Download Rule Britannia Booklet

The music that
made Britain great
CROWN IMPERIAL
LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY
JERUSALEM
ZADOK THE PRIEST
THE DAM BUSTERS
FAIREST ISLE
2
[78’39]
CD1
1
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL 1685-1759
La Réjouissance (Rejoicing) from Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV351
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Graham Abbott conductor
2’00
2
GUSTAV HOLST 1874-1934
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity from The Planets, Op. 32
Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Nicholas Braithwaite conductor
8’10
3
RONALD BINGE 1910-1979
The Watermill
Diana Doherty oboe, Sinfonia Australis, Mark Summerbell conductor
3’32
4
WILLIAM WALTON 1902-1983
Crown Imperial – Coronation March
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Marc Taddei conductor
6’03
5
JEREMIAH CLARKE c.1674-1707 orch. HENRY J. WOOD 1869-1944
The Prince of Denmark’s March (Trumpet Voluntary)
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Northey conductor
2’24
6
ERIC COATES 1886-1957
Youth of Britain: The Princess Elizabeth from The Three Elizabeths Suite
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor
5’33
7
8
JOHN BACCHUS DYKES 1823-1876 arr. MICHAEL LEIGHTON JONES b. 1947
Eternal Father, Strong to Save (The Royal Navy Hymn)
Words by William Whiting 1825-1878.
Choir of Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Jonathan Bradley organ,
Michael Leighton Jones conductor
KENNETH ALFORD 1881-1945
Colonel Bogey – March
Australian Army Band, Perth, Capt. Craig Johnson conductor
3
3’07
3’30
9
0
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 1872-1958 arr. RALPH GREAVES
Fantasia on Greensleeves
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, David Stanhope conductor
5’06
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Zadok the Priest – Coronation Anthem No. 1, HWV258
5’32
Words based on I Kings 1:38-40.
Sydney Philharmonia Symphonic Choir, Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra, Antony Walker conductor
LIVE RECORDING
!
EDWARD ELGAR 1857-1934
Nimrod from Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 ‘Enigma’
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, David Stanhope conductor
4’26
@
ERIC COATES
The Dam Busters – March
The Queensland Orchestra, Michel Swierczewski conductor
4’04
LIVE RECORDING
£
FREDERICK DELIUS 1862-1934
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Carl Pini conductor
6’02
LIVE RECORDING
$
EDWARD ELGAR
Pomp and Circumstance March in C minor, Op. 39 No. 3
Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Patrick Thomas conductor
6’27
%
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
The Lark Ascending – excerpt
Dimity Hall violin, Sinfonia Australis, Antony Walker conductor
7’13
^
THOMAS ARNE 1710-1778 arr. MALCOLM SARGENT 1895-1967
Rule, Britannia!
Words by James Thomson 1700-1748.
Nicole Car soprano, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Marc Taddei conductor
4
3’44
[79’41]
CD2
1
EDWARD ELGAR
Pomp and Circumstance March in D major, Op. 39 No. 1 (Land of Hope and Glory)
6’47
Words by Arthur Christopher Benson 1862-1925.
Sydney Philharmonia Symphonic Choir, Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra, Antony Walker conductor
LIVE RECORDING
2
3
4
HENRY PURCELL 1659-1695
Fairest Isle from King Arthur
Words by John Dryden 1631-1700.
Sara Macliver soprano, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Paul Dyer director
RONALD BINGE
Elizabethan Serenade
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Patrick Thomas conductor
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Hallelujah! from Messiah, HWV56
Sydney Philharmonia Motet and Symphonic Choirs, Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra,
Antony Walker conductor
4’19
3’00
3’51
LIVE RECORDING
5
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Let the Bright Seraphim from Samson, HWV57
Words by Newburgh Hamilton 1691-1761.
Yvonne Kenny soprano, Geoffrey Payne trumpet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra,
Vladimir Kamirski conductor
5
5’15
6
7
8
9
0
!
@
£
$
%
ARTHUR SULLIVAN 1842-1900 arr. CHARLES MACKERRAS 1925-2010
Pineapple Poll – Suite from the Ballet
I. Opening Number
II. Poll’s Dance
III. Captain Belaye’s Dance
IV. Pas de Trois
V. Jasper’s Dance
VI. Belaye’s Hornpipe
VII. Reconciliation of Poll and Jasper
VIII. Finale
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Marc Taddei conductor
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL
Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Solomon, HWV67
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Bright Is the Ring of Words from Songs of Travel
Words by Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894.
