Hubert Parry : Songs of Farewell - Quinney, New College Choir, Oxford

Hubert Parry's Songs of Farewell are highlighted by the Choir of New College, Oxford, conducted by Robert Quinney, on Novum Records and receive very fine performances indeed. But the disc is also worth hearing because it places Parry together with Felix Mendelssohn, making the connection between Parry and the European mainstream.
The disc begins with Parry's Hear Ye, O my people ! Written some twenty years before the Songs of Farewell, it is solidly in the “Cathedral” style typified by Samuel Wesley, for massed voices. It was first performed by the Salisbury Diocesan Choral Association which could deploy up to 2000 singers. Initially the organ dominates with spectacular effect, but a solo quartet soon emerges, defining the line and leading the unison voices. A solo aria for bass “Clouds and Darkness” creates further focus. In contrast to the might that has gone before, “Behold, the eye of the Lord” shines with lightness, the purity further underlined by a youthful treble. The organ introduces the hymn “O praise ye the Lord!” drawing together the soloists, the choir and the magnificence of the New College organ (here played by Timothy Wakewell). The influence of Bach is detectable in the structure, showing the depth of Parry's understanding of wider European sacred music.
It's entirely apposite, therefore, to hear Mendelssohn's Sechs Sprüche in this context, given how Mendelssohn acknowledged Bach. Mendelssohn's oratorios and other works were received with such enthusiasm in this country that he is effectively a British composer by adoption. These six motets date from 1843-1846 and were written when Mendelssohn was Generalmusikdirector to the Hohenzollerns in Berlin, and reflect the Prussian pietist aesthetic. The songs are a capella, their beauty unadorned, so to speak, the blending of voices reminiscent of the early Lutheran Church, of Heinrich Schutz and even of Palestrina. Each motet addresses Christian themes – Christmas, New Year, the Ascension, the Passion, Advent and Karfreitag (Good Friday), and are readily adaptable for liturgical use.
Parry's Songs of Farewell can thus be heard in context, their contrapuntal clarity built on firm foundations. Though not entirely secular, they aren't religious in any restrictive sense, but reflect Parry's interest in ethical issues. "My Soul there is a Country", sets a 17th century text by Henry Vaughan. The “country” here isn't a nation in the modern sense, but a place beyond “foolish ranges” where grows “the flower of Peace, the Rose that cannot wither”. “I know my Soul hath Power” places moral responsibility on the individual. “I know myself a Man, which is a proud and yet a wretched thing”. “There is an Old belief” refers to the idea “old friends” shall meet again after death “Beyond the sphere of Time and Sin”. God appears in “At the round Earth's imagin'd corners”, to a text by John Donne, the vocal setting radiant, voices subtly and beautifully parted. “Lord let me know mine End” is poignant, given that by 1918, Parry's health was declining. He didn't live to hear the Songs of Farewell performed as a group at a memorial concert in his honour, at Exeter College Chapel with the combined choirs of New College, Christ Church and the Oxford Bach Choir, under Hugh Allen, Parry's friend and successor at the Royal College of Music.
As a bonus, Parry's Toccata and Fugue for organ in G major and E minor, from 1912, written for an organist who lost his right arm in battle in 1917 but survived. When Hugh Allen performed it at New College a few years later, he played with one arm tied behind his back. In this “intense, elliptical work, writes Robert Quinney in his excellent notes, “the advanced chromaticism and sometimes dense texture is reminiscent of the neo-Bachian form and harmony of Max Reger”. Just as there's a case to be made for Parry as the father of modern British music, he has a place in the wider European mainstream.
Please see my other posts on Hubert Parry, including


Parry Symphony no 4 - Rumon Gamba, BBCSO Chandos


Parry Twelve Sets of English Lyrics from SOMM Vol 1 Vol 2 and Vol 3


Parry Symphony no 5 at the Proms 2017


Parry and the Battle of Jutland

and much more

Ten years - Oxford Lieder Festival 2011

Ten years of the Oxford Lieder Festival!  The Oxford Lieder Festival 2011 is the most important song festival in this country, and attracts international interest.  Sholto Kynoch and Oxford Lieder prove that those who believe passionately in what they do can achieve great things. The Oxford Lieder spirit is exciting because it's a mix of enthusiasm, deep knowledge and genuine love for the art of song performance. Support it and be there.
 
Public booking is now open, so please make plans. Oxford's not that far from London and the two key weekends are unmissable. October is perhaps the best time to be in Oxford, since the crowds are gone and, in the mist, the city takes on melancholy, timeless romance. Wonderfully atmospheric. That's the Holywell Music Room, where most concerts take place. (Photo : Peter Trimming)  It's the oldest public music room in the world. Mozart, Handel and Haydn played here, and many others. It seats only 150 people, ideal for a genre like Lieder where intimate, personal communication is of the essence. No-one makes big money from audiences this size, so that's all the more reason to support the Oxford Lieder ethos.

