THE Wye Valley Music concert on Sunday was held at St Mary the Virgin Church, St Briavels. Wye Valley Music began as the St Briavels Music society many years ago, before acknowledging its growing connections to Monmouth, Chepstow and Hereford by adopting the Wye Valley title.

The recital was to celebrate the centenary of Madeleine Dring. As a student at the Royal College of Music, she was taught by Herbert Howells of Lydney and also by Ralph Vaughan Williams of Down Ampney, Cirencester. 

She was a composer of wide musical genres, including jazz, cabaret and waltz, which complemented the poetry of Shakespeare and John Betjeman in this programme.

The artists presenting the concert were Lorna Day (mezzo soprano) and Olivia Dance (piano), experienced concert performers, who presented the challenging range of the programme with energy and passion, and introduced the audience to some great ‘Previously Unpublished Works’.

The concert featured an eclectic programme of classical, jazz, calypso, songs from the shows, with music and words from Gershwin, Britten, Shakespeare and the Gloucestershire poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who provides folk rhythms to rustic verses by poets Francis Ledwidge, Joseph Campbell and WB Yeats.

Betjeman’s verses are rarely set to music, but Madeleine Dring’s musical accompaniment of five of his works performed here are wistful, delightful and powerful celebrations of the English music hall and other distinctive features of English life in the 1930s. 

Shakespeare’s verse is put to music in Dring’s previously unpublished musical takes on his rustic verses from ‘As You Like It’ and his 1599 poetic anthology.

The ‘West Indian Dance’ is her musical interpretation of the early days of the Notting Hill Carnival in the early 1970s, and her ‘Waltz Finale’ is a wonderful seamless mixture of classic, popular, dance and cabaret music.

The finale of the concert was another previously unpublished cabaret song, ‘The Lady Composer’ a playful, self-deprecating, delightful legacy of a life of a great but little-known composer. Her ‘Previously Unpublished Works’, eventually published many years after her death, may uncover many such hidden gems.

Wye Valley Music, as well as putting on concerts throughout the Wye Valley, are collaborating this year with the Three Choirs Festival, the annual series of musical events visiting the cathedral cities of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester over a 3-year cycle. 

This year it’s Gloucester’s turn, with events from 22nd to 29th July being held in the Cathedral and some other local venues. 

On Wednesday 26th July there is a performance of ‘What the Lark Saw’ at Gloucester Cathedral, which is a project involving Wye Valley Music, around 300 individuals from eleven different schools and community groups in a showcase concert and exhibition, and will feature the song cycle of Gloucester composer Liz Lane. 

‘What the Lark Saw’ was inspired by ‘The Lark Ascending’, Ralph Vaughan William’s ever popular orchestral piece. Concert pianist Olivia Dance is also performing at the festival.