Teddy Tahu Rhodes bass-baritone, Sharolyn Kimmorley piano
[19’47]
3’47
1’10
1’49
1’54
3’47
1’48
1’53
3’13
2’53
1’39
^
ERIC COATES
Knightsbridge – March from London Everyday
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor
4’31
&
EDWARD ELGAR
Pomp and Circumstance March in G major, Op. 39 No. 4
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor
4’18
*
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS orch. GORDON JACOB 1895-1984
Somerset: Folk Songs – March from English Folk Song Suite
West Australian Symphony Orchestra, David Measham conductor
3’00
6
(
JOHN LENNON 1940-1980 and PAUL McCARTNEY b. 1942 arr. JOHN LANCHBERY 1923-2003
The Yesterday Concerto from The Fool on the Hill
7’46
Isador Goodman piano, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, John Lanchbery conductor
)
RON GOODWIN 1925-2003
633 Squadron – Main Theme
Australian Army Band, Perth, Capt. Craig Johnson conductor
¡
™
#
HUBERT PARRY 1848-1918
Jerusalem
Words by William Blake 1757-1827.
Cantillation, David Drury organ, Brett Weymark conductor
TRADITIONAL
God Save the Queen
Words: Anonymous.
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Marc Taddei conductor
TRADITIONAL
Auld Lang Syne
Word: Anonymous, collected and adapted by Robert Burns 1759-1796.
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Marc Taddei conductor
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3’00
2’23
2’08
3’19
They don’t place their hands on their hearts and gaze up at it reverently with heart a-throb and a tear in
the eye, as the Americans are wont to do with the Stars and Stripes, but Britons are no less attached
to their Union Jack. The traditional British stiff upper lip is swept away in the flag-filled exuberance of
the Last Night of the Proms, not only in London’s Royal Albert Hall, but cramming nearby Hyde Park as
well as town squares, market places, greens and commons around the country, from Dundee to
Plymouth and from Dover to Swansea to Hillsborough in Northern Ireland.
In all the jostling for standing room, there’s a jubilant egalitarianism which shrugs aside divisions of
class and privilege. British patriotism is, at heart, a pride in the freedom and dignity of the nation and of
its citizens, and this is expressed full voice in one of the most famous Proms anthems, Rule,
Britannia!: ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves.’ The composer, Thomas Arne, wrote almost
exclusively for the theatre, with music for over 90 stage shows to his credit: all of it now forgotten,
except for Rule, Britannia!. The song was first performed in 1740 as part of a masque – a kind of 18thcentury multimedia spectacular – on the subject of King Alfred the Great, at a private event in the
country home of the Prince of Wales, but five years later it had slipped the shackles of privilege and
was at large in London. It has been part of the British cultural identity ever since, and musicians from
Beethoven to Johann Strauss to Pink Floyd have used it as a kind of musical shorthand to symbolise
the nation and its heritage.
A more gentle approach had been taken some fifty years earlier by Henry Purcell in Fairest Isle. This
too was written as part of a masque in honour of a legendary British hero, though this time more a
mythical figure than a historical one: the masque comes at the end of the opera King Arthur. Arthur has
defeated the Saxons and rescued his fiancée, the blind Princess Emmeline, and in celebration, Merlin
conjures up a vision of the island Britannia rising from the waves. The goddess Venus herself appears
to bless the island and make it a ‘seat of pleasure and of love’.
With a title like The Prince of Denmark’s March, Jeremiah Clarke’s piece might seem like an odd
inclusion in an album of British music. But the prince in question, Prince Jørgen, in 1683 had married
Her Highness the Lady Anne, who in 1702 would become Queen Anne of England, Scotland and
Ireland. Jørgen was now Prince George, Knight of the Garter, Duke of Cumberland, Earl of Kendal and
Baron Wokingham. Clarke’s march is a unique blend of stately dignity and festive cheer, and is a favourite
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at wedding celebrations, but during World War II it was broadcast daily by the BBC as a boost to public
morale. Had Clarke been alive to hear it, however, he might have found his personal morale at a low
ebb, as the piece was at that time being credited to Henry Purcell! It was not until 1963 that the March,
or ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ as it had become known, was once again acknowledged as Clarke’s work.
