A World Premiere performance of an unknown work by composer Stanley Bate will be performed at the opening concert of this year’s English Music Festival in May.
There have been many significant first performances at the English Music Festival’s opening concert over the years and this year sees the BBC Concert Orchestra give the much-anticipated World Première of the Symphony no.2 by Stanley Bate (1911-1959).
Bate was a student at the Royal College of Music and his teachers included Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob and Arthur Benjamin.
Stanley Bate’s prolific but vastly neglected output is overdue for re-evaluation and his works although being gradually recorded have yet to find a place in the concert hall. Symphony no.2 op.20 was completed in the spring of 1939, but the work appears to have been withdrawn by the composer without ever having achieved a performance.
Bate’s wife and fellow-composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, claimed her husband wrote a dozen or more symphonies and 30 or so piano sonatas. Often writing ‘en voyage’, Bate’s idiom can be dramatic and turbulent contrasting with interludes of exuberance, beauty and lyricism.
For more information and to book tickets, visit the English Music Festival website.
Photo credit: Ross Burgess, LGBT Archive