Gibbons: Anthems

Day 204

Orlando Gibbons: Three anthems

O Lord in thy wrath

Hosannah to the son of David

Choir of Clare College

Timothy Brown

This is the record of John

Choir of Kings College Cambridge

Michael Chance

Phillip Ledger

So this next phase of the project is to listen to some Tudor church music. As I have said before I have no experience of singing in choirs and so this repertoire is unfamiliar to me. As a consequence I find it very difficult to evaluate what I am hearing - I don't have the reference points which I have in, for example, 19th century opera.

So what I can say here is that the first two anthems struck me as quite attractive - they were more homophonic than I was expecting, though there were some contrapuntal passages. The third is a verse anthem in which sections for solo voice alternate with choral material. I found this less attractive - I didn't feel that Gibbons' word setting really added much to the text - though perhaps I was expecting too much. After all this music is a lot earlier than Purcell, who was a master of setting English texts and perhaps I was judging Gibbons unfairly.  So overall a limited amount of pleasure from these three settings.  They were chosen completely at random and perhaps a different selection might have produced a more positive reaction.