Music tor Saint Cecilia's Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 9

Music tor Saint Cecilia's

Day

| T the end of the 17th Century it was the custom to celebrate St. Cecilia’s Day with a choral service at a London church, followed by a banquet and a concert at which an Ode was sung in praise of the Patron Saint of Music. The Festival was revived in 1946, when a special service was sung by a choir from St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and a concert, broadcast by the BBC, was given by the London Symphony, the London Philharmonic Or-_ chestra, and the Alexandra Choir. Next week, on Tuesday, November 22, listeners will be able to hear a broadcast of what is probably New Zea-

land’s first large-scale St. Cecilia’s Day Festival, which is being held under the auspices of the British Music Society at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Wellington. The performers will be Dr. V. E. Galway, Dunedin City organist, the Schola Cantorum, the

Lindsay String Orchestra, and the English Singers. The first hour of the Festival will be broadcast from station 2YC, starting at 8.0 p.m. At 7.0 p.m. on the following day 2YA will broadcast a recording of a speech made by Dr. V. E. Galway at the St, Cecilia’s Day Luncheon on Wednesday, November 23. The Festival will consist of music by Purcell, Handel, and outstanding modern English composers, as well as works by Bach and Corelli. The opening item will be a performance by choir and organ of Dr. Galway’s own composition "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The Schola Cantorum, conducted by Stanley Oliver, will sing Holst’s "Of One That is so Fair and Bright," the Kyrie from Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor, and John Ireland’s Immortality. Corelli’s Christmas Concerto will be played by the Alex Lindsay String On chestra, while the English Singers, conducted by Malcolm Rickard, will sing "Welcome to All the Pleasures," one of _Purcell’s Odes to St. Cecilia’s Day. Dr. Galway will also play Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor and two of his Choral Preludes. Saint Cecilia was martyred in Sicily about the year 176. Through a medieval misinterpretation of her Acts she came to be associated with church music, and especially with the orgari, which she is supposed to have played, if not to have invented; and when the Academy of Music was founded in Rome in 1584 she was adopted as the patroness of church music. Her story is told’ in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale; Dryden’s famous Ode to her was set to musi¢ by Handel and later by Sir Hubert Parry; and Pope also wrote an Ode to her. The most recent composition in her honour was Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia, to words by W. H. Auden. (St Cecilia’s Day is also Britten's birthday.) .