GARDINER AND ELLIS CONCERTS

Gardiner and Ellis Concerts

In 1912–14 London enjoyed three short series devoted to the promotion of new British music. These concerts were not the first to focus on homegrown composition, and indeed they were preceded by a Musical League festival in Liverpool in 1909.

But public enthusiasm and critical approval far exceeded anything these composers had ever attracted before: the status of British music was substantially enhanced, a transformation that would be picked up after the First World War.

Balfour Gardiner (1877–1950) was a notable composer, one of the group trained in Frankfurt that also included Grainger, Quilter, Scott and O’Neill. Backed by family money he put together his first series in 1912, featuring the New Symphony Orchestra and London Choral Society, both closely associated with British music. The programmes included new works by the Frankfurt Group and many others such as Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax and Delius. Modern part-songs were set in the context of older madrigals, sung by the Oriana Madrigal Society under another enthusiast, Charles Kennedy Scott.

One critic wrote: ‘Frankly, I have never seen any such enthusiasm or such good spirits in connection with music of British origin as at these concerts of Mr Balfour Gardiner… they are the finest English concerts I have ever experienced.’ (Quoted in Lloyd, p. 89)

A second series on similar lines followed in 1913, but disillusion set in and Gardiner declined to follow up the initiative. Instead another wealthy entrepreneur emerged in Francis Bevis Ellis (1883–1916), a relation of the prominent patron Lord Howard de Walden. Ellis’s 1914 series (two orchestral concerts, one chamber) took a slightly different stance, placing British instrumental music firmly in the orbit of new music from the continent. Ravel was set beside the crowning glory of new orchestral music, Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony.

For programmes of these concerts, download the Calendar of London Concerts 1893–1914, press the Search Series tab at the bottom of the page, and select Gardiner Concerts or Ellis Concerts.