Poston: Three carols

Day 359

Elizabeth Poston: Three carols

Praise our Lord

Bethlehem

The Boar’s Head Carol

St Albans Cathedral Choir

Tom Winpenny

Elizabeth Poston has a secure place in musical history as the composer of the lovely carol Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. We sang it at school when it was still a fairly new piece (it was written for the King’s College Festival of 9 Lessons and Carols in 1967) and it has been a favourite of mine ever since. Its appeal lies in its simplicity, its ‘white note’ harmony and the memorable leap to the top G in the last line. 

It probably took her only a couple of hours to write and yet it has overshadowed everything else she wrote in a long life as a working musician. Indeed one study of her work is entitled Beyond the Apple Tree. It must have been a bitter sweet experience to have written one tiny peice which achieved musical immortality.

So on Christmas Day I was keen to hear some of her other carols. The first two are written in memory of Peter Warlock. Praise the Lord has an organ accompaniment and some attractive rhythmic counterpoint - Bethlehem is a simpler piece for unaccompanied choir - it was rather beautiful. Piston’s arrangement of the Boar’s Head Carol was, I thought, rather less successful. It was over elaborate and was perhaps trying to be too clever.  

So I am pleased to have explored beyond the apple tree but it may come as no surprise that I came back to it after these three carols. Posterity isn’t always wrong. That simple carol has a magic all of its own.

Schütz: The Christmas Story

Day 357

Schütz: The Christmas Story

Yale Schola Cantorum

David Hill

Over the years I have heard a few bits and piece of Schütz, mostly as items in choral concerts where I was playing in other pieces. I can't say that the music has made much of an impression on me one way or another. I felt rather the same about this setting of the Christmas story. Much of it is in fairly fluid recitative - Schütz was at pains to explain that he used the modern ideas of operatic recitative rather than the older plainsong-based approach. This is interpreted with choral interludes with some attractive instrumental writing which is reminiscent of Monteverdi or Gabrieli. The whole thing was perfectly pleasant but didn't really make much of an impact on me.  Again I am pleased to have heard it as it is something which is written about quite a lot, but I don't feel inclined to spend much more time exploring more Schütz.

Nadia Boulanger: La Sirène

Day 345

Nadia Boulanger:  La Sirène

Soloists

Orchestra National Du Capitole De Toulouse

Leo Hussain

This took me a little by surprise. Nadia Boulanger is of course famous as a teacher of a several generations of composers. Thinking about the music that they wrote I had expected Boulanger’s music to be elegant and refined, with more than a hint of classicism. But this was anything but. It is an extended piece for soloists chorus and orchestra (not to be confused with her much shorter piece with piano accompaniment Les Sirénes) which was her entry for the Prix de Rome  in 1908. She came second: the winner was the now completely forgotten André Gailhard. La Sirène is a no-holds barred full-blooded piece of post-Wagnerian French symbolism and clearly belongs to the same world as Debussy, Dukas and Chausson. It had some moments which were rather overheated, and the very end was perhaps a slight disappoint, but other that that I thought that it was a fine piece that did not deserve to fall into almost total neglect. 

 Nadia more or less gave up composition in order to teach. She was exceptionally self critical, remarking to Fauré ‘if there is one thing of which I am certain it is that I wrote useless music’. On that basis of this piece her normally impeccable judgement failed her when it came to her own music.

Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast

Day 318

Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast

Anthony Rolfe Johnson

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Kenneth Alwyn

It is hard now to believe just how popular this piece one was. Between the wars Malcolm Sargent conducted regular performances - sometimes for days on end - at the Albert Hall with massed singers all dressed up in ‘red indian’ costumes. It was an standard work for amateur choral societies - my mum had a score in her small collection of music, though I don’t remember her performing it during the time that I went to her choral concerts.

