SHOES MALE VOICE CHOIR KENDAL

Sir Arthur Somervell

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MUSIC AND THE LAKE DISTRICT

(from http://www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2001/Sept01/lakes.htm)

However it is Arthur Somervell who among musicians who may be said to have retained most connections with his Cumbrian roots. He is also the best known as a composer of all the figures we have mentioned so far. Born in Windermere in 1863, he studied with Stanford at Cambridge, Parry at the RCM, where Somervell himself taught between 1894 and 1901, and in Berlin. He worked as Inspector of Music at the Board of Education but despite the demands of that job he managed to compose prolifically: a Symphony in D minor (Thalassa), Brahms-inspired like the symphonies of his teacher Stanford which it somewhat resembles (may we please have a recording?), orchestral suites like The Loving Heart and In Arcady, concertos for violin and piano, an attractive Clarinet Quintet which has been recorded, a Sonata and a Suite, both for violin and piano, piano music, of which Spring Fancies and the seven characteristic pieces The Romance of the Ball were once popular, five song cycles - Maud can occasionally be heard and may well be his masterpiece, but A Shropshire Lad (1904) which predates Butterworth's setting but has now been overshadowed by it, has several delightful songs - and large scale choral works. These latter include two masses and the cantatas Joan of Arc (1893), The Forsaken Merman (1895), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1896), Elegy (1896), Ode to the Sea (1897), The Passion of Christ (1914) and Christmas (1926). Of more relevance to this paper were A Song of Praise (1891) and The Power of the Soul (1895) as both were premiered at the Kendal Festival and because it is (like The Power of Sound) a setting of words by Wordsworth, Lakeland poet par excellence, the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, first performed at the Leeds Festival of 1907. His shorter songs include the two part Grasmere Carol - When Mary on that Christmas Day, published in 1925, which gained some popularity if not as much as his evergreen Shepherd's Cradle Song. Somervell, like Wordsworth, is buried at Grasmere.