Chichester Psalms

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge Final Logo Brand Extension Logo 06.27.12 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS DONA NOBIS PACEM BERNSTEIN CHICHESTER PSALMS Stephen Cleobury Britten Sinfonia THE CHOIR OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE For more than half a millennium, King’s College Chapel has been the home to one of the world’s most loved and renowned choirs. Since its foundation in 1441 by the 19-year-old King Henry VI, choral services in the Chapel, sung by this choir, have been a fundamental part of life in the College. Through the centuries, people from across Cambridge, the UK and, more recently, the world have listened to the Choir at these services. Today even people who aren’t able to attend services in the Chapel have heard King’s Choir, thanks to its many recordings and broadcasts, and the tours that have taken it to leading international concert venues around the world. Despite its deep roots in musical history, the Choir has always been at the forefront of technological innovation, and records exclusively on its “impeccable” own label. Ailish Tynan soprano VAUGHAN Roderick Williams baritone WILLIAMS Henry Websdale organ DONA NOBIS PACEM The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge Britten Sinfonia Stephen Cleobury conductor George Hill treble BERNSTEIN Helen Sharp harp CHICHESTER PSALMS Joby Burgess percussion Richard Gowers organ The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge Stephen Cleobury conductor 3 CD 51:20 VAUGHAN WILLIAMS DONA NOBIS PACEM 1 I Agnus Dei 3:11 2 II Beat! beat! drums! 3:46 3 III Reconciliation 5:48 4 IV Dirge for Two Veterans 9:47 5 V The Angel of Death has been abroad 3:12 6 VI O man greatly beloved 7:05 BERNSTEIN CHICHESTER PSALMS 7 I Psalm 108, 2 - Psalm 100 4:08 8 II Psalm 23 - Psalm 2, 1-4 5:07 9 III Psalm 131 - Psalm 133, 1 9:16 PAULUS 10 The Road Home 3:31 4 to his mind, than procuring a bit of plainsong or PEACE WORKS a snippet from Bach’s B Minor Mass, printing the statement in question could not but pacify the Dona Nobis Pacem and most conflicted of listeners: the Chichester Psalms The exchange between RVW and Merrick may On 27 October 1952, Ralph Vaughan Williams seem little more than a footnote to the history of penned a short letter to the pianist and lifelong Dona Nobis Pacem, the cantata from which this conscientious objector Frank Merrick. The elderly phrase is taken, yet the appropriation of the composer (just turned 80) was prompted to do so lilting fragment by the Musicians' Organisation by a contact at the Oxford University Press, which for Peace tells us something important about had received from the Musicians' Organisation RVW’s principles, intentions, and popular allure. for Peace an application to reproduce a fragment Composed in 1936 to mark the centenary of the of his music on its forthcoming Christmas card. Huddersfield Choral Society, Dona Nobis Pacem ‘I thoroughly mistrust these so-called “Peace” has often been thought to have exceeded the movements’, RVW remarked to Merrick, shooting – terms of its commission, garnering admiration for it would appear – from the hip. ‘I know that your the ways in which it sets its sights further afield, “Peace” organisation is run by honest and single- and thereby prompts listeners to regard it as ‘a minded people: (indeed in early days I think I commentary on the state of Europe’. Attractive joined it myself) but I think there is a great danger though it may be to think of the cantata in these that you are too simple minded and will become terms – as a piece of musical ‘propaganda’, or, dupes of the nefarious designs of the kremlinists.’ in one recent account, as ‘a manifesto for world No-one, of course, likes to be dubbed a dupe; peace’ – RVW’s response in 1952 to ‘simple minded’ but neither, under these circumstances, would pacifists should encourage us to return to his you want to appear a Scrooge. So, having aired work in the mid-1930s, and to think again about his doubts and sounded a note of caution, RVW its motivation as a form of political testimony. silenced his inner Ebenezer just long enough to For rather than opting to enlist material from give Merrick’s greeting card the go-ahead, and the English literary tradition, as Benjamin Britten to outline succinctly what his statement ‘in favour would in the case of The War Requiem some of peace’ would be. Though more complicated, twenty-five years later, RVW strove in 1936 to 5 piece together a choral work that would speak could see no hypocrisy at all in his wanting to in curiously distant ways to the matter of peace- transplant the poet’s lyrics. He