Yet now it is almost forgotten and is a relic of a bygone era. I have to say that I thought it was a very disappointing peice. I can see why people liked singing it so much - there is a big role for the choir, the vocal parts are not that difficult and it makes a good noise when everybody is singing at the top of their voices. But musically it was very thin. The melodic material is unmemorable and Coleridge-Taylor’s harmonic palette is very limited. After a while I became heartily frustrated with the rather facile way that he moved up the keys in repetitive phrases in an attempt to build up the tension. He was a young man when he wrote this and probably had little by way of models to go on, but it seems impossible that this was once a highly regarded piece. The words don’t help. Longfellow’s use of made up Indian names now seems very uncomfortable and the continuous trocahic rhythm of the poetry see on gets on your nerves. It also seems to have inhibited any sense of rhythmic freedom in the music. It is all too foursquare.

There are two other Hiawatha pieces to go with this one - I am sure that i will be in no hurry to hear them. The past really is another country sometimes - it is just so hard to understand just what this piece had the position in British musical life for so long.

Adams: Harmonium

Day 317

John Adams: Harmonium

BBC National orchestra and chorus of Wales

Grant Llewellyn 

I’ve very little experience of Minimalist music. I’ve heard a few odd snippets here and there and did once play in a performance of the Philip Glass violin concerto but I’ve never been particularly interested in the whole minimalist ethos and haven’t really had any inclination to explore it. So I didn’t approach this large scale choral work by John Adams with any particularly enthusiasm.

Rather to my surprised I really enjoyed it. These is something quite hypnotic in the way that Adams uses repetitive figures to build up the texture and to create waves of sound. The choral writing is highly effective and builds up to some impressive climaxes. It must be very hard to sing this sort of music and to keep you place when bar after bar is exactly the same. Adams is very practical about this, indicating at several points where the conductor is required to give specific indications to the choir to ensure that they are all in the same place.

Orchestral this must be extremely tedious to play (I certainly found the constant repetition in the Glass concerto frustrating and that is quite restrained compared to this piece) and I don’t know how players retain their concentration. Perhaps it is all done through adrenaline and the sense of being part of those whole wound world.  I can imagine, however, that in the concert hall the waves of sound can be very exciting. 

The second of the three movement is much less exuberant than the outer movements though it is still based on reputation of small figures.  I found it really rather expressive and lyrical and it formed a good contrast with what came before and after it. 

I was at one time tempted to think that there was no real musical skill in minimalist music and that it almost wrote itself. This piece certainly was not like that. There was a real musical mind here at work with complete command of the material and a sense of how to shape long paragraphs of music. It still would not be my preferred choice of listening but I ended up with much more respect for Adams than I anticipated when I selected this for today’s listening.

David: Le Désert

Day 313

Félicien David: Le Désert

Soloists

Choir of St Hedwig’s cathedral Berlin

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Guido Maria Guida

Félicien David is largely forgotten as a composer these days, though his name is familiar to collectors of old vocal recordings because a few extracts from his operas were regularly features in the catalogues. But he was an important figure in his time and Le Désert is a key piece. It is scored for male chorus, tenor soloist, orchestra and a narrator and is one of the first pieces of orientalism in 19th century French music. As such it was huguely influential throughout the rest of the century. 

The key musical influence is probably Gluck, although there are also some hints of Spontini and, to a lesser extent Auber. Berlioz also lurks in the background. He is known to be an admirer of David’s music and one can see how Berlioz took some of the David’s ideas further than the composer himself.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the score is the Muezzin’s call. This is highly evocative and foreshadows much that it is to come - I was particularly reminded of the similar passages in The Barber of Baghdad.   Indeed much of the whole late 19th century French interest in the exotic can be traced back to David’s score. It may not be the most inspired score but without it much of what followed could not have happened.

Charpentier: Te Deum

Day 312

Charpentier: Te Deum

Les musicians du Louvre

Marc Minkowski

I’m not sure that I have ever heard any Charpentier (Marc-Antoine) before, though I may have heard the midnight mass at some point). As a Rameau enthusiast it is perhaps surprising that I have not investigated any of Charpentier’s operas - perhaps that will come in another project.

