Poetry is Life

Poetry Is Life – the Rudolf Kempe Society’s annual “poetry marathon” of actors reading their favourite poems – opened the 2018 Songs of Apollo Word and Music season at Stratford-upon-Avon as Programme I. This year’s theme was Colour, Light and Shade. It was devised by Cordula Kempe with the poet Angela France and the actor and pianist Zubin Varla, and brought together classical poetry read by actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, contemporary poetry read by its authors, and musical interludes from Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Grieg, Shostakovich and others played by Zubin Varla. It took place on Sunday 21 January 2018 at 7.30 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

Actors

• Clifford Rose – Honorary RSC Artist
• Sam Dastor
• Nicholas Day
• Karen Drury
• Jennifer McEvoy
• Michael Mears
• Zubin Varla – actor and pianist. Born in London to a Persian family, he began the piano at three and graduated from the acting course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1992. His stage work spans the RSC (Romeo, Caliban, Brutus, Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children), the National Theatre (Cyrano de Bergerac, War Horse, the title role in Dara), the Globe, Young Vic and Donmar, with film and television from Spooks to Deep State. He had worked with Cordula Kempe since 1994 on word and music programmes and in chamber music with her Bergonzi Quartet.

Poets reading their own work

Ann Alexander, Kathryn Alderman, Susan Davies, Ann Drysdale, Angela France, Wendy Freeman, Hazell Hills, Judy Ison, Nina Lewis, John Mason, Jenna Plewes, Connie Ramsay Bott, Belinda Rimmer, Marg Roberts, Cathy Whittaker and Linda Williams – most of them members of the poetry workshops held at The Muses.

Programme

Part I

• J. S. Bach – Aria from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
• Thoughts on poetry by various authors, including Yevtushenko, Mandelstam and Schneyder
• John Donne – The Sun Rising
• Quotations by Kunze, Morley, Menashe, Cage, Logue and Sappho
• W. A. Mozart – Wedding March theme from The Magic Flute
• Kathryn Alderman – Painting the Sky
• Dmitri Shostakovich – Prelude, Op. 87 No. 1
• Jenna Plewes – Low Light on a Winter Day
• Dmitri Shostakovich – Fugue, Op. 87 No. 1
• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 97
• Judy Ison – Shadows in the Close
• Edvard Grieg – Nocturne, Op. 54 No. 4
• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 43
• Susan Davies – Full Moon
• Claude Debussy – Clair de lune
• Angela France – Pond Life
• Marg Roberts – Riding in Style
• A. E. Housman – from Last Poems, XXVIII
• Angela France – Cold Comfort
• Frédéric Chopin – Prelude in D flat major, Op. 28 No. 15, “Raindrop”
• Robert Frost – Acquainted with the Night
• Pablo Neruda – The Light Wraps You
• Connie Ramsay Bott – Colours
• Gerard Manley Hopkins – Pied Beauty
• Nina Lewis – Template Town
• Ann Alexander – Blue Curtains
• The Beatles – Here Comes the Sun
• J. W. von Goethe – from Iphigenie auf Tauris, Act III, scene 1
• J. S. Bach – Prelude in B flat minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, No. 22
• Bertolt Brecht – final lines of The Threepenny Opera
• J. S. Bach – Fugue in B flat minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, No. 22
• Elizabeth Daryush – We Should at Times Go Out
• Wendell Berry – To Know the Dark
• Wendy Freeman – In the Dark
• Cathy Whittaker – After Days of Cleaning
• Kathryn Alderman – Mindscapes
• Wendy Freeman – Cheap Thrills
• J. S. Bach – Prelude in F sharp minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, No. 14
• W. B. Yeats – He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
• Nina Lewis – Signs
• Boris Slutsky – Solar Batteries
• Jim Burns – Epitaph in Case It Should Happen

Interval

Part II

• Leonard Cohen – Out of the Thousands; Laughter in the Pantheon
• Anna Akhmatova – An Epigram
• Sergei Prokofiev – Visions fugitives, Op. 22 No. 16
• Cathy Whittaker – I Hear You
• A. E. Housman – from A Shropshire Lad
• Belinda Rimmer – Trill
• William Shakespeare – Sonnet 99
• Frédéric Chopin – Prelude in A major, Op. 28 No. 7
• Belinda Rimmer – Light
• Sylvia Plath – Southern Sunrise
• Susan Davies – Salad Sense
• Hazell Hills – In St Mary’s Churchyard, Warwick
• Alfred Tennyson – Summer Night
• Frédéric Chopin – Prelude in B minor, Op. 28 No. 6 (beginning)
• William Cowper – The Poplar-Field
• Frédéric Chopin – Prelude in B minor, Op. 28 No. 6 (end)
• Philip Larkin – The Large Cool Store
• Ann Drysdale – Darkness and Light
• Jenny Joseph – Warning
• Ann Drysdale – Solstice
• John Mason – Cotswold Views
• Marg Roberts – Return to Charlecote Park, September 1905
• Isaac Albéniz – Tango
• Jenna Plewes – A Mexican Wave
• Hazell Hills – L’Heure bleue
• John Mason – Wild Colours
• Angela France – Lightfall
• Linda Williams – Colour, Light and Shade
• Ann Alexander – The Coming of Colour
• Connie Ramsay Bott – As Simple as Black and White
• W. H. Auden – from September 1939
• Erich Fried – Retrospect
• Franz Schubert – German Dance, Op. 33 No. 15
• Dylan Thomas – Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
• John Milton – On His Blindness
• Franz Schubert – German Dance, Op. 33 No. 10
• Erich Fried – What Is Life?
• J. S. Bach – from the Goldberg Variations: Quodlibet (Variation 30) and Aria

About the programme

The booklet welcomed poets and actors to the Society’s “traditional Poetry Marathon”, a blend of classical and contemporary poetry interwoven with music. It was illustrated with Russian landscape paintings – Alexei Savrasov’s The Flight of the Rooks and Isaak Levitan’s Spring – High Water and Fog over Water.

In a note on Poetry at The Muses, Angela France described the long-running writing workshops held at the Kempe Studio – started by Hazell Hills, later run by the late Sally Clark and Don Barnard, and now led by her – whose members studied published poetry, wrote to a theme at each meeting, and often contributed poems to Cordula Kempe’s programmes. In her own thank-you, Cordula Kempe wrote of the ancient ideal of Kalokagathia, beauty and goodness united, and of poetry and music together as a force that “may, at any given time, feel like a drop in the ocean; but it will never be as if that drop has not been there”.

Credits

• Devised by Cordula Kempe with Angela France and Zubin Varla
• Publicity, printing and archive recording: Max Ross
• Dame Judi Dench, Patron; Richard Pearce, Chairman of the Society