A Walk with Ivor Gurney

A WALK WITH IVOR GURNEY A WALK WITH IVOR GURNEY from late 1907 were allowed use of the organ to Philip Lancaster try out their works ‘in the midst of Gloucester’s imperturbable Norman pillars’. Gurney was also CD1 In September 1910, an Elgar night at the a former chorister in the cathedral choir, with 1 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) [14.16] Gloucester Three Choirs Festival began with a long involvement with the Three Choirs 2 Like as the Hart Herbert Howells (1892-1983) [7.09] a new work, holding up the main feature, Festival, at which he had first encountered 3 Since I believe in God the Father Almighty Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) [5.49] The Dream of Gerontius. It was, the cathedral Elgar, who inspired him to become a composer. organist, Herbert Brewer, said, a new work 4 A Walk With Ivor Gurney * Judith Bingham (b. 1952) [12.15] by a ‘strange man who lives in Chelsea’; With his experience at Gloucester, and later 5 Ivor Gurney [4.28] By a Bierside ‘something to do with Thomas Tallis the great associations with Westminster and Salisbury Orchestrated by Herbert Howells Tudor composer’. That ‘strange man’ was Cathedrals and St. John’s College, Cambridge, CD2 Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the new work his Howells would go on to write many works for 1 In Flanders Ivor Gurney [3.15] Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The choir and organ. In early 1941, during the Orchestrated by Herbert Howells Fantasia, for double string orchestra, was Second World War, he composed a set of six 2 Sleep Ivor Gurney [3.32] based on a tune Tallis had written for anthems ‘in time of war’, five of which were Orchestrated by Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) Archbishop Parker’s metrical psalter, published written on successive days. Like as the Hart was 3 An Oxford Elegy Ralph Vaughan Williams [22.51] in 1567, which Vaughan Williams had in 1906 composed in a single sitting on 8 January. introduced into The English Hymnal. For two Written in London, with air-raids a constant 4 Valiant for Truth Ralph Vaughan Williams [5.24] members of the audience it was a seminal threat, whilst many men were engaged in 5 Lord thou hast been our refuge Ralph Vaughan Williams [8.18] moment: Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells fighting, and many were lost, the questioning were both so excited by the Fantasia that, cry of ‘where is now thy God?’ must have Total timings: [87.23] following the performance, they walked the been close to the lips of many. * World Premiere Recording streets of Gloucester together into the night, talking, trying to make sense of what they had Gurney wrote very little church music, and TENEBRAE just heard. little of what he did write has survived. His AURORA ORCHESTRA motet for double choir, Since I believe in God DAME SARAH CONNOLLY MEZZO SOPRANO Gloucester Cathedral played an important part the Father Almighty, was written in June SIMON CALLOW NARRATOR in the musical origins of both Gurney and 1925, a couple of years before Gurney stopped NIGEL SHORT CONDUCTOR Howells. They studied with Herbert Brewer, and composing. It is a deeply personal work that www.signumrecords.com - 3 - seems to look back to Gloucester Cathedral, Cotswolds. He walked with friends, talking of World War. Whilst serving with the 2/5 Hubert Parry, the director of the college, worried with extended pauses written into the piece music and poetry, and alone, often reading, Gloucestershire Battalion near Arras in June greatly for his students, and felt any losses very that allow the great acoustic of that building declaiming Shakespeare to unsuspecting cattle, 1917, Gurney began a song setting of a poem deeply. He tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade to sing fully. The reasons for Gurney’s attraction and pausing to write ideas in his notebook. by A.E. Housman, ‘On Wenlock Edge’, which Vaughan Williams from volunteering; and in April to Robert Bridges’s poem are obvious. It speaks Gurney’s connection with Gloucestershire, tells how little the human condition has changed: 1917 he wrote to Howells, ‘Gurney’s case I feel of an ambivalent relationship with God. The however, was not merely circumstantial or each generation must weather the storms of their to be quite a special martyrdom. His mind is so speaker undoubtedly believes in God, but neither aesthetic. As Thomas Hardy observes in his age; ‘Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I’. When full of thoughts and feelings far removed from he nor anyone else can know or understand novel The Woodlanders, one who truly inhabits writing A Walk with Ivor Gurney, commissioned crude barbarities that it seems almost monstrous. him, particularly as one who had ‘crie[d] a place knows ‘those invisible ones of days by Tenebrae in 2013, Judith Bingham identified But war is monstrous and we have to take it as angrily out on God’ in poems of the First gone by’: they know ‘whose feet have traversed something of that common circumstance: far as we can from the collective point of view.’ World War and in his later life. Also, throughout the fields’, ‘whose hands planted the trees’, ‘[T]he Romans were foreign invaders here, and his life, Gurney remained true in his pursuit and the ‘domestic dramas’ that have been we don’t feel the same sympathy for them as we It was only whilst serving in France that Gurney of beauty. It could have been of Gurney that enacted in that place. In his late poem do for the men in the trenches. And yet, on the began to write poetry in earnest, serving his Bridges wrote of he ‘whose spirit within [him...] ‘Gloucester Song’, Gurney writes, ‘I walk the land tomb memorials found in Gloucestershire, one apprenticeship in the trenches and behind loveth beauty’. In the final stanza, while the my fathers knew, wide to distants blue / And gets a sense of men stranded far from home, the lines. It was more difficult to write music, speaker is cherishing the freedom of belief, summon all the tales unseen, the good earth and of the gulf of time between them and but he did compose a handful of songs. Amongst Gurney, in his ‘hours of anguish and darkness’, lets them through.’ Memory is an inherent part us.’ In A Walk with Ivor Gurney, Bingham sets these, In Flanders – a setting of a poem by may have been cherishing an idea of a freedom of his landscape, summoning up the Elizabethans, passages from several Gurney poems and his boyhood friend Will Harvey – is an expression both spiritual and physical; freedom from the Danes and Romans. He felt that connection with intersperses them with inscriptions from some of homesickness, composed in January 1917. mental hospital in which he spent the last the past in his veins also: upon seeing a of those Roman memorials, ‘evok[ing] the sense By a Bierside sets a poem that first appeared fifteen years of his life, where he eventually Roman brooch, discovered in a field, he declared, Gurney had of time and people of the past within John Masefield’s play, The Tragedy of resigned himself to his hopeless abandonment. ‘how the centuries in my blood shouted and woke!’ residing in the landscape. The mezzo-soprano Pompey the Great (1910), where it is spoken by solo is ‘the spirit of that landscape’, while the four centurions, lamenting the death of a young In his freedom, Gurney was an inveterate Part of Gurney’s attraction to the Roman male voices of the choir, always “off-stage”, sing Roman soldier. It was written in August 1916, walker. He perhaps knew Gloucestershire more presence in Gloucestershire may have arisen Roman tomb memorials of soldiers long dead.’ whilst lying on a damp sandbag in a disused intimately than any other in his day. He walked from a shared experience of war in a foreign trench mortar emplacement. Gurney wrote endlessly the county’s meadows and hills, across territory. Gurney’s studies at the Royal College With the coming of the war, the Royal College of at some length on the song, which begins the Severn plain westwards to May Hill, north of Music were interrupted in 1915 by his Music – as other institutions – emptied of many as ‘a rhapsody on beauty, full of grief but not towards Elgar’s Malvern hills, and east into the volunteering for active service in the First of its students as they volunteered for active service. bitter, until the unreason of death closes the - 4 - - 5 - thought of loveliness, that Death unmakes. in the form of a set of Five Elizabethan Songs, for narrator, chorus and orchestra: An Oxford sought is shining still.’ This pastoral invocation Then the heart grows bitter with the weight of composed in December 1913–January 1914. Elegy. Adapted from two poems by Arnold, ‘The of the Elegy is something that Gurney would grief and revelation of the impermanence of Shortly after the publication of these songs, in Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’, it recounts the have related to, in both his poetry (particularly things[...] But, anger being futile, the mind 1920, the young Gerald Finzi took a copy of one story of a disillusioned Oxford scholar who, that poetry influenced by Edward Thomas) and turns to the old strangeness of the soul’s of them – a setting of John Fletcher’s ‘Sleep’ – two centuries earlier, went to live with the his music. For Gurney, music – like his sense wandering apart from the body, and to to his composition lesson with Edward Bairstow gypsies, to discover their arts before returning of the past – ‘clung to’, and was ‘exhaled’ by, what tremendous mysteries! And the dimly in York.

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