Music for a While

“Music for a While shall all your cares beguile” was Programme II of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2015 Songs of Apollo season: a tribute to the actor Jeffery Dench by his fellow actors and musicians, devised by Cordula Kempe. Jeffery Dench – a long-serving RSC actor, a great music lover and the Society’s Chairman until his death on 24 March 2014 – had taken part in almost every one of the Society’s word and music programmes. The tribute was performed twice, on Saturday 31 January 2015 at 7.30 pm and Sunday 1 February 2015 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. An informal talk-back with the artists followed on the Monday morning.

His sister Dame Judi Dench, Patron of the Society, was to have been guest of honour; unable to come, she sent a message thanking Cordula Kempe for organising the concerts in memory of “my beloved brother Jeff”, and promised to be there in person on Palm Sunday.

Performers

Bergonzi Quartet and Friends

• Cordula Kempe – violin. Rudolf Kempe’s widow and the Society’s Artistic Director, she studied at the Munich State Academy and for 25 years with Max Rostal, played in Karl Richter’s Munich Bach Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic, and taught at the Richard Strauss Conservatoire in Munich. She led the Bergonzi Quartet and devised the Songs of Apollo programmes.
• Barbara O’Reilly – violin. Brought up in Glasgow, where she co-led the National Youth Orchestra, she studied at the University of Birmingham and the Royal Northern College of Music, played with the CBSO and Longborough Opera, and was Head of Strings at The Kingsley School.
• Cristinel Bacanu – viola (RKS International Young Artists Platform 2013/2014). Born in Romania in 1986, he trained in Bucharest and on full scholarships at Ohio University and Arizona State University, and led several Midlands orchestras; in 2013 he gave an acclaimed recital for the Society.
• Peter Wilson – cello. From North Yorkshire, he studied at the Royal College of Music with Anna Shuttleworth, played principal cello with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and taught in Warwickshire and Coventry.
• Sara Lane Rees – guest cello. A Royal Northern College of Music graduate, she played with the CBSO, Philharmonia and Opera North, freelanced with the Orchestra of the Swan, and co-founded the Sorelli Ensemble and the Sarabande Trio.
• Gabija Butkute – piano (RKS International Young Artists Platform). A Lithuanian pianist studying accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music, and a member of its Song Circle.

Soprano

• Helen-Jane Howells – soprano. A Cornish-Welsh singer who began as a flautist and jazz singer and taught for five years before studying at the Royal College of Music, she had sung at Glyndebourne, the BBC Proms and Wigmore Hall and with the Gabrieli Consort; she had often performed with Jeffery Dench at The Muses.

Actors

• Nicholas Day – a regular RSC actor (most recently in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) and at the National Theatre, and author of On Bard Duty.
• Oliver Dench (RKS International Young Artists Platform 2014) – had just made his RSC début in Gregory Doran’s The Witch of Edmonton.
• Karen Drury – stage, film and television actress (Brookside, A Bit of a Do, Cry Freedom) and an experienced recitalist for the Society.
• Guy Henry – actor.
• Jennifer McEvoy – actress and director, with RSC, National Theatre and West End credits.
• Sonia Ritter – actress, adapter and director; Lavinia in Titus Andronicus for the RSC and roles at Shakespeare’s Globe.
• Clifford Rose – an RSC founder member from 1960, winner of the Clarence Derwent Award (2009).
• Timothy West – one of the country’s leading actors, made CBE in 1984, who with his wife Prunella Scales had read for the Society since 1995.

Programme

The programme was built from excerpts of the word and music programmes Jeffery Dench had performed over twenty-five years; the earlier programme each section came from is named in brackets. Texts marked † were ones Jeffery Dench himself had recited.

