On Saturday 14th June, Ripon’s St Cecilia orchestra will give their final concert of the 2024-25 season, ‘Romantics and Radicals’, in the beautiful setting of Holy Trinity Church: a programme juxtaposing works by two of the greatest composers of the Romantic era, Schumann and Tchaikovsky, with two of the early 20th Century’s most radical, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.
The concert opens with Prokofiev’s sparkling ‘Classical’ Symphony. This short work, one of the composer’s most enduringly popular, is composed along the lines of a Mozart or Haydn symphony, blending Prokofiev’s own daring musical language with typical melodic turns and gestures from the Classical era. In the composer’s own words it is ‘what Haydn might have written had he lived another 100 years’.
Next is Schumann’s intensely lyrical cello concerto, performed by St Cecilia’s principal cellist, Helen Dawson. Clara Schumann said of the concerto: ‘it seems to be written in the true cello style: the romantic quality, the vivacity, the freshness and humour, also the highly interesting interweaving of cello and orchestra are indeed wholly ravishing’. Soloist Helen Dawson has been principal cellist of St Cecilia Orchestra since 2018, though she has connections with the orchestra going back to the 1990s. She has performed as a chamber musician in Ripon numerous times, most recently playing the Rachmaninov cello sonata with Tim Harper in Ripon Cathedral’s lunchtime concert series and the Schubert String Quintet at Markenfield Hall with the Dales Ensemble. As a concerto soloist she played Shostakovich’s cello concerto no 1 with the VaCO orchestra and is looking forward to working with conductor Xenophon Kelsey in this way again, saying ‘playing a concerto always is a special experience, but to perform with musicians and a conductor with whom I have had such a long musical connection will be a very special thing indeed’.
After the interval, Helen takes to the stage again in Tchaikovsky’s poignant Andante Cantabile, arranged for cello and strings by the composer from his first string quartet, before the concert is brought to a close with Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella Suite’. Formed of 8 movements from his ‘Pulcinella’ ballet score, this work marked a new direction in Stravinsky’s composition and is based on compositions from 18th Century Italy. He retains much of the charm of the original pieces, but with harmonic and rhythmic twists that are pure twentieth-century inventiveness and pure Stravinsky. In the words of the RLPO, Stravinsky ‘takes 18th Century music, sprinkles it with humour and drops it headfirst into the Roaring Twenties’!
Tickets for the concert, priced at £20 for adults and free for under 18s, can be bought online via Ticketsource (www.ticketsource.co.uk/st-cecilia), from the Little Ripon Bookshop, Harrogate Theatre box office, or on the door from 7.00pm on the concert day.
