Flowers of the Field - Gurney Finzi Butterworth RVW

"As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes", so goes Psalm 103. This new recording, Flowers of the Field  connects composers affected by the 1914-1918 war, but it's real significance lies in its featuring the world premiere recording of Ivor Gurney's The Trumpet and of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera. 

Ivor Gurney was gassed at Passchendaele, and spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of mental  hospitals. The Trumpet was written in 1921 but remained unpublished and unperformed until 2007. Here we hear the edition reconstructed by Gurney scholar Philip Lancaster with full orchestration, which received its Three Choirs Festival premiere in 2010, which I was privileged to attend.  Read Philip Lancaster on the genesis of the piece HERE.  Gurney used a poem by Edward Thomas, killed in Arras in 1917, whose work he had set previously. The song begins with a resolute "Rise up! Rise up!", the City of London choir singing as one voice with forceful attack. It's a curious poem. Does the trumpet  refer to the trumpet of modern battle or to the trumpet that marks the beginning of the End of Time in the book of Revelation? Gurney emphasizes the word "Scatters" in the phrase "as the trumpet blowing scatters the dreams of Man".  Unlit stars, dew and the traces of lovers must be scattered in this strange new dawn. Percussion pounds, and the full orchestra surges. The choir cries out, unequivocally "Scatter it, Scatter it!". The clarity of the setting reflects the image of  "that clear horn"  and "the air that has washed  the eyes of the stars". No maudlin sentimentality here, but clear-sighted fervour. "Arise! Arise!" the choir sings. After Armageddon, the past will be erased, the dead will rise from their graves in a new era of hope.

Strictly speaking, the premiere recording of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera was conducted by Richard Hickox nearly ten years ago, but in a different  performing edition by Philip Thomas, made in 1990. This version is edited and completed by Christian Alexander. Hilary Davan Wetton conducts the London Mozart Players with idiomatic depth.  The Reqiuem de Camera (1924) is an ambitious piece in  four sections. An orchestral prelude leads to an extended choral setting of a poem by John Masefield  "How still this quiet cornfield is tonight". The text doesn't explicitly mention context, but the original poem was titled August 1914. Although this is very early Finzi, we can already hear how he would go on to be influenced by images of English landscape and history, and the passage of time.  Wetton, who has conducted a great deal of English choral music, gets the City of London Choir to sing with nicely hushed tones: silence is of the essence.  The same mood of timelessness prevails in the section for baritone (Roderick Williams) and orchestra: "Only a man harrowing clods".  Finzi dedicated the work to Ernest Farrar, his tutor, who was killed on the Somme in 1918, but I think it's a mistake to overstate the idea that the Requiem connects musically to Butterworth or to Gurney (whom Finzi championed). It is far more relevant to assess its relevance to Finzi's own later work, and to his songs and choral pieces. It's not as sophisticated as Intimations of Immortality, but contains, in germ, the spirit of Finzi's future greatness.

On this disc we can hear Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad – Rhapsody for Orchestra and, more of a rarity, the complete Ralph Vaughan Williams An Oxford Elegy, with Jeremy Irons as narrator. The Oxford Elegy is based on a poem by Matthew Arnold about a scholar who runs away to learn from gypsies.  He could be any man who disdains academia for real life experience: I don't think we should make too much of its connection to Oxonians who went to war, since it was written 1946-9 in the wake of a much more gruesome war.  Oddly enough, its connection to George Butterworth isn't mentioned in the booklet notes, a surprising omission in a compilation based on 1914-18. Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were so close that RVW might have not developed as he did without the influence of Butterworth, who pushed RVW creatively, and for whom RVW dedicated his Symphony no 2 "London" in 1913.

Please see my numerous other posts on Gurney, Finzi, Butterworth and RVW (use labels below)

Ivor Gurney War Elegy Prom 20

Will Ivor Gurney at last receive the recognition he is due? His War Elegy received its Prom premiere at BBC Prom 20. Gurney's poetry is so well known that it's even taught in schools. so you'd expect that there might be a ripple of interest in the print media. Did millions die to make the world a safer place for Kiss Me Kate and War Horse?

Gurney's War Elegy is fascinating because it moves as a processional. The music seems to approach from a distance. Long, surging lines suggest  forward thrust, percussion pounding like a savage metronome. How grand those long lines seem, and yet so sad. They give way to a more contemplative mood. A solo woodwind plays an elusive melody that soars upwards until it merges with the strings in a new, fuller theme which itself ends when the horns enter. Darker undercurrents make their presence: basses and cellos pick up the "march" the prercussion had earlier defined. Yet again, the full orchestra leads forwards, trumpets and horns in command. Gurney's very structure incorporates  relentless forward movement. Wave after wave, tutti and spareness. Eventually the music rises to a grand crescendo, but cut through with sharp brass calls.: not quite disssonant but enough to dispel comfort. Perhaps this is the heart of the piece, where Gurney is making his point. Soon after, the music recedes, as if those who marched past us for a moment have vanished, pulled away beyond our hearing.

