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Rare Welsh Classical Music Revived

A rare piece of Welsh classical music is set to be heard again as its score is published to mark St David`s Day.

Missa Cambrensis, by Barry-born composer Grace Williams, is well-known by Welsh classical music fans although it was only performed once, in 1971.

It appears in a new edition of musical scores edited by Graeme Cotterill. `It is a deeply challenging piece that certainly requires re-evaluation - I`d love to hear a modern interpretation of the score,` he says.

Grace Williams (1906-77) is considered by many to be one of the finest composers Wales has ever produced.

Very few of her works are commercially available as recordings or printed scores but many young people will know her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Rhymes which is part of the GCSE Music course in Wales.

The newly-edited scores, published by Oriana Publications in partnership with Tŷ Cerdd and the Welsh Music Guild, will make it possible for orchestras, choirs and others to discover and perform major works by Grace Williams, and may lead to further commercial recordings of her work in the future.

Eryl Freestone, Grace Williams`s niece, said: `This is a very significant day for Welsh music`.

`These wonderful works, by one of our foremost composers, will at last be readily available for performance, and can then be heard and appreciated by the wide audience they deserve.`

Seven of the pieces, including the mass, two symphonies - the earlier being the first symphony by a Welsh composer - and other orchestral works, have been edited by Graeme Cotterill, a doctoral student in music at Bangor University.

Community work

`Missa Cambrensis, which I have been fortunate enough to hear in a recording of the only performance from the BBC sound archive, is a complex yet always fulfilling work,` he says.

`It is a deeply challenging piece that certainly requires re-evaluation, and I`d love to hear a modern interpretation of the score.`

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales paid tribute to the composer in the naming of one of its rooms at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.

The Grace Williams Studio is the base for the orchestra`s community work.

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COMPOSER OF THE MONTH
Hilary Tann

From her childhood in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, Hilary Tann developed the love of nature which has inspired all her music, whether written for performance in the United States (Adirondack Light for narrator and orchestra, for the Centennial of Adirondack State Park, 1992) or for her first home in Wales (the celebratory overture, With the heather and small birds, commissioned by the 1994 Cardiff Festival).

A deep interest in the music of Japan led to study of the ancient Japanese vertical bamboo flute (the shakuhachi) from 1985 to 1991. Among the works reflecting this special interest are the chamber work, Of erthe and air (1990), and the large orchestral work From afar, premiered in October 1996 by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor. From afar received its European premiere in 2000 by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and is scheduled for the opening concert of The International Festival of Women in Music Today at the Seoul Arts Center in Korea (KBS Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Apo Hsu, April 2003).

Hilary Tann lives south of the Adirondacks in upstate New York where she chairs the Department of Performing Arts at Union College in Schenectady. She holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton University. From 1982 to 1995, she was active in the International League of Women Composers and served in a number of Executive Committee positions. Numerous organizations have supported her work, including the Welsh Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music USA. A number of her chamber works are available on the Capstone and N/S Consonance labels. Since 1989 her music has been published exclusively by Oxford University Press.

Her connection with Wales continues in various choral commissions - The Moor for the Madog Center for Welsh Studies, Psalm 104 (Praise, my soul) for the North American Welsh Choir, and Wales, Our Land for the Green Mountain College Welsh Heritage Program. The influence of the Welsh landscape is also evident in many chamber works - The Cresset Stone (solo violin), and The Walls of Morlais Castle (oboe, viola, cello). In July 2001, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes premiered The Grey Tide and the Green, commissioned for the Last Night of the Welsh Proms.

Recent years have brought a series of concerto commissions - for violin (Here, the Cliffs premiered in October 1997 by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra with violinist Corine Brouwer Cook), alto saxophone (In the First, Spinning Place premiered in March 2000 by the University of Arizona Symphony Orchestra with Debra Richtmeyer as soloist), and cello (Anecdote, premiered in December 2000 the Newark (DE) Symphony Orchestra with Romanian cellist Ovidiu Marinescu). In March 2001, Hilary Tann guest composer-in-residence with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra in conjunction with a performance of her 1989 concert overture, The Open Field (In memoriam Tienanmen Square).

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Tŷ Cerdd
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