the business of writing something suitable for this season, he knew exactly what he was doing!

Transcription

1 Concert for St Nicholas s Day, 6 th December 2014 The Choir of S. Bartholomew the Great Directed by: Nigel Short, Organ: Jeffrey Smith, Soloist in Vaughan Williams s Fantasia on Christmas Carols: Ashley Riches This evening s programme of music gives us all an opportunity to hear some Christmas music that either would not be so appropriate in a carol service, or which would be unlikely to be performed in such a setting because of its length. The format of the evening is built around two suites of carols more about them in a moment. We begin with Veni, veni Emmanuel, which we know in translation as O come, O come Emmanuel. The hymn is actually created out of the texts of the great O Antiphons (so called because several of them include vocatives such as O Sapientia O Wisdom, O Jesse virgule O Jesse s stem) that are part of Vespers in the period immediately before Christmas. In fact, Veni, veni Emmanuel is the last of these texts, and forms the culmination of the sequence. It is sung tonight first in chant, before we move into a setting by Adrian Peacock, an extremely active Audio Producer who has worked extensively with Nigel Short and Tenebrae as well as with numerous other choirs, soloists and instrumentalists. He also has a strong career as a singer himself, so he knows the business from every angle. This setting builds a considerable urgency with its repeated entreaties into the appeal for Emmanuel God with us to come to us. A little more chant from the Antiphon brings us to one of the very best-known pieces by the late John Tavener, whose death on 12 th November this year was extensively reported in the press, something that doesn t always happen with modern composers. Tavener wrote vast pieces including one designed to last all night as well as numerous miniatures and just about everything in between. The Lamb is a perfect example of his spare, simple, yet highly effective style at its best. He wrote it, he said, in 1982 while being driven by his mother from South Devon to London, and found that it came to him fully formed in his mind, and only had to be written down. The text is from William Blake, and he attributed the inspiration in the music to the poet and to Tavener s (then) three-year old nephew, Simon. And so to one of the key composers of this evening, Ralph Vaughan Williams. This is Wither s Rocking Carol, a lullaby freshly composed by Vaughan Williams to a text by the seventeenth-century poet, satirist and pamphleteer, George Wither ( ). The composer picks up the rocking idea as a parent tries to comfort a child. The sweet baby here is not the baby Jesus, but simply a disconsolate infant. The parent encourages it to sleep by drawing attention to Jesus s own childhood, when He too was a small child, urging it to take comfort and strength from this knowledge and from what the Christ-child has done for its salvation.

2 Before we hear the main piece of Vaughan Williams this evening, Jeffrey Smith will play the Chorale Prelude on Es ist ein Ros entsprungen by Johannes Brahms ( ), one of his 11 Chorale Preludes, Op.122. That, incidentally, is a posthumous opus, published only in 1902, five years after the composer s demise. Most of these preludes belong to 1896, although it is possible that some of them had been composed earlier. This is, as far as one can tell, a setting for manuals alone, although some versions have found places to use the pedals as well. The chorale comes to us from Praetorius, and Brahms makes use of his harmonization, but surrounds it with a beautifully flowing texture that both conceals the music within its own self and also contributes a delightful commentary on the text known to us in English as Lo! A rose e re-blooming which can be heard in a setting by David Blackwell at this Sunday s Advent carol service. Vaughan Williams s Fantasia on Christmas Carols has always been one of the outstanding and best-known Christmas works in the British repertoire since its first performance in 1912 at the Three Choirs Festival, which was held that year in Hereford Cathedral. It is a relatively substantial work lasting some thirteen minutes, making it most suitable for a concert context rather than a service. Vaughan Williams was friendly with Cecil Sharp, the indefatigable collector of British folk songs, including those that belong to the season of Christmas. Their researches had turned up three carols that he then built into this work, thereby giving these melodies a currency that has lasted to today. It is hard to imagine that they were at one time hardly known outside a small community. This is the truth sent from above, Come all you worthy gentlemen a wassail carol and On Christmas Night all Christians sing also known as The Sussex Carol form the substance of this work in vivid and thrilling arrangements, with sly references to other carols, such as The First Nowell, thrown in as brief quotations. It is an enormously satisfying work, and reminds us of a time when the Nine Lessons and Carols had still not migrated from Truro Cathedral to Kings College Cambridge, and much of the Christmas music we take for granted today had yet to be either composed or rediscovered. After the interval, we hear a couple of carols that also date from the intervening years of British Christmas with music by Peter Warlock and Gustav Holst. Warlock, whose real name was Philip Heseltine, was a somewhat rum character who worked mainly as a music critic and author. The Warlock of his chosen pseudonym undoubtedly was a direct reference to his interest in the occult. He became a good friend of the composer Frederick Delius, and indeed wrote an early biography of him. In his persona of Peter Warlock, he was a prolific composer of carols (for example, the beautiful Bethlehem Down, which earned him a great deal of money) and solo and part songs. Benedicamus Domino, written in 1918, avoids his usually rather chromatic approach to harmony, perhaps making a point through a persistently sunny C major tonality throughout about simple faith in the season of Christmas. He himself struggled with traditional Christianity, but when it came to

