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Love Is Come Again Monteverdi Choir Gardiner Love Is Come Again Music for the Springhead Easter Play

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Love Is Come Again Monteverdi Choir Gardiner Love Is Come Again Music for the Springhead Easter Play Love is come again Monteverdi Choir Gardiner Love is come again Music for the Springhead Easter Play Monteverdi Choir English Baroque Soloists John Eliot Gardiner ‘This personal selection of music for Easter from the 11th to the 20th centuries tells the story of the Resurrection and Christ's appearances to his disciples. It is based on my experience of compiling and directing the music for a mimed Easter play, performed in village churches in Dorset every year between 1963 and 1984, the brainchild of my mother, Marabel Gardiner, to whose memory this recording is dedicated.’ 2 John Eliot Gardiner Marabel Gardiner aged 19 in Florence, 1926; 3 her production notes for the Springhead Easter Play, 1964 The Crucifixion Mary Magdalene at the tomb 1 The Seven Virgins 2:14 7 Eheu! They have taken Jesus 2:55 Trad., Herefordshire Thomas Morley 1557/8-1602 Angharad Rowlands soprano 8 But Mary stood without the sepulchre 3:53 2 O vos omnes 3:52 Heinrich Schütz 1585-1672 Carlo Gesualdo 1566-1613 Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi Hugo Hymas Evangelist 3 Woefully array’d 7:44 Gareth Treseder, Ruairi Bowen Jesus William Cornysh 1465-1523 Charlotte Ashley, Angharad Rowlands Alison Ponsford-Hill soprano Mary Magdalene Matthew Venner alto Peter Davoren tenor 9 Bless’d Mary Magdalene 0:57 Christopher Webb bass Trad., English Easter Morning 4 Dum transisset Sabbatum 8:11 John Taverner c.1490-1545 5 Love is come again 2:00 Trad., French 6 Surrexit pastor bonus 5:59 Jean L’Héritier c.1480-1552 4 The Road to Emmaus The Lake Side 10 And behold two of them went that day 2:16 15 Peter saith, I go a-fishing 2:48 Wipo of Burgundy c.995-c.1048 (attrib.) after Jean Tisserand d.1494 Victimae paschali laudes O filii et filiae Hugo Hymas tenor Peter Davoren tenor 11 Abendlied 3:39 16 Kyrie eleison 1:16 Josef Gabriel Rheinberger 1839-1901 Missa Orbis factor 12 Alleluia. And it came to pass 1:39 17 Ego sum panis vivus 2:53 William Byrd c.1543-1623 Leonora d’Este 1515-1575 (attrib.) 13 And they said one to another 4:09 18 Lov’st thou me? 1:40 Wipo of Burgundy (attrib.) after Benjamin Britten 1913-1976 Victimae paschali laudes Canticle II, Abraham and Isaac Hugo Hymas tenor Hugo Hymas Evangelist Gareth Treseder, Ruairi Bowen Jesus Verily the Lord is risen Heinrich Schütz 19 If ye love me 2:20 Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi Thomas Tallis c.1505-1585 Hugo Hymas Evangelist Gareth Treseder, Ruairi Bowen Jesus Epilogue 14 Die ganze Welt, Herr Jesu Christ 2:14 20 Surrexit pastor bonus 2:28 Jacob Gippenbusch 1612-1664 Giovanni Gabrieli c.1554/7-1612 Surrexit Christus hodie 21 Non nobis, Domine 2:24 Samuel Scheidt 1587-1654 Anon., arr. John Linton Gardner Emma Walshe soprano Hilariter 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18 Trad., German adapted by John Eliot Gardiner 5 Rehearsals, 1982 Ralph Coward, as the disciple Cleopas, 6 recites a poem by William Barnes, 1982 Love is come again on a journey in music, from the horrors of Calvary Music for the Springhead Easter Play to the wonders at the tomb, on the road to Emmaus and at the Sea of Galilee. It is the early spring of 1963 in Dorset, and the Marabel Gardiner spent a seminal year in Florence endlessly creative Marabel Gardiner – stage director, in her late teens, where she gained a deep knowledge art historian and singer – is working on a new play and lifelong love of Italian Renaissance art. Paintings to mark the Easter festival in her local church. She such as Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Resurrection’ enlists the help of her son John Eliot, who is midway and Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ were a through his undergraduate studies at Cambridge, constant inspiration. John Eliot recalls in his notes to curate a programme of live music for the drama. for Once as I remember ‘a dignified, ritual-like purity’ Between them, and with much support from family, to her theatrical style: both the Christmas and Easter friends and the local community, they create the Plays had ‘a touching mixture of formal, stylised and Springhead Easter Play, ‘Springhead’ being the name naive elements’. Stillness and meditation were key of the Gardiner family home. The play is all in mime, elements of the drama. Marabel’s handwritten and is punctuated by a specially constructed production notes for the plays demonstrate the sequence of plainchant, motets and carols. imagination and care which went into the design, A year later, John Eliot Gardiner heads back to dress and stagecraft of the performances. Cambridge after the first revival of the Easter Play Music provided both the narrative thread and to conduct a student performance of