Gurney was only 30 years old when he wrote the War Elegy, yet it is a singular advance on what he'd written before. He's best known for his song settings, so one might ask:   "What Gurney orchestral music?"  as Ian Venables prefaced his talk at the Three Choirs Festival in 2010.  (more here).  In the disruptions of Gurney's life, unpublished manuscripts went missing. Fragments remain, though, and now the Gurney Archive at Gloucester is being carefully mined by Venables (himself a composer), and Philip Lancaster. It's now known that Gurney wrote quite a bit, including two symphonies, and even planned an opera based on  J M Synge's Riders to the Sea, whose theme is also the relentless progression of death.  Read more here about how Venables and Lancaster worked on Gurney's War Elegy.

Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody and the War Elegy were written around the same time, and completed in 1921, but the War Elegy is much more sophisticated as music, and much more emotionally charged. What might Gurney have heard if he hadn't been incarcerated during the later 1920s and 1930s when so much was happening in musical Europe? His was an original mind, not necessarily one to follow safe convention. I've been listening to Gurney's War Elegy repeatedly (link here) because on the night of the Prom I was in Worcester for the Three Choirs Festival (more here). Just as well. At home I can cry quietly for what we lost in the tragedy of Gurney's life.

Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC SO. He conducted the Philharmonia in 2010, so he's a bit of a Gurney maven. Prom 20 also included Sally Beamish's The Singing (2006)  a concerto for accordion, played by dedicatee James Crabb. Accordions and bagpipes operate in the same way, but bagpipes make savage music. Crabbe's accordion playing beautifully evokes the horror of the Highland Clearances, ethnic cleansing in the British Isles, not really so long ago. For an encore, he played a transcription of a Rameau piece for harpsichord. Accordions are much under-rated.

Brabbins also conducted William Walton's Symphony no 1. Nice performance, without the turgid shallowness that has put me off the piece for years.

The Fourth of August

The Fourth of August 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany. When war seemed a glamorous, jolly jape.  Lawrence Binyon's poem "The Fourth of August". Yow! Rhyming couplets and a beat as rigid as marching footsteps. The banality is terrifying. Then look at the penultimate verse. At least when Elgar set the poem to his Spirit of England  (read more here) he moderated the violence. I grew up with Lawrence Binyon books on art,  never connecting him to poems like this. It's much more belligerent than the more famous "For the Fallen" but there's time for that in the years ahead.  Yow, the rhyming couplets and steady best, like automatons Lots more war poetry on this site - look up Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen.

The Fourth Of August

Now in thy splendour go before us.
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us
In the hour of peril purified.

The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thought dilate,
 We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate

For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.

Among the nations nobliest chartered,
England recalls her heritage.
In her is that which is not bartered,
Which force can neither quell nor cage.

For her immortal stars are burning
With her the hope that's never done,
The seed that's in the Spring's returning,
The very flower that seeks the sun.
 
She fights the force that feeds desire on
 Dreams of a prey to seize and kill,
The barren creed of blood and iron,
Vampire of Europe's wasted will.

Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken,
Purged by this dreadful winnowing fan,
O wronged, untameable, unshaken
Soul of divinely suffering man.

Hymnus Paradisi Howells Elgar Brabbins Prom 61

Herbert Howells Hymnus Paradisi is not a rarity. Indeed, it's considered by some to be his masterpiece, extremely well known to those interested in British choral tradition. Sowhat if it's new to the Proms?  Several recordings exist, Vernon Handley, David Hill, David Willcox and my personal favourite, Richard Hickox. So it's fitting that it was included in this Proms season with its sucession of spectacular choral extravangazas. Martyn Brabbins is a great champion of British music, but with huge experience of more contemporary music.  Brabbins conducted Howells and Elgar's Symphony No 1 with a fresh new perspective.

Hymnus Paradisi is an amalgam of private grief, public celebration and art for its own sake. Howell's only son Michael died suddenly, aged only 9. Any parent would be devastated: no one ever "gets over" such events. Howells worked through his grief with music. Hymnus Paradisi is no less than a rumination on the meaning of life and loss. As a young man, Howells was so sickly that he nearly died, and couldn't serve in the First World War, while so many of his healthy friends were killed or damaged.  The irony was not lost on him. When Howells wrote Hymnus Paradisi, he wasn't to know he'd live til 1983, but he knew his friend Ivor Gurney was incarcerated in a mental hospital, far from his beloved Gloucestershire hills.

