
• William Morris – Autumn
• Paul Laurence Dunbar – Merry Autumn
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Divertimento, K. 439b: 1. Allegro
• Edward Thomas – Digging
• Mozart – 2. Menuetto and Trio
• Robert Louis Stevenson – Autumn Fires
• Stevie Smith – Autumn
• Gerard Manley Hopkins – The Windhover
• Mozart – 3. Larghetto
• Mozart – letter to his father, 4 April 1787
• Mozart – 4. Menuetto and Trio
• Dorothy Parker – Autumn Valentine
• Mozart – 5. Rondo: Allegro
• Epilogue: William Shakespeare – Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”

About the programme

Autumn as a season of ripeness and of leave-taking ran through the evening, from Keats’s mellow fruitfulness to Hölderlin’s Halfway through Life and Mozart’s famous letter to his dying father of April 1787, and it closed with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Three poems were new, written by members of the writers’ workshop that met at The Muses under the poet Angela France: Jenna Plewes’s Woodwind Voices, Susan Davies’s Migration and Hazell Hills’s Windfall in Leamington. The programme book was illustrated with Isaak Levitan’s Park in Autumn (1879).

Credits

• Devised by Cordula Kempe
• Title image and centre page by Jon Welsh; photograph of Trio Poetico by Charlotte Oettinger
• Publicity and printing: Max Ross