Pelham Humfrey the Choir of Her Majesty’S Chapel Royal
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PELHAM HUMFREY THE CHOIR OF HER MAJESTY’S CHAPEL ROYAL SACRED CHORAL MUSIC JOSEPH McHARDY 1 O give thanks unto the Lord [11:13] PELHAM HUMFREY (1647/8–1674) AC NM NP AR THE CHOIR OF HER MAJESTY'S CHAPEL ROYAL, ST JAMES'S PALACE Service in E Minor – Morning Service SACRED CHORAL MUSIC 2 Te Deum [4:54] JOSEPH McHARDY, Director of Music AC NM NP AR 3 Jubilate [2:11] Alexander Chance countertenor Bojan Čičić violin 1 AC NM SW AR Nicholas Mulroy tenor Elin White violin 2 Jane Rogers viola Nick Pritchard tenor Service in E Minor – Communion Service Sarah McMahon Ashley Riches bass cello Alex McCartney theorbo 4 Kyrie [0:59] Stephen Whitford bass/cantor Martyn Noble, Joseph McHardy organ 5 Credo [3:39] NM 6 Sanctus [0:41] 7 Gloria [2:21] 8 By the waters of Babylon [13:03] NM NP AR Service in E Minor – Evening Service This recording was made possible through the generous patronage of Her Majesty The Queen, with the kind support of the friends of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, and a significant contribution from 9 Magnificat [4:01] John Parke Wright IV, supported by kind donations from Halcyon Days, Mrs Pamela and Dr Peter Harper, AC NM NP AR Admiral H Kirk Unruh, Peter and Roseanne Williams, Kirby Allison, Matthew Ekberg, Aaron Regent and 10 Nunc dimittis [2:36] Richard H Martin Jr, and other supporters and friends from the 1660 Captain Henry Cooke Society. Thanks AC NM NP AR are also due to Benjamin Ashurov for help with the psalm texts. 11 O Lord my God [13:17] Recorded on 27-29 January 2020 in Design: Drew Padrutt @delphianrecords HM Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace Booklet editor: Henry Howard NM NP AR Producer: Paul Baxter Cover image: foxbrushfilms.com @delphianrecords Engineer: Matthew Swan Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Total playing time [59:02] 24-bit digital editing: Matthew Swan Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK @delphian_records 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter www.delphianrecords.com Tracks 3-7 are premiere recordings ‘Singing after the Italian manner’ Imagine visiting London in 1672: English music on the Restoration Chapel Royal was The Whitehall Chapel may be lost, but we about and devotion to Italian and French translations of Giulio Caccini’s treatise not simply on its compositional style, but are still Humfrey’s choir, and feel a sense of baroque vocal music, trying to read between Le nuove musiche circulate, available to on the institution’s performing practice, so continuity between his generation and the the lines, and imagining how he would have anybody who wants to sing Italian songs. much so that Henry Cooke and the Chapel current choir, in everything from the music approached performances of his own works. In Whitehall, Charles II employs his own Royal were described by John Playford as we sing and our use of the 1662 Book of band of Italian musicians, heard only by the ‘honour of our Nation’ for its evincing the Common Prayer to our role in supporting © 2021 Joseph McHardy his favoured courtiers. Stepping into the Italian ‘manner’. We wanted to look at the the Sovereign and the uniforms that the Chapel, the choir is new, revived in 1660 score with the eyes of those musicians trained choristers wear. Our connection really comes I am very grateful for the assistance of by Henry Cooke. Cooke was known for his in Gibbons and in Carissimi and Boësset – alive when we share Humfrey’s excitement Corrina Connor in preparing this foreword. expertise in the Italian style, and after his ornamentation becomes an essential part of death his protégés have taken over: Pelham the singers’ declamatory armour: the written Humfrey and John Blow, barely out of their music awaits the singer’s improvisatory skill. teens. According to Samuel Pepys, Humfrey My own formative experience with Monteverdi has been transformed by his experiences in opera and the expertise our soloists have in France, while Blow feverishly copies scores seventeenth-century Italian music spurred all of Italian music – possibly they drop in to hear of us to explore the Italianate ornamentation the Italian musicians at Queen Catherine’s espoused by Caccini, as well as French Catholic chapel too. The Chapel Royal choir ornamentation found in Mersenne’s L’art du comprises the best English singers, and they bien chanter (1666). We also studied Purcell’s cannot but be caught up in this Franco-Italian florid vocal music, imagining that he was creative maelstrom. Imagine now that we’re writing later in life what he had been taught to at evensong in the King’s Chapel and it is time improvise earlier, in Humfrey’s lifetime. for the anthem – By the waters of Babylon, a lament of the exiled and enslaved – a The Whitehall Chapel no longer exists, but we bitter irony when we consider how London’s used its geography to imagine an antiphonal growing wealth is generated by the toil of approach in which strings, choir, and soloists enslaved Africans, trafficked to the new formed distinct ‘choirs’ who dialogue with colonies. Some string players rise; perhaps a each other; the strings do not double the voice few clerical eyes roll – this business of violin parts, and the continuo players mostly bow out music in the anthem is but an imitation of of the string symphonies. In Humfrey’s time Louis XIV’s 24 violons du Roy – but every the Chapel organ was at a higher pitch than is musician is determined to impress their now normal, and this recording reflects this. patron, Charles II. We also chose to ask a tenor to sing many of the parts designated ‘alto’, in the range Our guiding principle making this recording that the French described in the seventeenth was that the effect of Italian and French vocal century as haute-contre. Notes on the music Virtually all we know of the life of Pelham court. Pepys’s vivid vignette has helped shape The key of E minor imbues Humfrey’s Service demonstrate Humfrey’s dexterous negotiation Humfrey comes from the records of the perceptions of Humfrey ever since. Another in E minor less with chiaroscuro than with of the monarch’s aesthetic requirements. Chapel Royal, and a few recollections by the vignette comes from a wedding Hymneal an enveloping tenebrism: the dark character diarist Samuel Pepys and Humfrey’s close by Robert Veel on the occasion of Humfrey’s of the key and the restraint of the vocal O Lord my God sets six verses from Psalm 22 contemporary and fellow-composer Thomas marriage to Katherine Cooke; Veel’s eloquently writing invoke the gloomy chill of morning (vv. 1, 14, 16−19). In this psalm of individual Tudway. Humfrey spent half of his short life ribald paean hails Humfrey as a ‘jolly youth’ prayer in winter, mist drifting off the Thames lament, in which the suffering individual calls in the service of Charles II’s court, initially as with ‘wandering Hand and unconfined Eye’. into Whitehall, or the perilous darkness hopelessly for mercy while experiencing one of the first generation of boy choristers Few appreciations of Humfrey as a composer of a January evensong. In his settings of unjust persecution by enemies, Humfrey’s conscripted to the Chapel Royal choir by Henry survive, except for a sincere encomium by each section of these texts for the chief arrangement of the psalm verses emphasises Cooke after the Restoration in 1660. After Thomas Flatman written shortly after the daily Anglican offices, Humfrey permitted agony and humiliation. His heightening of Humfrey’s voice broke in 1664 he was sent composer’s untimely death, and ending: himself only the most occasional moments the dramatic impact of the text also draws to study on the Continent, spending time in of word-painting (for example the overlapping attention to its messianic prophecy, creating a France and probably Italy, financed by secret ’Twas Thou couldst make dead words to live, ascending figurations for ‘and lift them up’ in connection with the crucifixion of Jesus in St service funds. He returned to court in 1667, Thou that dull numbers couldst inspire the Te Deum, and a brief descending cascade John’s Gospel (John 19: 23–24). O Lord my God With charming voice and tuneful lyre, where he had two appointments as lutenist to That life to all, but to Thyself, couldst give; of quavers for ‘he hath scattered the proud’ also demonstrates Humfrey’s skill as a musical the King’s Private Music, and as a Gentleman Why couldst Thou not Thy wondrous art in the Magnificat) or florid melisma. Even the rhetorician, utilising several tropes associated of the Chapel Royal. Following the death of bequeath? doxology at the conclusion of the Magnificat with classical oratory throughout an anthem that Henry Cooke in 1672, Humfrey succeeded – often a tempting opportunity for elaboration exhibits characteristics of prosopopoeia – him as Master of the Children of the Chapel Humfrey wrote no purely instrumental – is restrained. Humfrey’s largely syllabic in which a speaker (or singer) communicates Royal, and composed sacred music for the music that survives. Instead, he responded setting of texts for matins, communion, and with their audience or congregation in the voice Chapel, celebratory odes for the King’s birthday with acute dramatic sensibility to text, most evensong suggest that the priority here of another person (in this case, the crucified and other occasions, and some theatre music. especially to the rich language of the psalms was the clear and relatively unadorned Jesus) – or pathopoeia, in which the singer/ In 1672 Humfrey married Cooke’s daughter in the Book of Common Prayer.