Both our performances of Mystical Masterpieces, in Cirencester’s Parish Church of St John the Baptist on February 22 and in Highnam’s magnificent Church of [...]]]>

CHORAL MAGIC FROM RHEINBERGER, KODÁLY, TAVENER & PÄRT

For our spring 2013 concerts, Cantores brought together four composers with very individual views of religion, and whose spiritual convictions permeate their music.

Both our performances of Mystical Masterpieces, in Cirencester’s Parish Church of St John the Baptist on February 22 and in Highnam’s magnificent Church of the Holy Innocents on March 2 were a great success, and enthusiastically applauded by satisfyingly well-peopled naves.

As Roger Jones put it in his review of this March 2 2013 Highnam concert in the Gloucester Echo:

Cantores deserve congratulations both for the originality of their programming and faultless technique.

As a special treat, you can hear here a recording of the Cirencester performance of the exquisite, ethereal Hymn to the Mother of God by Britain’s Sir John Tavener, one of Prince Charles’s favourite composers.

And click here for Roger Jones’s Gloucestershire Echo review in full.

The main work in our Spring 2013 concert programme was the Mass in E flat opus 109 by Joseph Rheinberger, first performed at the Court Church in Munich in 1879 under the direction of the composer, at that time the royal Kapellmeister.

Rheinberger saw himself as part of the long tradition of Bavarian Catholic composers going back to Orlandus Lassus and his music is in the direct line from the Rome and Venice of the Renaissance.

Arranged for two four part choirs, the style is conservative and has references to Gregorian Melody but also has the expressiveness of the Romantic harmonic palette.

Although nominally Catholic, Zoltán Kodály produced few works based on sacred texts being much more concerned with the development of a truly Hungarian musical style based on the folk music of the country and with music education.

The Pange Lingua of 1931, like much of his sacred work, has a dominant role for the organ and sets the different verses of the Latin hymn to contrasting music of enormous character.

Sir John Tavener (c) Wikipedia

John Tavener’s spiritual journey has had a profound influence on his music, much of which is set to religious texts from around the world.

In 1977, Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox church and, although of late his music has reflected preoccupations with other world religions, he has remained largely loyal to that church. The ‘Two Hymns to the Mother of God’ (1985) are a setting of words from the Liturgy of St Basil and from the Vigil Service for the Dormition of the Mother of God.

Arvo Pärt is from the Estonian Orthodox tradition, but has been categorised as one of the ‘holy minimalist’ composers whose music has a more broadly based mystical focus. The ‘minimalist’ element of the description refers to the use of simple, largely diatonic, harmonies and straightforward patterns but, in Pärt’s case, bell-like qualities that he refers to as ‘tintinnabuli’.

Arvo Pärt

The spiritual mood of the Magnificat composed in 1989 is restrained and prayerful capturing a timelessness that is an essential quality of his religious thought. A rich, thought- and soul-provoking evening that was a very particular pleasure.

PROGRAMME

Mass in E flat opus 109 – Rheinberger | Pange Lingua - Kodály | Two Hymns to the Mother of God – Tavener | Magnificat - Pärt

Mystical Masterpieces, with David Whitehead (organ)

Conducted by John Holloway

For our spring 2013 concerts, Cantores brings together four composers with very individual views of religion, and whose spiritual convictions permeate their music.

John Tavener – Two Hymns to the Mother of God

Herbert Howells – Psalm Prelude Number One Op. 32

Arvo Pärt – Magnificat

Zoltán Kodály – Pange Lingua

Interval

Joseph Rheinberger – Mass for Double Choir in E flat Op. 109

Kyrie Eleison

Intermezzo from Sonata No. 4 in A minor

Gloria

Adagio non Troppo from Sonata No. 5 in F♯ minor

Credo

Intermezzo from Sonata No. 8 in E minor

Sanctus and Benedictus

Agnus Dei

John Tavener – Two Hymns to the Mother of God

John Tavener’s spiritual journey has had a profound influence on his music, much of which is set to religious texts from around the world.

In 1977, Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox church and, although of late his music has reflected preoccupations with other world religions, he has remained largely loyal to that church. The ‘Two Hymns to the Mother of God’ (1985) are a setting of words from the Liturgy of St Basil and from the Vigil Service for the Dormition of the Mother of God.

1. Hymn to the Mother of God

In you, O woman full of Grace, the angelic choirs and the human race, all creation rejoices. O sanctified Temple, mystical Paradise, and glory of Virgins. In you, O Woman full of Grace, all creation rejoices.

2. Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God

O ye apostles, assembled here from the ends of the earth, bury my body in Gethsemane; and Thou my Son and God, receive my Spirit.

Herbert Howells – Psalm Prelude Number One Op. 32

Arvo Pärt – Magnificat

Arvo Pärt is from the Estonian Orthodox tradition, but has been categorised as one of the ‘holy minimalist’ composers whose music has a more broadly based mystical focus. The ‘minimalist’ element of the description refers to the use of simple, largely diatonic, harmonies and straightforward patterns but, in Pärt’s case, bell-like qualities that he refers to as ‘tintinnabuli’.

The spiritual mood of the Magnificat composed in 1989 is restrained and prayerful capturing a timelessness that is an essential quality of his religious thought. A rich, thought- and soul-provoking evening that promises to be a very particular pleasure.

et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salvatore meo,

quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae.

Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes,

quia fecit mihi magna,

qui potens est,

et sanctum nomen eius,

et misericordia eius in progenies et progenies

timentibus eum.

Fecit potentiam in brachio suo,

dispersit superbos mente cordis sui;

deposuit potentes de sede

et exaltavit humiles;

esurientes implevit bonis

et divites dimisit inanes.

Suscepit Israel puerum suum,

recordatus misericordiae,

sicut locutus est ad patres nostros,

Abraham et semini eius in saecula.

My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

He hath shewed strength with his arm;

he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

Zoltán Kodály – Pange Lingua

Although nominally Catholic, Zoltán Kodály produced few works based on sacred texts being much more concerned with the development of a truly Hungarian musical style based on the folk music of the country and with music education.

The Pange Lingua of 1931, like much of his sacred work, has a dominant role for the organ and sets the different verses of the Latin hymn to contrasting music of enormous character.

Corporis mysterium,

Sanguinisque pretiosi,

quem in mundi pretium

fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit Gentium

Nobis datus, nobis natus

ex intacta Virgine,

et in mundo conversatus,

sparso verbi semine,

sui moras incolatus

miro clausit ordine

In supremae nocte coenae

recumbens cum fratribus

observata lege plene

cibis in legalibus,

cibum turbae duodenae

se dat suis minibus.

Verbum caro, panem verum

verbo carnem efficit:

fitque sanguis Christi merum,

et si sensus deficit,

ad firmandum cor sincerum

sola fides sufficit.

Tantum ergo Sacramentum

veneremur cernui:

et antiquum documentum

novo cedat ritui:

praestet fides supplementum

sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque

laus et jubilatio,

salus, honor, virtus, quoque

sit et benedictio:

Procedenti ab utroque

compar sit laudation.

Amen

Sing, o tongue, the mystery

of the glorious Body,

and of the precious Blood,

which in the world the King,

the fruit of noble birth,

poured out as the value of the nations.

Given to us, born to us,

from untouched Virgin,

and in the world kept company,

had scattered the seed of the word,

his own delay of exile,

concluded in wonderous order.

In the most supreme night at dinner,

reclining with brothers,

to observe the fullness of the law,

a meal in accordance with the laws,

food of the multitude of the twelve,

he gave himself into their own hands.

Precious word, true bread,

word made flesh:

and made of the blood of Christ alone,

and if the senses failed,

to the sincere heart made strong,

faith alone supplied.

So great therefore a Sacrament,

let us venerate with faces to the ground:

and let the ancient instruction

give way to a new rite:

let faith furnish the supplement

when the senses fail.

To the Begettor and the Begotten

be praise and jubilation,

health, honor, power,

and likewise blessing:

to the one proceeding from both

be equal praise.

Amen.

Joseph Rheinberger – Cantus missae in E flat major

The main work in this programme is the Mass in E flat opus 109 by Joseph Rheinberger, first performed at the Court Church in Munich in 1879 under the direction of the composer, at that time the royal Kapellmeister.

Rheinberger saw himself as part of the long tradition of Bavarian Catholic composers going back to Orlandus Lassus and his music is in the direct line from the Rome and Venice of the Renaissance.

Arranged for two four part choirs, the style is conservative and has references to Gregorian Melody but also has the expressiveness of the Romantic harmonic palette.

Rheinberger was one of the greatest organists of his age and we, tonight, intersperse the sections of the Mass with movements from his organ sonatas much as would have been heard in liturgical performances in his own time.

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Intermezzo from Sonata No. 4 in A minor

et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Laudamus te. Benedicimus te.

