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wed 22 oct, 7.30pm: i dreamt i dwelt: irish composers and bedford park’s heyday with irish heritage & wb yeats bedford park project celebrating Bedford Park’s 150th anniversary

Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX
Tickets: £20 (incl. wine), £5 for under 35s, from Irish Heritage

‘Come, we must have music…’
The Player Queen: WB Yeats

A unique autumn concert as Irish Heritage musicians & singers join us in the Arts-&-Crafts splendour of St Michael & All Angels (the Yeats family’s parish church from 1879 to 1901, at the heart of Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood, an innovative cultural community founded 150-yrs-ago by Dublin-born Jonathan Carr), in a programme celebrating the great Irish composers who dominated London’s music scene in this garden-suburb’s first quarter-century.

The talented Yeatses, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, Willie, Arts-&-Crafts founders Lily & Lolly, and Jack B, Ireland’s greatest 20c painter, grew up with Sligo parents in a home that resounded with Irish conversation, story and song, at the heart of this “urban village”, surrounded by a unique local community of artists, poets, playwrights, actors, musicians, composers, arrangers, lyricists and music publishers (many of them Irish) who interacted, collaborated with, and, like all of London, flocked to hear, the music & songs of 19c Irish composers including Field, Moore, Sullivan, Wallace, Balfe, Stanford and Wood, their Celtic tonality, inventiveness, beguiling language and traditional airs bringing a touch of the pastoral, the transcendent, the enchanted, to the teeming Dickensian capital, rather as Bedford Park itself famously offered, as the Yeatses found, an escape from bustling crowded city streets.

The latter two composers, Stanford and Wood, not only helped found both English and Irish Folk Song Societies with help from Bedford Park connections, but also taught an astounding generation of gifted British and Irish composers (Herbert Hughes, of Salley Gardens fame, Rebecca Clarke, Stokowski, Martin Shaw, Bridge, Ireland, Coleridge Taylor, Gurney, Goossens, Bliss, Vaughan Williams and Holst to name a few), encouraging them to find inspiration in both traditional legends and contemporary poetry – including works by Yeats and other Bedford Park poets – and to explore traditional English, as well as Irish, airs, thus creating a 20th-century English musical revival as rich as the Celtic Revival that Yeats and Bedford Park friends created for Ireland!

Thanks to Irish Heritage (who, for over 50 years, have encouraged the appreciation of Irish music in London and funded the development of so many young Irish composers, musicians and singers) the evening’s programme features Aimee Kearney (soprano), Stephen Walker (tenor), Georgina Cassidy (piano) and Brian Hughes (piano), and has been developed by Brian, Irish Heritage’s Artistic Director, in collaboration with host and WB Yeats Bedford Park founder/organiser, Irish poet, musician and broadcaster, Cahal Dallat, who will give an introductory talk on the composers and their Bedford Park connections. And the Bedford Park Society’s 1875-2025 exhibition, The Community at Bedford Park: Ahead of the World in Everything? will be on display in the church that evening (see pics below), so do come early, enjoy a glass of wine and view the story of this rare architectural gem and its artistic impact!