carried with him a making. After all, he too might have taken up the volume of Leaves of Grass as he went about his poetry of Wilfred Owen, or indeed followed the duties as a stretcher-bearer in the war, no doubt example of Gerald Finzi’s Requiem da Camera alive to the fact that he was following vicariously (1924), which had incorporated texts by Thomas in Whitman’s footsteps. As a volunteer nurse in Hardy, John Masefield, and Wilfrid Gibson, each the American Civil War (1861-65), Whitman too of them alert to the ethical problems of writing had witnessed the stark, scattered effects of pastoral verse in the light of regime change and modern artillery, and had written about them military upheaval. Instead, RVW elected to borrow at length in a series of poems called Drum-Taps the words of a New Yorker – Walt Whitman (later to be included in an expanded version of (1819-92) – whose poetry had long tantalised Leaves of Grass). One of these poems, ‘Dirge for and tested him, trying the limits of his taste, Two Veterans’, had set RVW sketching before both as a reader and as a song-writer. Whitman, the outbreak of war in Europe, and it is easy to he once remarked, ‘“was too fond of the smell of guess what piqued his curiosity. Extending to his own armpits”’ – a sniffy bit of criticism, to be nine four-line stanzas, the poem tells a familiar sure, but one that also demonstrates an intimacy story – the passing of a funeral party, the sounding with the very curves and crevices of the poet’s of bugles and drums – yet there is a strangeness work. A letter to Gustav Holst in 1898 reveals an about these proceedings, and it has something early, playful fascination with the American’s style, to do with the ‘new-made double grave’ that and in the years leading up to the First World War, opens like a wound at the end of the first verse. RVW had applied himself seriously to the task of In time, we learn that the grave has been dug to setting portions of Whitman’s lifework, Leaves accommodate blood relations – ‘two veterans, of Grass (1855-92), culminating in 1909 with the son and father, dropped together’ – and in the completion of A Sea Symphony. In a lecture of wake of that twofold bereavement, the witness 1912, RVW had been swift to acknowledge the to this burial allows himself to be carried away poet’s ‘cosmopolitan’ appeal, but it is clear from by the ‘immense’ procession. This is a poem, such accounts that he had come to see Whitman oddly, that purports to rejoice in the rhythms as a model folklorist, first and foremost, precisely and phantom rhymes of the dirge, and to wax because he’d reaped his ‘inspiration’ from the soil lyrical about the ways a procession of this sort beneath his feet, and not from the ‘incompatible ‘enwraps’ and seems to ‘please’ those who live conditions’ of a ‘foreign culture’. to fight another day. It is all the more surprising, then, that Whitman By returning to this ghoulish piece in 1936, RVW remained such an important figure for RVW, who began to compose a cantata that would appear, 6 crucially, to be in two minds about the struggle is said and done – and sung – it will be clear that for peace. We sense this mood of indecision too there are no greeting-card conclusions, or ‘simple in the settings of Whitman that precede the ‘Dirge’, minded’ mottos, to be drawn from this fitful work. first in the manic call to arms of ‘Beat! beat! drums!’, A fair hearing of the cantata, on the contrary, might and then, more sweetly, but no less irresistibly, in account for its lingering interest in the grim and ‘Reconciliation’. In this short, confessional poem – sensual aspects of combat. Only then, perhaps, written shortly after the Civil War – Whitman finds could we reasonably say that Dona Nobis Pacem himself at once preoccupied and elated by the is greater than the sum of its parts. spectacle of an enemy corpse. He gazes lovingly The other piece featured on this CD, Leonard upon the ‘white face’, and feels inclined to ‘touch Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (1965), would seem lightly’, not with his hands, but with his ‘lips’, to require little by way of introduction. It has rather, in a necrophiliac gesture that bespeaks been noted many times before that the three a chilling kind of intimacy. RVW’s setting gives dense movements of this work amount to a nothing away, and simply allows the baritone belated sign of peace, and an intimation of the soloist to hover uncertainly in the moment of his ways Bernstein had come to doubt the dissonant stolen kiss, sensitive perhaps to the reality that effects of his third symphony, Kaddish (1963).

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