The tenor Robin Tritschler won the Song category at the 2025 Gramophone Classical Music Awards for his Signum album ‘Songs for Peter Pears’, which features Lennox Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs and Songs of the Half-light, with other works by Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Richard Rodney Bennett and Geoffrey Bush, written for, or associated with, the renowned tenor Peter Pears. Tritschler collaborated on the recording with pianist Malcolm Martineau, guitarist Sean Shibe and cellist Philip Higham. During the awards ceremony in London in October he and Shibe performed Berkeley's Rachel from the album, and in speech afterwards Tritschler thanked the Lennox Berkeley Society for supporting the project. The Gramophone Awards are highly regarded as a benchmark achievement in the classical recording industry, celebrating exceptional recordings released over the past year. Writing on the Gramophone website, the musicologist Hugo Shirley revealed that ‘Songs for Peter Pears’ was up against stiff competition, ‘but this superb album underlines the Irish tenor’s virtues – a firm, clean flexible voice allied to impeccable musicianship and unshowy artistry – in carefully-chosen works that explore a key period in English musical history – and what fine music it is: a fascinating, often moving programme, impeccably prepared, performed and recorded.’
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Berkeley in Poland
November 2025
One of Lennox Berkeley’s finest chamber pieces, the Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano, originally commissioned by the pianist Colin Horsley in 1953 who gave the first performance with Dennis Brain and Manoug Partikian in London the following year, is to be given a performance in Poland later this month as part of a British Music Festival. This event has been made possible through a generous donation from an anonymous member of the Society, which covers the artists’ fees and the hire cost of the music. The players will be Christian Danowicz (violin), Tomasz Binkowski (horn) and Julia Samojlo (piano), and the concert will take place in the Nizio Gallery in Warsaw on 28 November. The festival has been organised by the former Chairman of the LBS, the choral conductor David Wordsworth, with Julia Samojlo, and it brings to Poland music by Parry, Stanford, Elgar, Delius, Ireland and Walton as well as by living composers, among them Michael Berkeley, James Macmillan and John Rutter. The original plan was to include the Polish premiere of Berkeley’s great Stabat Mater, which Wordsworth revived for British audiences at the Spitalfields Festival in London in 2016, with the Marian Consort and the Berkeley Ensemble – and recorded for Delphian (DCD 34180-CD). But the proposed performance in St Florian’s Cathedral in Warsaw had to be postponed and will now take place in May next year as part of the Musica Sacra Festival in Warsaw, and possibly again in Wroclaw later in the year. David Wordsworth, like Berkeley, has always been interested in Polish music – from Chopin and Szymanowski to Lutosławski and Panufnik – and he is currently in Warsaw studying Poland’s rich choral tradition under the aegis of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Michael Easton (1954-2004)
October 2025
One of Lennox Berkeley’s last composition pupils at the Royal Academy of Music was Michael Easton,
an Englishman who later emigrated to Australia. Born in Hertfordshire, Easton was encouraged to
pursue music by a neighbour, the composer, pianist and writer Elizabeth Poston, who lived at Rooks
Nest House in Stevenage, the childhood home of E.M. Forster. When Michael Easton graduated from
the Academy, where Poston herself had been a student, he went into music publishing, first with
Chester’s and then with Novello.
In 1982 he decided to make his home in Melbourne, and four years later he felt able to retire from music
publishing and to concentrate full-time on composing. In Australia he quickly established himself as a
practical and inventive composer, a brilliant arranger and an all-round musician. In 1990 he and another
Berkeley pupil, the composer Michael Hurd, founded the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival in Victoria.
That same year Easton composed two musical tributes to his beloved teacher Lennox Berkeley, who
had died at the end of the previous year. One is called Reflections, a set of six variations for piano based on Lennox’s own Six Preludes for Piano. The other is a little piece for flute and piano called In Memoriam: Lennox Berkeley, which quotes from some of the composers who were close to Lennox,
including Britten, Poulenc and Ravel. Both works can be heard on YouTube in recordings made by
Easton’s friend and colleague, the South-African born pianist Len Vorster, with the flautist Frederick
Shade.
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Roger Butler’s Berkeley Letters
September 2025
A folder of personal letters written by Lennox and Freda Berkeley to a friend, Roger Butler, who lost his sight as a young man, has surfaced following the publication of a new book about him. The Light of Day by Christopher Stephens (Headline £20), tells the moving story of the author’s first meeting with Roger Butler, when, as a 21-year-old postgraduate at Oxford in 2003, he was asked to read to him; their close friendship for the next eight years; and the discovery after Roger’s death in 2011 that he had been a pioneer of gay liberation, when in 1960, with homosexuality still illegal, he wrote a letter to The Spectator, starting, ‘Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned’. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act on the recommendation of the 1957 Wolfenden Report that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence, and it led, indirectly, to a change in the law in England and Wales in 1967. The new Berkeley letters form part of a much larger collection of Butler’s letters and other papers inherited by Dr Stephens, who has kindly made them available to the Berkeley family. Read more about the Berkeley letters in our Articles section.
