‘Portraits of Mind’: music by Ian Venables, Ralph Vaughan Williams & George Butterworth in a glorious celebration of Venables’ 70th birthday at the Temple church
By Robert Hugill
4th November 2025
A celebration of Ian Venables’ 70th birthday, a generous programme gave us a chance to hear his wonderful Portraits of Mind alongside the RVW work for which it is a companion, On Wenlock Edge
Temple Music’s concert at the Temple Church on Tuesday 4 November 2025 brought together a number of threads. For one, it was a celebration of the 70th birthday of composer Ian Venables with a programme that included two of his song cycles. The evening began with the London premiere of Venables’ Out of the Shadows which was commissioned by Robert Venables KC who is a Bencher of Middle Temple and the cycle celebrates Robert Venables’ 30th anniversary with his partner Gary Morris. Ian Venables’ second work of the evening was Portraits of a Mind which was commissioned by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth and was intended as a companion piece for RVW’s On Wenlock Edge. In a generous programme we heard On Wenlock Edge along with George Butterworth’s cycle Love blows as the Wind Blows.
The performers were tenor Gwilym Bowen (standing in for Alessandro Fisher at a few days notice), baritone Gareth Brynmor John, pianist William Vann and the Navarra String Quartet (Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Eva Aronian, Sascha Bota, Brian O’Kane).
Written for baritone (Gareth Brynmor John) and piano trio (Eva Aronian, Brian O’Kane, William Vann), Venables’ Out of the Shadows is intended by the composer to ‘focus on various aspects of male love’. His selection of poems from Constantine Cavafy (in English translation), Horatio Brown, Tennyson, JA Symonds and Edward Perry Warren rather brought the out the idea also of the gay male gaze. At the cafe door by Egyptian-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is a celebration of the sight of a beautiful young man which Bored by Scottish poet and historian Horatio Brown (1854-1926) features a narrator bored at a posh social occasion constantly reiterating ‘I liked their footman, John, the best’. Returning to Cavafy, The mirror in the hall was another celebration of male beauty, briefly glimpsed. The three verses from Tennyson’s In memoriam are bleaker, the poet gazing on the house where ‘he’ is not there. JA Symonds’ translation from the Greek Anthology, Love’s Olympian Laughter gives us few details beyond the sheer joyful celebration of a young man in love. The cycle ends with Body and Soul by American millionaire and author Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928), a poem that celebrates love in an ideal form.
The songs were very much about lovely, sometime luscious instrumental textures surrounding quite plain, direct vocal lines that prioritised the words. Gareth Brynmor John sang with an admirably vibrant directness and a superb projection of the poetry. The long-limbed lines of At the cafe door moved from the contemplative to something more outgoing with intense moments, reflecting a fleeting moment rather than an encounter. The busy textures of Bored implied constant forward motion, with sly harmonies in the mobile instrumental textures. Venables treated the poem entirely seriously but I felt that the refrain of ‘I liked their footman, John, the best’ could have benefited from a little more wit, there is something slyly camp about the remark. The mirror in the hall moved from the evocative to something approaching a dance when the lovely young man looks in the mirror. Here John did bring out the sly storyline, and as with the first Cavafy setting this was simply a moment, everything evaporated at the end. In memoriam which moved from slow narration to something more intense, tightened the screw gradually with John bringing out the sense of the effort it took the poet to move on (the poem is about Tennyson’s grief at the death of a friend). Love’s Olympian Laughterhad a lively mobile texture, but seemed to take the poem a tad too seriously and I wanted a little more fun in the song. Finally the calm unfolding lines of Body and Soul leading to an affirmative climax and then a slow unwinding.
Tenor Gwilym Bowen joined the instrumentalists for Vaughan William’s On Wenlock Edge, his 1909 cycle of songs based on poems from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, the collection of lyrical poems published originally in 1896 but whose themes took on greater resonance during the Boer War and World War I.
I enjoyed Venables’ Portraits of Mind when I first heard it in Alessandro Fisher, William Vann and the Navarra Quartet’s 2023 recording for Albion Records [see my review] so I was very pleased to be able to heard it live for the first time. Venables explains his selection of poetry, “I wanted to explore the principal elements that informed his [Vaughan Williams’] creativity and so ‘paint’ a musical portrait in which each song reflects a different aspect of his creative mind.”
His selection begins with George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending which inspired RVW’s work of the same name, and is followed by Ursula Vaughan Williams’ Man makes delight his own, then Robert Louis Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage and Christina Rossetti’s Echo, and finally Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight. There are RVW links beyond the Meredith. Ursula Vaughan Williams was, of course, RVW’s wife whilst Stevenson and Rossetti were both poets whom RVW set in his early mature songs, and Whitman’s work threads its way throughout RVW’s output. RVW never set Meredith’s The Lark Ascending, it is a very long poem. Here, Venables sets an excerpt but we first hear a singing violin melody over murmuring strings. Gwilym Bowen gave us a carefully shaped line, undulating melismatic sections contrasting with a vibrant edge in the tone. The middle was faster, more eager but the quietly intimate end led to rhapsodic climax. Man makes delight his own had Vann’s gentle piano complementing Bowen’s affecting high tenor. As the pace sped up there were intriguing shadows in the climax, but the conclusion was intimate with both words and music being affecting. The vivid words of From a railway carriagesped by wonderfully, with Venables giving us hints of the exotic in the music. Echo began atmospheric, concentrated and positively hypnotic though the conclusion to the first verse was powerfully intense. The middle verse was more concentrated, with Bowen positively spitting the words but this verse’s ending was disturbing in its quiet intensity. The final verse returned to the opening hypnotic texture with the end powerful indeed. The final song, A clear midnight featured quite a short Whitman verse, but this was giving an intimate, lyric performance with Bowen’s affecting high tenor over a mobile accompaniment and a rather magical ending.
We ended with a short piece by Herbert Howells that, for the first time in the evening, brought all the performers together. An Old Man’s Lullaby is a setting of Thomas Dekker. Full of ravishing textures, a delightful way to end the celebration.