String Trio and The Winter’s Tale with the Royal Shakespeare Company

One of Lennox Berkeley’s most popular chamber works, the String Trio of 1943, was given a performance at the Leicester International Music Festival on 15 September, with a broadcast on a Radio Three Lunchtime Concert a few days later. The players were Marina Chiche, violin, Philip Dukes, viola, and Guy Johnston, cello. The anonymous reviewer of the blog leicesterconcertgoerdiary.wordpress.com gave it a warm welcome: ‘The received opinion until recently was that his [Lennox Berkeley’s] music was beautifully crafted in the French style but rarely of much depth, in other words the same thing that used to be said about Ravel. In fact, this work illustrated perfectly that poise and craft is not the same as shallowness. It had both immense brio and a delightful touch of astringency in its lyricism. It was rather like a good white wine that has a touch of sharpness in the taste.’

Incidental music which Lennox Berkeley wrote for a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1960 was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company for a concert of modern British Shakespeare music at St. John’s, Smith Square, London, in September 2016. It was played by the Southbank Sinfonia (conductor Simon Over) in a programme including Vaughan Williams’ music for Richard II and Rubbra’s for Macbeth. Guest actors taking part in the concert included Patricia Hodge, David Threlfall and Samuel West. A suite of nine movements from The Winter’s Tale score was published by Chester Music in 1962. Berkeley also wrote incidental music for a production of The Tempest at Stratford in 1946, and Decca recorded some of the songs from it. Scores of both these Shakespeare settings can be found at the British Library. Picture shows Peggy Ashcroft as Paulina (second left) in Peter Wood’s production of The Winter’s Tale, Stratford, 1960.