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...

Ian Higginson Conductor – Composer – Organist – Teacher – Examiner Ian Higginson was born on Merseyside and moved to Gloucestershire in 1983. He is well known as an organist, conductor, accompanist, composer and arranger and has performed in many of the country's leading cathedrals, churches and concert halls. Ian studied the organ with Ian Tracey (Liverpool Cathedral) and John Scott (St Paul's Cathedral), David Saint (St Chad’s Cathedral Birmingham) and the late John Scott (Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, New York). Ian has also studied conducting with Jonathan Delmar and the late David Willcocks, and he has performed both as an organist and conductor in many concert halls, cathedrals and churches across the UK, USA and Europe .   He has also studied conducting with the late Dr Melville Cook, Jonathan Delmar and Sir David Willcocks. In addition to conducting Cheltenham Choral Society (a post which he has held since 1989) and the English Concertanté Singers and Orchestr...

  Sir William Walton One of Britain’s greatest ever composers, was born on the 29th of March 1902 at 93 Werneth Hall Road, Oldham, Lancashire. William Turner Walton’s birthplace was a typical Pennine mill town, characterised by factory chimneys, terraced houses and extremes of wealth and poverty. His determination to escape the drab, grey streets of Oldham, combined with a highly developed self critical awareness produced a fabulous body of work of the highest standard. This shy and reserved, yet inherently romantic Lancastrian, in whom stubborn independence and musical sensitivity were finely blended, would become the leading British musical figure between Vaughan Williams and Britten. His father, Charles Alexander Walton, was the son of an Inland Revenue off icial from Hale in Cheshire. Charles had a fine Bass-baritone voice and was one of first pupils at new Royal Manchester College of Music. He became the organist and choirmaster at St John’s Church, Werneth, for 21 years and s...