Fritz Bennicke Hart, a prolific composer, educator, and conductor, was born in London in 1874. Hart wrote over 500 songs and 23 operas as well as orchestral and chamber works, eighteen of which were for violin—fourteen works for violin and piano and two for violin and orchestra. Before relocating to Australia to live and work, he attended the Royal College of Music (1893-6), where he associated with fellow students Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Hurlstone and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Hart’s arrangement of Elgar’s Allegretto (1934) and Parry’s air (1907) which were both written in in 1941, combine elements of the English countryside with lyrical freedom, reminiscent of the composers they denote. Hart’s Idyll is a peaceful musical representation of a picturesque idea of place and lyricism. This sense of being in a perfect landscape is strikingly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, both of which make use of the violin’s lyrical qualities.  An experience of place is embodied in The Lark Ascending, where we can experience a reverie initiated by bird song as one follows the bird on its journey through the violin’s mix of aeolian/dorian and pentatonic melodies. Both Idyll and The Lark Ascending begin with modal chords that set the mood before the violin enters. Gustav Holst’s A Song of the Night (op. 19) was composed in 1905 but remained unperformed for almost eighty years. Together, Holst, Hart and Vaughan Williams created modern art music infused with the elements of the idioms of English folk song and dance. This, along with their unique style of writing for strings and the violin, gives their music its English quality. These three composers share a common writing style and lyrical use of the violin in these works represented today, despite their stylistic and idiomatic differences.