Of the Church and From the Heart: Part Songs and Anthems of 20th Century England
Saturday, March 8, 1997 at 8:00 pm.
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
God Is Gone Up, op. 27#2 (1951)
I Praise the Tender Flower, op. 17#1
My Spirit Sang All Day, op. 17#3 (1934-37)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Three Shakespeare Songs (1951)
Full Fathom Five
The Cloud-Capp'd Towers
Over Hill, Over Dale
I Got Me Flowers (from Five Mystical Songs, 1911)
Ca' the Yowes (1922)
Edward Cuthbert Bairstow (1874-1946)
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence (1925)
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, op. 36a#1 (1916)
Eternal Father, H. 169 (1927)
Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)
Beati quorum via integra est, op. 38#3 (1905)
The Blue Bird, op. 119#3 (1910)
Holst
Come to Me, op. 12#5 (1902-03)
John Joubert (b. 1927)
O Lorde, the Maker of Al Thinge, op. 7b (1952)
Vaughan Williams
The Spring Time of the Year (1913)
The Dark Eyed Sailor (1913)
Just as the Tide Was Flowing (1913)
Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (1921)
Texts and translations
Program Notes
Arguably, no other country of the Western World has, since the Middle Ages, so continuously spawned an extraordinary richness of scope, differentiation, and sheer output of fine vocal music as has England. Think of it: Dunstable, Taverner, Tye, Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gibbons, Weelkes, Wilbye, Purcell, Handel, Boyce, Sullivan, Elgar, Delius, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Tippett, Bennett, Davies - the list can be almost endlessly expanded. And when this estimable body of work is viewed all together, it's not at all difficult to appreciate the truth of the famous cliché: "The Great British Choral Tradition."
This evening's concert is perforce a bit more focused than the above survey of famous names. We'll offer works of only two from this roll call, and add four equally worthy but less familiar. Throughout the music tonight there are remarkable contrasts and similarities of styles and ideas. Indeed, all of tonight's composers were either students, mentors, or admirers of each other - colleagues of the finest kind. Their works share a richness of texture and sonority akin to what the French and Flemish Renaissance composers called in their British contemporaries the "contenance anglaise." In addition, they share a true mastery of language setting, whether English or Latin, and exhibit great gifts of melody and harmonic invention. Yet each composer speaks with a unique voice and vocabulary of expression, though often the influence of a common inspiration is palpable, as we shall see. Let's briefly explore this apparent paradox of similarity and difference.
Tonight's program comprises two intimate forms of choral expression: anthems and part-songs. In somewhat traditional definitions, anthems are generally used as part of services held in the Christian church. Their texts are therefore sacred, and in British church music tradition are almost always in English or Latin. In their most common United States context, anthems are performed during the Gradual or Offertory in Episcopal (Anglican) churches, and sometimes offered as aids to meditation during the Eucharist. Part-songs are choral settings of secular texts, usually verse, whose subjects are often romantic or pastoral, perhaps borrowing these conceits from the Italian and English madrigalists. The most finely crafted part-songs exhibit the extra care the composer has employed to link the musical rhythm and syntax to the cadences of the language of the poetry. Paul Spicer, noted conductor of this music in Britain, suggests that an even greater appreciation of the best part-songs can be achieved by reading each song's text aloud before the music is sung.
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford is the earliest born of the composers we perform tonight, and for this and other reasons can be considered the progenitor of all the other music on the program. Born in 1852, he showed talent at an early age as both a singer and a 'cellist. His studies included stints in Berlin and Leipzig where the influence of Brahms and the other famous Germanic composers was inescapable.
He joined Sir Hubert Parry as Professor of Composition at the founding of the Royal College of Music in 1883, and for the next forty years taught virtually all the subsequent important British composers. So highly regarded was he by his peers, that at his death in 1924 he was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Purcell.
The two works of Stanford on this program - one an anthem, the other a part-song - illustrate two very different sides of this protean musician. Beati quorum via integra est, set in a rich six-part SSATBB, clearly pays homage to Brahms with its flowing lines, lingering suspensions and rich harmonic language. The Blue Bird, on the other hand, is an impressionistic yet intriguingly austere portrait in color and sound, with its vivid yet calm text almost magically reflected by the music.
Sir Edward Cuthbert Bairstow was born in Huddersfield in 1874. He became organist at York Minster in 1913 and his reputation as choir director there and in Leeds and Bradford was highly regarded through the north of England. Brahms is counted among his early influences, and later somewhat more austere elements of harmony and counterpoint become noticeable in his works. Like his contemporary Gustav Holst, Bairstow's choral works are finely crafted and have many moments of striking originality and beauty. Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, written in 1925, shows evidence both of Brahms and plainsong, the former in the rich and mellifluous harmony neatly illustrating the text "Before Him come the choirs of angels," and the latter at the very beginning and end of the anthem.