Queen Anne was succeeded by George I. George was not a popular monarch but he should be
remembered with gratitude by music lovers: one of the last things he did before his death in 1727 was
to make British citizens of a number of foreigners – including the German composer Georg Friederich
Händel. The King’s declaration came just in time for George Frideric Handel (as he is known in English) to
be eligible to write the music for the coronation of the new king, George II, and as a result, British
monarchs ever since have been able to enjoy Handel’s magnificent Zadok the Priest at their coronation
ceremonies – as have audiences around the world at countless concerts. The excitement builds through
the music’s slow orchestral introduction, the chords unfolding inexorably, tension mounting almost to
breaking point until the choir bursts in with words taken from the Old Testament’s first book of Kings,
describing the coronation of Solomon, famous for his wisdom and for the glories of his reign.
Twenty years later, King George II ordered a public display of fireworks in London’s Green Park to celebrate
the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which brought to an end the War of Austrian Succession.
Handel was commissioned to provide music for the occasion. His Music for the Royal Fireworks caused
a sensation at the public rehearsal six days earlier, creating traffic chaos as 12,000 people crowded into
Vauxhall Gardens; the fireworks themselves turned out to be a spectacle rather different from that originally
planned, when the specially-designed wooden building in which the musicians were playing caught fire
and burned to the ground, bringing the performance to an unexpectedly early close.
Handel’s brilliant sense of musical drama made him a great success as a composer of opera, which
was enormously popular in early 18th-century London. But when public tastes shifted away from opera
in the late 1730s, Handel brought the same theatrical flair to a different kind of drama. Oratorios, a kind
of sacred drama in music, performed with soloists, chorus and orchestra but without staging or
costumes, were especially popular during Lent, the period of abstinence leading up to Easter. Opera
was too frivolous for this solemn season, but audiences flocked to hear Handel’s oratorios. The church
authorities were unhappy at the general lack of reverence displayed by the often boisterous audiences,
but the listeners could perhaps be forgiven their excitement, given that Handel had invested his
oratorios with as much drama and emotion as his operas. The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, from
Solomon, is full of bustling excitement and eager anticipation; Let the Bright Seraphim, from Samson,
is an ecstatic hymn of triumph that soars to heaven.
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Handel’s best-known oratorio is of course Messiah, first performed in 1742, in Dublin. By requesting
that the ladies not wear hooped skirts, and that the gentlemen leave their swords at home, an extra
hundred people were squeezed into the music hall on Fishamble St; audiences have been crowding in
to experience Messiah ever since. Handel was always a fast worker but he completed Messiah in just
24 days; in writing the piece, he declared, ‘I did think I did see all of Heaven before me, and the great
God himself.’ The Hallelujah! chorus is the most famous part of the oratorio. Legend has it that when
the King attended a performance in 1743, he rose to his feet during the chorus; whether out of
admiration for the music, reverence for the text (which acclaims Christ as the King of Kings), or to ease
his gout is not known, but the audience was obliged to stand too, and the tradition of standing for the
‘Hallelujah!’ chorus persists to this day.
Something strange happened to English music after Handel. Continental Europe produced Haydn,
Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn; but there are no equivalent ‘big names’ from England
until the start of the 20th century. The one 19th-century English composer whose music still enjoys
widespread popularity is Arthur Sullivan, and he was constantly frustrated by the success of his comic
operas with W.S. Gilbert, which he felt undermined his reputation as a ‘serious’ composer. Even Queen
Victoria once said to him, ‘You ought to write a grand opera, Sir Arthur: you would do it so well.’
Sullivan did eventually write one, Ivanhoe, which was very well regarded at the time, but has since
sunk into oblivion. Meanwhile, his comic operas are constantly being performed by everyone from
national opera companies to high schools. Pineapple Poll is a ballet score created by Australian Sir
Charles Mackerras using music from almost all of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas: The Mikado, Trial by
Jury, Patience, The Sorcerer, The Gondoliers, The Pirates of Penzance, Ruddigore, The Yeoman of the
Guard, Iolanthe, H.M.S. Pinafore, Princess Ida and even Cox and Box, a comic opera Sullivan wrote
with librettist F.C. Burnand before teaming up with Gilbert.
