Choral Music by the GLORY and the DREAM
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THE GLORY AND THE DREAM SOMMCD 0184 Choral Music by Céleste Series RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT (1936-2012) THE GLORY AND THE DREAM Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir Nicholas Morris organ† Paul Spicer director Choral Music by RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT 1 I wonder as I wander* 2:41 9 III. Con moto appassionato 6:34 bl IV. Vivo e leggiero 7:27 2 Lullaby Baby* 3:15 bm 3 The Sorrows of Mary* 4:32 This Day* 2:41 bn Two Madrigals A Contemplation Upon Flowers* 3:54 4 I. Still to be neat* 1:01 bo Madrigal ‘And can the physician’* 1:29 5 II. The hour-glass* 2:07 bp Time* 3:33 6 Remember, O thou man* 4:36 bq One Equal Music* 2:36 The Glory and the Dream† [30:02] 7 I. Con anima 11:31 8 II. Andante lento 4:28 Total recording time 62:43 *First recordings Recorded at St. Alban the Martyr, Highgate, Birmingham on June 26-28, 2017 Producer: Siva Oke Recording Engineer: Paul Arden-Taylor Front cover: Stormy Sea with a Cliff, after Simon Jacobsz de Vlieger, 17th Century, oil on panel, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan / Bridgeman Images Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir Design: Andrew Giles Booklet Editor: Michael Quinn DDD © & 2018 SOMM RECORDINGS · THAMES DITTON · SURREY · ENGLAND Nicholas Morris organ Paul Spicer director Made in the EU able to respond to a wide array of commissions, large and small, which Choral Music by regularly came his way during his immensely successful composing career based in New York after 1979. One of these productive areas of composition RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT was choral music. The earliest pieces to be written on this recording are three madrigal It is well known that Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) was a composer, settings of 1961. Two of them, to texts by Ben Jonson, were published performer and entertainer of immense versatility and catholicity. After his together as Two Madrigals while the third, to an anonymous text, was studies at the Royal Academy of Music under Howard Ferguson, Lennox published separately as Madrigal. Bennett was greatly attracted to poetry Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew (which he claimed were of only minimal of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and these pieces attempt to help), he was a regular visitor to the Darmstadt summer courses in the capture something of that era’s expressive wedding of words and music late 1950s and a student of Pierre Boulez in Paris. Even before these forays though viewed through a 20th-century prism. In The hour-glass Bennett into the avant-garde, he had also begun to make his name as a composer gives us a reflective elegy in which the seemingly inert dust of our mortal of film scores in the late 1950s. While his work for films brought with it a remains is compared with the physical ardour of a once living body. After handsome income and international fame, it was largely as a composer of an impassioned climax, the madrigal concludes quizzically with the line art music that Bennett set his hopes and aspirations for the future. “Even ashes of lovers find no rest”. As a foil to the first piece, Still to be neat describes the cosmetic effects of dress and perfume which distract While he retained an interest in the avant-garde, he nevertheless jettisoned the eye but not the heart, a sentiment captured by the musical conceit this aspect of composition in his later style which was governed essentially of the strict canon, two-in-four, between the upper and lower pairs of by a desire to develop a contemporary tonal language. Moreover, there voices which occupies the first four lines of each verse. Moreover, its was also a strong inclination to write music across a broad range of genres coquettish temperament, evoked by the fluctuating metre, has the spirit – be it symphonic, chamber, song or choral music – that would attract a of a canzonetta. The third madrigal setting, And can the physician make similar variety of performing abilities and audiences. In this sense he shared sick men well?, has a similarly lively disposition. The focus of each verse, something of Benjamin Britten’s ability to reach out both to professionals the refrain (“With lily, germander and sops in wine, With sweet briar and and amateurs without any hint of condescension or compromise. Perhaps bonfire and strawberry wine and columbine”) appears to offer a form of inevitably, with this abundance of technique, empathy and fluency, he was homeopathic panacea to the strange nonsense of the three verses. 