This year's programme is ambitious. Wolfgang Holzmair, Hakan Vramsmo, James Gilchrist, Miah Persson, Roderick Williams, Felicity Lott, Thomas Allen,  Florian Boesch, Mark Stone, Sarah Connolly, Birgid Steinberger, Graham Johnson, Anna Larsson, and many others. Many big names appear at Oxford Lieder long before they reached the really big time. This year Gary Griffiths and Marcus Farnsworth, for example, who have already made an impact. Indeed, one of the many fine things about Oxford Lieder is the way it nurtures talent, for the young are the lifeblood of the future.

Only three concerts featured in the first festival in 2001, but they were the three Schubert song cycles. cornerstone of the genre. This year the first weeked (14th to 17th October) is an intensive immersion in Schubert, where nearly everything he wrote for voice will be included. All day and evening, plus talks!

The second weekend  (22-23 October) will be worth travelling much longer distances than usual for it's an immersion in Scandinavian song, long a speciality of Oxford Lieder.  Rangstrom, Nystroem, Stenhammer, Petersen-Berger etc, featuring singers like Miah Persson who normally would play much bigger houses like Glyndebourne but sings at Oxford Lieder because they're reaching an audience who knows and cares.  Book for this straight away, even if Swedish song is new to you, because it's a treasure house of fascinating gems.

Thius year's Festival features no fewer than 33 recitals, as well as talks before every evening concert, a 2-day study event looking at Wagner and his influence on Liszt and Wolf, the launch of Volume 2 in Oxford Lieder’s recordings of the complete songs of Hugo Wolf, (please see review of Vol 1 HERE).

Oxford Lieder is committed to commissioning new work. This year's composer is award-winning Charlotte Bray, who has written a song cycle for baritone and piano based on the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, the eccentric Portuguese fantasist. (Lots more about Pessoa on this site, please search on "Pessoa"). Roderick Williams sings, so this should be a highlight. (27th October)

Central to the Oxford Lieder Festival philosophy is the idea of giving back to society something of what Lieder has given us : the joy of song.  Hence the very much acclaimed residential masterclass, which give intensive, specialist development for experienced pairs of singers and pianists. Yet anyone can experience the pleasure of singing - lots of work is done with schools, with amateurs as well as professionals.

I've supported the Oxford Lieder Festival since year two, so naturally I sing its praises, but there's quite a big circle of long-term and new supporters for the simple reason - it's unique and an extremely important contribution to the art of song and performance. For more information, see the website and book soon.

Faust Feast, Oxford

"In the basement beneath the rolling Quad of Trinity College, a scholar is preparing to offer the devil his soul in exchange for absolute power".

A major festival of Faust related plays, concerts and films take place now in Oxford. Few places could be better posed for true Faustian atmosphere - gargoyles, medieval colleges, cobbled alleyways and above all, ancient libraries, filled with arcane and ancient wisdom. And, one might add, Faust-like scholars buried in books. But some of the "nerds" that have haunted these halls have gone on to unimaginable things and often they don't have to sell their souls. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, who created the World Wide Web, who was at Queen's.

Two versions of Christopher Marlowe's Faust. One by Creation Theatre Company takes place in Blackwell's Bookshop, next to the Quad at Trinity. Imagine, the reality of a bookshop famed for its erudiite stoock, but actors wandering about. Very apt. "Ile burne my bookes!"

Another staging of Marlowe's Faust runs from 9th to 13th February in Corpus Christi College auditorium. Arthur Kincaid directs and acts as Faustus. A true town and gown production, half students, half normal locals. Interesting too, that these productions will use slightly different editions of Marlowe as well as different settings.

Goethe's Faust gets a much welcomed outing from 24th to 26th February in Queen's College Chapel with the Eglesfield Players. A modern translation, staged in a chapel, with a chorus in the cast, the production will "bring all the dramatic (and comic) potential without losing sight of its academic and religious debate" and its resemblance to Oxford life over the ages.

George Lord Byron's epic Manfred gets a reading by professional actors in New College Chapel on March 27.  Manfred of course inspired Schumann, but it's not a piece that lends itself easily to the stage, so hearing it read by people who know drama should be a good experience.

There's so much Faust-inspired music it's hard to imagine it in one concert - Mahler, Busoni, Berlioz, Gounod etc. So see what they do on 5th March at Corpus Christi. The films are Istvan Szabo's Mephisto based on the novel of Klaus Mann and Faustus a ten-minute art piece shot in Merton Chapel.  They're not showing F W Murnau's classic film Faust, but you can watch that on this site  in FULL DOWNLOAD. For more information contact the Oxford Faust Festival on email oxfordfaustfestival@gmail.com. Prices are low, and the Films are free but this is such an adventurous project, it's worth making an effort to participate.

Pre Raphaelites and Italy - Oxford Ashmolean

Special exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy opened this week at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and runs until December.  Everyone knows the famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings of blowsy women, medieval and biblical myth. This exhibition, however, shows how they came to be "pre-Raphaelite" in the first place. They wanted to be "Pre-Raphael", going back before the baroque.