But comic opera doesn’t hold up well on the international stage, not against heavyweights like Wagner
and Mahler, and in 1904, the German critic Oscar Schmitz contemptuously dismissed England as ‘the
land without music’. Schmitz was behind the times, though. Five years earlier, Edward Elgar had
written one of the great glories of English Romantic music: the ‘Enigma’ Variations. The piece had
come about by accident. Elgar at that stage was earning his living as a humble country music teacher,
increasingly resentful of the success of younger composers like Schoenberg and Debussy. Doodling
away at the piano one evening, he chanced upon a brief musical theme that pleased him, and began to
play around with it, imagining how it might sound performed by one of his friends, or how he could
capture their personalities by changing the mood or the style. The ‘Enigma’ is that we don’t actually
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know what the tune was: Elgar claimed that the theme we hear is a variation on a well-known melody
which he refused to identify, and nobody has ever been able to solve the puzzle. The Nimrod variation
represents Elgar’s publisher and great friend A.J. Jaeger; the title is a pun on Jaeger’s name, ‘Jaeger’
being German for ‘hunter’, and Nimrod being a biblical character referred to in the book of Genesis as
‘a mighty hunter’.
Two years later, in 1901, Elgar published the first of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches. The Boer
War was generating a massive wave of British patriotism, and the march’s rousing Trio clearly struck a
chord with the general public. At its first Proms outing, ‘the people simply rose and yelled,’ wrote
conductor Henry Wood. ‘I had to play it again – with the same result; in fact they refused to let me get
on with the programme… I went off and fetched Harry Dearth who was to sing [the next piece] but
they would not listen. Merely to restore order, I played the march a third time.’ The march at that point
had no words. Arthur Benson’s poem ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was added while Elgar was adapting
the Trio for incorporation into the Coronation Ode he was writing for Edward VII. It was also performed
at the coronations of George V, George VI and the current monarch, Elizabeth II. The other four Pomp
and Circumstance Marches are less well known, but deeply satisfying all the same.
William Walton’s Crown Imperial was also written for a coronation: that of Edward VIII, scheduled for
12 May 1937. Edward, however, abdicated in 1936 to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson; the coronation went
ahead as scheduled, but with a replacement monarch, George VI. The central section is clearly
modelled on Elgar; the outer sections are lighter in texture and perhaps show the influence of
Stravinsky and Prokofiev, both of whom Walton greatly admired.
Parry’s mighty hymn Jerusalem, like ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, was born during a time of war, in 1916.
But rather than being the crest of a wave of enthusiastic national pride, Jerusalem was a deliberate
attempt to rouse public morale from a trough of pessimism in the face of mounting casualties and
receding hopes of peace. It was commissioned as part of a campaign by the women’s suffrage
movement Fight for the Right, which had set aside its political agenda in order to support the war
effort. Its aims were now ‘to brace the spirit of the nation that the people of Great Britain, knowing
that they are fighting for the best interests of humanity, may refuse any temptation, however insidious,
to conclude a premature peace, and may accept with cheerfulness all the sacrifices necessary to bring
the war to a satisfactory conclusion.’ William Blake’s prophetic vision of the city of God established in
‘England’s green and pleasant land’, married to Parry’s incomparable tune, has been taken up by
women’s institutes, rugby teams, political parties of all colours, and public school assemblies, and it
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recently beat God Save the Queen and Land of Hope and Glory to become the victory anthem for
Team England in the Commonwealth Games.
Parry is best known today for his sacred music, which is a mainstay of the Anglican cathedral tradition,
but his most significant contribution to the history of British music was as the Director of the Royal
College of Music, and teacher of composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst who were
at the forefront of the renaissance of British music that Elgar had begun. Holst was something of an
unconventional thinker – he was, for example, profoundly interested in Hindu spirituality, and wrote
several pieces based on the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Rig Veda, teaching himself Sanskrit in
order to read the sacred texts in the original language – and his most famous piece, the orchestral
suite The Planets, was inspired by astrology rather than astronomy. Each movement is intended to
evoke the influence of a planet on the human psyche, according to Holst’s rather idiosyncratic
understanding. Thus the music of Jupiter evokes not the planet’s size, but concepts of prosperity
and good fortune. That said, the central section features a grand and supremely dignified melody which
has been used as the tune for one of the most patriotic hymns of all: ‘I vow to thee, my country’.
