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Contents:
DDD 74.40 Recorded: Exeter College, Oxford 16 & 17 March 2001 Poulenc: Quatre Motets Pour Le Temps De Noel Poulenc’s religious music, while expressing perfectly his profound Catholic faith, was always closely bound up with his relationships with friends and lovers. He had been catapulted back to the church in 1936 by the death in appalling circumstances of the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud. His great opera Dialogues des Carmelites was deeply affected by the illness and death of his lover Lucien Roubert. These four exquisite miniatures seem to have been written, between November 1951 and May 1952, at least in part as gifts for their dedicatees: indeed they are such private pieces that no proper record exists of their first performance. What may have been their premiere was given, rather incongruously, in Madrid by the Netherlands Chamber Choir. Poulenc dedicated the first of them, a dark, tender setting of "O Magnum Mysterium", to the conductor of that performance, Felix de Nobel. The gentle second motet "Quem Vidistis Pastores" was a tribute to one of Poulenc’s closest woman friends, Simone Girard. She was the secretary of the Avignon Concerts Society and by all accounts an indefatigable organiser and fine amateur pianist. To Poulenc she was indispensable. In a letter of 1951, in which he offers her the "Quem Vidistis", he tells her "You have the ultimate intelligence – quite simply that of the heart, a sentiment surely appropriate to this evocation of the simple shepherds seeing the star over Bethlehem. The set is completed by a setting, marked "Calme et doux", of "Videntes Stellam", and an exultant "Hodie Christus Natus Est" which seems to be made up entirely of fanfares. Villette: O Magnum Mysterium Pierre Villette might be considered a part-time composer, as most of his life has been spent in music education, most notably as director of the Conservatoire in Besancon and later at its counterpart in Aix-en-Provence. He has found time to write a succession of sensuous motets which set Latin texts familiar from the Catholic liturgy. This "O Magnum Mysterium" was written in Aix in 1983 and is a fine example of his very personal synthesis of the Catholic choral tradition and the harmonies of jazz. Victoria: O Magnum Mysterium Victoria’s life, although it began in Spain, was for many years dominated by Rome. As a priest, following his ordination in 1575, he was part of the community of St. Philip Neri and held chaplaincies at two Roman churches, before his return to Spain in 1587, to serve as chaplain to the sister of Philip II. He had arrived in the city much earlier, in 1563 or 1565, to study at the Jesuit Collegio Germanico, where like the Oxbridge choral scholars of today, he was one of a small number of students selected for their singing rather than their academic ability. This is not to say that Victoria did not learn there: he quickly achieved fluency in Latin, while his musical studies may well have been assisted by Palestrina, who was maestro di cappella of the Seminario Romano close by. Certainly his early motets, such as this four-part "O Magnum Mysterium", first published in 1572, bear all the hallmarks of Palestrina’s fluid, consonant contrapuntal style: indeed it is rather more typical of the older man’s work than the rather Gabrielian "Hodie Christus Natus Est" elsewhere on this disc. Howells: A Spotless Rose The few years after World War One were a time of great hope for the world and of great productivity for Herbert Howells. As well as much chamber music and the rhapsodies for organ, they gave us the set of three Carol-Anthems, of which this is the last. "A Spotless Rose" was written, said Howells, "after idly watching some shunting trains from the window of a cottage … in Gloucester which overlooked the Midland Railway". Perhaps the "bumping and banging" Howells heard suggested the shifting unequal time signatures, which make the piece seem to float somehow outside time, rather in the manner of plainsong. The harmony, almost imperceptible under the arching solo line, flowers at the end into a moment so magical that, every Christmas, Patrick Hadley, himself a composer of wonderful church music, would send Howells a postcard on which it was written out, with the words "O Herbert! That cadence!". Darke: In The Bleak Midwinter Although she was a most enthusiastic Christian, and a particularly talented writer of children’s verse, it seems that Christina Rossetti did not intend "In The Bleak Midwinter" to be used as either a hymn or a carol. The two famous settings of the poem, by Gustav Holst, and this one by Harold Darke, were both written many years after her death. This is by far Darke’s most famous piece, written at the age of 23, long before he took up the fifty-year appointment at St. Michael’s Cornhill in the City of London, which brought him national recognition in his lifetime. A small detail will demonstrate the sensitive nature of Christmas carols: many, otherwise quite fearless hymn books, even to this day, remove the "breastful of milk" in the third verse. Warlock: Bethlehem Down This is one of a group of songs and choral works which Philip Heseltine, using his Satanic sobriquet of Peter Warlock, composed to texts by his friend Bruce Blunt. Theirs was largely, it appears, the friendship of drinking companions, and Blunt alleged that both the words and the music of "Bethlehem Down" were rattled off at high speed to raise Christmas beer money. Listening to the exquisite miniature they produced this seems unlikely: not only is Warlock’s slow-moving harmonic writing perfectly judged, Blunt’s poem, in which