Adoramus te. Glorificamus te.

Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.

Domine Deus, rex calestis, Deus Pater omnipotens,

Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe,

Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris.

Qui tollis peccata mundi, misrere nobis.

Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram.

Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,

miserere nobis.

Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus.

Tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe.

Cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris. Amen

Glory be to God in the highest
And in earth peace
to men of good will.

We praise Thee; we bless Thee;
we worship Thee; we glorify Thee.
We give thanks to Thee
for Thy great glory.

O Lord God, Heavenly King,
God the Father Almighty.
O Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son.
Lord God, Lamb of God,
Son of the Father.
Thou that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer.
Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father,
have mercy upon us.
For thou only art holy,
thou only art the Lord,
thou only art the most high, Jesus Christ.
Together with the Holy Ghost
in the glory of God the Father.
Amen

Adagio non Troppo from Sonata No. 5 in F♯ minor

factorem caeli et terrae,

visibilium omnium, et invisibilium.

et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum,

Filium Dei unigenitum,

et ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula,

Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine,

Deum verum de Deo vero,

genitum non factum, consubstantialem Patri,

per quem omnia facta sunt.

Qui propter nos homines, et propter nostram salutem

descendit de caelis, et incarnatus est

de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine,

et homo factus est.

Crucifixus etiam pro nobis

sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est.

Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum

Scripturas.

Et ascendit in caelum:

sedet ad dexteram Patris.

Et iterum venturus est cum gloria,

judicare vivos et mortuos:

cuius regni non erit finis.

Et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum

et vivificantem:

qui ex Patre Filioque procedit,

qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur

et conglorificatur:

qui locutus est per prophetas.

Et unam sanctam catholicam

et apostolicam ecclesiam.

Confiteor unum

baptisma in remissionem peccatorum.

Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,

et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.

I believe in one God, The Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth,

and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord, Jesus Christ the

Only-begotten Son of God.

Born of the Father before all ages.

God of God, Light of Light,

true God of True God.

Begotten, not made,

of one substance with the Father.

By whom all things were made.

Who for us men

and for our salvation came

down from heaven.

And became incarnate by the

Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary:

And was made man.

He was also crucified for us,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

and was buried.

And on the third day He rose again

according to the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven and

sits at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead and

His kingdom will have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord and Giver of life,

Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Who together with the Father

and the Son is adored and glorified,

and who spoke through the prophets.

And one holy, Catholic and

Apostolic Church.

I confess one baptism

for the forgiveness of sins

and I await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Intermezzo from Sonata No. 8 in E minor

Dominus Deus sabaoth.

Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis

peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis

peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is He that cometh
in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest.

Lamb of God,
Who takest away the sins of the world,
have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God. Who takest away the sins of the world,
grant us peace.

Cantores are:

Sopranos
Aileen Graham
Kate Kinsey
Fiona Barnaby
Kate Hooper
Nathalie Marshal
Rosalind Keefe
Sue Lewis
Katherine Safe
Erika Letts

Altos
Lorna Eayrs
Phillipa Holloway
Mandy Sturman
Jo Williams
Pauline Loveday
Lynne Whitworth

Tenors
Mark Brayne
Martin Graham
David Hudson
Alan Moore

Basses
Edward Barnaby
Stephen Penton
David Bryant
Simon Fletcher
Andrew Ives
George Allcock

The two concerts – at Malmesbury Abbey on Nov 24, and in our homebase Church of St John the Baptist in Cirencester on [...]]]> For our winter concerts in 2012, Cantores presented major sacred choral works by Bach, Palestrina, Wesley, Mendelssohn and Eric Whitacre where the composer is responding to dramatic events from the Psalms and The Testaments.

The two concerts – at Malmesbury Abbey on Nov 24, and in our homebase Church of St John the Baptist in Cirencester on Dec 1 - drew gratifyingly substantial audiences, despite torrential rain and local flooding around the Malmesbury event.

As ever, we are grateful to our regular reviewer Donald Hollins for the following assessment of the Cirencester concert which we all, as the singers, hugely enjoyed. And for more information from our Musical Director John Holloway on the background to the choice of music, please scroll down to the bottom of this page.

THIS was an interesting programme – something  in the nature of a musical sandwich, in fact.

The programme opened and closed with JS Bach. The opening words Komm, Jesu, komm from the choir echoed thrillingly round the church. The writer longs for Christ’s peace, the bitter way having become unbearable. Nevertheless, there is almost a fervent sense of joyfulness at times interspersed with long sustained phrases with the sopranos prominent.

The frame of the sandwich was completed with Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude (Jesus, my Joy…my adornment…) with  its periods of restraint and staccato passages set to Saint Paul’s words: For those who love God/ even their   afflictions/become pure sweetness. The two works were movingly and efficiently sung throughout. Quite perfect! 

Cantores performing Nov 22 2012 at Malmesbury Abbey

The other contents of this musical sandwich contained many goodies, not least Mendelssohn’s Warum toben die Heiden – Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? – with frequent echoes of this composer’s Elijah. The other main work was Palestrina’s Stabat Mater which is a setting of Jacopone da Todi’s 13^th century poem describing Mary’s feelings as she beheld her tender child/ saw Him hang in desolation/Till his spirit forth He sent. 
  
Two short pieces by contemporary American composer Eric Whitacre displayed his concern to produce beautifully- sounding choral works . These were certainly beautiful and lovingly sung but I sought in vain for any deep-felt spiritual conviction in these works..

An important part of the programme was provided by organist David Whitehead’s solo contributions. Buxtehude’s Toccata in D minor offered a splendid outpouring and displayed the distinguished pedigree of both organ and organist as did the challenging Sonata no 2 in C minor by Mendelssohn which was thrillingly delivered. 

It was good to see such a large audience whose appreciation was evident.

This was a well and interestingly balanced programme that provided a positive challenge for this 26-strong chamber choir that it met most successfully. Under conductor John Holloway the choir has achieved a high standard, produces a rich quality of sound and when necessary offers a surprisingly powerful body of sound. On this evidence Cantores continues to go from strength to strength

Programme

Palestrina – Stabat Mater

JS Bach – Komm Jesu, Komm

JS Bach – Jesu meine Freude

Felix Mendelssohn - Warum toben die Heiden

Samuel Wesley – in exitu Israel

Eric Whitacre - Lux Aurumque

Eric Whitacre - Alleluia Amen

John Holloway comments:

Correctly, a motet is a setting for unaccompanied singers of Latin words for use in the liturgy of the church. Our programme shows, however, how this idea has been adapted at different times and places to reflect current cultural, theological and musical thinking.

Plainsong, the traditional unaccompanied chanting of the church, the origins of which go back to the early years of Christianity and therefore carries the authority of history, is a recurring feature in the motet of many eras, almost an acknowledgement of the need to be part of that tradition.

Palestrina’s setting of Jacopone da Todi’s thirteenth century poem ‘Stabat Mater’ dates from the last years of the seventeenth century and describes Mary’s contemplation at the foot of the cross.

Although not quoting any pre-existing plainsong, the melody and harmony are dominated by plainsong’s modality and phraseology. Two choirs answer and comment on each other coming together at powerful cadences.

In Lutheran Germany 150 years later, Bach uses the motet to express the most profound spiritual insights using contemporary texts in German. The music is accompanied at least by a continuo instrument.

Paul Thymich wrote the eleven-verse poem “Komm, Jesu, komm” for Johann Schelle (cantor of the Thomasschule from 1677 to his death in 1701) to set to music for the funeral of the school’s rector Jacob Thomasius in 1684. Bach sets only the first and last verses:

Come, Jesus, come, my body is weary.
My strength fails more and more,
I long for your peace;
the bitter path becomes too hard.
Come, come, I will yield to You;
You are the right path, the truth and the life.

So I give myself into Your hands
and say: World, good night!
Just as my life’s course is hurrying towards its end,
the spirit is opportunely healthy.
It hovers next to its creator,
as Jesus is and remains
the true way to life.

“Jesu meine Freude” is a setting of words of Saint Paul on the subject of earthly death and heavenly eternity interspersed with verses by Johann Franck about forty of whose hymns appear in German Hymnals.

The music is dominated by the chorale melody of the title composed by Johann Crüger but the different movements display a variety of styles in response to the text. The spiritual centre of the work is the fugue “Ye are not of the flesh but of the spirit”.

Mendelssohn writes consciously in the shadow of Bach in his setting of Psalm 2 “Why do the heathen rage so fiercely and the kings of the earth set themselves up?” As in “Komm Jesu, Komm” and the Palestrina he writes for two four part choirs often answering and responding to each other but the musical language has all the drama, colour and harmonic inventiveness of his age.

And, unlike Bach, there is no counterpoint to cloud the effect of the words; that is, until the Gloria where Mendelssohn composes the strictest of four part canons.

