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Contents:
DDD 71:13 Recorded: The Chapel of Queens’ College, Cambridge – 22-25 June, 2003 TLLove and Honour is both a celebration of the musical heritage of Great Britain and a celebration of its sovereign. A Garland for the Queen, composed in 1953 for a concert on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is the centrepiece, and is juxtaposed with sacred music of a festal or regal nature. Recorded in 2003, the Golden Jubilee year, this recording is of particular significance as it also celebrates the Queen’s acceptance of the title of Patroness of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Queens’ College, founded in 1448, is deservedly proud of its musical tradition. Since the mid-nineteenth century the college has maintained a choir, conducted by one of the college’s Organ Scholars – undergraduate students, who each hold the post for three years. The choir has been associated with contemporary music since Charles Villiers Stanford, one-time student of Queens’, wrote a setting of the canticles for the choir. It is fitting that works commissioned for the college by Tarik O’Regan, an important young composer on the British scene, with close links with Cambridge are recorded alongside works by many of the most revered English composers of the Twentieth Century.Love and Honour The disc opens with its most senior composer’s most famous work. Parry’s I was Glad was composed for the Coronation of George V in 1902. The première performance was somewhat chaotic, the conductor having misread a signal and performed the entire piece before the Monarch had even arrived at the service. Parry revised the piece for the 1911 Coronation, including the addition of the declamatory introduction and triumphal postlude, and it is this version that has featured at every Coronation since then, and which is used as a festal anthem in churches and cathedrals throughout the world. Expansive, joyous, and satisfyingly English, few pieces could be said to fit their function, or epitomise their era as well as this. 1953 was a year of looking both forward and back. Great Britain was recovering from the austerity and bleakness of the 1940s – rationing was still in force, and the Second World War still fresh in everyone’s mind. The untimely death of King George VI, who, with his wife Queen Elizabeth the Queen mother (who was patroness of Queens’ College, Cambridge from 1948 until her death in 2002) had been a beacon of hope in the war years, came as a blow to the nation. The accession and coronation of the young Elizabeth II sparked a new optimism throughout the country, not least among musicians, poets, authors and playwrights. The Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned the present collection of ‘songs for mixed voices’, entitled A Garland for the Queen. It was performed at the Royal Festival Hall on the eve of the Coronation, 1 June 1953, by the Golden Age Singers and the Cambridge University Madrigal Society, conducted by Boris Ord, then director of music at King’s College, Cambridge. The ten composers represented in the collection are a diverse group from two distinct generations, but possessing an obvious strong national identity (not least with two Masters of the Queen’s Musick among their number). Their works are a touching record of a nationalism that we may never again see demonstrated in a comparable manner. Sir Arthur Bliss, whose Aubade opens the collection took over as Master of the Queen’s Musick after Sir Arnold Bax’s death in October 1953. The text by Henry Reed is full of excitement – describing the twittering anticipation of woodland creatures at the coronation of a young new Queen. Bliss’s setting captures this beautifully, utilising vocalised soprano solo lines to represent the two birds described in the text, giving each a distinct melodic character. In What is it like to be young and fair? Sir Arnold Bax sets a text by his brother Clifford, in a playful commentary on the accession of the youthful Queen: ‘What is it like to become a Queen when the leaves of life are still fresh and green?’. Bax achieves a comparable youthful lightness of choral sound with the use of divisi soprano and alto, and the omission of bass voices. The tone of the text and the musical language are somewhat naïve, almost whimsical, yet this only adds to the piece’s appeal, with the rousing toast at its close. Dance, Clarion Air is a tour-de-force of colours, textures and techniques, demanding considerable virtuosity from the singers. With his driving syncopations, vibrant polyphony and impulsive gestures, Tippett lends his inimitable exuberance and freshness to Christopher Fry’s succinct call to praise for the new Queen. Vaughan Williams dedicates Silence and Music ‘to the memory of Charles Villiers Stanford and his Blue Bird’. Silence and Music shares an ethereal detachment of the soprano line with the earlier piece. The text, by Ursula Wood (later to become the composer’s second wife) evocatively describes the awakening of music ‘from silence, where it slept’. Spring at this hour and Berkeley’s two operas, A Dinner Engagement (c1954) and Castaway are fruits of a very successful and productive relationship between the composer and Paul Dehn. In Spring at this hour, Dehn describes the decadence and elation at the arrival of the new Queen, with ingenious interwoven lines and vivid harmonies, beautifully balancing calm pastoral description in the outer sections with the fanfares of the central section. The pieces by Howells and Ireland both set texts that focus on the now all-but-vanished essence of England