Unlike so many Requiems and memorial pieces, Hymnus Paradisi is deeply felt and deeply personal. Although Howells is writing for big orchestra and choir, the last thing you want in performance is insincerity. Brabbins's approach emphasizes the luminous qualities in this music: high, bright textures, always ascending, refusing to wallow in self indulgence. How quietly this Preludio began, suggesting, perhaps, lost innocence. Yet already, sudden, shining chords break through. The choirs enter in hushed tones, without breaking the reverie. Only when the soloist, Miah Persson, sings, do the choirs begin to reach greater volume. The organ enters, reminding us of the force of suffering. It's interesting how Howells works the different phrases in The Lord is my Shepherd, so they aren't full blast unison, maximizing instead the poignancy of the solo soprano line "I will lift up miine eyes". Quietly, the tenor (Andrew Kennedy) repeats "The Lord is my Shepherd". Parallel songs, parallel prayers, parallel lives. This interweaving is crucial, I think, to the meaning of the work, for it emphasizes the idea that those gone are neither alone nor lost. Only then do the choirs (BBC Chorus, London Philharmonic Choir) and the BBC SO reach full crescendo.

"I heard a voice from Heaven" sings Kennedy, alone. Again the interplay of voices is critical, for in a burial service, one person takes leave from those around him and  goes out on their own. But as Howells shows it's a journey into glorious eternal light. "Wonderful, wonderful" is the holy light which receives those who die, and offers comfort to those who believe. "Alleluja!". Hymnus Paradisi ends in a glowing halo. Eternal rest, eternal bliss.

I used to do an annual pilgrimage to Chosen Hill, where Ivor Gurney would stride ahead, Howells behind him, and then visit nearby Twigworth where Howells, Gurney and Michael are buried together. Photo by Jeffrey Carter (link here)  Arguably, Gurney was  by far the greater and more original composer (and poet), and I suspect Howells knew so too, which  makes Hymnus Paradisi so moving.  I loved Brabbins's Elgar First Symphony, tightly structured and lucid, but was so wiped out emotionally by his Howells that I had to listen again to the broadcast to appreciate how well Brabbins conducts Elgar.

Ivor Gurney's secret love

Ivor Gurney's secret love? It's known that Gurney became briefly engaged to the nurse Annie Drummond in 1917 but who was Margaret Hunt? Evidently Margaret, a teacher in Gurney's beloved Gloucester, meant a great deal to him. She was the dedicatee of many works, including the song cycle By Ludlow and Teme. But relatively little is known about her. Four years after her death in March 1919, Gurney wrote a poem "On a memory". It's in manuscript in the Gurney archives, being collated by Philip Lancaster.

Read the poem and more HERE and visit the new Ivor Gurney website for news of a premiere in  Gloucester in June and a Gurney weekend at Churchdown in May.

Strange Hells

There are strange Hells within the minds War made.
Not so often, not so humiliating afraid
As one would have expected - the racket and fear guns made.

One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;
Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout
Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked low their heads
And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,
That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;
"Apres la guerre fini" till Hell all had come down,
Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen pounders hammering Hell's thunders.

Where are they now on State-doles, or showing shop patterns
Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns
Or begged. Some civic routine one never learns.
The heart burns - but has to keep out of face how heart burns.

Ivor Gurney 1890-1937

To the Prussians of England

When I remember plain heroic strength
And shining virtue shown by Ypres pools,
Then read the blither written by knaves for fools
In praise of English soldiers lying at length,
Who purely dream what England shall be made
Gloriously new, free of the old stains
By us, who pay the price that must be paid,
Will freeze all winter over Ypres plains.

Our silly dreams of peace you put aside
And Brotherhood of man, for you will see
An armed Mistress, braggart of the tide
Her children slaves, under your mastery.
We'll have a word there too, and forge a knife,
Will cut the cancer threatens England's life.
Ypres Pools - - - Mid holes on the battlefield at Ypres

More Ivor Gurney. poet and musician (1890-1937)
Click photo to enlarge

Bach and the Sentry

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.

When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man's Land again?

Ivor Gurney, poet and musician in the Somme. 

Big scoop - Ivor Gurney premiere Three Choirs

The big news at this year's Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester was the premiere of Ivor Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody. Gurney is hardly unknown. He's one of the most prominent First World War poets. He's on the school curriculum, so even 16 year olds know who he is. He's also famous as a composer of songs. So when Three Choirs presents his orchestral music, it's a major scoop.

