INVICTUS Across Europe

FRANCESCO DURANTE: CORO CORO connections connections REQUIEM Despite its enduring popularity in the 18th HOWARD GOODALL century this beautiful and majestic work was never published but survives through over 50 manuscript copies scattered INVICTUS across Europe. This is the premiere recording of Stephen Darlington’s new A PASSION edition of the work which shows Durante to be a composer of considerable skill and invention, who combined his mastery of counterpoint with an elegance of melody, a richness of harmony and an imaginative cor16147 instinct for structure. Christ Church Cathedral Choir “The soloists are uniformly excellent, and the Christ Church Cathedral Choir Soloists from The Sixteen string playing as crisp and alert as the fresh young voices of the Christ Church trebles.” Soloists from The Sixteen Oxford Baroque the observer Clive Driskill-Smith The Lanyer Ensemble “...moments of elegance and charm Stephen Darlington which are beautifully rendered.” bbc music magazine Stephen Darlington www.thesixteen.com cor16165 he collaboration between a conductor and a composer to bring music to life is Tone of the true excitements for a musician. In my case, I have been fortunate enough to have experienced this many times in my career at Christ Church, and HOWARD GOODALL most often with Howard Goodall, whose inspiring new work, Invictus: A Passion, is recorded here for the first time. In this piece, Howard has found a route directly to people’s hearts through his challenging choice of texts combined with wonderful INVICTUS music, characterised by his extraordinary gift for harmony and melody. A PASSION Stephen Darlington 1 Gethsemane 8.26 t is rare for a church choir to be involved in one premiere, much less two. We 2 Lamentation 6.47 were so fortunate to have presented Eternal Light for the first time in the United I 3 States, which began our love affair with the music of Howard Goodall, and resulted Chorale: His Paths are Peace 3.33 in this commission. Howard’s gift of choosing text, along with what we have come 4 Compassion 6.19 to love as his signature style, combine in this incredibly powerful new perspective 5 on the Passion story. Invictus 5.31 Sid Davis 6 Golgotha 6.27 7 Easter Hymn 4.27 Invictus: A Passion was commissioned by St Luke’s Friends of Music for the Chancel 8 The Song of Mary Magdalene: Now we are they who weep 6.57 Choir of St Luke’s United Methodist Church, Houston, Texas, Sid Davis, Director of Music and Fine Arts. 9 I will arise 9.35 This recording was made possible by the generous support of the Friends of Christ Total Running Time: 58.02 Church Cathedral and the Christ Church Cathedral Music Trust. 2 exerting itself against ideas that one at times saturated with conflict, threaten and challenge, the power of hazard and anger: I have tried to find INVICTUS A PASSION a peaceful, loving humility in the face a musical vocabulary for the piece of tyranny, the facing-down of fear – which creates layers, therefore, without holds profound universal resonance muddying understanding. Thus, when Composer’s note for people of many faiths and those of the music began emerging in my head ost composers would agree known as ‘The Crucifixion’, which was none. It is this universal meaning that I heard not a full, homogeneous string Mthat it is the most rewarding one of the most popular choral works my Invictus: A Passion hopes to address, section but two quartets of soloists, of outcomes possible when the piece of the 1ate 19th, early 20th century. so that, like my 2008 Eternal Light: acting, in choral terms, antiphonally. you next want to write is also the I wanted to reflect musically on what A Requiem, it might find relevance We would hear individual players, not piece that your next patron wants to this story has to tell us, now. with choirs and their audiences or a wash. A lone soprano saxophone, commission. Such was the case with congregations everywhere. the nearest to my mind that a wind Invictus: A Passion, when I tentatively Traditionally, the Passion narrative instrument gets to the sound of suggested to Sid Davis and the has taken excerpts from the Christian 45 years of writing musical theatre human keening, weaves amongst the musical team at St Luke’s Methodist gospels to describe and reflect upon has inevitably shaped the way I set voices, at times friendlessly isolated. Church, Houston, Texas, that I was the final hours of the life of Jesus of narrative texts, encouraging me Whilst the piano underpins the voices, keen to write a contemporary setting Nazareth, his doubts in the Garden to avoid the abstract, opaque or particularly the soloists, as it might of the Passion story. In so doing, in of Gethsemane, his trial, his public overly elusive in meaning. Likewise accompany an intimate song, the the 21st century, I felt it important humiliation and torture, his crucifixion, I make no apology for