Signs of Spring

Performed in St. Bartholomew's Church, the same venue as our last concert before lockdown, Signs of Spring was an early precursor to When Speech is not Enough and consisted of what could very loosely be described as ‘folksongs’, or songs inspired by folk music to some extent.

The programme was centred around a collection of poems by James Murry Lacey, a practically unknown Romantic poet who lived and worked in the early 19th century. He lived (some of the time) in London but spent as much time as he could at his place in the country, in the tiny hamlet of Hare Hatch in Berkshire. Like all Romantic poetry, his concerns itself with themes of nature, melancholy, and subjectivity. The first two poems, To the Lark and To an Early Snow-Drop, were set for Better Times in 2018 to arrangements of movements from Gustav Holst’s Brook Green Suite by Glyn Lloyd-Jones. Spring was composed and set for us by our friend, AJ Bethke, and the last two, To Pain and The Flower, were written by Glyn Lloyd-Jones, a descendant of Lacey's.

One of the pieces included in this concert, Plyve kacha po Tysyni, is a folksong from Western Ukraine with an interesting history. Likely existing long before the 20th century, its first recorded appearance was during the First World War. During the comparative peace of the 1920s, however, the song vanished. It was next sung during the Second World War and became popular among Ukrainian partisans as they risked their lives fighting against the forces of both Hitler and Stalin. After that conflict, the song went away again, but during the aftermath of the pro-democracy Maidan Uprising in 2014, Plyve kacha was being sung again. Ukraine has not seen peace since, and so, for as little as we can do from this side of the globe, we give our support and raise awareness of the plight of the Ukrainian people as we are able to.