The opening of the Te Deum is famous/notorious as the theme music for Eurovision - particularly the song contest. Though anybody hearing this performance would be surprised at the speed that Minkowski adopts.  I have to say, though, that the piece largely passed me by without making any sort of impression = it was very much a case of in one ear out of the other. That doesn’t mean that there was anything unpleasant about the piece. It just seemed rather to be a piece of baroque painting by numbers. Everything was in its place and was effective but it just failed to make any sort of impact. Perhaps that is a little unfair - I didn’t have a score and my attention did wander from time to time.  Gustav is the Charpentier for me!

Xenakis: Three choral pieces

Day 298

Xenakis: Three choral pieces

A Colone

Nuits

Knephas

New London Choir

James Wood

After a couple of weeks catching up with some gaps in my coverage of earlier music I want to turn to some late 20th and early 21st century music - particularly some of the more challenging and difficult composers.

We did study a bit of Xenakis at university. I remember the lecturer talking about his use of Stochastic techniques - I didn’t understand it at the time and I don’t think that I do now!. We also had some performances of his music. I recall the cellist (I think is was Rohan de Saram) attacking his instrument with such vigour in Nomas Alpha that is seemed that the cello would disintegrate at any moment.

I don’t think that I have heard any Xenakis since to I came to these three choral pieces with an open mind. A Colone is an austere ritualistic piece for voices with trumpet trombone and double bass. It very much belonged to the world of late Stravinsky. But the other two pieces were anything but restrained. Xenakis uses the voices instrumentally and makes extraordinary demands on the singers - how they managed to sing this music is beyond my comprehension. Some of it was pretty hard to take but there were some moments here which were fascinating and which made a real impact. There was a real musical intelligence behind this wild and anarchic sounding music.

Wilbye: Madrigals from first set

Day 297

Wilbye: Madrigals from first set of Madrigals

Consort of Musicke

Anthony Rooley

Today was a busy day so only time for a few madrigals from John Wilbye’s first set.  After the extremes of Gesualdo yesterday it was a pleasure to move to the much calmer world of the English madrigal. I do remember enjoying doing a little madrigal singing at school and at university and these brought back some pleasant memories - I think that we did sing Adieu sweet Amarylis at school. This is very much music to perform rather than listen to passively but I certainly did enjoy the chance to hear this selection. The style is generally fairly straightforward but there is some entertaining rhythmic invention and the occasional moment of harmonic tension. Wilbye certainly knew how to shape a melodic phrase but also was able to bring some real intensity to these miniatures.

Gesualdo: 10 madrigals

Day 296

Gesualdo: 10 madrigals from book 6

Delitiae Musicae 

Gesualdo is know for two things - the fact that he murdered his wife and the extreme chromaticism in his music. I had heard the odd snippet from some of his madrigals as examples of his harmonic daring but I don’t think that I had ever properly listened to any of his music.

I found these madrigals very tiring to listen to. I had planned to listen to the whole of book 6 (it contains 23 madrigals) but after ten of them I had had enough. The extremes of dissonance that Gesualdo are astonishing even now - goodness knows  what they must have sounded like to listeners in the early 17th century. But the problem I had was that the actual music invention seemed quite thin. There was no real shape to the music, no obviously attractive melodic material and the rhythms seemed all over the place.

My appreciation was not helped by the performance I listened to. This CD has been widely praised in reviews but it seemed to me that in trying to squeeze the last ounce of expression out of the music the performers sucked any life out of these scores. It would I think have been better to have left the music to speak for itself. The very dramatic pauses, rhythmic shapelessness and extremes of dynamic contrast did the music no favours. And the rather ‘hooting’ sound of the countertenor on the top line started to be grating very quickly.

This music will always have a fascination because of its harmonic daring, but I am not sure that it is music that I would want to hear very often.

Marenzio: Madrigals for five voices - book six

Day 295

Marenzio: Madrigals for 5 voices - book 6

La venexiana

My old music professor started his book on Marenzio with the words ‘Marenzio is the Schubert of the madrigal - both were master of settings words to music.  That quote has remained with me for 50 years but  I can’t recall ever listening to any of his music.

I was intending to listen only to a selection of this madrigal book but I was so captivated by the music that I ended up listening to the whole book. I can see exactly what Dennis Arnold meant by that phrase. There is a real lyrical gift in this music - and although I don’t speak Italian I could sense that there was a real sensitivity to the Italian language. It is impossible to imagine these madrigals being sung in English.