Tony Scotland
Lennox Berkeley Society AGM 2025
Wednesday 21 May 2025
Razumovsky Academy concert hall, 56 College Road, Kensal Green NW10 5ET, 2.00pm, AGM of the LBS, chaired by the president, Petroc Trelawny, followed by concert given by the guitarist Emmanuel Sowicz and pianist Yuko Sano: two Berkeley works - the Quatre pièces for guitar written for Segovia in Paris in about 1927, and the Toccata for piano of 1925 - together with works by Poulenc, Roussel, Dandrieu arr. Godowsky and Manuel Ponce. Admission free - on application to the Hon Secretary, Rupert Robertson, at rupert@lennoxberkeley.org.uk
Counting the Beats
May 2025
The soprano April Fredrick [sic] and the pianist Eric McElroy will be giving a rare performance of Berkeley’s song, Counting the Beats, at a lunchtime concert in the Huntingdon Hall in Worcester on Friday 30 May, as part of the Elgar Festival. The song sets words by Robert Graves, on the theme of mortality, the fleeting nature of time and the fear of impending doom. Berkeley wrote the music for the 1963 Festival of Poetry organised by the Poetry Book Society. The programme will also include McElroy’s own song cycle of war poems by Graves, A Dead Man’s Embers. The concert has been designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Berkeley’s friend and wartime colleague in the BBC, Sir Arthur Bliss.
Georgi Dimitrov performs Theme & Variations
February 2025
The Bulgarian guitarist Georgi Dimitrov played Berkeley’s Theme and Variations in a lunchtime concert shared with the Londinium Consort at the Wigmore Hall, London, on Saturday 1 February starting 1pm. He and the quintet are winners of the New Elizabethan Award 2025, a biennial award for classical guitarists and lutenists for the performance of solo and/or ensemble music, written by composers from the two Elizabethan ages. Further details here.
Songs For Peter Pears
July 2024
Robin Tritschler’s new song recital album on Signum Classics (SIGCD774) continues to attract admiring reviews, and BBC Music Magazine has given it five stars as ‘Choral & Song Choice’. The album, dedicated to the memory of the tenor Peter Pears, includes the first-ever complete recording of Lennox Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs, with the pianist Malcolm Martineau, and Berkeley’s de la Mare settings, Songs of the Half-Light, with the guitarist Sean Shibe. Under the heading ‘Pears-shaped pieces just ripe for revival, the BBC Music Magazine’s critic Ashtosh Kandekar writes that Tritschler delivers Berkeley’s ‘expressionistic settings’ of Housman ‘with luminous tone and unflinching emotional directness, full of the resignation and bitterness of unrequited love’, while Martineau’s ’radiant piano playing underscores the heartache’. Of the Songs of the Half-Light Kandekar writes that Shibe ‘brings an astonishing range of sonic effects, adding the subtlest of brushstrokes to Tritschler’s glinting vocal palette’. The Guardian spoke of Tritschler’s ‘impressively lucid’ performances, and The Times described the album as ‘a powerful and rewarding release’, to which its critic had listened ‘with plenty of pleasure, buoyed by Tritschler’s intelligence, the music and its multiple shades of feeling’. In a comprehensive notice in his online music magazine, Planet Hugill, the composer Robert Hugill describes the disc as an album ‘that makes you think, but also satisfies as a recital in its own right’. Berkeley’s Housman Songs, he writes, are ‘terrific - lyrical yet spiky and all with a remarkable intensity to them’. The album is available online for as little as £8.00.
Tritschler Sings Berkeley
June 2024
The long-awaited song recital disc, on which the lyric tenor Robin Tritschler pays tribute to the memory of the great Peter Pears in a programme of works associated with him, including two by Lennox Berkeley, is released by Signum Classics today. It features the first-ever complete recording of the Five Housman Songs, in which the piano accompanist is Malcolm Martineau, and the five Songs of the Half-Light (setting poems by Walter De la Mare), in which Robin in joined by the guitarist Sean Shibe. An early review describes it as ‘one of the finest vocal recital discs of this decade.’ Read more, and buy the download (£8.00) or CD (£14.00).
