Serenade for Strings
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Product ID: GM2 CO054
By John Jeffreys
Publisher:
Goodmusic
Series:
Concert Originals
Line Up:
String Orchestra
Duration:
5:00
Set & Score
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Composer
John Jeffreys (1927-)
born 4 December 1927; died 3 September 2010
John Jeffreys, who has died aged 82, was a multi-talented song composer whose sensitive, gentle settings of English poetry have recently found favour with distinguished singers including Ian Partridge, James Gilchrist and Jonathan Veira. The musical climate in the 1970s was not sympathetic to a composer of such traditional bent, and, disheartened, Jeffreys destroyed much of his work. However, in 1983 he chanced upon four reels of tape recordings made in 1966, and reconstructed most of the songs on them.
The publisher Kenneth Roberton championed his cause and published three substantial volumes, with piano accompaniment, in facsimiles of the composer's beautifully and precisely calligraphed manuscripts, with cover illustrations by the composer. In the songs, there is a perfect fusion between the text and the refined, subtle accompaniment. Virtuosity is eschewed in favour of expression and diction. Although many of the early songs were originally composed with string quartet, they were mainly recomposed with piano. There are others with bassoon and recorder as the accompanying instrument.
Jeffreys was born in Thanet, Kent, the youngest of three sons with Welsh parents. His father was a Congregational minister. However, church music, despite a late-flowering interest in organ music, did not figure greatly in his output as a composer. His earliest literary inspiration came from the poetry in his father's library, and his early musical inspiration came from his mother, "who was blessed with a soprano voice capable of singing intensively quietly".
His mother sang Welsh folksongs to him that had been passed on to her by her own mother. Such music remained particularly dear to Jeffreys, and his last composition, in 2005, was a setting of Watching the White Wheat (Bugeilio'r Gwenith Gwyn), arranged for recorder and string quartet, to celebrate the Welsh composer Ian Parrott's 90th birthday.
As a child, Jeffreys took piano lessons and was a chorister. The family moved to Exeter, instigating his lifelong love of nature and the Devon countryside. The river Exe at Bickleigh later formed the inspiration for a violin concerto, composed in 1951 as a gift for, and first performed by, his wife Pauline Ashley, a fellow student at Trinity College London, where (after national service in the RAF) he studied piano, theory and musical philosophy, and took lessons on the recorder from Edgar Hunt.
In the 1950s and 60s, Jeffreys composed a substantial body of works including a symphony, three violin concertos, a cello concerto, a string quartet and a piano sonata – all later destroyed except for one violin concerto – and some 200 songs, many with string accompaniment. He worked for a spell as a teacher, but finding this uncongenial, he went to work for Tottenham council in north London as a garden designer. Plants and gardening were an abiding interest and in 1974 he published two books, Hardy Plants for Small Gardens and Perennials for Cutting.
His composing career was abruptly terminated by a severe illness in 2005. Earlier this year a disc featuring some of his orchestral works was issued under the title Idylls and Elegies. Pauline's musical career had been cut short by the onset of multiple sclerosis in her early 20s. She died shortly before him.
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