The harmonic language is generally consonant but there are plenty of moments of chromatic tension - a sign that the late renaissance era was gradually making way for the Baroque. What a fascinating time in musical history.

Guerrero: Battle Mass

Day 294

Guerrero: Battle Mass

Westminster Cathedral Choir

His Majesty’s sagbutts and cornetts

James O’Donnell

This came as something of a surprise. The name of the piece plus the fact that there were instrumental forces involved led be to expect some sort of technicolour spectacular - a hypothetical creation of how this music might sound in a festival performance. But it was not like that at all. Guerrero (1528-1599) was a Spanish composer who had a long career and seems to have had an adventurous life - Wikipedia mentions that he spend some time in prison.

The Battle Mass title is somewhat misleading. The name comes from the fact that the music uses a few fragments from a chanson by Janequin La guerre. But you would never know that from listening to the mass - in fact is rather a serious and sober piece with none of the instrumental flourishes that I had been anticipating. There are some extrovert moments but generally the music is more inward looking. To be honest I didn’t find anything particularly distinctive about the score or quite understand why some commentators rate the piece so highly. Perhaps I really need to immerse myself in Renaissance music to start to appreciate some of its subtleties. At the moment I can only go on first impressions.

I will continue this exploration of Renaissance music in the next phase of the project, listening to the work of various madrigal composers.

Tomkins: Three anthems

Day 293

Tomkins: Three anthems

O sing unto the Lord a new song

Then David mourned

My beloved spake and sang unto me

Choir of St George’s Chapel Windsor

Christopher Robinson

Tomkins was just a name to me - I don’t recall hearing any of his music and I don’t think that he featured in the music history course at university. I chose these three anthems at random. They are in a quite different style to the polyphonic masses that I have been listening to over the last few days. That’s not just because they use English texts. There is also the question of organ accompaniment. I am not entirely sure exactly what role the organ played in this music but it was present in these performances and not just doubling the voices.  The music itself was expressive and had a wide harmonic range coupled with a sense of energy in the more chordal sections.  I certainly enjoyed hearing these three pieces but in all honesty they have not remained in the memory in the way that some of the other music I have listen to this week has.

Lassus: Missa Super ‘Triste depart’

Day 292

Lassus: Missa Super Triste depart

Christ Church cathedral choir

Stephen Cleobury 

This is a superb piece . I think that I must have heard some music by Lassus as part of the University music course but I don’t have any particular memories. This is fully mature renaissance music which has all of the richness of complex polyphony. But what was fascinating was the foreshadowing at times of later music - there were distinct pre-echos of the poly-choral music of the Gabrielli school. This was by no means crude juxtaposition: the chordal passages emerged naturally out of the textures. All told there was completely mastery of the material: it demonstrated just why Lassus was such a venerated composer in his own lifetime and has remained centuries later one of the towering figures of renaissance music.

Obrecht: Missa Caput

Day 291

Obrecht: Missa Caput

Oxford Camerata

Jeremy Summerly

I remember learning about ‘Caput’ masses at University. These masses are based on a a florid line of chant which an appears in an antiphon from the Sarum rite - the Salisbury collection of liturgical music. Several composers wrote ‘Caput’ masses, in particularly Dufay (though there is now some doubt about the attribution) and Ockeghem. This one is by Obrecht . He is a generation later than Ockeghem and you can hear that his music is smother , less rhythmically complex and harmonically more consonant that the earlier composer.  I found it very pleasant to listen to but after a while perhaps a little less characterful that some of the early music that I have been listening to recently. At times I did rather let it wash over me rather than play close attention to the detail. Nothing wrong in that of course, but perhaps it was a sign that a certain blandness had set it. Of course it could just be me having a slightly off day…..

Dufay: Missa Ave Celorum

Day 290

Dufay: Missa Ave Celorum

Cantica Symphonia

Kees Boeke

This is astonishing music - it has so many facets - it looks forward to mellifluous renaissance counterpoint and back towards medieval, more astringent, music. And at times there were choral progressions which seemed almost to foreshadow Baroque harmony. Some pars of the music were rhythmically highly complex , where the voices seems almost completely independent of each other. 

