In three years as the BBC Singers’ Associate installation spaces as often as in concert halls AIRPLANE CANTATA Composer, from 2010 to 2013, Gabriel Jackson or churches). It was an aesthetic of radical CHORAL WORKS BY GABRIEL JACKSON wrote for them eight works (including a simplicity which won him the friendship and bilingual work for two choirs, written for a support of composers as seemingly different joint concert with the Latvian Radio Choir). as Steve Martland and John Tavener; and its This disc collects the four secular ones with essential elements first found expression in a 1 The Voice of the Bard [6.59] 0 Winter Heavens [6.02] Olivia Robinson soprano English texts, and prefaces them with an short piano piece, Angelorum (1987), of Lynette Alcántara mezzo-soprano earlier BBC commission written in 2007. which Jackson declared at the time in a brief Choral Symphony Christopher Bowen tenor Roughly coinciding with a decade in which programme note – almost more like a mission q First movement: Quite quick [7.42] Stephen Charlesworth baritone he has impressively consolidated his reputation statement – that it w Second movement: Slow [10.08] as a choral composer (he has been shortlisted 2 e Third movement: Quick [4.16] Ruchill Linn [9.10] seven times in the Liturgical and Choral has a key signature of E flat major. Apart r Fourth movement: Quite quick [4.42] categories at the British Composer Awards from a momentary modulation at the Airplane Cantata * Elizabeth Poole; Alison Smart; Emma Tring sopranos Margaret Cameron mezzo-soprano since 2003, winning three times, and this is climax there are no accidentals. There is 3 Overture: Icarus [2.18] Christopher Bowen tenor the fifth disc devoted to his choral music no counterpoint or polyphony, only block 4 Take-off [2.51] Stephen Charlesworth baritone released in the same period), they well chords, simple diatonic melodies and pedal 5 Flight [2.41] exemplify his approach to the medium, as well notes in the left hand. 6 Landing [3.29] Total timings: [68.47] as setting the seal on a relationship which 7 Toccata Aeronautica [1.18] began with Jackson’s first BBC Singers With only very slight modification, much of 8 Newsreel/Narration [3.20] commission, Cecilia Virgo, in 2000. this could equally be said of the music on the 9 Chorale-Coda [3.42] present disc. Already characteristic, too, is Stephen Jeffes tenor Charles Gibbs speaker At the same time, they contain stylistic and the suggestion (contained within the title of Rex Lawson pianola technical features, and express themes and the piano piece) of a spiritual or metaphysical ideas, that he began to develop as early as dimension even to pieces which are the mid-1980s, a period when his work was ostensibly secular. And perhaps the roots primarily centred not on choirs but on small of the aesthetic go even further back, to BBC SINGERS REX LAWSON PIANOLA chamber ensembles, and often related to Jackson’s time as a chorister at Canterbury DAVID HILL, JAMES MORGAN* CONDUCTORS visual art (sometimes physically as well as Cathedral, where he developed a deep love of conceptually, being presented in galleries and the English Tudor composers. Like theirs, he www.signumrecords.com - 3 - has said, his music is “not about conflict and but not identical to the poem’s. It is a form of the same music – before “break of day” as a sign under which the poet’s contemplation resolution; even when animated, it is essentially of attentiveness to the text that can include provokes a final turn to the tonic major. takes place – is set off from the prevailing contemplative”. It moves, but it stands still. the bringing out of structural features (and for Jackson unusual) contrapuntal which music can realise perhaps even more In the Scottish poet Robin Bell’s exquisite textures, in a sequence of chords filling out the The clear lines and contrasts intrinsic to this successfully than words alone: the contrast of Ruchill Linn (“linn” is a Scottish dialect word whole registral space and framed by silence approach fit Jackson well both for larger-scale “calling” and “weeping” in the first two lines for “waterfall”, and here describes a location before and after, not unlike the way Tudor choral works – in which he likes to construct of the second stanza, for instance, which the in the poet’s native Perthshire), by contrast composers often set the words “Jesu Christe” an array of texts appropriate to the subject lower voices repeat expressively underneath to the Blake, the poem’s syntax does not in the Gloria section of their masses. matter – and for short to medium-length pieces the decoratively melodic, divided soprano lines. coincide so tidily with its rhyme-scheme. Jackson says it wasn’t a conscious allusion like the three included here, which each take Jackson treats the text as heightened prose, in this case, but it’s nonetheless characteristic a single poem and set it using a single span As in Angelorum, Jackson’s style does not following its punctuation rather than line breaks, of his approach and aesthetic: while he of music with clear internal subdivisions. involve a high degree of modulation, or