Ian Venables began formal composition lessons with Professor Richard Arnell at Trinity College of Music and with Andrew Downes and John Joubert at the Birmingham Conservatoire. After moving from Dorset in 1986 he has settled in Worcester where he is able to devote much of his time to composition.
Ian Venables has recently been described as "... perhaps the finest song composer of his generation ..." (Editorial - British Music Society Newsletter, March 2004). This accolade is not unexpected when one considers that his CD recording, The Songs of Ian Venables (1998) received critical acclaim from all the leading classical music journals. John Steane in the Gramophone wrote "... Venables has a substantial reputation and output [and] impresses as a songwriter in the line of Gerald Finzi ...", Piers Burton-Page in the International Record Review said, "... One's impression is of a composer wholly serious in intent ... the evidence here is of a willingness readily to engage with sorrow and loss, or nature in dark mood ..." and Malcolm Hayes in the Classic fM Magazine wrote, "... there is no mistaking the emotional and technical strength in Venables' songs, besides their very real beauty - qualities which can only come from an individuality as deep as it is genuine."
Internationally established artists such as Ian Partridge, Roderick Williams, Peter Savidge, Andrew Kennedy, Richard Edgar-Wilson, Susan Anne Jenkins, Howard Wong and Helen Meyerhoff have included Venables' songs in their recitals. They have been aired on Radio 3 (Iain Burnside's Voices programme) and Classic fM and praised by such leading figures as the late Christopher Palmer - "Venables' songs are beautiful miniatures" and Professor Stephen Banfield, the author of Sensibility and English Song, [Venables has] "... a genius for melancholy, for understanding melodic, harmonic and poetic tradition ...". He is also the only composer to have featured in all three of the Wigmore Hall's Song Book series - an innovative showcase for new art-song. Michael White in The Independent on Sunday singled out Venables' song - At Midnight Op. 28, describing it as "... a ravishing response to Edna St Vincent Millay..."
It is not just in the field of song writing that Ian Venables is gaining a reputation. He has written music for piano, organ, (his Rhapsody Op. 25 has been recorded on the Regent label by Adrian Lucas), brass and choir. His many chamber works are performed regularly - in particular, his String Quartet Op. 32 and Piano Quintet Op. 27. Both the Chilingirian and Duke quartets have given acclaimed performances of his Quintet and Roderic Dunnett writing in the The Independent described it as "... lending a new late 20th century dimension to the English pastoral ..."
The level of interest in his work is such that the author Colin Scott-Sutherland is currently writing an essay on the composer due for publication next year.
His recent work, Songs of Eternity and Sorrow Op. 36, for tenor, string quartet and piano, commissioned by the Finzi Friends was premiered at the Weekend of English Song in Ludlow in 2004, and received much critical acclaim - "Songs of Eternity and Sorrow by Ian Venables, was so gorgeously and unashamedly lyrical in its tonal language ... you felt even Finzi himself would have been proud to own it" (David Hart - Birmingham Post), and in Tempo Peter Palmer said "with its classical tonal pull Venables' musical style doesn't strive for novelty, but neither does it ever sound stale. The variety of texture afforded by the instrumentation of Songs of Eternity and Sorrow is shrewdly exploited across the cycle". He is currently working on a set of songs Op. 37 and a cycle for Tenor, Clarinet and Piano. A new CD of English songs, including a selection of songs by Ian Venables and performed by Roderick Williams and Susie Allen, will be released later this year on the SOMM label.
His works are published by Novello and Co., Fagus-music.com and Enigma Publications.
© Graham Lloyd