my musical two horns’ role is to counter-balance to look at its ideas, its format and its his body’s disappearance from the idiom being, I hope, approachable. the chorus, occasionally reinforcing message afresh. I couldn’t simply re- tomb and the climactic miracle of his The recurring messages of this but mostly acting in counterpoint to run the text or the structure of the resurrection from the dead. Whilst collection – suffering, fortitude, them. Against this relatively sparse, majestic 18th century Passion settings this final event is one uniquely adhered compassion and survival against personal, almost baroque texture, the of Bach and his contemporaries, nor to by believing Christians, much of terrible odds – are intended to voices are paramount, allowing those John Stainer’s ‘Meditation on the the Passion in general – persecution challenge and comfort in equal of the authors and poets to speak Sacred Passion of the Holy Redeemer’, of the innocent, malevolent authority measure. We live in a troubled era, directly and urgently to us. 4 5 One aspect of the Passion story above respected woman, close to Elizabeth vengefulness of the court’s proceedings look the other way but you can never all others guides the choice of texts I and certainly known to William with its pompous, vainglorious bullies, say again that you did not know”. in this piece and that is the role and Shakespeare, a subject of enormous or on the agony of ‘the two Marys’ at perspective of women, in particular scholarly speculation as to whether the Cross. In the midst of appalling suffering, that of Jesus’ close friend Mary she was the ‘Dark Lady’ alluded to in women so often must carry the Magdalene, and his mother Mary. Shakespeare’s sonnets, or even – as Within the over-arching shape burden of care, survival and loss. some have proposed – the anonymous provided by excerpts from Æmelia The 4th movement,Compassion , is To draw this out, I have chosen mostly author of the First Folio plays herself. Lanyer’s extended poem, movements inspired by the extraordinary story (though not exclusively) female Recent scholarship has suggested that are interspersed by other female of Irena Sendler née Krzyżanowska, poets writing in English between her family – the Bassanos, recruited authors: Gethsemane by Ella a Polish nurse and head of Żegota, the 17th and 20th centuries. The in Venice to be musicians in Henry Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919), Mary the Polish Council to Aid Jews in the central narrative thread, for example, VIII’s court – were in fact ‘converted’ Magdalene and the Other Mary by Second World War, whose personal normally taken from St John, St Luke Jews (converted, that is, to avoid Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830- interventions saved the lives of or St Matthew’s gospels, are in this execution, originally in Catholic 1894), and Slave Auction by African- approximately 2,500 Jewish children work taken from a verse version of Spain). In any case, her telling of American author and abolitionist in the Warsaw Ghetto, smuggling the events written by Æmelia Lanyer the Crucifixion story is remarkable campaigner Frances Ellen Watkins them to safety, acts of humanitarian née Bassano, called Salve Deus Rex in one important respect – it is a Harper (1825-1911). This latter poem, bravery that eventually caused her Judæorum (Hail God, King of the feminist critique of the events. Its which forms the basis of the 2nd arrest and torture by the Gestapo. She Jews). This was printed in book form sub-headings read, ‘Eve’s Apologie movement, Lamentation, expresses is honoured as Righteous Amongst in 1611 (making it contemporaneous in defence of Women’, ‘The Teares the unbearable, unimaginable pain the Nations at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. with Shakespeare’s ‘magical’ plays, of the Daughters of Jerusalem’ and felt by a mother seeing her child torn The Latin texts of this movement are The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest), ‘The Salutation and Sorrow of the away from her at a slave auction. To taken from the Book of Lamentations and can claim to be one of, if not Virgine Marie’. Emphasis is therefore this harrowing account are appended (“My eye hath run down with streams the earliest published in English by a placed, for instance, on Pontius the words of William Wilberforce, of water, for the destruction of the female author. Lanyer is an extremely Pilate’s wife begging for mercy for the spoken in the House of Commons on daughter of my people. My enemies intriguing figure, a highly educated, prisoner, the injustice and pointless 18th April 1791, “You may choose to have chased me and caught me like 6 7 a bird, without cause…”) and from wondrous cross, acknowledging the 1 Gethsemane Psalm 142, the Old Testament being grief of those left to mourn.

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