BRATTLEBORO — Hugh Keelan, the Windham Orchestra's music director, is a native of England but hasn't tried putting together a concert showcasing the music of his homeland. Until now.
This weekend, the Windham Orchestra opens its 2012-13 season with British Jubilee, a special concert that includes pieces from the three most beloved British composers of the twentieth century.
The first half of the program consists of Frederick Delius' Irmelin Prelude and Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, followed after intermission by one of the most iconic pieces of British music, Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations.
“It actually is the very first concert in which I have completely programmed music from Great Britain,” said Keelan.
There will be two performances: On Friday, Nov. 16, at 7:30 pm, the Windham Orchestra will perform at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, and on Sunday, Nov. 18, at 3 p.m., it will play at Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro.
As part of its mission to make music accessible to all, the Windham Orchestra is offering admission to British Jubilee by donation.
Keelan said he wanted the British Jubilee concert to show how “powerful, emotive, sentimental, generous, macabre, and weird the British are. I have personal associations with two of the composers. To play this music while living in America brings up deep feelings and love for the music of my own country, now at some distance.”
“It is a very touching concert from my point of view,” he continues. “It recalls English habits that I retain, even though I have lived in America since the early 1980s.”
Keelan was born in London, but he never has lived there. “I know many other capitals of Europe better than London, such as Paris and several Italian cities.” He grew up in the North of England, where his father was a soldier and the family moved frequently. He later lived in the south of England, in the Cambridge and Essex vicinity.
While at Cambridge, Keelan won the prestigious Harness Fellowship (comparable to a Rhodes Scholarship) that enabled him to study in the U.S.
The fellowship allowed him to study conducting at Indiana University and Mannes College. He remained in New York for private study with Vladimir Kin (from the Leningrad school of Mravinsky and Rabinovich) and worked at the American Opera Center at the Juilliard School.
“Harness gave me an amazing amount of freedom,” he continued. “The one condition of the fellowship was that I travel. I could travel anywhere I wanted in the United States. The experience was life changing. I may have not gone to all 50 states, but at least 40. I fell in love with America.”
However, since the point of the fellowship was to bring “the wonders of America” back to England, Keelan had to return to his homeland. He stayed there several years sharing what he discovered, but his heart was elsewhere. After he married an American, he moved to the U.S., ultimately settling in Brattleboro.
A complex view of home
Keelan said he has a complicated relationship to his former homeland: “I do not quite fit in when I go back to England.”
Although, here in Brattleboro, he is noted for his striking British accent, he finds himself accused of adapting an American dialect when he goes home.
The truth of the matter is that “home” no longer is the right world to call England for Keelan. He characterizes himself as a strange mid-Atlantic creature lost between two continents.
“I was sort of a young man displaced,” he said, yet then quickly added, “but that is really no longer a problem, since I have learned that home is one's own skin.”
Nonetheless, Keelan says that he has always loved English music. “I used to see it, like many do, as a spin-off of continental music, with every now and then a weird flowering of Native music, such as in the Elizabethan age, with Purcell, lute music and those sad, sad songs. It is sometimes called the Golden Age of British music.”
The late 19th and early 20th centuries then became the great second flowering of English music.
“I see less continental influences in this music nowadays than I once did,” he said. “I am now struck by how English these works are. They have the emotion, the restraint, the generosity that strike me as specifically English. By and large, British music doesn't operate on a big scale, and there are surprising few duds here. More than ever before, I find myself intimately relating to it, now that I am at a considerable distance from it.”
Keelan explains that Edward Elgar's Enigma is a deeply endearing set of portraits of friends, family, and self.
“For musicologists, historians and other sleuths, the guessing games and layers of puzzle are fascinating, but what puts this work at the top of the orchestral repertoire is how warm and revealing the music is of these personalities close to Elgar,” he said. “It is 15 character studies about love.”
Alongside this mighty and subtle masterpiece, the Windham Orchestra performs a little gem, the orchestral Prelude based on Frederick Delius' opera Irmelin.
“Delius is considered a minor master,” said Keelan. “A miniaturist, he captures a specific glimpse of emotion or an an emotional journey. The effect is something I can't put into words without stumbling, but the result is a tearjerker, expressive of love and loss, sadness and blissful memory entwined together.”
The final work of the concert, Benjamin Britten's Serenade, is scored for tenor voice, french horn, and string orchestra with local soloists James Anderson and Victoria Eisen.
Keelan says that “this incomparably good piece” tells of the many moods of the night: weary, fantastical, bathed in moonlight, erotic, nightmarish, gentle - six nocturnal studies expressed in music and English poetry across 600 years.
Anderson, the tenor soloist, has enjoyed a career of constant demand in opera houses. He has had with leading roles in over 150 opera, operetta and Broadway musical productions. In addition to teaching singing, he enjoys lecturing on “the performing of opera” for the Live in HD Met performances at the Latchis Theatre.
Eisen, on French horn, is the founder and artistic director of Unity Hills Arts Centers International, a charitable aid organization whose primary aim is to bring the arts of all cultures to underserved communities across the world.
For advance tickets to either performance, call the Brattleboro Music Center at 802-257-4523 or visit www.bmcvt.org. For more information about the orchestra, visit www.windhamorchestra.org.