Samuel Wesley (father to Samuel Sebastian) was born in 1766 and he too has Bach in mind in composing his most well-known work describing the Israelites fleeing from Egypt and the demise of the pursuing Egyptians in the Red Sea. But he writes in Latin “In Exitu Israel” and makes extensive use of the plainsong melody associated with the text.

There is plenty of counterpoint too particularly to the words “mare vidit et fugit” (The sea fled away) and a correspondingly dramatic unison passage “Jordanis conversus est retrorsum” (The Jordan was driven back).

The Contemporary American composer Eric Whitacre, in the introduction to his 2012 motet, “Alleluia” claims neither to be an atheist nor a Christian. This immediately sets him apart from all the other composers in our concert who write from a position of faith.

He does however “see the deep wisdom of the liturgy” and its poetry but his response to the two word text “Alleluia, Amen” is that of a composer with no historical baggage or precedent who rejoices only in the glory of choral sound. (It is, in fact a free transcription of his wind symphony).

“Lux Aurumque” has a reference to a “new born baby” which may be the Christ child but, again, the only concern of the work is choral sonorities: “Light, warm and heavy as pure gold” and music that the composer suggests should “shimmer and glow”.

For our 2012 summer concerts, Cantores teamed up with the early music ensemble The Six to perform a rich medley of choral and instrumental music from the Renaissance and Early Baroque period, delivering in the [...]]]> THE MUSIC OF THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE AND EARLY BAROQUE – “A MAGICAL EVENING”

Cantores at Northleach, June 16 2012

For our 2012 summer concerts, Cantores teamed up with the early music ensemble The Six to perform a rich medley of choral and instrumental music from the Renaissance and Early Baroque period, delivering in the words of our regular reviewer Donald Hollins “a Magical Evening.”

The two concerts, at Northleach Parish Church on Saturday June 16 and at St Mary the Virgin in Tetbury on June 30, saw our 26-strong choir (eight sopranos and six each of the other voices) performing at our very best – assured, with the exquisite harmonies of up to 12 parts of the period, and (mostly!) perfectly tuned.

Over to Donald Hollins, with thanks, to summarise the Northleach concert:

THIS concert of Renaissance choral music accompanied by period instruments afforded another opportunity to hear the excellent twenty-six strong Cantores Chamber Choir. A bonus was the setting of St Peter and St Paul church, a lovely, historic church in which to hear a rich selection of 16th and 17th century choral music, canzonas and dances by great composers of the Renaissance and Early Baroque period. Add the sympathetic acoustic of the church and the result was a wholly-satisfying evening.

From the very first Alleluja of the opening Plaudite Omnis Terra by Gabrieli, the quality of sound was apparent as the choir sang of making a joyful noise unto God…

Nisi Dominus from Vespers of 1610 by Monteverdi for two choirs followed, briskly sung as a proclamation of strongly held faith, with a beautifully sustained Amen at the end.

Intermingled with the singing, sometimes performing on their own and at other times accompanying, were The Six, who turned out to comprise two cornetts and two sackbuts played with authority by David Jarratt-Knock and Wayne Plummer and Jack Smith and David Todd respectively.

As composers of the period often wrote music for either singing or playing this added an authentic touch to the concert and some madrigals varied the mood.

Conductor John Holloway invariably chooses interestingly compiled programmes and this was no exception.

John Taverner became an agent for Thomas Cromwell’s brutal suppression of the monasteries yet composed some marvellous music such as the plainsong Dum Transisset Sabbatum which in this setting was most moving. Further plainsong followed with the male singers highlighted in Tallis’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis.

In contrast was the German Schutz’s Meine Seele Erhebt den Herrn (Magnificat). The four instrumentalists and John Wright on a portable organ joined the choir in Hodie Completi Sunt by Gabrieli, a devout proclamation of faith. Two longer pieces completed the programme: a Mass by the Spanish composer Victoria which was beautifully sung as was Dixit Dominus (from Vespers of 1610 ) by Monteverdi which mixes passages in chant with duets and trios.

A magical evening!

We asked our Musical Director John Holloway to explain the background of this very special concert:

Nowadays we are all used to highly idiomatic writing for different instruments and for singers;

Liszt has shown us what the piano can do and Paganini the violin. Their musical idiom is not normally interchangeable.

Composers of the Renaissance and early Baroque, while aware of the possibilities of different instruments and particular players, were often content to write music that could be either sung or played.

This was especially important in the domestic environment where one used the skills, vocal or instrumental, of whoever was present. A particular part or line had to be accessible to a range of voices or instruments. Title pages would often say ‘Apt for Voices or Viols’.

This is not to say that composers were unaware of sonority or virtuosity, rather that performers had greater freedom to exploit their particular resources.

Both Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi had access to companies of players and singers, differently constituted at different times and so performances of their music would have sounded different on different occasions.

For our summer 2012 concerts in Tetbury and Northleach, grand motets in eight or twelve parts will combine the instrumental and vocal textures, and the separate ensembles will show off their skills in choral music by Tallis, Taverner and Victoria and instrumental canzonas and dances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Programme

G Gabrieli Plaudite Omnis Terra a12

G Gabrieli Hodie completi sunt a8

Schütz German Magnificat

Monteverdi Dixit Dominus (from Vespers of 1610)

Monteverdi Nisi Dominus (from Vespers of 1610)

 Victoria Missa O Quam Gloriosum

Tallis Loquebantur variis linguis

Taverner Dum transisset sabbatum

]]> http://cantores.net/2012/03/sackbuts-and-cornetts-northleach-june-16-tetbury-june-30-2012/feed/ 0 http://cantores.net/2011/12/the-cloths-of-heaven-highnam-march-3-cirencester-march-10-2012/ http://cantores.net/2011/12/the-cloths-of-heaven-highnam-march-3-cirencester-march-10-2012/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:16:40 +0000 Cantorescotswolds http://cantores.net/?p=947 Cantores sing Cloths of Heaven, Cirencester March 10, 2012

We spread our cloths under your feet – ‘but tread softly because you tread on our dreams…’

For our 2012 Spring concert season, Cantores were thrilled to perform some of the most inspiring works from [...]]]>

Cantores sing Cloths of Heaven, Cirencester March 10, 2012

ENGLAND’S 20th CENTURY MUSICAL RENAISSANCE

We spread our cloths under your feet – ‘but tread softly because you tread on our dreams…’

For our 2012 Spring concert season, Cantores were thrilled to perform some of the most inspiring works from England’s magnificent 20th century musical renaissance, what’s more doing so in the splendour of two of the country’s most beautiful Parish Churches – the Church of the Holy Innocents in Highnam, just outside Gloucester and St John the Baptist in Cirencester.

See the end of this post for a full programme. We’re most grateful to our stalwart reviewer Donald Hollins for one of the most heart-warming formal accolades Cantores has received in some time, reflecting our own huge enjoyment in performing this most challenging but also rewarding of concerts.

Cantores Chamber Choir at Cirencester Parish Church.

By Donald Hollins, Saturday March 10 2012.

THIS fine, large church was the setting for this go-ahead chamber choir’s latest concert under its musical director, John Holloway. In the interestingly-conceived programme we were invited to hear “some of the most inspiring works from England’s 20^th century choral renaissance.”

Cantores Chamber Choir number about 25 singers and perform regularly in churches throughout the Cotswolds. The Cloths of Heaven  comes from WB Yeats’s poem set to music by Howard Skempton. This proved to be one of the highlights of the concert, with every word clearly enunciated :

“Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,/ Enwrought with gold and silver light,/ ….I would spread the cloths under your feet:/ But I, being poor, have only my dreams;/I have spread my dreams under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams..”

A lovely poem lovingly sung!

Sadly, fewer and fewer churches offer choral evensong although the tradition continues to thrive in our cathedrals. Cantores sang several pieces with which lovers of England’s rich choral tradition will be familiar, including Stanford’s wonderful Magnificat , Finzi’s God is Gone Up and Charles Wood’s Hail Gladdening Light.

Throughout the concert the choir sang impressively, always responsive to its conductor. When required, it produced a strong body of sound that belied its size, as in the conclusion of Vaughan Williams’s Valiant for Truth:

“So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

There was a moving, well-sustained ending to My Beloved Spake by Patrick Hadley. Here as elsewhere diction was good.

Other pieces I particularly enjoyed included Walton’s Set me as a Seal, Britten’s highly individual Jubilate Deo, William Henry Harris’s Faire is the Heaven to the sublime words of Edmund Spenser, and John Tavener’s Funeral Ikos.

The latter is from the Order for the Burial of Priests in the Eastern Church and, sung in plainsong,  it was  fascinating to listen to.

Two works by contemporary composer James MacMillan - The Gallant Weaver and Christus Vincit – received excellent performances; particularly striking was the latter in which the sopranos excelled and one soprano [ed: Kate Hooper] in particular.