"What Gurney orchestral music?" one might ask, as Ian Venables prefaced his talk at Cheltenham Town Hall on 12th August 2010.  It's known that Gurney wrote quite a bit, including two symphonies, and even planned an opera based on  J M Synge's Riders to the Sea, later set by Ralph Vaughan Williams. But in the disruptions of Gurney's life, unpublished manuscripts went missing. Fragments remain, though, and now the Gurney Archive at Gloucester is being carefully mined by Ian Venables (himself a composer), and Philip Lancaster.

There's enough of  Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody for Venables and Lancaster, both Gurney specialists, to produce a performing version for orchestra. Gurney began the piece around 1919, after returning from the trenches, and completed it in 1921. Nearly ninety years later, it received its premiere with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

Provocatively, Gurney starts with the same first bars as Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra -  a dramatic opening, but with a twist. Gurney deliberately wanted to counteract "The Prussians" and what they stood for. Understandable for a man who served throughout the war, though Strauss wasn't fond of "Prussians" either, being Bavarian.

The horns give way to a pastorale in which Gurney evokes the Gloucestershire countryside, with its rolling hills and spacious horizons. It's primeval. To Gurney, past and present connected in seamless flow. The ghosts of prehistoric hunters, Romans, medieval farmers, depicted in a bucolic dance theme. "Two thousand centuries of change, and strange people".

An ostinato section suggests both the heavy march of Time and the men of Gloucestershire marching innocently to slaughter on the Somme. I inherited a photo of an ancestor marching to war, passing under a shop sign that read "Butchers". Gurney said that what kept him going in the trenches was the thought of commemorating these men in poetry and music. A short, chaotic "war" section then gives way to a beautifully expansive theme, which might evoke a glorious dawn after a night of horror. It's Elgarian, in the sense of grandeur, but also Gurneyesque in that it's not triumphalist, but tender. This "dawn" opens on a gentle landscape in which you could imagine hedgerows and birds.  Nature returns, and time moves on.

A Gloucestershire Rhapsody is fascinating becuase it offers a glimpse of what Gurney might have achieved. The five sections might even have been a prototype for a more ambitious symphony. It is important and deserves much more attention than it's had from the national press, for whom the whole Three Choirs ethos seems an unknown world.  The BBC to its credit ran a news story on it. Three Choirs has always supported new music - they discovered Elgar and RVW for instance - and Mendelssohn, and Handel.  They even featured  Charles Ives a few years ago, and this year John Joubert's An English Requiem.  No doubt, if Gurney's larger orchestral and choral works had survived, he'd have been heard in the Cathedrals before now. Gurney's The Trumpet, also reconstructed by Philip Lancaster, received its premiere on 13th August in Gloucester, where Gurney sang as a chorister a hundred years ago,

Contrary to received wisdom, Gurney wasn't entirely denied music when he was locked in the asylum. At the Gurney Conference in Cambridge in 2008, there was an excellent paper based on research into hospital and other archives, which gives a tantalizing glimpse of pianos to which Gurney might have had access. In the 1920's and 30's, society didn't understand mental illness and PTSD. Veterans from Afghanistan don't get the help they deserve, so Gurney's tragedy is still relevant today.

Fortunately, Venables, Lancaster and the Ivor Gurney Archives at Gloucester may give Gurney the respect that he is due. Below is a short clip of another Gurney fragment, the slow movement for piano and violin from a larger, but unfinished work, premiered at Gresham College, which has been providing public services to learning, free, for nearly 500 years. .

Three Choirs Festival Finzi Gurney Elgar

At the Three Choirs Festival, concerts start with prayers, which is a good thing, because it reminds us how lucky we are. Without music, beauty, spirituality (of any form) what would life be?

Gerald Finzi's Intimations of Immortality is an act of faith, too, in the power of art to transcend. Relatively few composers have dared tackle William Wordsworth, whose poetry is too thorny  to adapt easily to song. Finzi took years perfecting his Thomas Traherne setting, Dies Natalis, but daringly threw himself spontaneously into Intimations of Immortality.

It's ambitious, requiring a large orchestra, a well trained chorus and a tenor with the fortitude to sustain 45 minutes of singing against a loud background. Finzi attempts to match the grand, stirring verse of Wordsworth with an equally expansive orchestral setting. For a composer whose strength was in smaller scale chamber and choral music and song, it is quite an achievement. As Finzi quipped "it makes a hell of a noise, but rather a wonderful noise all told".

