Rochdale Music Society: Lucille Burns and Vincent Lindsey-Clark

Lucille Burns

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Rochdale Music Society’s 2010-11 season came to a most satisfying conclusion on Saturday (11 June) with a programme of music for Flute and/or Guitar arrangements performed in St. Andrew’s Church, Rochdale, by the accomplished musicians: Lucille Burns (Flute) and Vincent Lindsey-Clark (Guitar).

Flute and guitar duos have become a regular feature of local music societies’ concerts up and down the country in recent years.

Quite apart from the fact that the performers tend to ask very reasonable fees for their work, the interplay of these instruments offers a very rewarding opportunity to explore of a wide range of delicate to rasping sounds.

Much music written originally for other instruments and ensembles can be arranged to provide audiences with great artistic satisfaction when played by this combination of blown and plucked instruments.

Most of the items in the programme were arrangements of music with a definitely ‘Latin’ flavour.

Examples of the Spanish composer/poet Gasper Sanz (1640-1710), whose pioneering music for guitar at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries has influenced composers ever since, led on through dances culled from the stage works of early twentieth century Manuel da Falla (1876-1946) to the Argentine Piazzolla (1921-92) whose monumental Histoire du Tango was the main and concluding item in the second half of the concert.

All these were brought to the audience with an obvious delight in performing them and with a commanding technique and presentation. As were the charming Roumanian Dances of Bela Bartok (1881-1945) which followed the mysterious ‘off-stage’performance of Syrinx, a solo flute piece written by Claude Debussy (1862-1918) for behind-the-scenes performance in a theatrical production in 1913.

In the first half there had been some original pieces for guitar written by Vincent Lindsey-Clark himself. Five Pictures of Sark, the happy outcome of musical reflection on his honeymoon on that smallest of the Channel Isles, and Spiral Dance, a substantial single movement work for Flute and Guitar written only months ago and with Lucille Burns in mind, both revealed his mastery as composer as well as guitarist.