and Englishness. Ireland’s setting of James Kirkup, The Hills is touching in its simplicity, characterised by its gentle forward assertion brought about by the short phrases which start on metrically weak beats. On the other hand, Howells’s setting of Inheritance, to words by Walter de la Mare is much more diverse, exploring an extensive tonal palette, with Howells’s enviable control of space and musical direction. Gerald Finzi, whose unparalleled skill at word-setting and the crafting of partsongs is more fully explored in Queens’ College Chapel Choir’s Evening Watch (GMCD 7155), was a great lover of the English Countryside, and even cultivated rare species of apple tree in his garden. He chooses to set Edward Blunden’s words, to combine a slightly sentimental depiction of a rural idyll with the optimism for the new Queen present in the earlier items in the collection. He uses a lilting 5/4 at the start, and later introduces intriguing cross-rhythms with utmost ease and simplicity. Equally skilful is Alan Rawsthorne’s macaronic Canzonet. Rawsthorne, who, prior to attending the Royal Academy of Music in the 1920s considered dentistry and architecture as potential careers, is often unjustly overlooked as a composer. Louis MacNeice makes a commentary on the refrain from Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus), an anonymous poem from the last period of the Roman Empire. The latin words Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit cras amet (Let he who has never loved love tomorrow and let he who has loved love tomorrow) are seamlessly juxtaposed with English verse describing the constancies and inconstancies of the passing of time: ‘A thousand years and none the same.’ Rawsthorne mirrors the conflict of two languages with a metrical conflict in his setting – contrasting a lilting 9/8 for the latin, and an expansive cantabile 3/4 for the English words. Rubbra’s Salutation, setting words by Christopher Hassall, draws the collection to a close by bringing the listener back to the climate and outlook of 1953. The thought that the new Queen’s accession was banishing memories of a gloomy past and opening the way to a brighter, more optimistic future is mirrored in Rubbra’s response to Hassall’s text: ‘our land is a land of lingering winter, blessed with the Spring for Queen’ – a gradual sharpening of tonality and lightening of the texture to the radiant final chord. Tarik O’Regan was born in 1978, and was educated at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He has had his works performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and BBC Singers as well as by the Choirs of New College, Oxford and Clare College, Cambridge. The commissions on this recording are his first collaboration with Queens’ College Chapel choir. Having held several academic and creative arts fellowships in Britain, he currently lives in the United States, where he holds the Fulbright Chester Schirmer Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Musical Composition. Tu Claustra Stirpe Regia is the first of O’Regan’s three Motets for St Wulfstan for unaccompanied choir. The text for these motets is taken from the Portiforium of St Wulfstan, one of the earliest and most important English hymnals still extant. It dates from 1065 and is housed in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Tu Claustra Stirpe Regia was composed to celebrate the accession of Her Majesty the Queen to the position of Patroness of Queens’ College. It is a section of the seven-stanza Ambrosian hymn Nunc tibi, virgo virginum, an uplifting Marian text, linking liturgy with the Regal theme of other pieces on this recording. Its directness and simplicity conveys in a very intense way the almost gleeful joy which underpins the text: ‘Their weeping changed into delight’. His setting of the Cantate Domino was composed in response to a commission from Queens’ College, to celebrate the restoration of the historic 1892 Binns Organ, completed in 2002. Its vibrant and punchy phrases complement the words very effectively, and the scoring for accompanied choir allows the newly-refurbished organ to be used to telling effect. The warm yet clear acoustic of Queens’ College Chapel allows the listener to appreciate each of the contrasting textures of this exciting setting. Patrick Gowers, educated at Cambridge University has a diverse output as composer of both commercial and concert music. His church music includes several large anthems, a cantata, as well music for organ. Viri Galilaei was composed for the consecration of the Bishop of Oxford at Ascensiontide in 1988. It is a thrilling montage of texts and textures. Gowers juxtaposes the Proper of the Mass for Ascension with the first stanza of Wordsworth’s hymn See the conqueror mounts in triumph, surrounded by a shimmering shroud of Alleluias, and a glittering harmonic field set up by the semi-improvised second organ part. William Walton’s music, has earned a deserved place at the core of the Twentieth-Century Choral Canon. The composer of Marches for two Coronations, Walton has a life-long musical connection with the Crown. His Te Deum, composed for the 1953 Coronation is a rousing and substantial work for large forces. The Twelve, his most expansive anthem, is on a similar scale. The sectional structure of the piece is inherited from Auden’s text. It displays an enormous variety of choral textures, all grounded in Walton’s incredibly versatile tonal language, drawing influences both from the Anglican choral tradition, and more modern secular idioms. Page revised 15.12.04 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