As English composers looked for ways to revitalise the nation’s music, one of the places that many
found inspiration was folk music. The traditional songs and dances of Britain, sprung, as it were, from
the very soil of the nation, had an integrity which made them fascinating to many composers, including
Ralph Vaughan Williams. His English Folk Song Suite was written in 1923 for military band, and later
arranged for full orchestra and brass band by his student Gordon Jacob. The final movement Somerset:
Folk Songs – March, features the folk tunes Blow Away the Morning Dew, High Germany, Whistle,
Daughter, Whistle and John Barleycorn.
Probably the best-known English folk song of all is Greensleeves. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on
Greensleeves, however, is no rustic celebration of folk culture, but rather an exquisite study of beauty
in full Romantic flight. Like all good Romantics, Vaughan Williams looked to the past as a place of
innocence and truth, and the music evokes an idyllic pastoral age – which of course never really
existed, though that has never stopped anyone from wishing that it had! Bright Is the Ring of Words,
from Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, taps into that same yearning for times past. It’s not folk music
or folk poetry (the verses are by Robert Louis Stevenson), but there’s a sense of nostalgia in the
imagery of swains in fields of heather, and long-dead bards taking their songs from village to village.
The poem’s message, that art has the power to move us long after its maker is gone, is eloquently
expressed in the generous, warm-hearted opening chords that gradually melt into a lingering whisper.
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Pastoral sweetness also flavours The Lark Ascending; its delicate beauty becomes even more
poignant with the knowledge that the piece was sketched by the composer while watching troop ships
cross the English Channel at the start of World War I. (The pathos turned to bathos when Vaughan
Williams was arrested by a police officer who believed that the dots and lines he was jotting down
were some kind of secret code.) On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring, by Frederick Delius, was
written two years earlier. With its imitation cuckoo calls from the clarinet, it is less subtle than The Lark
Ascending but still intensely beautiful. Delius was living in France at the time, and the folk melody on
which the piece is based is Norwegian (Delius being close friends with Edvard Grieg), but he remained
passionately nostalgic for England, as shown in his wish to be buried ‘in a quiet country churchyard in
a south of England village’ – a wish which was ultimately granted.
The textures are lusher but Ronald Binge’s The Watermill is steeped in the same pastoral yearning.
Binge began his career as a cinema organist in the days of silent movies, when most picture houses
had a light orchestra; he later worked as a composer and arranger for the BBC. Light music, with its
emphasis on the sheer pleasure of music, began in the late nineteenth century as an upper-class
pastime in the Palm Courts of elegant resorts, hotels, spas and ocean liners, but through the new
medium of radio it brought an air of sophistication to popular entertainment. The melodies were simple
and attractive, the orchestrations lavish and rich. Elizabethan Serenade is perhaps the most famous
example. It originally bore the generic title Andante cantabile, but when Binge’s publisher heard a
broadcast performance of it, he rang the composer and said, ‘That’s what I call a tune! I think we’ve
got something here. Damned if I know what you’re going to call it. Sounds like some kind of
Elizabethan serenade’ – an inspired choice in 1952, the year which had seen the young Princess
Elizabeth accede to the British throne.
That ‘second Elizabethan age’ was still a decade away when Eric Coates composed his suite The Three
Elizabeths. The first movement recalled the glory days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; the second
was a musical portrait of the Queen Mother, and the third, Youth of Britain, captured in its proudly,
irrepressibly cheerful tribute to the Princess Elizabeth the nation’s hopes for a new, confident future,
even in the midst of World War II. Coates, unlike most composers of light music, had no qualms about
the lack of ‘serious’ works in his catalogue. He was perfectly happy to stick with popular, easy-listeningstyle pieces, and he wrote them magnificently well; the BBC, in an obituary of Coates, dubbed him
‘the uncrowned king of light music’. When his Knightsbridge March was first broadcast, the BBC was
flooded with requests from listeners desperate to know the name of the piece.