Last but by no means least, mention should be made of organist Robin Baggs whose accompanying was first class (particularly in the demanding Britten), as was his playing of two solo works by Bridge and Howells.

The programme in detail:

Highnam's Church of the Holy Innocents

Magnificat in A major: Charles Villiers Stanford
Stanford brings the language of Mendelssohn and Brahms to a setting of the first evening  canticle. The original version of 1880 was scored for an accompaniment for full orchestra.

Set me as a Seal: William Walton

The first of two settings, in our programme, of the Song of Solomon, written for a friend’s wedding in 1938

My Beloved Spake: Patrick Hadley          

This passage from the Song of Solomon has been set many times by composers. This was also composed in 1938 when Hadley was strongly under the influence of Delius.

Faire is the Heaven: William Harris

Organist at St. George’s Chapel Windsor Castle from 1933 until 1961, this is the most famous of Harris’ works for cathedral choir exploring all the possible sonorities and distant and wayward harmonies.    

Adagio in E: Frank Bridge

Bridge studied at the Royal College of Music from 1899 to 1903 under Stanford from whom he learned a mastery of the late Romantic style. This Adagio is one of his most performed works.

Valiant for Truth: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Christian, John Bunyan’s hero, meets Mr Valiant for Truth, wounded and carrying a sword. This motet describes his last moments before passing over to the other side.

Christus Vincit: James Macmillan

One of the most influential and often performed of living composers, Macmillan has made a huge contribution to the contemporary choral repertoire. Here he exploits the possibilities of canons for single and multiple voices and crowns it with a soprano solo of rare brilliance.

Hail Gladdening Light: Charles Wood

A pillar of the English choral tradition, Wood, like Stanford, was Irish. He followed Stanford as Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1924. This, his most famous composition, is finely crafted and delights in the sheer beauty of choral sound.

Interval

Jubilate in C: Benjamin Britten

This was written for the choir of St. George’s Chapel Windsor in 1961. There a characteristic economy of musical material but used to great effect with remarkable sudden contrasts of key and dynamic.

Nunc Dimittis: Gustav Holst

First performed in Westminster Cathedral in 1915 Holst’s Nunc Dimittis was subsequently forgotten until a revision by his daughter Imogen was performed by the BBC Northern Singers in 1974.

The Gallant Weaver: James Macmillan

Here are Macmillan’s profoundly Scottish roots: words by Robert Burns, idioms of folk melody and the distant drone. But, again, we have effective canons and uncompromising comings together to great choral effect.                       

Paean: Herbert Howells

Born in Lydney and trained firstly at Gloucester Cathedral Howells was steeped in the tradition of Stanford and Elgar. A fine organist, his Paean has symphonic drive as well as brilliance with just a look over the shoulder at the twentieth century Parisian masters. 

Funeral Ikos: John Tavener

At the time of composing the Funeral Ikos (1981),  Tavener was preoccupied with the traditions and liturgies of the Eastern Church. This text is from the Order for the Burial of Priests.

Ecce Beatam Lucem: Jonathan Dove

This setting of words by Allessandro Striggio (1540 – 92) dates from 1997. The score is pervaded by the ‘light’ of the title in different colours and brightnesses. Eventually the light draws us to the peace of Paradise.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven: Howard Skempton

A deceptively simple arrangement of Yeats’ words gives us the theme of our concert. Written in 1999, light is, again, the subject of the music: gold, silver, blue, dim, bright and half-light 

God is gone up: Gerald Finzi  

A work for Saint Cecilia’s Day in 1951, Finzi’s joyous anthem closes our concert. By nature retiring and conservative, this is, for Finzi, an uncharacteristic foray into almost Elgarian grandeur.

The songs were the highlight of a programme opening [...]]]> Cantores concluded our 20th anniversary year with one of the most inspiring and well-attended concerts we’ve ever performed, with  six exquisite and beautiful new English songs by our Musical Director John Holloway, set to poems (click here for the texts) by the early 20th century poet John Drinkwater.

The songs were the highlight of a programme opening with Vaughan Williams’ famous ‘Serenade to Music’, and concluding with Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s exquisite 17th century popular-melody-based ‘Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve’. 

As an additional a capella item, we also performed the beautiful Faire is the Heaven by William Harris.

We’re grateful to stalwart Cotswolds reviewer Donald Hollins for the following thoughts about the concert, after which please enjoy John’s own pre-concert musings on how he came to write these songs – and also the picture on the right of our Cantores-sponsored Christmas tree in the Parish Church, complete with celebratory balloons.

THIS interestingly-programmed concert marked twenty years of singing by a Cotswolds-based chamber choir which has a reputation for an innovative and exciting repertoire.

The highlight for me was musical director John Holloway’s setting of six poems by John Drinkwater. Drinkwater was one of a group of poets for whom the village of Dymock was their spiritual home in a period leading up to the First World War.

He wrote of a pastoral, rural and gentle countryside soon to be lost forever in the carnage to come. These are lovely, varied poems that John  Holloway has most successfully set to music that fully complements and evokes the words , and which the  Cantores singers sang with apparent love and understanding. The overall feeling was for a deep passion for the countryside.

The lyrical theme was continued throughout the first half of the programme which had begun with Ralph Vaughan-Williams’s sublime piece, Serenade To Music, originally written for eight soloists but here performed as a choral work.

There is music in the very words of Shakespeare’s “How sweet the  moonlight sleeps upon this bank….”

Completing the first half of the programme was the short Faire Is The Heaven  by Edmund Spenser set to attractive music by 20th century composer and organist William Harris and which begins:”Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place/ In full enjoyment of felicitie.”

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was a prolific composer in 17th-century France , and his Messe De Minuit Pour Noel continues to be popular with many. It comes across as a rather jolly mass, often rhythmic and dance-like with a certain sameness at times. Organist Anthony Hammond , as was apparently customary, improvised between the movements of the mass which is essentially a series of carols.

The work was well sung and enunciated by this very good choir, but  I was left with the feeling that it was neither fish nor fowl and somehow there was no mystery or awe in this mass.

Donald Hollins

And now, here are John Holloway’s own thoughts about his newest composition.

Drinkwater was a Gloucestershire poet through and through, one of the group of poets associated before the First World War with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, along with Rupert Brooke and others, and we asked John Holloway to describe what moved him to take these poems for his newest work – and also to tell us a little more about the rest of the evening’s programme.

I almost invariably compose for specific performers and events so it was a welcome challenge to be able to exploit the impressive choral talents of the choir on such an auspicious occasion.

I was concerned to reflect Cantores’ home territory and natural musical style and so I turned to the pastoral poetry of John Drinkwater, one of the ‘Dymock Poets’, who with such as Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas lived and worked in the Gloucestershire village of that name in the early years of the twentieth century.

While many of his poems evoke a long lost pastoral innocence, there are, at the same time, moments of dark anticipation of war and the end of things and a profound questioning of accepted spirituality.

The words, to a degree, determined an appropriate musical style which is in the neo-romantic tradition of Holst, Vaughan Williams and Finzi and is one where the choir is, I hope, entirely at home.

The six songs are designed to be accompanied by five string players but can, quite happily be accompanied by a piano. The total duration is a little less than twenty minutes.

Our concert opened with Vaughan Williams’ famous ‘Serenade to Music’ which he wrote for Sir Henry Wood in 1938.

Originally for 16 named solo voices we are taking the opportunity to show off the different sections of the choir with their contrasting timbres.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s ‘Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve’  dates from the Paris of 1690. It is joyous in style and is full of French Christmas Carol melodies that would have been well known at the time.

And for those who’ve had the enthusiasm to read all the way down here, here is the full programme from the December 3 Cirencester concert.

CELEBRATION

Cantores

with

Peter Stacey – violin

Justine Tomlinson – violin

Cecily Rice – viola

Rachel Howgego – violoncello

Ian Hartnell – double bass

Anthony Hammond – piano and organ

 

Conducted by John Holloway

 

Celebrating 20 years of singing

Cantores was originally founded by a group of keen singers back in 1991. During the past 20 years we have built up a strong reputation and a keen following across the Cotswolds. To mark our anniversary we sang a programme of ‘Gems’ earlier in the year, featuring some of our best loved pieces, and are delighted to be singing new pieces tonight specially composed for us by our Musical Director John Holloway.

1. Serenade to Music – Ralph Vaughan Williams

In 1938 Sir Henry Wood, the distinguished conductor and founder of the Promenade Concerts, celebrated the fiftieth year of his first public performance. Vaughan Williams composed this serenade “in grateful recognition of his services to music” and it was first performed by a handpicked group of sixteen soloists including Isobel Baillie, Eva Turner and Heddle Nash.

Vaughan Williams sets words from Act 5 of The Merchant of Venice where, in Portia’s moonlit garden, Lorenzo speaks to Jessica of love and the benign effects of music on the human spirit.