Part I

• (Strings in the Air) Purcell – Introduction to The Fairy Queen
• (Music for a While) Gerard Manley Hopkins – Henry Purcell (dedication) †; Purcell – Music for a While, song from Oedipus
• A personal history, from 1978
• (A Musical Offering) The Bible – 1 Corinthians 13 †; J. S. Bach – Air from Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068
• More history, from 1990
• (Bridging the Centuries) On Mozart, Bach and Shostakovich †; Anna Akhmatova – We Keen †; Shostakovich – Moderato from the String Quartet Op. 49; Daniil Kharms – The Red-haired Man †
• (Il Divertimento Definitivo and Entirely Mozart) Anthony Burgess – on Mozart †; Mozart – Adagio from the String Trio (Divertimento), K 563
• (Viennese Delights) On Schubert †; Percy Bysshe Shelley – Invocation to Misery †; Friedrich von Schiller – from The Gods of Greece †; Schubert – Minuetto from the String Quartet in A minor, D 804; W. H. Auden – The Composer †
• (The Ceremony of Innocence) Noël Coward – Bad Times †; C. P. Cavafy – from Waiting for the Barbarians
• (The Quality of Mercy) Observations by W. N. Ewer, C. Browne and others; Erich Fried – Constructive Self-Criticism † and Fears and Doubts †
• (Beautiful and Pure and Gracious) Mendelssohn – Andante espressivo from the String Quartet Op. 44 No. 1; Heinrich Heine – Eighteen Hundred Years †; Wallace Stevens – Be Thou the Voice †
• (The Seven Last Words) David Hare – from Racing Demon, Act I scenes 6 and 9 †; Haydn – Sonata III, “Woman, behold thy son”, from The Seven Last Words, Op. 51; April 1943; Zvi Kolitz – Yossel Rakover Speaks to God †; Haydn – Sonata IV, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” †; H. Aldrich – Five Reasons
• An interval conversation †

Part II

• (Poetry Is Life) Christopher Logue – London Airport; the title; definitions of poetry by Sappho, Leonard Cohen, Reiner Kunze, John Cage, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Osip Mandelstam and others †; Dvořák – Cypresses No. 2 for string quartet; Joshua Sobol – The Task of Art; Jaroslav Seifert – Poetry is with us from the start †; Leonard Cohen – Better than Poetry, Thousands and Laughter in the Pantheon †; Dvořák – Cypresses No. 11; Vita Sackville-West – The Poet – the Artisan; Shakespeare – Sonnet 12; Edwin Morgan – Instructions to an Actor; Hopkins – Binsey Poplars; Roger Pringle – The Caretaker †; Dvořák – Waltz in D, Op. 54 No. 2, for string quartet; Shakespeare – from The Winter’s Tale, Act III Scene 3 †; Dvořák – Cypresses No. 12; recent history; Shakespeare – Sonnet 66 †
• (Thou Lovely Art) Beethoven – Cavatina from the String Quartet in B flat, Op. 130
• (Strings in the Earth and Air) On playing open strings; Angela France – Learning to play the viola by holding a bow †; Purcell – Fantazia upon One Note †
• (Perchance to Dream) Frank McGuinness – from Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me: Christmas in prison †; Bach – Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Variations 29 and 30 (Sitkovetsky’s string trio arrangement); Shakespeare – from The Tempest, Act IV Scene 1 †; Bach – Goldberg Variations, Aria; John Donne – One Equal Music – One Equal Eternity

Epilogue – Thou Lovely Art

• Schubert – Adagio from the String Quintet in C, D 956 (printed D 960)
• Sappho – lines for Jeffery
• Schubert – An die Musik, D 547 (“Du holde Kunst” – Thou Lovely Art)

About the programme

Cordula Kempe called the programme a labour of love for a close friend of more than twenty-five years: a journey through “four millennia of poetry, four centuries of classical music” and their European centres – Purcell’s London, Bach’s and Mendelssohn’s Leipzig, the Vienna of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Shostakovich’s St Petersburg and Dvořák’s Prague. She remembered his youthful enthusiasm, his boundless joy in the word and music programmes, his technical mastery and insight, and his total lack of ego.

The booklet traced his career: born in Lancashire and raised in York, he trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, worked for eight years in repertory, joined the RSC in 1963 and appeared in all but five of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as in Nicholas Nickleby in the West End, on Broadway and on television. For the Society he had read in Food of Love, The Quality of Mercy, The Seven Last Words, Viennese Delights, Divertimento, Perchance to Dream and A Musical Offering, the orchestral programme conducted by Sir Charles Groves that launched Songs of Apollo at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1990. The poet Hazell Hills contributed a memoir of “Jeff” – the actor who knew “It’s all in the words”, hummed along to the music under his breath, and once played the viola’s open C string in Purcell’s Fantazia upon One Note at a birthday concert in the Kempe Studio.

Press

Preston Witts reviewed the weekend in the Stratford Herald (5 February 2015) as “a great and most profound tribute”, singling out the Adagio of Schubert’s String Quintet. A second account, by Alex Austin, called it “a fitting tribute worthy the man”. Both reviews are among the downloads below.

Credits

• Devised by Cordula Kempe, with contributions from Hazell Hills
• The artists contributed their performances to the tribute, which had no outside grants or funding