The three-week Festival runs this year from Saturday 22th September to Saturday 20th October inclusive. Under the artistic directorship of KAC Chairman Benjamin Costello, this year's Festival promises a wealth of talent from the worlds of music, drama, and dance.Festival of the Voice 2007 Commissions
In a new departure for Kingston Arts Council, Benjamin Costello and the Festival Committee have commissioned three composers and a writer who all live or work in the Royal Borough to write works for this year's Festival. They are:
James Webb / Thackeray– Come Wealth or Want (anthem for choir, organ and piano)
(James Webb – Composer; read Music at Cambridge; first winner of BBC Young Composer of the Year; former BBC producer; Director of Music at Wimbledon High School).
A setting for SATB choir, organ and piano of William Makepeace Thackeray’s text taken from the concluding stanzas of his poem The End of the Play. An English journalist and novelist, famous for his novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray (1811 – 63) lived in Surbiton for a time.
Frank Millward / Heather Keens – The Lament of Lucy Vaughan-Harding (song cycle for voice and piano)
(Music: Dr Frank Millward – Australian-born composer, performer and producer working in a range of cross-disciplinary performance areas; Director of the Live Arts Course at Kingston University).
(Words: Heather Keens – British singer, singing teacher, voice teacher, examiner; performer in opera and musical theatre; tutor, The Vocal Athlete, University of Surrey.)
The song cycle is based on the story of James Squire, a Kingston resident and highwayman who escaped conviction in 1774 by joining the army. Returning a free man two years later, he ran a hotel in Heathen St, Kingston. In 1784 Squire was arrested again for the theft of his neighbour’s chickens. He ended up in Southwark Gaol, before being shipped to the British Penal Colony in Australia, on the first fleet of 1787. Many adventures took place for Mr Squire in Australia. He eventually became the first man to grow hops and brew beer there, where an established business still exists to this day in New South Wales. This song cycle is from the view point of his Australian lover and house keeper Lucy Vaughan-Harding, who outlived him. She laments of his life and death.
John Bate / Timothy Knapman – Cantari Dignus: A Kingston Fanfare (choral fanfare for choir, organ and brass)
(Music: John Bate – Freelance conductor; Director of Thames Philharmonic Choir; former Director of Music Performance at Kingston University).
(Words: Timothy Knapman – Freelance writer; read History at New College, Oxford; Children's writer, lyricist and playwright; published by Puffin; has worked with I Fagiolini, Trestle Theatre Company, OAE et al; work performed at Dartington, Cheltenham Festival, BBC Proms).
Tim Knapman writes: It’s not an easy thing to sum up Kingston in seventy-three words, even when you know those words will be given wings by the passionate magnificence of John Bate’s music. Geography helps: the river Thames, having wound its way through English literature for centuries, can always be relied upon to lend a poem buoyancy; history too: Julius Caesar was here (so I’ve allowed myself some Latin), and so were the Anglo-Saxons. Kingston, after all, is the place where the Old English crowned their kings, and that’s what drives my poem: the thought that buried under our suburban streets and shopping centres is the sacred spot which bound an ancient nation together, and the hope that, for a few moments at least, its magic will be allowed to sing again. Kingston is cantari dignus all right: worthy of being celebrated in song.