2. Faire is the Heaven – Sir William Harris

This double choir motet was written in 1925 while Harris was organist at New College, Oxford.

The words are taken from a much longer poem by Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599), A Hymne of Heavenly Beautie.

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins
Which all with golden wings are overdight.
And those eternall burning Seraphins
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright
Be the Angels and Archangels
Which attend on God’s owne person without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

3. Six Poems of John Drinkwater – John Holloway

The village of Dymock in the northwest corner of Gloucestershire was a spiritual home to a group poets in the years leading up to the First World War. Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater were all among their number.

Their work in this time captures a picture of a lost world of pastoral innocence that was to be destroyed forever in the approaching holocaust. The beauty of the countryside and the simple pleasures of the inhabitants are to be found in the poetry. But there is too the shadow of a premonition of what was to come.

I have attempted in the music to exploit the natural qualities of Cantores, the beauty of sound, response to melody and the intelligence required to project the complex images and expressions found in the poetry

Cotswold Love

Blue skies are over Cotswold
And April snows go by,
The lasses turn their ribbons
For April’s in the sky
And April is the season
When Sabbath girls are dressed,
From Rodboro’ to Campden,
In all their silken best.

An ankle is a marvel
When first the buds are brown,
And not a lass but knows it
From Stow to Gloucester town.
And not a girl goes walking
Along the Cotswold lanes
But knows men’s eyes in April
Are quicker than their brains.

It’s little that it matters,
So long as you’re alive,
If you’re eighteen in April,
Or rising sixty-five,
When April comes to Amberley
With skies of April blue,
And Cotswold girls are briding
With slyly tilted shoe.

The Broken Gate

I know a little broken gate
Beneath the apple-boughs and pines,
The seasons lend it coloured state,
And round its hinge the ivy twines -
The ivy and the bloomless rose,
And autumn berries flaming red;
The pine its gracious scent bestows,
The apple-boughs their treasure shed.

It opens on an orchard hung
With heavy-laden boughs that spill
Their brown and yellow fruit among
The withered stems of daffodil:
The river from its shallows freed
Here falls upon a stirless peace,

The tides of time suspended lead
The tired spirit to release.

A little land of mellowed ease
I find beyond my broken gate,
I hear amid the laden trees
A magic song, and there elate
I pass along from sound and sight
Of men who fret the world away,
I gather rich and rare delight
Where every day is holy day.

Daffodils

Again, my man of Lady Street,
Your daffodils have come, the sweet
Bell daffodils that are aglow
In Ryton woods now, where they go
Who are my friends and make good rhymes.

They come, these very daffodils,
From that same flight of Gloucester Hills,
Where Dymock dames and Dymock men
Have cider kegs and flocks in pen,
For I’ve been there a thousand times.

Your petals are enchanted still
And when those tongues of Orphic skill
Bestowed upon that Ryton earth
A benediction for your birth,
Sun daffodils that now I greet.

Because, brave daffodils, you bring
Colour and savour of a spring
That Ryton blood is quick to tell.
You should be borne if all were well,
In golden carts to Lady Street.

 Mamble

I never went to Mamble
that lies above the Teme,
so I wonder who’s in Mamble,
and whether people seem
who breed and brew along there
as lazy as the name,
and whether any song there
sets alehouse wits aflame.

The finger-post say Mamble,
and that is all I know,
of the narrow road to Mamble,
and should I turn to go
to that place of lazy token,
that lies above the Teme,
there might be a Mamble broken
that was lissom in a dream.

So leave the road to Mamble
and take another road
to as good a place as Mamble
be it lazy as a toad;
who travels Worcester County
takes any place that comes,
when April tosses bounty
to the cherries and the plums.

The Boundaries

Although beyond the track of unseen stars
Imagination strove in weariless might.
Yet loomed at last inviolable bars
That bound my farthest flight.

And when some plain old carol in the street
Quickened a shining angel in my brain,
I knew that even his passionate wings should beat
Upon those bars in vain.

And then I asked if God omnipotent
Himself was caught within the snare, or free,
And would the bars at his command relent. -
And none could answer me.

Immortality

When other beauty governs other lips,
And snowdrops come to strange and happy springs,
When seas renewed bear yet unbuilded ships,
And alien hearts know all familiar things,
When frosty nights bring comrades to enjoy
Sweet hours at hearths where we no longer sit,
When Liverpool is one with dusty Troy,
And London famed as Attica for wit .
How shall it be with you, and you, and you,
How with us all who have gone greatly here
In friendship, making some delight, some true
Song in the dark, some story against fear?
Shall song still walk with love, and life be brave,

[From here, not being sung....

And we, who were all these, be but the grave?
No; lovers yet shall tell the nightingale
Sometimes a song that we of old time made,
And gossips gathered at the twilight ale
Shall say, "Those two were friends," or, "Unafraid
Of bitter thought were those because they loved
Better than most." And sometimes shall be told
How one, who died in his young beauty, moved,
As Astrophel, those English hearts of old.
And the new seas shall take the new ships home
Telling how yet the Dymock orchards stand,
And you shall walk with Julius at Rome,
And Paul shall be my fellow in the Strand;
There in the midst of all those words shall be
Our names, our ghosts, our immortality.]

 Interval

 

 

4. Messe de Minuit – Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was one of the most outstanding musicians in late seventeenth-century France. His output of sacred music was prodigious, comprising some thirty-five oratorios, eleven settings of the Mass, over two hundred motets and the well-known Te Deum, the overture of which was used as the signature tune for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Charpentier was particularly drawn to writing Christmas music, producing instrumental carols, Latin oratorios on Christmas themes, French pastorales and a Christmas mass – the delightful Messe de Minuit pour Noël. This piece dates from around 1690 and was probably composed for the great Jesuit church of St. Louis in Paris, where Charpentier held the important post of maître de musique.

The use of popular carols in church music had long been an accepted practice. In England carols were more often sung than played, but in France noëls figured prominently in the substantial French organ repertoire. The liturgy of Midnight Mass permitted the singing and playing of these Christmas folksongs, and by Charpentier’s time quite complex instrumental arrangements were commonplace. However, Charpentier’s idea of basing a whole mass on these songs was completely original. Altogether there are ten noëls, most of which are dance-like in character, reflecting the carol’s secular origins.

Tonight, as was customary in Charpentier’s time, Anthony Hammond will improvise on the carols at the organ between the movements of the mass.

John Bawden

Kyrie              Joseph est bien marié

Or, nous dites; Marie

Une jeune pucelle

Gloria             Les Bourgeois de Chastres

Où s’en vont ces guays bergers

Credo             Vous qui désirez sans fin

Voici le jour solennel de Noël

A la venue de Noël

Sanctus           O Dieu que n’étais-je en vie

Agnus Dei      A minuit fut fait un réveil

 

Soloists:           Susan Lewis (Soprano)

Rosalind Keefe (Soprano)

Pauline Loveday (Contralto)

Martin Graham (Tenor)

David Burden (Bass)

 

Cantores are:

Sopranos
Aileen Graham
Kate Kinsey
Fiona Barnaby
Kate Hooper
Nathalie Marshal
Rosalind Keefe
Sue Lewis
Katherine Safe

Altos
Lorna Eayrs
Phillipa Holloway
Mandy Sturman
Jo Williams
Pauline Loveday
Lynne Whitworth

Tenors
Mark Brayne
Martin Graham
David Hudson
Steve Derrick
David Smith

Basses
Edward Barnaby
David Burden
David Bryant
Andrew Ives
George Allcock

The acoustics of the church,  with its [...]]]> Cantores celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and (after a wonderful choir dinner at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College with several former members and musical directors past),  we began our musical reminiscence on July 2 with a magnificent concert of songs both sacred and secular in Cirencester Parish Church.

The acoustics of the church,  with its new flat floor and spectacularly restored Father Willis organ,  spoke beautifully to the choir’s strengths,  and it was perhaps one of the best performances we’ve given in our two decades since Cantores’ first 1991 concert in Tetbury.

There was contemporary humour and mystical contemplation,  and a particularly vivacious (and in the event reassuringly coordinated) performance of Bob Chilcott’s ‘The Making of the Drum’,  a work inspired by African sounds and rhythms and highlighting a number of percussion instruments from drum to sticks and sandblocks.

We performed largely the same programme to an enthusiastic audience on Friday July 22 at Holy Trinity Church in the beautiful Dorset coastal villag of West Lulworth, as highlight of their last Coast and Country Festival.

Our present musical director John Holloway summarised the thinking behind our 2011 summer’s programme:

In the 20 years that Cantores have been singing together,  the musical landscape that we have inhabited has been truly diverse.  The motivation to select one piece rather than another for exploration and,  perhaps,  performance,  is largely derived from the enthusiasms of the singers.  And,  of course,  no two singers will agree entirely on what deserves the choir’s attention –  and from there derives the huge variety of pieces that have been performed.