Gerald Finzi studied privately with Bairstow from 1918-1922. There are some similarities, but Finzi's musical language evolved into something uniquely his own. A fragile, quietly ecstatic and extremely personal element is never far from view in his work. This is apparent in the two part-songs we offer from his op. 17, one praising beautiful flowers, the other an ardent love. God is Gone Up springs from a totally different - and less typical - aspect of this composer. Overtly celebratory and "public," it nonetheless contains a more personal musical "kernel" at its center.
Gustav Holst is best known to concertgoers for his very popular 1919 orchestral suite The Planets. But church musicians know that Holst wrote a large body of very effective music for choirs. He grew up idolizing Wagner, and in 1895 while a student at the Royal College of Music met Ralph Vaughan Williams where the two became good friends. Holst later became infatuated with Hindu literature and philosophy and left his musical studies to learn Sanskrit. He returned to the College, studied trombone, played in wind ensembles, began teaching, was among the first to revive and be an advocate for the music of Purcell, and began conducting choirs in schools. His big success with The Planets, sadly, served only to bewilder him. He became introverted and withdrew from public life. A series of illnesses was broken by a visit to Harvard as Guest Lecturer in Music in 1932, but he fell ill again that spring and died in London - far too soon - in 1934.
The two Holst anthems heard tonight are supremely crafted miniature masterworks with a profound sense of harmony and finely planned dramaticism. Note the mounting excitement inherent to Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence (a very different conception from that of Bairstow!), and the exquisite harp-like ostinato of the soprano arpeggi at the end of Eternal Father, with the theme intoned as cantus firmus by the men, symbolizing Man on Earth below the angelic choir soaring above.
Come to Me, written in 1903, was intended to be the fifth of Holst's Five Part Songs, op. 12, but for reasons unclear, it and the third were left behind when three of their brethren were published by Novello many years ago. Perhaps Holst felt that the frankly romantic text and the rich, heartfelt music to match it did not project a persona appropriate to his later life, or the song harbored a poignant or wistful memory he later chose to forget - we will never know. In any case, Come to Me is extraordinarily beautiful, very much worthy of being heard. The Spectrum Singers were privileged to give the first United States performance of this work in 1992 through the gracious assistance of the Holst estate and Faber Music in London. The work has now - finally and thankfully - been published by Faber and is available at last for all to read and admire.
John Joubert is almost an interloper in this program, having been born in South Africa in 1927. But his professional training and subsequent musical language is purely British, though with a decided harmonic tang of his own. Perhaps best-known for his beautiful Christmas choral works, his several worthy larger works cry out for performance in this country. O Lorde, the Maker of Al Thinge projects an almost gothic austerity, yet paradoxically offers a rich and powerful impression with its many choral unisons and darkly chaste organ accompaniment.
Ralph Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel in Paris in 1908, a fact often forgotten about this composer, commonly thought to be the "most British" of the twentieth century school. The Three Shakespeare Songs, written even as late as 1951, offer a clearly French/Ravelian harmonic language and musical style. Vaughan Williams's large volume of works spans a huge range - chamber music, song, instrumental sonatas, church music, choral works large and small, symphonies - and the vastness of this output is reflected in his extremely broad range of expression. The ferocious savagery of his Fourth Symphony when compared with the quiet ardor of I Got Me Flowers from his Five Mystical Songs we hear tonight is illustrative of this musician's breadth.
A fascination with folk music consumed Vaughan Williams, and accounts for the large number of richly harmonized folk/part-song settings he wrote throughout his career. Three of our offerings from this genre are concerned with the sea, with an especially serene homage to Scotland paid with Ca' the Yowes.
In the United States, Ralph Vaughan Williams' music has never experienced the overall popularity in enjoys in England, where thankfully there appears to be an overdue renaissance of his oeuvre. Vaughan Williams greatly admired Bach, and his idiosyncratic but illuminating performances of Bach's B-minor Mass, the two major passions, and many cantatas are still fondly remembered by British musicians. The magisterial Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge, written in 1921, is based on Psalm 90. Its rich, homophonic a cappella beginning lends a timelessness to its first third, followed by an interlude for organ which sets up the powerful conclusion, climaxed by a trumpet pealing forth William Croft's 1708 hymn-tune O God, Our Help in Ages Past. Vaughan Williams's homage to Bach's dramatic use of chorales in his Passions is unmistakable. A great broadening of tempo and increase in volume brings this noble work - and our concert - to a strongly affirmative finale.
Program notes (c) 1997 by John W. Ehrlich
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