3 the business of writing something suitable for this season, he knew exactly what he was doing! Lullay my liking by the Cheltenham born and raised Holst uses words addressed by the Blessed Virgin Mary to the baby Jesus as a recurring refrain, between which the verses recount elements of the Christmas story and draw conclusions from it. The text is an anonymous fifteenth-century poem, and Holst goes out of his way to lend the music a consciously antique feeing in a way that English composers at that time were prone to doing. His seems less self-conscious than some, however, and this is a beautiful little gem of a carol. Holst and Vaughan Williams were good friends, and one can trace many shared interests in their music, including in their approach to Christmas carols. We come somewhat more up to date with My Lord has come by Will Todd (b.1970), a composer who hails from Durham. He is very involved with jazz, and many of his works incorporate strongly its influence. One of his highest-profile commissions was for a piece in the Diamond Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul s, since recorded by Nigel Short with Tenebrae and the English Chamber Orchestra. This carol is a setting of the composer s own words, which refer us to the Christmas story, the shepherds, the sages, all drawn to the stable, and asking them to lead us also thither to witness the incarnation described by S. John. Todd, and composers of his generation, are the beneficiaries of a new phase in Christmas music that began just over fifty years ago when David Willcocks, then Director of Music at Kings College Cambridge, and the choral conductor Reginald Jacques, collaborated to produce what became the first volume of Carols for Choirs, published by Oxford University Press in This book, which was followed by four further volumes edited variously by John Rutter, Bob Chilcott and David Blackwell, revolutionized the English carol tradition almost single-handedly, and the proliferation of carol books we have today and the ever more exciting arrangements they have introduced to the carol service tradition is the result. No wonder that Carols for Choirs Book V, which contains this beautiful carol, came out in 2011 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of this remarkable series. John Rutter, for many years one of the leading figures of British Christmas music, is still very much with us and composing busily, but there is no doubt that Bob Chilcott, a former chorister and choral scholar at Kings College Cambridge (but now a resident of Oxford), has come to be seen as a leading member (perhaps the leading member) of the next generation of outstanding Christmas music composers. We are going to hear his suite On Christmas Night, which takes us on a journey through the Christmas story in the course of eight completely original carols although he utilizes a number of familiar melodies along the way. As the story develops, a number of differing styles are deployed to great effect to communicate the narrative. Chilcott actually provides a set of possible readings to be used in conjunction with

4 these, so that the whole can in fact form the basis for a carol service or other liturgical event if required, although we shall not be using these tonight. This is a great tour de force by one of the most accomplished and successful composers in this genre today. Ian Humphris ( ) belongs also to the sadly recently departed, having died suddenly just four days short of a year before John Tavener. He had an extremely full life in music, studying at the Royal Academy of Music in violin, piano and composition. Later, he joined the Linden Singers, which he directed for ten years, and sang with the Ambrosian Singers, the Baccholian Singers, and the Purcell Singers under Imogen Holst, through which he took part in some 15 years of Aldeburgh Festivals. Later, he directed the National Westminster Choir not at all a shabby organization and the Choral Course at the Charterhouse Summer School and was for many years Head of Choral Studies and Singing at the Centre for Young Musicians. During all this time, he was regularly on television and radio in a number of capacities. His arrangement of The Twelve Days of Christmas was one of several he made for the music publishers Novello, which published them in the Novello Book of Carols, their answer to the Oxford University Press Carols for Choirs series, now amplified by three volumes of books titled cheerily Noël. This carol is an open invitation for quirky and entertaining arrangement, and Humphris s version does not disappoint, going out of its way to bring the more extreme gifts mentioned in the text to vivid life. Con amores, la mi madre was composed originally by the Spanish Renaissance composer Juan de Anchieta ( ), and is sung here in an arrangement by Bob Chilcott, who makes it entirely accessible to a contemporary audience. It became well-known when performed by the Kings Singers, and appears under their own imprint, as well as being published by Oxford University Press. The last two items come from our own Nigel Short. It sometimes can seem that Nigel keeps the light of his tremendous abilities as an arranger firmly under a substantial bushel. These are two fantastic arrangements, with Away in a Manger exploring just about every conceivable thing you can do to this carol harmonically, and We wish you a merry Christmas a just wonderfully illuminating and cheerful reworking of the wellknown melody. Away in a Manger is an example of the extent to which the thing we regard as an English or British Christmas is in fact an amalgam of American and British pieces. (As an aside, if you go to Germany and listen to their carols, you will find remarkably little cross-over with those that are familiar to us: Adeste Fideles (O come all ye faithful) and a handful of others, but not many overall. America and Britain share virtually all carols in terms of words, although a few of the tunes are different.) The first two verses of Away in a Manger were first published in 1884 in Boston, Massachusetts in a publication called The Myrtle that was produced by the Universalist Publishing House. It claimed that the text was by Luther and was being

5 republished in honour of his 400 th anniversary, but this was nonsense. It seems likely, however, that it was indeed written in Luther s honour and that the attribution was just a gimmick to sell more copies. Incidentally, the third verse was added eight years later when the carol was reprinted in Gabriel's Vineyard Songs, but as to who wrote that, it is as mysterious as the first two verses. We wish you a merry Christmas comes from the West Country. It clearly relates to the Wassail tradition, where carollers would go carousing about the place hoping to be rewarded with food, drink, money, or anything else that might be available. It became known in the modern world through an arrangement by Arthur Warrell a Farmborough-born and Bristol-based organist, composer and arranger that was published by Oxford University Press in Nigel trumps that wonderfully, although not every amateur choir would be able to bring off his arrangement!