2 3 The Sorrows of Mary, a Christmas carol, was composed in 1964 and later familiar from Gerald Finzi’s setting of the early 1950s), Bennett divides included in Oxford University Press’s Carols of Today. The two verses of the the work into four sections. The first is a combination of a tender, pastoral anonymous 15th-century text are framed by an invocation and epilogue reflection with a sprightly Scherzo, rejoicing in the splendours of nature. for five-part chorus in which the top line outlines a melody suggesting Both moods, however, are shot through with a pang of regret at the plainchant. This is also mirrored in the bass line while the other parts passing of childhood rapture (“Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”). move in stepwise motion away from the outer voices. The two verses, for The second section, dirge-like, dwells on the loss of innocence while the four voices, begin canonically (four-in-two) before being treated freely in third (much of which is unaccompanied) revives a sense of hope, a force their concluding sections. In the epilogue, the ‘plainchant’ nature of the which cannot destroy the spirit of man’s and nature’s immortality. opening material is presented more starkly in unison before the familiar five-part texture is restored. Here Bennett also takes the opportunity to From the pathos of this contemplative material, the final section is a more give us a telling harmonic variation for the final line, “He took his death buoyant outpouring of pleasure, which, in spite of the realisation that the with perfect goodwill”. unblemished days of childhood can never be recaptured, a new, more vigorous, optimistic adult perception is instilled. In the final part of the Another carol, Lullaby Baby, using a 15th-century text by John Phillip, was work, Bennett recalls his opening material with a new sense of purpose, dedicated to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge in 1986. A gentle ‘hush giving Wordsworth’s last thoughts to the unaccompanied chorus (just as song’, there is much in the delicious moments of chromaticism to remind Finzi does) as a moving coda, replete with a last reference to the ‘grief’ one of Peter Warlock’s music (which also includes a setting of this very text), motive in the organ which has pervaded the entire work. especially in the richer textures of the last refrain. The partsong A Contemplation Upon Flowers dates from 1999 and was Dedicated to his sister, the poet Meg Peacocke, The Glory and the Dream composed for Philip Barnes and the St Louis Chamber Chorus. An elegiac for mixed voices and organ was commissioned by the New Cambridge setting of a 16th-century text by Henry King, it marvels at the annual cycle Singers and a group of choirs from the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, of flowers and how, just as they bloom with each spring and die with each Canada and Iceland. It received its first performance on 3 March 2001 in winter, they might also “sweeten and perfume” or own death. St John’s College Chapel, Cambridge by the New Cambridge Singers directed by Christopher Brown. Taking his text from William Wordsworth’s Words from John Donne’s Sermon LXXIII served as the text for This Day, ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (a text a vocal fanfare which was dedicated to Philip Brunelle, the organist and 4 5 choirmaster of Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis. By 1 I wonder as I wander contrast, Time, a setting of Giles Fletcher’s late-16th-century lyric, is a sombre meditation on how all things will have an end except for the I wonder as I wander out under the sky eternity of Christ’s beauty and virtue. Affecting in its simplicity is the carol How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die I wonder as I wander, written for Jonathan Manners and DeChorum for For poor on’ry people like you and like I; a carol service at All Saints Church, Weston-super-Mare on 22 December I wonder as I wander out under the sky. 2008. Another commission, this time for Coro and their conductor Mark Griffiths on the occasion of the choir’s tenth anniversary in December 2010, When Mary birthed Jesus ’twas in a cow’s stall Remember, O thou man, is more substantial. Using a familiar Christmas With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all text from Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata of 1611, Bennett’s carol is a But high from God’s heaven, a star’s light did fall fervent and heartfelt prayer which ends in quiet contemplation. And the promise of ages it then did recall. Completed in New York and London in February 2012, not long before If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing his death on Christmas Eve of that year, the introit One Equal Music was A star in the sky or a bird on the wing, commissioned by the Frank Clarke-Whitfeld Trust and the Three Choirs Or all of God’s Angels in Heaven to sing Festival for the choir of Hereford Cathedral and its organist and director of He surely could have it, ’cause he was the King.