The MD is charged with generating programmes which,  on the one hand,  have an innate coherence or logic and also please most of the people most of the time.  Not always possible,  of course…

After a period of self-indulgence,  most choirs discover the delight of giving pleasure to audiences as well as to themselves. To sense the waves of enthusiasm emanating from an audience which is genuinely caught up in the performance is an extraordinary experience,  and one which all choirs,  who have felt it once,  want from every concert.

Our islands have been for centuries the most fertile in the production of music for choirs such as ours.  We have explored the Tudors,  Byrd and his contemporaries,  The Baroque from Purcell to Handel (the greatest non-English, English composer),  the Romantic style that we learned from Mendelssohn through the Wesleys to Stanford and the great 20th century flowering in Vaughan Williams, Britten and so many others.

That much of this music is sacred is testament to the mighty tradition of cathedral music which has been central to our choral life for 400 years.

Our Gems summer programme reflected the richness and diversity of the music available to our choirs not just from our islands but also from the rest of Europe.

Particular enthusiasms were clearly apparent:  the Italian Baroque with its light and colour;  the expressiveness and rich choral sonorities of the German and Russian Romantics;  and the great union between poet and musician reflected in the English music of the 20th century.

The folk traditions,  be they British or inspired by other cultures, were rich seams too,  and extended into the popular genres which so many choirs aspire to but which only the best truly make their own.

There were,  of course,  huge gaps, but these can be partially filled if we can persuade you to join us for our future presentations..

For our winter Cantores concert,  to be held on Saturday December 3rd at 7.30 p.m. and appropriately entitled ‘Celebration‘,  we will be joined by the string ensemble which accompanied our highly successful baroque programme presented in Tetbury and Northleach recently and featuring Handel’s ‘Dixit Dominus’.

The programme will include Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade to Music’, a new work specially commissioned for this anniversary by Cantores Conductor John Holloway, setting words by the Dymock poet John Drinkwater, and Charpentier’s ever popular ‘Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve’.

Our performances of Handel’s Dixit Dominus at St Mary’s Parish Church in Tetbury on Saturday Feb 26 and on March 12 at Northleach’s Church of St Peter and St Paul were a triumph. We’re grateful to Donald Hollins for the following review of the Tetbury concert, and see towards the end of this post for the [...]]]>

Our performances of Handel’s Dixit Dominus at St Mary’s Parish Church in Tetbury on Saturday Feb 26 and on March 12 at Northleach’s Church of St Peter and St Paul were a triumph. We’re grateful to Donald Hollins for the following review of the Tetbury concert, and see towards the end of this post for the full programme notes.

TETBURY’S lovely and elegant church, with its ranks of box pews, provided a gracious setting for this talented choir’s concert.

It opened with Monteverdi’s Beatus Vir with its arresting and oft repeated chorus from the sopranos. A setting of Psalm 112 this motet has a haunting quality. Like all this composer’s work it is dramatic and imaginative in the way it employs voices and instruments with striking harmonies and is altogether a compelling work. The Fantasia in F minor for a Mechanical Organ was written by Mozart in his last year and that organ must have been primitive compared with the fine instrument at Tetbury on which John Wright gave an impressive performance. It was fascinating to listen to the complex fugue.

The short first half concluded with the anthem, Praise the Lord O Jerusalem, by Henry Purcell in which the text is mostly taken from several psalms. Spacious, rich harmonies are followed by lyrical sections moving on to a gentle mood. As the choir sings its many final alleluias the mood is exalted and exuberant. The singers gave a good account of this great work with the choir producing a satisfying quality of sound.

After an interval (that nearly lasted as long as the first half!) we came to the main work of the evening which provided considerable challenges for the choir; for the most part these were successfully met. Dixit Dominus, composed in Rome by a young Handel, is a setting of Psalm 110 written in Baroque style.

Much flexibility of singing is required throughout and the piece,which is full of bright colours, demands much vocal virtuosity. The two visiting soloists were Grace Carter, soprano, and Louise Booker, mezzo, both of whom sang well but both of whom must take care not to develop too intrusive a vibrato.

The choir, its skilled conductor John Holloway and the soloists within the choir are to be congratulated on tackling this great work and for a considerable achievement. I shall long remember those staccata chords in the Dominus a Dextris Tuis and those soaring notes in the concluding Gloria Patri.

Programme Notes by Cantores Conductor, John Holloway

DIXIT DOMINUS

Beatus Vir, Claudio Monteverdi

This is a setting of psalm 112, ‘Blessed is the man that fears the Lord; his children shall be mighty upon the earth and riches and plenteousness will be in his house.’ It was printed in 1641 in Venice, where Monteverdi was maestro di Capella at the basilica of Saint Mark’s, in a collection called ‘A Moral and Spiritual Anthology’.

The music is a reworking of the madrigal ‘Golden tresses, you bind me in a thousand ways’ which goes some way to explain the exuberance and expressiveness of the setting. Different combinations of voices combine with the two violins and walking bass ostinato in a style far removed from the church music of the previous generation. Of particular note is the diminuendo and silence (desiderium peccatorum peribit – the wicked shall perish) before the final return of ‘Beatus Vir’ and the magnificent ‘Gloria Patri’.

Fantasia in F minor (K.608)  for a mechanical organ, W.A.Mozart

One needs to understand the contemporary public enthusiasm for mechanical devices and for mechanical organs in particular to appreciate why Mozart, in the last year of his life, should devote so much musical skill to the composition of a significant work for little more than a barrel organ. He was, of course, able to ignore the limitations of the human player equipped with only ten fingers and two feet so modern transcriptions require minor modifications to bring the notes within reach of the player but, even so, the technical demands are immense.

The opening section presents strong rhythmic statements before opening out into a complex fugue. There follows a gentle andante in the major key before the return of the opening material and a further reworking of the fugue.

Praise the Lord O Jerusalem, Henry Purcell

Purcell’s oft-quoted assertion that English music at the end of the seventeenth century was learning from both its French and Italian masters is nowhere more apparent than in this exuberant anthem: the structures, dance rhythms and phrasing are in the French style, the string writing and textures are Italian. Because of its size and scoring it is assumed that was probably written for the coronation of William and Mary in 1688.

The opening string ‘symphony’ is appropriately portentous and the choral acclamations are followed by references to royal parentage. Contrasting sections follow until the joyous triple time ‘Alleluia’ and a particularly English final cadence complete with ‘blue’ chromatic notes.

Dixit Dominus, G.F.Handel

1. Chorus – Dixit Dominus
2. Aria (Mezzo soprano) – Virgam virtutis tuae
3. Aria (Soprano) – Tecum pricipium in die virtutis
4. Chorus – Juravit Dominus
5. Chorus – Tu es sacerdos in aeternam
6. Soloists and chorus – Dominus a dextris tuis.
7. Soloists and chorus – De torrente in via
8. Chorus – Gloria Patri

This setting of Psalm 110 was completed by Handel in April 1707 while living in Italy. It is Handel’s earliest surviving autograph. The youthfulness of the writing is obvious in the powerful musical ideas and the apparent disregard for the ease of the singers. Some technical challenges are the result of awkwardnesses in the writing but most come from the composer’s vision of what choirs can do: imaginative textures using the extreme ranges of the voices, virtuoso runs and leaps and the piling up of musical ideas over lengthy periods of exhaustive development.

Unusually for Handel he uses plainsong melodies in long notes in a number of the movements in a manner reminiscent of the previous century. However, the writing for the two soloists is in the demanding style of the contemporary Italian opera, a form he was greatly to enrich in his later life.

No.4 (Juravit Dominus) contains the most daring harmony and No.6 (Dominus a dextris tuis) the most extraordinary texture near the end of the movement where the choir builds up sequences of disjunct staccato chords.

The Gloria is one of the great tours de force of the choral repertoire where over a span of nearly seven minutes the music cascades towards the most final of final cadences.

Performers

Grace Carter – Soprano, Louise Booker – Mezzo Soprano

Peter Stacey – Violin

Justine Tomlinson – Violin

Cecily Rice – Viola

Naomi Gaffney _ Viola

Rachel Howgego – Violoncello

Ben Groenevelt – Double Bass

John Wright – Organ

Cantores:

Sopranos                                                       Tenors

Aileen Graham                                               Martin Graham

Tina Power                                                       David Hudson*

Fiona Barnaby                                                Mark Brayne*

Kate Hooper                                                    Graham Shearn

Kate Kinsey*                                                    Steve Derrick

Nathalie Marshal

Rosalind Keefe*

Katherine Safe

Susan Lewis*

Altos                                                                 Basses

Lorna Eayrs                                                    Paul Rickard

Phillipa Holloway                                         Edward Barnaby*

Mandy Sturman                                            David Burden*

Jo Williams                                                     David Bryant

Pauline Loveday*                                        Andrew Ives

Lynne Whitworth                                         George Allcock

*Soloist

For our two end-of-year concerts in 2010, in Cheltentham’s All Saints Church on November 13 and in Cirencester’s magnificent Parish Church with its new organ on December 4, we chose three examples.

