A Pastoral Tapestry in Words and Music

CHARLES’S (ALMOST) LAST CONCERT

Charles continued to give great pleasure to the large audience which gathered for his (almost) last of a series of musical offerings over the years and the first with the Sine Nomine  ladies group.  The concert featured many fresh arrangements of known favourites in the musical sphere – especially some jazzy renderings by John Rutter of poems by Shakespeare, about wives cheating on their husbands (from Love’s Labour’s Lost) and another (“It was a lover and his lass”) on the joys of springtime from As You Like It  (well, really) – plus some lesser known  prose passages chosen by Audrey.

The sensitively rendered “Moon River” by Henri Mancini caused us to wonder yet again “What is a huckleberry friend?” (Answer: one showing a deep and long-term friendship, epitomizing loyalty, support, and reliability) and we also enjoyed the familiar strains of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”.

The lady singers showed great professionalism in their performance and flautist David Edmonds complemented the singing and the piano with his understated but telling accompaniments to the pieces.

Audrey – as always, perfect in diction and clarity – had chosen pictures of English literary life: from the gross coarseness of Dickens’ Mr. Bounderby from Hard Times (“standing with his back to the fire airing the (false) poverty of his birth and upbringing”) to the peaceful delight of an unscheduled summer stop at  Adlestrop railway station and the exhilaration of the beginning of a long-awaited holiday in the country by Kenneth Graham; let us also remember Poppy Green and her squint and cardboard gaiters in the village’s Peace Procession from Cider with Rosie and the plaintive little girl in Laurence Alma-Tadema’s “If no-one marries me” – all wonderful pen-pictures of people and times in a nostalgic, near-remembered past. Well selected and wonderfully presented.

It was a splendid morning – thank you to Charles and Audrey and to our other artistes, to everyone who helped with the refreshments and the artistic presentation – but is it really the end?  May we ask, please, for a further appearance from the Sine Nomine ladies (especially now that we know how to pronounce their name) and from Charles?  He has sharpened up our musical knowledge and appreciation over the years: it would be wonderful to hear Mozart, Bach and Gershwin et al continuing to fill the church’s arches over the future years.