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Coates’ music was perfect for lifting British spirits during the war years, and he wrote a number of
explicitly patriotic pieces such as Calling All Workers and Salute the Soldier. His most famous ‘wartime’
contribution, however, was written in the 1950s, long after the end of the war. According to the
composer’s son, the Dam Busters March wasn’t composed specifically for the film; Coates just
happened to have completed it, as an exercise, around the time when the BBC approached him.
Coates hated writing for film and had turned down numerous requests, but the producers managed to
convinced him of the ‘national importance’ of the film. The tune has since been turned into a hymn,
set to the words ‘God is our strength and refuge’.
Ron Goodwin, on the other hand, worked primarily as a composer of film music, with such epic
themes as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, The Guns of Navarone and The Battle of
Britain to his credit. 633 Squadron is set during World War II: an RAF squadron is assigned to knock
out an apparently impregnable German rocket fuel factory in Norway. Though the mission and indeed
the squadron are fictitious, the aerial scenes were spectacular (George Lucas has said that the final
sequence, with the planes flying up a deep fjord under heavy anti-aircraft fire, was the inspiration for
the ‘trench run’ sequence in Star Wars) and Goodwin’s thrilling music was a highlight of the film.
The iconic Colonel Bogey March has become forever associated with the World War II after featuring
in the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, but it was actually written in 1914, not long before the outbreak
of World War I. The composer, Kenneth Alford, was a lieutenant in the British Royal Marines, writing
under a pseudonym; his real name was F.J. Ricketts.
The Yesterday Concerto is based on a more recent icon of British popular music: the songs of The
Beatles. In 1975, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation collaborated with The Australian Ballet to
create a ballet that non-ballet fans could watch and enjoy on the then relatively new medium of colour
television. Composer John Lanchbery reworked themes from songs such as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, Michelle, The Fool on the Hill and of course the wistful ballad Yesterday.
God Save the Queen is the national anthem of the United Kingdom – proof of the unique esteem and
affection the British hold for their monarch. The origins of both words and music are a mystery; the
anthem, more or less as we now know it, was first published in 1744, though the tune seems to be
based on a 1619 piece by John Bull. Eternal Father, Strong to Save is often known as the Royal Navy
Hymn, with its prayer ‘for those in peril on the sea’. The tune, by the Anglican clergyman John Dykes,
is called ‘Melita’: a reference to the island of Malta, where the apostle Paul was shipwrecked, as
recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.
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The poem Auld Lang Syne was written by the Scots poet Robbie Burns in 1788, based on ‘an old
song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down
from an old man’. It is sung in English-speaking countries around the world on New Year’s Eve, when
its evocation of days gone by – ‘auld lang syne’, literally ‘old long since’, is the Scots equivalent of ‘for
old times’ sake’ – is both an acknowledgment of and a farewell to the old year. It has also been
variously adapted into dozens of other languages, from Bengali to Hungarian and Japanese, as a song
of farewell, a graduation anthem and a funeral hymn, and it traditionally closes the Last Night of the
Proms in a rousing chorus from the audience.
Natalie Shea
Executive Producers Martin Buzacott, Robert Patterson
Mastering Virginia Read
Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb
Publications Editor Natalie Shea
Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd
Cover Photo Creatas / Photolibrary
CD1 4, ^, CD2 6-£, ™, # recorded 12-14 May 2010 in the Federation Concert Hall, Hobart. Recording
Producer, Editor and Mastering Engineer: Virginia Read. Recording Engineer: Veronika Vincze.
Crown Imperial (Coronation March King George VI) by William Walton and Rule Britannia by Thomas Arne
arranged by Malcolm Sargent are published by Oxford University Press of Oxford.
ABC Classics thanks Alexandra Alewood, Claudia Crosariol, Laura Bell and Katherine Kemp.
1992 CD2 $; 1994 CD2 5; 1995 CD1 £, $; 1998 CD1 8, CD2 2, ); 2001 CD1 0, CD2 1, 4; 2002
CD2 3, ^, (; 2003 CD1 9, @, CD2 ¡; 2004 CD1 3; 2005 CD1 6, CD2 %, &, *; 2006 CD1 7; 2007
CD1 %; 2008 CD1 !; 2009 CD1 1, 5; 2010 CD1 2, 4, ^, CD2 6-£, ™, # Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
This compilation was first published in 2010 and any and all copyright in this compilation is owned by the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation. 2010 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under
exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public
performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.
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