Helena Kean - Music and Images

Madeleine Dring Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring was born at 66 Raleigh Road in Hornsey, London on the 7th Sept 1923. This wonderfully gifted and multi-talented English composer, singer, pianist, lyricist, cartoonist and actress was born into a family of talents amateur musicians, who supported and encouraged her precocious musical talent from an early age. Her father Cecil John Dring (1883-1949) was an architect and surveyor and her mother Winefride Isabel née Smith (1891-1968) came from a Scottish family. Madeleine had an elder brother Cecil, who was born 1918. The children had a fairly strict Roman Catholic upbringing, a happy family life, with holidays and plenty of music-making. Their mother was a trained singer, a mezzo, who gave a concert at Wood Green in 1926 with stars from the London Coliseum. Their father played the cello and the piano, also entertained them with his ventriloquism act, which he had learnt working in a World War One Concert Party; he had also been a stretch...

Roger Quilter Roger Cuthbert Quilter was born at No 4 Brunswick Square in Hove, Brighton, on 1st of November 1877. He was the fifth child and third son of Sir William Cuthbert Quilter, 1st Baronet and Lady Mary Ann Quilter, née Bevington. Queen Victoria had bestowed the baronetcy to William, in her Diamond Jubilee year 1897. Roger’s father was a wealthy stockbroker, a businessman, the founder and director of the National Telephone Company, a politician elected as Liberal MP and afterwards Unionist MP for Sudbury, and the landowner of the Bawdsey Manor estate in Suffolk. With his brother Harry, he had invested in an extensive art collection, which became quite famous. William’s appreciation of the arts lay only in the financial gains to be made and the sale of his collection increased the family’s wealth considerably. The family returned to Suffolk in 1882. Despite his enthusiasm for collecting art, Sir William had little interest in the artistic talents of his son. Music as a diversion...

  Ralph Vaughan Williams  1872 - 1958 My recordings: click to listen Tired -  The Sky Above the Roof -  Three Songs From Shakespeare   When Icicles Hang by the Wal l    Take Oh Take       Orpheus with his Lute This great English composer, teacher, writer and conductor was a key figure in the 20 th century revival of British music. He was born in the heart of the English countryside at Down Ampney in Gloucester on the 12 th of October 1872. The youngest of three children, he grew up at his mother’s family home, at Leith Hill in Surrey, where he would spend most of his life. His father the Reverend Arthur Vaughan Williams was the Vicar of Down Ampney. Arthur’s family was lawyers and judges of Welsh ancestry. After gaining his BA and MA from Christ Church, Oxford, Arthur went to minister the parish of Halsall near Ormskirk, in Lancashire between 1863 and 1865. He moved to Tanhurst near Leith Hill that year, where he met his wife. ...