manx celtic music and dance

Island of Culture joint concert - IOMSO/SPO - May 17th, Villa Marina, Douglas

10 Apr 2014

One of the largest orchestral concerts of recent times will take place at the Villa Marina on Saturday, May17th, and is sure to be one of the highlights of the Island of Culture. The Isle of Man Symphony Orchestra and the Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra are joining forces to perform one of the masterpieces of English twentieth century music, Holst’s vast symphonic suite, The Planets, conducted by the SPO’s musical director Benjamin Ellin.

The first half of the concert, though, conducted by the IOMSO’s musical director, Maurice Powell, has a distinctive Manx flavour as befits the occasion, and opens with Arthur Butterworth’s Nordic concert overture Ragnarok, ‘The Doom of the Gods’, dedicated to the late Alan Pickard and the Manx Youth Orchestra in 1995, but not performed since. This rugged and forbidding orchestral piece takes its inspiration from the scene depicted on the fragment of Thorwald’s Cross in Andreas, as Odin and the Gods and heroes go forth into the final grim and great Battle of Ragnarok against the monstrous wolf Fenrir and the forces of evil.

Haydn Wood was born in Slaithwaite, but spent much of his youth on the Island under the wing of his elder brother, Harry, who as ‘Manxland’s King of Music’, would become one of the best- known and influential musicians ever to have lived and worked here. Haydn Wood became a virtuoso violinist and the composer of some of the best-loved pieces in the light music field, as well as many fine songs and choral works. Many of his orchestral works were inspired by the lovely Manx melodies he knew so well, and such characteristic pieces as Mannin Veen, King Orry, Mylecharane and most popular of all, the 1931 Manx Rhapsody, which introduces a number of Manx melodies including: The Sheep under the Snow, The Cutting of the Turf, and Hush Little Darling, to give them their English titles.

There follows no less than two World premieres: Charles Guard’s Song of the Southern Hills especially for the occasion and introducing themes drawn from his evocative film scores, and the World premiere of John Edward Quayle’s Fantasy-Overture On Maughold Head, the second of two such works re-discovered as recently as 2013 in the attic of his grandson Ewan Davidson in Winchester.

Manx-born J E Quayle (1869-1957) was the conductor of the Douglas Amateur Orchestral Society from 1917-27; a fine violinist, who led the orchestra for many of Harry Wood’s Annual Students Concerts, the Guild Concerts and the Sunday Sacred Concerts from the Palace during the 1890s; an accomplished organist and pianist and a significant figure in the preservation of Manx traditional music. His significance as a composer has only been realised in the past few years as his larger-scale orchestral works have once more come to light. Like Haydn Wood in his overtures, tone poems and rhapsodies, J E Quayle introduces Manx melodies into his orchestral works, and although the inspiration for On Maughold Head comes partly from memories of long summer days spent in Maughold during WW, the entire piece is structured around the Manx tune Jemmy as Nancy. J E Quayle is no mere imitator though; his is a distinctive voice, and, as I hope to demonstrate after further examination of his surviving works, the authentic voice of Manx orchestral music in the first half of the twentieth century.

The concert has been made possible by the generous support of the Isle of Man Arts Council and the Villa Marina, and with a special grant from Culture Vannin towards the expenses of producing a modern conductor’s score and performing material from the autograph of J E Quayle’s On Maughold Head’. 

 

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