ARMSTRONG GIBBS FESTIVAL

St John Baptist Danbury

10.09.10

Last weekend saw the second festival to celebrate the work of C Armstrong Gibbs. Centred, appropriately, around the Danbury Church where Gibbs lies buried, and where he made music for many years.

The Festival began with a recital by the Griffin sisters, including some of the charming miniatures for which Gibbs is now best known. Lara gave us the Four Preludes, with a lovely evocation of water in The Trout Pool, and she was joined by Emma on clarinet for Three Pieces, including the pastoral Air, which, as she said, could well be a painting in music of the view over Danbury Common.

Festival Director Robert Atchison, a busy concert violinist and conductor on the international scene, was soloist in the Vivaldi Four Seasons in the Festival Concert, and also in Gibbs' Spring Garland. There was also an impressive performance of his little-known Concertino with Olda Dudnik as soloist.

There was also a successful Children's Concert, conducted by Simon Warne and featuring the talents of young musicians from Sandon School and Danbury Primary Schools, alongside Atchison's renowned London Piano Trio.

In the last of the summer sunshine, we gathered in the church for the final event: Choral Evensong with the St John's Singers and Paul Hagger at the organ. We heard Canticles set by Armstrong Gibbs, and sang his lovely hymn-tune, Lingwood.

photo of rehearsal for Festival Concert courtesy of Robert Atchison

SPRING CONCERT

Waltham Singers in the Parish Church

19.06.10

It's fifty years since the death of Armstrong Gibbs, and this enterprising programme was one of several concerts in his home county marking this anniversary.

It featured works by his teacher, Vaughan Williams [the familiar Three Shakespeare Songs] and his contemporaries Howells [Take Him Earth for Cherishing] and Parry – a wonderfully stirring Blest Pair of Sirens, with Robert Poyser getting the most out of the Waltham organ.

The same forces for Gibbs' Cantata for Passiontide, Behold The Man. Dramatic choruses, linked by narration, beginning with How Beautiful on the Mountains, and ending with a note of triumph. Conductor Andrew Fardell, and his sizeable choir, made excellent advocates for this neglected work.

Unaccompanied works included Dryden's Pleasures of Love, and Five Elizabethan Lyrics. Sleep was something of a theme – a lovely diminuendo at the end of The Cloud-Capp'd Towers, and Gibbs' “Come Sleep”, preceded by his setting of an Evening Prayer, “Before Sleep”, with a tellingly simple beginning and end. And Walter De La Mare's Five Eyes, very enjoyably rendered by the women's voices with Poyser at the piano.

He also gave us Gibbs's eight Lakeland Pictures, charming miniatures written in 1940 when World War Two took him to Westmorland.