SPENSER'S SONNETS, RUBBRA'S MUSIC
| (22 2NERS to Station 4YC at 8.24 p-m. on Monday, July 30, will hear a work by Edmund Rubbra that is rarely performed. It is Amoretti, his settings for tenor voice and string quartet of five Spenser sonnets. And because much of the music of Rubbra-one of the more austere among present-day English com-posers-is not easily assimilated at one hearing, Amoretti will be heard again from the same station at 7.33 p.m. on Sunday, August 5. Rubbra studied at the Royal College of Music under Holst, and occasionally Vaughan Williams. Here he re-discov-ered the great musicians who lived in England’s golden age of music-Tallis, Weelkes, Byrd and Morley. Composers of madrigals and masses in the Elizabethan age, their works were a tranquil contrast to those of Prokofieff, Stravinsky and Honneger, whose names were on the lips of all enthusiastic young musicians when Rubbra was studying and teaching in the ‘twenties. In the course of thirteen years he wrote five important symphonies, and many other
pieces, including Masses for liturgical use, and was commissioned.to write aTe Deum for chorus and orchestra for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Asked to describe his aim in-music he defined it: as "trying to bring the contrapuntal texture of the Elizabethans into wider instrumental forms." Edmund Spenser wrote his Amoretti towards the end of 1592 when he fell in love with Elizabeth. Boyle, whom he later married, He celebrated his wooing in the Amoretti and his wedding in the Epithalamion. The sonnets are all but one in a form which Spenser made his own, consisting of three linked quatrains and a couplet. Rubbra’s settings, though modern, are in complete keeping with the character of the poetry and its period. The programme, which is 19 minutes long and self-contained, wil, be presented by Robin Gordon (tenor), Ritchie Hanna and Thelma Lupp (violins), Pattricia Naismith (viola), Dorothy Wallace (cello), and Norman Griffiths (narrator). Later the Amoretti will be heard from each of the other three YC stations.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 20
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333SPENSER'S SONNETS, RUBBRA'S MUSIC New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 20
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