even of and yet the music again provides its own, rarely quotes directly from specific pieces by Jackson typically responds to his chosen text chromaticism in the harmony – indeed, all of subliminal yet ingenious structure. Although other composers, he thinks of all his work as, both on the level of detail and as a structure the pieces on this disc, however complex their the listener is unlikely to notice this beyond in the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s to be elucidated musically. Thus, The Voice textures, are remarkably diatonic in harmony – the second line or so, every verbal “sentence” Stravinskian phrase, “music about music”. of the Bard opens with a great choral cry but occasional “side-slips” into neighbouring up to and including the pivotal two-word Even if it is subconscious here, it might also of “Hear”, lasting a full fifteen bars (words tonalities are characteristic, and these too statement at the poem’s centre begins with be heard as confirming a spiritual dimension referring to music or to listening are often serve both a structural and an expressive the same three notes: E, F sharp and G. (In the to the work, one that fits and enhances its elaborately set by Jackson, as by another of his function. Notable here is the sudden shift from second stanza the key changes – again to E magical sense of place. composer-heroes, Michael Tippett). The stark, E minor into E flat major for the third stanza, flat major, as it happens – and the first two imposing octaves of this opening invocation representing the poem’s shift into direct speech. notes are flattened to E flat and F natural.) A Jackson has described powered flight as give way to chordal writing for the second The two tonalities then briefly coexist to colour more directly audible unity comes from two “the great technological miracle of our time”, line’s “present”, “past” (hushed, remembering “Night”, a minute or so later, before E minor strongly pictorial elements – the curlew, with and it is the subject of several of his works, …), and “future” (another elaborate figure, is reasserted at the beginning of stanza four, its distinctive downward glissandi, and the including his first string quartet (1992; drawing attention to the most unique of the effectively a modified return of the piece’s waterfall, a series of overlapping descents subtitled From Schiphol to Shannon), Luna Bard’s qualities). Jackson finds a new texture or opening. The closing lines contain another in multiple voices. 21 in the Sea of Serenity (2003; for the idea for each line, while also establishing typically Jacksonian conceit – “starry” and unusual mixed chamber line-up of the larger-scale contrasts and recurrences, as if “watery”, the first set with dappled ecstasy That central statement of “Ruchill Linn” – ensemble OKEANOS) and the saxophone quartet the music had its own “rhyme-scheme”, parallel and the second as a flowing, liquefied version the invocation of the place by name serving LM-7: Aquarius (2006) as well as the earlier - 4 - - 5 - choral work A Vision of Aeroplanes (1997), literary texts from various periods with Hart Crane despatches us back into the realm before subsiding to an equally typical ambiguous also premiered by the BBC Singers. Airplane documentary reports of the early history of of the imagination, and “the gleaming cantos closing chord. Cantata is his most ambitious treatment flight (a newspaper report of the Wright of unvanquished space”. yet of the theme, and if its choral aspect brothers’ first flight, a telegram from one of the And so to the Choral Symphony, written in the inevitably gives weight to the quasi-spiritual brothers, and accounts by other early pioneers Like Ruchill Linn, Winter Heavens describes summer of 2012 as the climax to Jackson’s dimension here too (a dimension which is Louis Blériot, who crossed the English Channel and explores a spiritual apprehension of a Associate Composership, and premiered by perhaps further underlined by the use of in an aircraft in 1909, and Amelia Earhart, scene from nature. This time the text is the Singers on a tour to Denmark and Sweden the word “cantata” in the title), then the who in 1932 became the first woman to fly traditionally prosodic, with the fixed line in October of that year. The work is a glorious choice of pianola as accompanying instrument solo across the Atlantic). The most telling lengths and rhyme-scheme of a sonnet, and homage to Jackson’s adopted city of London, – motivated primarily by Jackson’s admiration juxtaposition comes in the sixth section, unlike Bell’s charged simplicity, the language as well as a tribute to the extraordinary for the incredible sensitivity as well as virtuosity where an astonishingly clairvoyant prediction is high-flown and the expression convoluted – in group of singers also based there, and with of Rex Lawson, as well as his efforts in from the 19th-century British engineer Sir fact it’s the sort of poem that Eliot, Pound and whom he had now worked closely for almost single-handedly reviving the pianola as George Cayley is juxtaposed with the their English contemporary T.E.