Since the dawn of the Christian era, composers have set the Ordinary of the Mass, those five sections of the liturgy which [...]]]>  

For our two end-of-year concerts in 2010, in Cheltentham’s All Saints Church on November 13 and in Cirencester’s magnificent Parish Church with its new organ on December 4, we chose three examples.

Since the dawn of the Christian era, composers have set the Ordinary of the Mass, those five sections of the liturgy which are unchanging at each celebration, with music of the very greatest inspiration. We have chosen three examples from different traditions, each designed for liturgical performance, but highly contrasted and reflecting the artistic preoccupations of their time and place.

Missa Bell’ Amfitrit’ Altera: Orlande de Lassus (1532 – 1594)

One of a group of composers who were born in modern day Belgium but travelled to Italy to learn their trade, Lassus settled in Munich in 1556 remaining there until the end of his life. The melodic and harmonic style is that of Rome and his famous contemporary Palestrina but it has too the grandeur of the Venetian double choir manner and a very personal understanding of choral timbre and effects.

The title is taken from a madrigal, now lost, on which the music is based. The voices are laid out in two equal four part choirs which sometimes echo and contrast and sometimes join in massive chordal statements. Lassus also varies the texture with different combinations of voices, sometimes high, sometimes low, thinner textures or more substantial.

Certain sections are reduced to four voices only: the Christe eleison, the Crucifixus and the Benedictus.

Much has been written about Lassus’ sensitive response to text. His settings support the natural rhythms of the words and these rhythms can set off particularly effective dance-like sections when ideas are passed swiftly between the choirs. Lassus makes his own spiritual position clear near the end of the Credo when all the singers join in a joyous triple time moment at ‘Resurrectionem’.

Messe Solennelle: Jean Langlais (1907 – 1991)

It was as an organist that Langlais made his name in the tradition of César Franck and his teacher Marcel Dupré. Despite blindness from childhood, he toured widely in Europe and the USA where his playing and improvising were much in demand.

The bulk of his many compositions are for the organ or for liturgical use. He was organist of the Basilica of St. Clotilde in Paris between 1945 and 1988 and this mass is dedicated to the curé.

Although less uncompromising than his friend and contemporary Olivier Messiaen, Langlias’ musical language is often acerbic and freely tonal building up complex, overlapping harmonies and dramatic musical gestures. He explores the full sonorities of the organ and choir with sudden contrasts and often asymmetrical rhythms. The soprano’s top C in the ‘Hosanna’ and an unusually loud and triumphant ‘Dona nobis pacem’ are indeed memorable.

Choral No.3 in Aminor: César Franck (1822 – 1890)

Franck was appointed organist of St. Clotilde in 1858. He, more than any, developed the Romantic school of French organ composition by fusing the traditional forms of prelude, fugue, toccata and choral prelude with symphonic techniques. He was also able to exploit the new rich palette of colours available on the organs being built by Cavaillé-Coll.

This work is one of his last and begins in the manner of a fantasia soon subsiding into the first hearing of the ‘choral’ of the title. This combines with recurrences of the fantasia until an adagio in the major key. Here too the choral makes brief appearances building to a return of the fantasia in combination with the choral and a triumphant conclusion.

Mass in G minor: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958)

Soloists: Nathalie Marshall, Susan Lewis, Kate Hooper (sopranos), Pauline Loveday (contralto), David Hudson (tenor), David Bryant (bass)

This setting for soloists and double chorus dates from 1922 and is dedicated to his friend and contemporary Gustav Holst.

As a composer of the early twentieth century Vaughan Williams found himself at a turning point in musical history. Aware of all that had gone before in the Romantic age and of the different ways forward he chose not the radical atonality of  Schoenberg and his pupils but to evolve his own unique style by looking back to the roots of English music, especially Byrd and Tallis, and in particular to our tradition of folk music. He was very active in the English Folk Song and Dance society. The counterpoint and choral writing is clearly in the tradition of Byrd (and Lassus) but, melodically, it is in the modality of folk song. He has in mind the resonant acoustic of an English cathedral (it is designed for liturgical use) but uses the antiphonal effects that Tallis learned from the Venetian masters of the Renaissance.

The longer movements break into shorter sections with different combinations of solo voices and chorus. The ‘Qui Tollis’ in the Gloria, the Benedictus  and the end of the Agnus Dei are particularly effective; this last brings the work to the most peaceful of resolutions.

Cantores

Sopranos                                                        Tenors

Aileen Graham                                                Martin Graham

Fiona Barnaby                                                Mark Brayne

Kate Hooper                                                   Graham Shearn

Kate Kinsey                                                    Steve Derrick

Nathalie Marshal                                          Alan Moore

Rosalind Keefe                                               David Hudson

Katherine Safe

Susan Lewis

Altos                                                                 Basses

Lorna Eayrs                                                     David Wright

Phillipa Holloway                                          Edward Barnaby

Mandy Sturman                                             David Burden

Jo Williams                                                      David Bryant

Pauline Loveday                                            Andrew Ives

Lynne Whitworth                                           Michael Howell

“A superb concert.  I loved the mixture of [...]]]> Cantores performed two concerts of  delightful and varied English Pastoral music and words on Friday 2^nd July 2010 at St Peter’s Church, Rendcomb College, following a well-received first outing of this fabulous music at St John the Baptist Burford on Saturday 19th June. As one concert-comer wrote afterwards:

“A superb concert.  I loved the mixture of poems & music. I found the music a most interesting concoction with several most amusing themes. I enjoyed your  wide selections of well expressed poems.  I bet that there was a lot of hard work in putting the concert together, but  also must have been great fun. The quality of the work is fantastic.”

Our conductor John Holloway writes:

The English rural landscape and its people have inspired poets and musicians for centuries. The sense that, however sophisticated, English people will always respond to the simplicity of rural life is strong, whether you live in Greenwich or Greendale.

In the countryside love is easy, pleasures uncomplicated and nature wise and mysterious.

Cantores’ Summer programme reflected this mood in the ‘Songs of Springtime’ by Ernest Moeran, a composer much influenced by the chromatic style of Delius and who sets poems by Shakespeare and other sixteenth century poets.

Sensitivity to the written word is a characteristic of  20th century composers, none more than Gerald Finzi whose settings of Robert Bridges are justly well known by choirs. The trials of love are framed by the beauties of nature, its sounds and sights.

The programme included offerings from some of the finest madrigalists of the Tudor period, Vaughan Williams’ settings of Shakespeare and folk songs from around our islands.

This concert was supported by Rendcomb College, and  profits will go to their sister school in Njeru, Uganda, the Lords Meade Vocational College.

PROGRAMME

Songs of Springtime                                              Ernest Moeran

Under the Greenwood Tree                            William Shakespeare

Good evening and welcome to our concert. Poets, painters and musicians respond to the English rural landscape in similar ways. They see an idealised idyll of vigorous wooing, the contented farmer tending the soil as did his grandsires for time immemorial, nature rejoicing in all its richness and long summer evenings of innocent debauchery. It is also a place of Gods and magic.

The River God’s Song                                         John Fletcher

Two contrasting views now of love in the countryside. There is not a cloud in Thomas Nashe’s bird filled sky but Samuel Daniel is suffering the torments of love – ‘A plant that with most cutting grows, most barren with best using. More we enjoy it, more it dies; if not enjoyed it sighing cries “heigh ho!”’

Spring, the Sweet Spring                                Thomas Nashe

Love is a Sickness                                                Samuel Daniel

Thomas Hardy appeals to music to ease his heart-ache.

‘The Ballad-Singer’ by Thomas Hardy.

Sing, Ballad-singer, raise a hearty tune;
Make me forget that there was ever a one
I walked with in the meek light of the moon
When the day’s work was done.

Rhyme, Ballad-rhymer, start a country song;
Make me forget that she whom I loved well
Swore she would love me dearly, love me long,
Then – what I cannot tell!

Sing, Ballad-singer, from your little book;
Make me forget those heart-breaks, achings, fears;
Make me forget her name, her sweet sweet look -
Make me forget her tears.

We have to turn to Shakespeare for a more clear-sighted view of love – at least from the girl’s point of view

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh nor more;

men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea and one on shore,

To one thing constant never;

Then sigh not so,

But let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny;

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into. Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more,

Or dumps so dull and heavy;

The fraud of men was ever so,

Since summer first was leavy.

Then sigh not so,

But let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into. Hey, nonny, nonny.