It does beg the question of how this music was originally performed. We have all the usual questions of how many voices were involves, what speeds was the music taken at, what expressive nuances were employed, and whether instrument were used to double/substitute for the voices. On this recording instruments are used fairly freely  - sometime just to highlight a short melodic passage in one voice - at others to take over vocal lines completely. To my untrained ear much of this sounded convincing but how might it originally have been done. As far as I know this music was written in individual parts rather than what we would now think of as a vocal score. How did they rehearse such complex music? Surely they must have rehearsed - even the most experienced musicians would surely not have been able to deal with all of the difficulties at sight. So if they did rehears did somebody lead the rehearsal in a way that a modern choirmaster might? And would he have had a score. However otherwise would be have know that everything was together in the right place.  All sorts of question to be answers. I imagine specialists in this music do have some of the answers but I doubt that we will ever have the complete picture.

Dunstaple: Three pieces

Day 289

John Dunstaple: Three pieces 

Veni Sancti Spiritus

Tonus Perigrinus

Alma redemptoris Mater

Purcell concert of voices

Guade Virgo Salutaris

Hilliard Ensemble

First the name. Historically he had always been known as John Dunstable but it now seems clear that this was a transcription error and that his name was spelt with a ‘p’ as Dunstaple. I do remember hearing some of his music at University but I can’t put a name to any particular piece apart from ‘Oh Rosa Bella’ .a fairly simple song with a catchy melody.

These three pieces - selected at random - are rather more serious. They show a fascinating step in the evolution from the medieval music of Machaut towards the more sonorous music of the renaissance. Some of the ‘rougher edges’ of Machaut had disappeared and generally speaking the rhythms are less spiky than those of an earlier generation. But there is still enough here to know that this is still very early polyphonic music. Some of it was particularly beautiful, particularly the last of the three pieces, which seemed almost timeless.

What struck me most however was the evolution in performing styles. The second performance here, by the Purcell consort, was recorded quite a while ago - in fact it was probably performances by this group that I would have heard as a student. It now seems very old fashioned, with instrumental additions not specified by the composer and voices that seem quite rough, with a ‘hooting’ counter tenor. It is a world away from the very refined and understated performance by the Hilliard Ensemble, But perhaps in another generation our ideas of how to perform this music will have evolved and the Hilliards might seem out of date. It all goes to emphasise that we really don’t have much idea how this music was originally performed. Each generation must finds its own way of making sense of the bare notes on the page.

Machaut: Four Motets

Day 288

Machaut: Four Motets

Di Souspirant

Fine Amour

Puis qui la douce Rousse

Quis plus aimme

Hilliard Ensemble

I’m getting towards the final stretch of this project - less than 100 days to go. So for the next few weeks I will try to systematically fill in some gaps of important composers that I have not so far covered. Part of the pleasure of the project has been exploring some of the lesser known, and in some cases totally obscure composers I have met along the way, but I do want to make sure that I have not missed any significant figures. The best way to do this is to take a chronological approach. So the earlier important figure I have not previously covered is Machaut. 

Machaut is in fact one of the earliest composers for whom we have solid information. The only information we have about the earliest composer in this project - Perotin - comes from lecture notes complied long after his death. By contrast we know quite a bit about Machaut’s life and work and we know that he was celebrated as a composer in his own lifetime.

My earliest memory of Machaut is quite vivid. I’d had secured a place at University to read music and was sent a reading list before the course started. One of the books was Gilbert Reaney’s book on Machaut. I got a copy out of the library and was pretty taken aback when I understood very little of it. I had by that time a fair experience of a wide range of 18th to 20th century music but had no idea about much earlier music and found the whole discussion of Machaut’s musical style very difficult to grasp. It did make me wonder whether or not I would be able to cope with a music degree.  But when I got to University the book was never mentioned and it turned out that my tutor didn’t even know that the reading list had been sent out!