the adoration of the kings and the shepherds seems to take place on the hills of Southern England, has a quiet mystery of its own, close in both place and atmosphere to the greatest and most deeply-felt of the poems Warlock set, "The Frostbound Wood", in which a hooded Mary announces the birth of Christ in a bleakly empty English winter landscape. Leighton: Coventry Carol Kenneth Leighton spent much of his musical life in Scotland, ending as Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, although the Scottish tinge we might expect to find in his music is less evident than a streak of Yorkshire toughness: he was born and raised in Wakefield. After study in Italy, he taught at Leeds and Edinburgh and then for a while at Oxford, as a fellow of Worcester College. It was in 1955, during his time at Leeds that he wrote his set of four carols with soprano solo. This Coventry Carol, the most frequently performed of the group, sets the familiar text from the Fifteenth Century Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, which touchingly narrates the story of Herod’s massacre of the innocents from the viewpoint of their frightened mothers. Berkeley: I Sing Of A Maiden There are surprisingly few Oxford connections on this CD: Lennox Berkeley, however, both grew up and studied here. He was born in Boars Hill, on the high outskirts of the city, in 1903, where his father’s collection of piano rolls of Beethoven sonatas is said to have spurred his interest in music, although his studies at Merton College were in modern languages. Together with his French ancestry, though, the degree shaped his musical path, and he spent the five years from 1927 in Paris, studying with Nadia Boulanger, taking advice from Ravel and beginning a long friendship with Poulenc. There is a subtle French tang to the harmonies of this carol, a deceptively simple number written for the Cambridge Hymnal in 1967. Palestrina: Hodie Christus Natus Est Palestrina’s setting of the Christmas Day motet "Hodie Christus Natus Est" was published in 1575, the composer’s fiftieth year, in his Third Book of Motets. It is thus a product of his second and final period as maestro of the Cappella Giulia, the choir of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Rather in the manner of his later compatriot Giovanni Gabrieli, Palestrina captures the essence of the celebratory text, as well as that of the grand building in which it would be sung, with magisterial antiphonal writing for two uneven choirs, one predominantly of high voices, the other of low. The uncharacteristically rhythmic writing is given an extra kick by the text’s substitution of the seasonal "Noe, noe" (with the stress on the second syllable) for the more usual "Alleluia". Bruckner: Virga Jesse Floruit Most of Bruckner’s large-scale liturgical choral music – including six settings of the mass and one of the requiem – date from early in his career, before nearly all of the great symphonies for which we largely know him today. His motets, on the other hand, span more or less the whole of his creative life, from a "Pange Lingua" probably written around his eleventh birthday in 1835 to a setting of the "Vexilla Regis" completed in 1892 less than four years before his death. This setting of the Marian text "Virga Jesse Floruit" dates from 1885, while Bruckner was struggling with the Eighth Symphony, and was intended for the centenary celebrations of the city of Linz. Ten miles from Linz stands the monastery of St. Florian, where Bruckner had spent much of his formative years, first as a chorister and then as an assistant teacher, and for which several of those early liturgical works had been written. It is not impossible that the splendour of the choral writing with its vast, echoing climaxes and trumpeting alleluias reflects a distant memory of the monastery’s fine acoustic in the mind of the composer, now long-resident in far-off Vienna. Cornelius: The Three Kings Rather appropriately for a composer only known in the English-speaking world for this Christmas song, Peter Cornelius was born on Christmas Eve in 1824. With this in mind, and feeling himself to have been granted many gifts at his birth, he was inclined to liken himself to a Christmas tree. "The Three Kings" is an arrangement by Ivor Atkins of "Die Konige", the third of Cornelius’ six "Weihnachtslieder" for voice and piano, first published in 1856. Gigout: Rhapsodie sur des noëls Eugène Gigout received his early musical training at the choir school in Nancy Cathedral, before being sent to the Niedermeyer School in Paris at age 13. There, he and a younger friend, Gabriel Fauré, received piano tuition from Camille Saint Saens. At the young age of 19, Gigout was selected to be the first organist of the new church in Paris, Saint Augustine, where he was to remain all his working life. The Rhapsodie sur des noëls, dedicated to the English virtuoso W. T. Best, is in three parts. The declamatory first section introduces the French tune ‘Joseph est bien marié’, before giving way to a gentle Andante. In this, we hear ‘Adeste Fideles’, which soon becomes intertwined with the original tune. The final section, starting in similar fashion to the first, brings in the refrain of the carol ‘Shepherds in the field abiding’ to do battle with ‘Adeste’. The piece is concluded by a fanfare-like repetition of the first notes of ‘Joseph’. Ireland: The Holy Boy Subtitled ‘A Carol of the Nativity’, John Ireland wrote The Holy Boy as a song for voice and piano in 1919. This transcription for organ is Ireland’s own, and maintains the gentle, lilting quality of the original. Page revised 19.10.04 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
