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Contents:
DDD Total Time = 64.25
/ Recorded: Queens’ College Chapel, Cambridge 27-29 June 2000. I breathed a song into the air, Longfellow’s verses, envisioning Song as an enchanting, animating spirit, filling the sails of the poet’s imagination and taking wing from his breath, describe a quality of wonderment which is uncommon in our musical age, yet pervades the music of Howard Skempton. His increasing body of choral works radiates this quality in particular; here, an unassuming chordal idiom and exceptional ear for the rhythm and nuance of English poetry are married in settings both subtle and sensitive. Skempton favours texts of naïve, often fantastical imagery and direct, uncomplicated expression, in which awe, be it of the natural world (Edward Thomas, Longfellow), the legendary or miraculous (Flecker, Morris), or of consuming love (Yeats), is a strong presence. The music underscores that simplicity and directness by seeming to add very little: Skempton’s rhythm does no more than amplify the patterns of poetic rhythm, and the melody, though frequently angular, tends only to trace overhead the slow, underlying chord-sequences. What is more, Skempton’s empathy with the poetry’s punctuation and timing ensures that the natural flow of the language is hardly disrupted: it is as if the music is scarcely there at all. Yet it is there, endlessly shaping and refining the mood and tone, each tiny, unexpected gesture – a triplet, a syncopation, an unforeseen twist of Skempton’s unique harmonic dialect – enriching and illuminating the poem, as it were from inside the words. In We who with songs and The Flight of Song we encounter Song itself, in Flecker’s mystical bardic storyteller and in Longfellow’s pellucid seascapes. There is a particular beauty in the harmonic simplicity of We who with songs and the first and last movements of The Flight of Song, offset in the latter by the more chromatic ‘Becalmed’ and the minimalist circularity of ‘Chimes’, as well as the extraordinary poetic collage at its start (presented in idiosyncratic graphic score). Minimalist economy of material is also noticeable in the carol To Bethlem did they go, as the slightly mournful tune with which it begins is transfigured into a lively syncopated passage with characterful ‘pizzicato’ accompaniment. The more recent He wishes for the cloths of heaven, by contrast, expands Skempton’s textural palette into a sumptuous eight-part harmony. The earliest work of Skempton’s recorded here, A Song at the Year’s Turning, aims for a darker mood, in keeping with RS Thomas’ bleak verses; the strophic setting, wherein each verse has the same music reshaped to fit the different words, is a particularly telling realisation of the poem’s static coldness. Likewise, the setting of Mary Webb’s Rose-Berries encapsulates the winter’s chill in crystalline triads, and its pellucid texture of female voices is exploited further in another Flecker setting, Opportunity, written especially for this recording. Judith Weir’s Two Human Hymns (1995), commissioned for the University of Aberdeen Chapel Choir, are settings of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets George Herbert and Henry King. To listeners familiar with Weir’s celebrated carol Illuminare, Jerusalem (1985), the idiom of these later pieces is a surprise: the crisp, keen-edged harmony and laconic wit of the earlier work have been replaced by softer, more comfortable colours and an expressive generosity which verges on the prodigal in its willingness to court cliché and even kitsch in its pursuit of Humanity. Each poem is set over and amongst an expansive, florid organ part; in Herbert’s famous Love, different combinations of voices represent the different speakers, while the organ ripples through the scene in rivulets of sound; in King’s Sic Vita, the ephemerality of human life brings from Weir a spikier organ texture, into which the choir interjects the moral in dislocated phrases. The early Ascending into heaven (1983) also features a prominent rôle for the organ, but is much closer in harmonic language to Illuminare. Setting a medieval Latin text in praise of the Heavenly City, it falls into three large sections, the outer two grouped in loose symmetrical design around a central section in which tenor and bass soloists invoke the urbs caelestis and are then amplified by the full choir. On either side of this, the many wondrous attributes of the city are enumerated in a flowing, triple-time melody, sung at first by the sopranos and latterly by the whole choir in harmony. At either extreme, the words ‘Sion’ and ‘Alleluia’ are elevated on a bubble of organ figuration and choral glissando; and at the very end, ‘Alleluia’ disappears completely into the ether, leaving behind a single footprint, a lone C major chord. Jonathan Harvey has written extensively for voices, and much of his choral music displays a strong affinity with the English Cathedral tradition, in both spiritual and musical terms of reference. The three comparatively neglected pieces recorded here demonstrate Harvey’s inclination towards the mystical side of Christian experience, most particularly in the Hopkins setting, Thou mastering me God, which also illustrates Harvey’s tendency to expand simple tonal resources in unexpected directions. Thou mastering me God takes a single G natural as its source, which is present throughout the piece and undergoes a variety of reharmonisations before becoming submerged in thick-textured chords and resurfacing in the organ at the close, as the choir sinks onto the final B major chord. The deployment of the G natural in Thou mastering me God thus renders it theologically symbolic – perhaps of the mysterious touch of the divine, mastering God – which is characteristic of Harvey’s thought. In God is our refuge the resources are again simple and the symbolism clearer: lively, diatonic two-part canons (the first of which recalls the Lutheran chorale Ein feste Burg) are repeatedly quelled by a slow, chordal refrain, as the voice of God calms the furore. The Tree moves from a mood of initial desolation to a joyous bifurcation of parts at the end, illustrating the hope of renewal contained in the text. Tippett’s St John’s Service has become an acknowledged choral classic. Written in 1963 for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, the Magnificat is a burst of exuberant energy, whose fanfares and spare, spirited harmony recall the ritualised aggression of the opera King Priam. The Nunc dimittis is a gentler rite, a tender soprano above mantra-like repetitions of ‘Lord’ in the lower voices creating a restrained, plaintive lyricism. Page revised Thursday September 27 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
