FELTON, William (1715-1769) - Concerto in F, No.2 Op.4 (1752)

William Felton (1715-1769) - Concerto in F, No.2 Op.4 (1752) 

World Premiere Recording

Performers: Sibelius + Harpsichord samples (edited by Pau NG) 

Painting: John Jones (1745-1797) - Black Monday, or the Departure for School (1790)

Further info: Sheet music

---

William Felton (Drayton, 1715 - Hereford, 6 December 1769)

English clergyman, organist, harpsichordist and composer. He was the son of George Felton, a clerk, and was educated at Manchester Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge (BA, 1738; MA, 1743). He married Anna, daughter of the Rev. Egerton Leigh, by whom he had a daughter. Felton was ordained priest by the Bishop of Hereford on 11 August 1742, became a vicar-choral and sub-chanter of the cathedral on 3 February 1743, and minor canon in 1760. In 1769 he was made chaplain to the Princess Augusta, widow of the Prince of Wales, and in the same year he was appointed custos of the College of Vicars Choral at Hereford. From 1744 he held various parochial appointments in Herefordshire. He was buried in the Lady Chapel at Hereford Cathedral: the inscription on his gravestone states that he died at the age of 54 and was ‘multiplici doctrina eruditus, rerum musicarum peritissimus’. Felton was a steward at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1744 and in Gloucester in 1745; and his name is on the list of subscribers to Thomas Chilcot's Twelve English Songs (1744). He seems to have enjoyed wide popularity as a performer on the harpsichord and organ. Burney, who considered Felton a better performer than composer, recollected hearing in his youth ‘the celebrated Mr Felton’ play at Shrewsbury, and wrote in his History of his ‘neat finger for common divisions and the rapid multiplication of notes’. In his Account of the Musical Performances … in Commemoration of Handel (London, 1785/R) he related an anecdote about Felton's endeavours to persuade Handel to subscribe to his op.2 concertos through the violinist Abraham Brown; Handel started up angrily and said: ‘A parson make concerto? Why he no make sarmon?’. Handel's name did, however, appear on the subscription list to Felton's op.1 concertos. Felton is chiefly known as a prolific composer of organ and harpsichord concertos; Burney pronounced that he ‘produced two concertos out of three sets that were thought worthy of playing in London’. Despite this, Felton's concertos were widely acquired by music society libraries and private collectors, and his music frequently appeared in 18th-century domestic manuscript anthologies. Felton had a natural ability for devising bold, powerful thematic material, but his keyboard skills tempted him to include an excessive amount of passage-work. The ‘Andante with variations’ of the third concerto in op.1 achieved wide popularity as ‘Felton's Gavot’ or ‘Farewell Manchester’ (the latter title probably dating from December 1745, when it was supposedly played as the troops of the Young Pretender left Manchester). It is also said to have been played at the execution, in 1746, of Jemmy Dawson, the Manchester Jacobite, who was a contemporary of Felton's at St John's College, Cambridge (this legend may originate in the fact that a Felton concerto was played at the Manchester subscription concerts, which were notoriously Jacobite, in 1744). In about 1748 the tune was printed as Fill the Glass, a song for three voices. Burney said that it appeared in Ciampi's opera Bertoldo, produced at Covent Garden in 1762. The tune remained popular until the middle of the 19th century.