Monteverdi’s moments of reflection. An evangelist (John Eliot Vespers (1610) in his college chapel. The Monteverdi himself) would sing the Gospel texts, using an Choir is born; the rest is history. Yet for the next adapted English version of Heinrich Schütz’s twenty years, until the final performance in 1984, Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi (Story of the John Eliot will make time every Easter to join his Resurrection of Jesus Christ). A mixed group of mother and the parishioners of St Andrew’s Church, amateur and professional singers from the Monteverdi Fontmell Magna to perform the Springhead Easter Choir would combine to perform the polyphony, while Play. It is clear when we sit down to discuss his neighbours from the local farming community would memories of the play that it was not only a personal represent the various disciples and act out the story. highlight of the year, but a profound musical and The Easter weekend at Springhead was eagerly spiritual experience. anticipated by those members of the Monteverdi This recording presents much of the music from Choir who would join the locals. As well as the play the original play. It may be thought of as a companion itself, Carol Savage, an early member of the choir, to the Monteverdi Choir’s 1998 CD Once as I recalls ‘music and dancing in the barn, and feasting remember, which told the story of an earlier Marabel and recitations on the grass outside’. A local farmer, creation, the Springhead Christmas Play, performed in Ralph Coward (always cast as one of the Emmaus the house itself. Both were structured around a series disciples), would recite poems by William Barnes in of tableaux, the Easter Play narrating the Passion and the Dorset dialect; Rosalind Gardiner, John Eliot’s Resurrection of Jesus Christ through a combination of older sister, would play the violin for Playford dances, 7 the different Gospel accounts. The listener is invited which were called by their father Rolf (Simon Peter in the Easter Play) and led by Marabel ‘with her straight Easter Morning back, in a long dress decorated with a huge brooch’. The Resurrection scene would begin with the women Now John Eliot Gardiner and today’s Monteverdi going early in the morning to Jesus’ tomb, as told in Choir return to the soundtrack of those weekends the Gospel of Mark. John Taverner’s ‘Dum transisset at Springhead. Some larger-scale works have been Sabbatum’ sets the text, using the cantus firmus added to the original programme, such as ‘Woefully technique of a plainchant melody inserted into the array’d’, a setting by William Cornysh of a poem middle of the choral texture, here sung by the attributed to John Skelton, and the ‘Abendlied’ of baritones. Josef Gabriel Rheinberger. But the spirit of the The scene continued with a carol for Easter Day, Easter Play is retained: a dramatic retelling of the ‘Love is come again’, a version of the French Resurrection story, employing disparate musical Christmas carol ‘Noël nouvelet’ with words by the styles and frequent shifts of focus and perspective, Anglican priest and poet, J. M. C. Crum. An addition all held together by the creative vision of a Dorset for this recording is a setting of the Easter Monday mother and her son. responsory ‘Surrexit pastor bonus’, by the French Renaissance composer Jean L’Héritier, a more The Crucifixion reflective and serene take on the Resurrection The Easter Play opened in near darkness. Two women narrative. and two disciples would kneel at the nave altar, staring upstage, seemingly into the void. They were in Mary Magdalene at the tomb fact contemplating the imagined figure of the crucified As Mary Magdalene weeps by the tomb, we hear Christ, who was not portrayed in person at any point Thomas Morley’s ‘Eheu! Sustulerunt Dominum in the play. A lone voice would sing the English meum’, in a translation by John Eliot Gardiner. ballad-carol ‘The Seven Virgins’, otherwise known This motet first appeared in Morley’s A Plaine and as ‘The Leaves of Life’. The text tells the story from Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke of 1597 the Apocryphal Gospels of Mary’s visit to her son at and sets Mary’s response to the angels’ question Calvary, and his words to her from the cross. The in John 20:13: ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’. carol’s exact origin is unclear: the first known version Heinrich Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung Jesu of the text is found in a Manx carol book of 1826; Christi was published in 1623 and first performed that the tune was later collected by Cecil Sharp in 1923. year in Dresden. It tells the Easter story in a series of The Crucifixion tableau was further accompanied choruses, duets and recitatives accompanied by viol by a selection of music for Holy Week, in this instance consort – a precursor to Bach’s Passions a century Cornysh’s ‘Woefully array’d’ and ‘O vos omnes’ by later.
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