Sigh no more, Ladies                                  William Shakespeare

The male response to too much reality from the distaff side is, traditionally, greater conviviality:

Nor care nor sorrow e’er paid debt,

Nor never shall do mine;

I have no cradle going yet,

Not I, by this good wine.

No wife at home to send for me,

No hogs are in my ground,

No suit at law to pay a fee;

Then round, old jockey, round!

Shear sheep that have them, cry we still,

But see that no man ‘scape

To drink of the sherry

That makes us so merry,

And plump as the lusty grape.

Good Wine                                              William Browne

A repeated theme this evening is the impermanence of things. Herrick pleads with the daffodils to last until evensong. But like pearls of morning dew, they die never to be found again.

To Daffodils                                            Robert Herrick

Rupert Brooke considers his home from a café table in Berlin in 1912 and, although he is consumed with nostalgia, he is not universal in his praise for the Cambridgeshire landscape. Indeed, there is a strong sense of irony as the poem develops.

From – The Old Vicarage, Grantchester                Rupert Brooke

Would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!

Some, it may be, can get in touch

With Nature there, or Earth, or such.

And clever modem men have seen

A Faun a-peeping through the green,

And felt the Classics were not dead,

To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,

Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .

But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie

Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,

And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester . . . .

Still in the dawnlit waters cool

His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,

And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,

Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.

Dan Chaucer hears his river still

Chatter beneath a phantom mill.

Tennyson notes, with studious eye,

How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .

And in that garden, black and white,

Creep whispers through the grass all night;

And spectral dance, before the dawn,

A hundred Vicars down the lawn;

Curates, long dust, will come and go

On lissom, clerical, printless toe;

And oft between the boughs is seen

The sly shade of a Rural Dean. . .

Till, at a shiver in the skies,

Vanishing with Satanic cries,

The prim ecclesiastic rout

Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,

Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,

The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,

And get me to England once again!

For England’s the one land, I know,

Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;

And Cambridgeshire, of all England,

The shire for Men who Understand;

And of that district I prefer

The lovely hamlet Grantchester.

For Cambridge people rarely smile,

Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;

And Royston men in the far South

Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;

At Over they fling oaths at one,

And worse than oaths at Trumpington,

And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,

And there’s none in Harston under thirty,

And folks in Shelford and those parts

Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,

And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,

And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,

And things are done you’d not believe

At Madingley, on Christmas Eve.

Strong men have run for miles and miles,

When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;

Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,

Rather than send them to St Ives;

Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,

To hear what happened at Babraham.

But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!

There’s peace and holy quiet there,

Great clouds along pacific skies,

And men and women with straight eyes,

lithe children lovelier than a dream,

A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,

And little kindly winds that creep

Round twilight corners, half asleep.

In Grantchester their skins are white;

They bathe by day, they bathe by night;

The women there do all they ought;

The men observe the Rules of Thought.

They love the Good; they worship Truth;

They laugh uproariously in youth;

(And when they get to feeling old,

They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir

Across the moon at Grantchester!

To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten

Unforgettable, unforgotten

River-smell, and hear the breeze

Sobbing in the little trees.

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand

Still guardians of that holy land?

The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,

The yet unacademic stream?

Is dawn a secret shy and cold

Anadyomene, silver-gold?  An-a-dye-oh-mi-ni

And sunset still a golden sea

From Haslingfield to Madingley?

And after, ere the night is born,

Do hares come out about the corn?

Oh, is the water sweet and cool,

Gentle and brown, above the pool?

And laughs the immortal river still

Under the mill, under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget

The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

All Creatures Now are Merry Minded                        John Bennet

Draw on, sweet night, best friend unto those cares
That do arise from painful melancholy.
My life so ill through want of comfort fares,
That unto thee I consecrate it wholly.

Sweet night, draw on! My griefs when they be told
To shades and darkness find some ease from paining.
And while thou all in silence dost enfold,
I then shall have best time for my complaining.

Draw On, Sweet Night                                               John Wilbye

Finally in our first half we identify the source of all our bucolic happiness and pain: young Cupid with purple wings and in naked beauty clad. Take him quick before he flieth and causes yet more trouble.

Oyez, Has Any Found a Lad!                                   Thomas Tomkins

INTERVAL

Three Shakespeare Songs                                        R Vaughan Williams

On Prospero’s magic island whither he has been marooned, a company has been shipwrecked by the Tempest and wander through this magical landscape observed by Prospero, his daughter Miranda and led on by Ariel the invisible spirit and his unearthly music. The prince Ferdinand bemoans the loss of h s father who he believes drowned in the wreck.

“Where should this music be? In the air or the earth?

It sounds no more – and sure, it waits upon some God of the island.

Sitting on a bank, weeping again the king my father’s wrack,

this music crept by me on the waters, allaying both their fury and my passion with its sweet air.

Thence I have followed it – or, it has drawn me rather – but it’s gone. No, it begins again”:

Full Fathom Five

In the fantastical landscape of Prospero’s island nothing is quite what it seems. Ferdinand has won the hand of Miranda and gods, goddesses and nymphs dance and sing in celebration. Prospero, however, is still exercised by a conspiracy against him and dismisses the merry-makers:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you,

were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud capp’d towers,

the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself shall dissolve . . . “

The Cloud-Capp’d Towers

The landscape of ‘A Midsummer-night’s Dream’ is no less magical but, perhaps, more recognisably English despite the Athenian setting. Robin Goodfellow, the spirit Puck, servant to King Oberon, asks a passing fairy if preparations for the revels of Queen Titania are complete. The fairy has been busy . . .

Over Hill, Over Dale

Forward four centuries. The ‘willows, willow-herb, and grass, and meadowsweet, and haycocks dry’ still flourish but the railway cuts across the picture. We seem to be able to assimilate the steam engine into the Idyll.

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The Poems of Robert Bridges                                              Gerald Finzi

This is the same nineteenth century country world inhabited by Robert Bridges. Finzi has chosen to set those of his poems that join nature with the human condition. In the first song he joins the flower that bloomed in the winter with the maid to whom he cannot admit his love.

The maid for very fear of love I durst not tell,

The rose could never hear, though I bespake her well.

So in my song I bind them

For all to find them

I Praise the Tender Flower

A poem of unbridled joy:

My Spirit Sang All Day

This is a Constable landscape even down to the water meadows and the deep bell of the minster:

Clear and gentle stream!

Known and loved so long,

That hast heard the song

And the idle dream

Of my boyish day;

While I once again

Down thy margin stray,

In the selfsame strain

Still my voice is spent,

With my old lament

And my idle dream,

Clear and gentle stream!

Where my old seat was

Here again I sit,

Where the long boughs knit

Over stream and grass

A translucent eaves:

Where back eddies play

Shipwreck with the leaves,

And the proud swans stray,

Sailing one by one

Out of stream and sun,

And the fish lie cool

In their chosen pool.

Many an afternoon

Of the summer day

Dreaming here I lay;

And I know how soon,

Idly at its hour,

First the deep bell hums

From the minster tower,

And then evening comes,

Creeping up the glade,

With her lengthening shade,

And the tardy boon

Of her brightening moon.

Clear and gentle stream!

Ere again I go

Where thou dost not flow,

Well does it beseem

Thee to hear again

Once my youthful song,

That familiar strain

Silent now so long:

Be as I content

With my old lament

And my idle dream,

Clear and gentle stream.

Clear and Gentle Stream

High above the airman sees the world from a new perspective.

The Bonds of Earth by John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew –

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

People presume that the nightingale too sees the world from a heavenly perspective but not so.

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams wherefrom
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!.

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence, nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.

Nightingales

There is an urgency in this final poem not unlike that of Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’.

Haste on, my joys! your treasure lies

In swift, unceasing flight.

O haste: for while your beauty flies

I seize your full delight.

Lo! I have seen the scented flower,

Whose tender stems I cull,

For her brief date and meted hour

Appear more beautiful.

O youth, O strength, O most divine

For that so short ye prove;

Were but your rare gifts longer mine,

Ye scarce would win my love.

Nay, life itself the heart would spurn,

Did once the days restore

The days, that once enjoyed return,

Return, ah! nevermore.

Haste on, My Joys

Three English Folk Songs                                        arr. Andrew Carter

An island race will not compose many love songs before reference to the sea becomes a powerful image:

A ship there is and she sails the seas.

She’s laden deep, as deep can be;

But not so deep as the love I’m in

And I know not if I sink or swim.

O Waly, Waly

A riddle and its answer:

My head is the apple without e’er a core,

My mind is the house without e’er a door.

My heart is the palace wherein she may be

And she may unlock it without e’er a key.

I Will Give my Love an Apple

To finish, a broadside ballad with a most healthy attitude:

‘Why should I not love my love since love to all is free?’.

Come You Not From Newcastle