I heard the Machaut mass at University and probably a few other peices but I can’t recall which ones. So I selected these four motets at random. This is fascinating music - it offers a glimpse into some of the very earliest developments of music in three or four independent voices. Perotin’s 4-part organa are from an earlier generation but they are essentially in two parts - a slow bass and three upper parts moving at the same speed almost as one voice. Here these motets have quite independent parts (the first three are are for 3 voices and the last one is for 4 voices). There is still a slower moving lower part (not as slow as the Perotin) but the upper parts are much more independent of each other. There are some strong harmonic clashes between the voices at times but they come together from time to time in cadential figures. The rhythms can be complex. In modern transcriptions this can mean that the bar lines don’t coincide across voices, though of course the concept of the bar lines was still several hundred years away.

As I have said before in dealing with very early music we can only speculate on how this music might have sounded. We have no idea about speed, dynamics, expression or indeed exactly what forces would have been used. The performances I would have heard as a student tended to be quite colourful, with instrumental doubling and sometimes added effects but more recent performances have become more austere and use, as did the ones here, just solo male voices. The effect is compelling and ‘other-worldly’ though of course that is to project a modern sensibility onto the music - it would be fascinating to travel back in time to hear this music as it was performed in Machaut’s day - would be be thrilled or disappointed as to how matter of fact it was?

Bantock: Omar Khayyám

Day 285

Granville Bantock: Omar Khayyám

Soloists

BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra

Norman Del Mar

I have enjoyed listening to quite a bit of the orchestral music of Granville Bantock - the Hyperion series of CDs conducted by Vernon Handley has been a source of real pleasure. I’ve also heard a couple of his symphonies for unaccompanied voices, which are perhaps a bit more of an acquired taste.

I knew about Omar Khayyám  - his massive 3-hour long setting of the complete Rubaiyat in the Fitzgerald translation - but had not got round to listening to it. But this project seemed like an ideal opportunity so I devoted a considerable part of the day to listening to the whole thing.  What an extraordinary piece it is. Rambling is one way to describe it. There is a great variety of styles in the peice. Some of it is highly sophisticated in a post Straussian idiom with some complex chromatic harmonies but some of it can only be described as naive - indeed some of the more overtly ‘oriental’ music seems to be straight out of the shool of Albert Ketelby’s In a Persian Market. Nothing wrong with that of course - I rather like Ketelby’s music but it hardly a model for this sort of serious work.

But nonetheless I found a great deal to enjoy. Some of the choral writing is thrilling - it is a sign of just how virtuosic amateur choirs could be at the beginning of the 20th century. There are also some passages of great intensity - Bantock certainly had a strong sense of how to drive the music forward. His lyrical writing can be highly effective - his sense of word setting is much more intuitive than in some of the 20th century English music that I have listened to in this project. 

Of course the whole thing is quite impossible. It is hard to imagine that there will be anything but a very occasional revival as a special festival event and even that seems unlikely. I don’t suppose that I will listen to the whole thing again for a long time (if ever) but I am very glad I did devote the time to it today. Bantock music is certainly worth hearing and the best parts of Omar are I think as good as anything else that was being written in England at the time. But only the very greatest of composers can sustain consistently high level music invention over a three-hour period.

Monteverdi: 8th book of madrigals

Day 261

Monteverdi: 8th book of madrigals

Concerto Italiano

Ronaldo Allesandri

This is astonishing music.

I first encountered Monteverdi at school. We sang Beatus Vir and I also remember listening to Chiome d’oro and Zefiro torna in A level class and being amazed at the chromatic harmony. Since then I have heard most of the major works but I don’t have a close knowledge of the madrigals so this was a good opportunity to explore some previously unknown music.

I said above that this is astonishing music - how much more astonishing it must have been to listeners at the time. For those who have grown up with polyphonic church music the continuo-based chordal writing, the vigorous word setting and the use of instruments would have seemed as startling as the Rite of Spring was to audiences 100 years ago. There is great beauty in the music as well as drama, humour and pathos. In many ways it is more modern than much music written 100 years later. There can be few composers who changed the whole course of music in the way that Monteverdi did.