Romantics went to Italy to imbibe Classical antiquity and discovered sunshine. The Pre-Raphaelites, though, differed from Goethe and Turner in that they made their art for middle class Victorian society. Craft as much as High Art. This exhibition places them firmly in a stream of idealistic 19th century thought.

Just like Goethe, John Ruskin went to Italy to study. He recorded what he saw as literally as possible.The minute detail shows his craftsmanship. Ruskin didn't do people or have real relationships, not even with men, but he inspired others who were better artists. Hence the Pre-Raphaelite thing for fancy furnishings and perfect detail. Photography's killed that kind of art. When rich hippies discovered the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1960's what drew them was the way the exaggerated reality of these painting becomes psychedlic and unreal.

But back to Italy: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though British in many ways, identified with Dante Alighieri.  Hence numerous paintings, pen and wash sketches and writings on the theme of Dante and Beatrice. In fact,  his relationships with women were an extension of this. Rossetti liked unattainable women, apart from Fanny Cornforth, the hooker whose portrait screams out of the wall where other Pre-Raphaelite goddesses hang.

Above is Rossetti's Dante painting Angels, where the poet is seen as obsessively drawing angels that remind him of Beatrice. His friends try to distract him. Perhaps the woman is telling the priest that Dante's "got issues". Meanwhile, outside the cramped studio, nature, growth, freedom. The studio is not all that dissimilar from cramped Victorian morality.

Don't go to this exhibition expecting the usual army of famous, luminous paintings, which you can see anywhere, like on postcards and CD covers. Instead, go to the Ashmolean because this show is thoughtful and scholarly. Many pictures aren't normally on display, like the etchings and line drawings. This is your chance! Some are borrowed from Tate Britain and Italy, and some from private collections.

Oxford was a Pre-Rahaelite hotspot. Ruskin went to college here, accompanied, significantly, by his mother. Janey, the raven-haired muse Rossetti loved and William Morris married, grew up in a hovel in the narrow alley that leads to the 12th century Turf Tavern, which leads onto Holywell Street. Oxford's gargoyles and medieval corners are a part of the Pre-Raphaelite ethos.

So it's even more interesting that the Asmholean presents the Pre-Raphaelites in a wider, European context. One important group were the "Etruscans" who painted wide angled horizons, imaginging a world as people-free as an Etruscan dream. Their leader was Giovanni Costa, an Italian patriot who hung out with Garibaldi and influenced Frederick, later Lord Leighton, whose elaborately-decorated house is now a London museum.

This exhibition was curated by the Ashmolean for display in Italy, hence the Italian Connection. But here were other European art movements inspired bty Italy, too, such as the German Nazarenes, one of whose followers was Wilhelm Henschel, husband of Fanny Mendelssohn. European art was not insular. Decades before the Pre-Raphaelites, the Nazarenes were doing their thing in Rome, Berlin and beyond. Now there's another theme for an exhibition.

Dichterliebe - Aung San Suu Kyi

In March, 1999, Michael Aris passed away. He was the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident, who is still under arrest in Myanmar on trumped-up charges.  Here they are in happier times, in Burma, in 1973.

Aris was an authority on Himalayan Buddhism at Oxford, so a memorial was held for him in the theatre at Wolfson College. His identical twin Anthony is also a Buddhist scholar, so it was uncanny to see him at the memorial, But in many ways, that's karma.

Karma too, in the form of the memorial, a performance of Dichterliebe, for it was Michael and Suu Kyi's favourite song cycle, and meant a great deal to them.  Schumann won Clara only after years of separation and struggle. Although Dichterliebe was written to celebrate their wedding, the cycle is infused with a sense of uncertainty, as if happiness might not last. Only a few years into their marriage, Schumann became ill and died. Michael and Suu Kyi at least enjoyed some years of happiness before destiny called..

So this Dichterliebe was very  special indeed, emotionally very powerful. Let no one say that extra-musical impressions don't count. They do. We would not be human if we responded to music without emotion. Even the most abstract sounds are processed by who we are. Not all emotion needs to be effusive, heart-on-sleeve, but it's there, because people are not machines.  Sometimes simplicity is all the more sincere.

Mark Padmore sang this Dichterliebe with Julius Drake at the piano. It was a wonderful performance. Previously I'd only heard him sing baroque, lute songs and  Henze's Six Songs From the Arabian (sorry, but it wasn't good) but this Dichterliebe had me almost in tears. It was an experience I'll never forget.

Oddly enough what sticks in my memory too is the strawberries we were served at the end of the meal. Incredibly ripe and fresh.  We ate that crop, but offshoots of the plants have been growing again, year after year. Suu Kyi won't taste strawberries again, in prison, far away in tropical Burma, and Michael is dead. But they must have enjoyed the first strawberries of summer in the past, just as they once enjoyed Dichterliebe. She has grown old, suffering for her people and her ideals. I don't know if she'll be vindicated in her lifetime, but her courage is a symbol, for Burma, and for people everywhere who stand up for what is good, against all odds. Please seemy other posts on Aung San Suu Kyi by following the labels below and support the Burma Campaign and spreade the word by giving the new boiography to your friends.    The book is REVIEWED HERE.