Today is Patrick’s 87th birthday.
Last night, I watched again the Memorial Service in Deia, listened again to him describing how the point of his life was to meet Stephanie, and watched again a short video shot near the place he died, to reflect again on the beauty of the setting where he chose to end his pain.
This morning I called a few of his Spanish friends, chatting about our lives now in these Covid times, our lives in the past, and what our hopes for our families’ lives in the future.
Today I have updated some of these pages and menus, embedding some videos and recordings where before it was impossible to do so, and edited the First Timer’s Guide to this web site, just slightly, to better identify the sections.
Tonight I shall enjoy a glass of red wine in his honor, watch Four Last Songs in his memory, and revisit some of our conversations for his voice.
And there will be music.
I’m the son of Patrick of Meadows.
Just an update to my last contribution, really: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective have just released a CD on Chandos of the three early Coleridge-Taylor chamber works which Patrick type-set. Very approritely, the booklet note gives Patrick a name-check in the following terms: “Thanks to the efforts of Patrick Meadows, the artistic director of Mallorca’s Deià International Music Festival, performing editions were eventually prepared from the surviving manuscripts…”
And so his legacy lives on.
Beautiful tribute, JP and Lionel.
I think about Patrick almost daily, but his presence seemed all the more palpable last week when the Chineke! Orchestra played a BBC Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall and included as the grand finale of their programme Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony in A Minor. Patrick prepared and published the first typescript edition of this wonderful work back in 2005 — one of many Coleridge-Taylor manuscripts which he converted to a performable state. In July, the Three Choirs Festival programmed Coleridge-Taylor’s Solemn Prelude, a work which he composed for the Festival in 1899 and which almost certainly had not been played since. This great resurgence of interest in Coleridge-Taylor’s music is in no small measure due to Patrick’s pioneering work in the 1990s and 2000s. Although he is sadly no longer here to see the fruits of these particular labours, this represents a significant part of his musical legacy for which we, and many generations to come, will remain indebted.
Un abrazo, mi amigo