When the music maker came to town

Yet the product of a youthful fling Aunt Vi had with a junior houseman at a London teaching hospital is a talented trumpeter. When the lad was five he was taken to see the Queen's Silver Jubilee parade. He pointed to the front row of the Household Brigade band and announced his life's ambition.

"Where did he get it from, Vi?" we asked when 15 years on he graduated from the army's Kneller Hall college of music. Not, declared his tone-deaf single mother, from her side of the family. But when we repeated the question a decade later on his appointment as a school's head of music, there was an enigmatic variation: "His father was a great nephew or somesuch of Sir Edward Elgar."

There we have it then. Music is in the genes, more nature than nurture. And that can be as much for places as it is for individuals. Richmond seems to have music in its ancient stones and it is entirely appropriate that Elgar has a role in the latest manifestation of the North Yorkshire town's musical heritage.

On April 28, Richmondshire choral society sings his choral ode, The Music Makers, at Richmond school. It is an occasion which harks back to two performances of that work given in this neck of woods more than 80 years ago, both of them conducted by the man then at the height of his fame as England's greatest composer since Purcell.

Those choral concerts on successive nights in December 1919 were at Bishop Auckland and Middlesbrough. The mezzo-soprano soloist was Richmond's Jennie Weedon, then the 30-year-old Miss Hood, who was singing and teaching music in the town until not long before her death in 1980.

Taking a special interest in this month's performance is a supporter of the choral society who inherited not only Jennie Weedon's memorabilia - including the programme for the Bishop Auckland concert autographed by Elgar - but sufficient of her musical DNA to enable him to pass some on to his son.

The father is John Lovell, of Skeeby, whose son Andrew has gone on to a successful professional career as a clarinettist (his latest job has been with Grease at Leeds) having those special genes nurtured by the splendid musical tradition of Richmond school. Jennie Weedon was their aunt and great aunt.

JENNIE was Madame Weedon in her professional life. Well, she was born a Victorian and in the era of the great queen empress, and for some time beyond, that was the prefix accorded palmists, milliners and distinguised women musicians..

She was a child prodigy in industrial Yorkshire. When she was aged 13 her singing of the Jewel song from Faust was acclaimed as "phenomenal for her age". At 16 she became the youngest member of Leeds Philharmonic society. Her move to Richmond came in 1918 on her marriage; her husband worked at the Haughton Road brewery in Darlington.

In 1922 she founded Richmond operatic society, which prospers to this day.

When Mr Weedon changed his job and took her back to the West Riding in 1932, his wife sang with Sheffield Philharmonic society chorus. Between then and her return to Richmond in 1953 on her husband's retirement through ill-health, her conductors included the household names of that generation: Beecham, Barbirolli and Sargent.

She quickly involved herself again with the operatic society and was the formidable Dr Arthur Bull's predecessor as conductor of Richmondshire musical society.

She was aged 91 when she died and 20 years later the generations of Richmond youngsters who were her pupils now have key roles in local musical life.

GETTING Back to Normal was the headline to editorial comment on The Northern Echo's page which carried reviews of the 1919 Elgar concerts.

The newspaper meant normality after the Kaiser's War and it was perceptive in its warning, while the peace settlement was still being hammered out, of a danger that "we shall have fought a great war merely as a training ground for a greater".

It added that even Britain's home affairs "are no nearer the normal than we were at the Armistice". There was increasing national debt, inflation, profiteering and a worsening housing problem; a report nearby tells of five women and their children sharing a bedroom in Louisa Street, Darlington.

But the mere fact of the concerts showed that something, at least, of pre-war normality had returned. I'd like to know more about the Dr Kilburn, apparently a close friend of Sir Edward and obviously a hallowed name in Northern music circles, who had arranged both events - the first that either Auckland musical society or Middlesbrough musical union had held since wartime hibernation.

Dr Kilburn had conducted the Auckland society since it was founded in 1876, says the reviewer. At both Middlesbrough and Bishop Auckland town halls (the latter with the Bishop of Durham in the packed audience) he seems to have shared the conducting of the Leeds symphony orchestra in an all-Elgar programme with the composer himself.

After the National Anthem, which the D&S Times reported was sung at Bishop Auckland "as Sir Edward would have it sung, with introductory fanfare and full orchestral accompaniment", there was the Enigma Variations and then The Music Makers with Madame Jennie Hood as soloist. She was praised for the richness of her voice and in two later solos she sang "with fine spirit and brilliancy of voice".

WHAT can the uninitiated expect when the Richmondshire society's 70-strong mixed-voice choir, backed by a large orchestra, is let loose on The Music Makers? Something rather special, says organiser Sue MacCormack, a music teacher at Richmond school, who has spent £3,000 on buying in the 40 musicians.

It will be stirring, soaring stuff, with plenty of the patriotic, indeed imperial, grandeur for which Elgar is famed. Mrs MacCormack's husband Roy, head of music at Risedale school, Hipswell, conducts and Madame Jennie's part is sung by Joyce Tindsley.

The words which inspired Elgar to write the music - just as his imagination was fired into Pomp and Circumstance mode by Arthur Benson's Land of Hope and Glory exultation - are the best-known work of poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-81). The Music Makers, poem and choral ode both, begins:

We are the music makers,

And we are the mad dreamers of dreams.

Wandering by lone sea-breakers;

World-losers and world forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever it seems.

Now isn't that extraordinary? If you skipped the poetry, please go back and take in that second-last line: "movers and shakers" did not, after all, first see the light of day as a buzz-phrase of the 70s or 80s.

I was even more surprised by that than by the front-page lead story in that 1919 The Northern Echo.

It combined the news of Lady Astor's first day at the House of Commons with that of anti-gambling MPs voting down a scheme to raise money by a method eventually introduced by Harold Macmillan half a century later. "Premium Bonds defeated" said the headline. There's nothing new under the sun.

l Tickets for The Music Makers at Richmond are available from Mrs Audrey Carr, tel 01748 822407s, at £5 (under-12s free), or at the door. The programme is completed by John Rutter's Magnificat.