Ursula Vaughan Williams, Jeremy Dale Roberts

Spoken To A Bronze Head

Jeremy Dale Roberts ' Spoken To A Bronze Head (2009) for Mezzo Soprano and Piano. This is a setting for text by Ursula Vaughan Williams. ' In all the long years that I knew her and it was a matter of regret between us I never set a word of Ursula's poetry. It was only after her death, when I was asked to contribute a setting of one of her poems to a celebratory concert held at the Royal College of Music that I 'jumped': I knew immediately which one I wanted to do lines 'Spoken to a Bronze Head'. This was the portrait bust of RVW made by David McFall: not the Jacob Epstein which neither of them liked very much. It stood always in her sitting room, a benign presence, a'virtual' companion in her long widowhood. My setting is in an 'arioso' style, quite simple and austere maybe to match the rather 'Augustan' style of the verse. It is of course a memorial, also a salute: and I wanted to enshrine in it the two of them, Ralph and Ursula. So at the heart of it is a clangourous, bronze-like chord, lifted from the last movement of VW's 6th Symphony, from which I quote a passage just before the conclusion. - Jeremy Dale Roberts