Helena Kean - Music and Images

  The English Art Song - A Shakespeare Perspective William Shakespeare loved music and recognised its use as a theatrical tool. Nearly all of his thirty-seven plays contain music of some kind, which he has most skilfully used for dramatic, comic, or atmospheric purposes to great effect. Tragic heroines sing, swan-like, before death; clowns and fools are given the liberty to sing bawdy or controversial lyrics; impassioned suitors serenade in vain; lovers sigh; rogues celebrate the joys of country life; fairies sing lullabies; supernatural spirits cast spells; and villagers entertain with popular songs and ballads. Before wider literacy poems were always sung to communicate, memorise and disseminate the poem. Today Shakespeare’s genius is recognised across the world and the dissemination of his works via music has been very important. For over 400 years composers have been inspired by Shakespeare’s texts, writing operas, ballets, overtures, symphonic poems, musicals, suites, or...

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...

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...