James Gilchrist is perhaps the finest exponent, against very strong competition (Ainsley, Langridge, Partridge) because he enters into the heroic spirit of this monumental piece. Against the vast forces behind him, and in the vastness of Gloucester Cathedral, Gilchrist's voice rings out resolutely. He's very moving, for he breathes meaning into what he sings, making Wordsworth's convoluted text feel personal and immediate. Get his recording, it's wonderful, the best introduction to the piece..

Like  Dies Natalis, the introduction whispers themes to come.  The orchestra is singing "There was a time, when meadow, grove and stream" before the voice comes in. The idea of unity between soloist, choir and orchestra, central to the mysticism in the piece.

 Gilchrist draws you into "the visionary gleam". "Waters on a starry night" sings Gilchrist, with the subtlest pause before and after the image, as if he's contemplating a wondrous jewel.  Then again, with "the innocent brightness of a newborn day". What miracle is happening here ? Overwhelming ecstasy that can't be explained in mundane terms, exquisitely wondrous. "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", revealed by Gilchrist's shining conviction.

The Philharmonia Orchestra, from London, are talking up a three year residence at the Three Choirs Festival,  so their playing adds a sheen much more polished than average. In time, they'll absorb Finzi's very unusual idiom, where intuition counts as much as form. The Philharmonia is possibly the finest British orchestra, steeped in European repertoire. Adrian Lucas, who conducted,  is an organist and choirmaster, long associated with Three Choirs. It was interesting to hear how these two different traditions combine. This partnership between Three Choirs and the Philharmonia could prove quite an innovation.

The Philharmonia has done quite a lot of Elgar. Here at Gloucester, Sarah Connolly was soloist for Sea Pictures, singing with heroic purpose,  Boudicca refined and cultured.

The real rarity on this programme, however, was Ivor Gurney's The Trumpet, receiving its first professional performance, 80 years after it was written.  Gurney was Gloucester born, so deeply identified with the area that, in some ways, he died of a broken heart, forcibly confined in an asylum far away. When a map of the Cotswolds was smuggled into him, he obsessively traced his old hiking trails with his fingers. If only he could have known that his music would be given high profile exposure at Three Choirs, and in Gloucester Cathedral, where he sang in the choir and learned his music.
 
Gerald Finzi would have been happy, too, for he passionately championed Gurney. I don't know if Christopher and Hilary Finzi were in the audience, (they usually are) for their presence would have felt like completing a circle.

The Trumpet, based on a poem by Edward Thomas (text here), is a short piece for choir and orchestra, recently restored in full orchestration by Philip Lancaster. "Rise up! Rise up!" sing the combined voices, "Arise! Arise!". Trumpets and horns blow alarums, the effect overall uplifting. I enjoyed this! Read more about the genesis of this orchestration of The Trumpet on Philip Lancaster's site , which is a goldmine.

On Thursday 12th, another Gurney first, the restoration of Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody was premiered by The Philharmonia and Martyn Brabbins. That is a major story, no-one's picked up on nationally, except the BBC. It deserves proper respect,so please click here for more. ease keep coming back to this site, where there's lots on Gurney, Finzi, Three Choirs, Elgar etc. and will be more, too. With the beatification of John Cardinal Newman coming up, I might also write about a true life,  real miracle that happened at the last Gloucester Three Choirs Dream of Gerontius. Read about it HERE. Miracles don't have to be fancy stuff like raising the dead and moving mountains.  But there are uncanny, inexplicable things that do immense good. PLEASE READ many other articles and reviews on this site about 3 Choirs, Ivor Gurney, Finzi, Hubert Parry, Butterworth and English music - use labels at right or search button.

"The Best of England" Parry 3 Choirs

Highnam Church is in Gloucestershire, on the estate where Hubert Parry grew up.,He learned to play the organ here as a small boy, and visited it again a few months before he died. It's not ancient but a completely new church, designed and built in 1851 by Parry's father, who also painted the frescoes. On Tuesday, St Cecilia Singers, conducted by Ashley Grote, sang Hubert Parry's Songs of Farewell.

Please read the address by Anthony Boden given on the occasion. It is extremely moving. The last Parry to occupy the estate loved this church and was also a stalwart member of the 3 Choirs Festival. He would have been at this concert, in his element, but passed away suddenly a month ago. Many in the audience knew and remembered.

Boden's speech commemorates Hubert Parry, but it also tells a lot about the ethos of the 3 Choirs festival, and why it's so unique. It is much more than a music festival, it's a community that has been growing for many generations. I love 3 Choirs because of its old-fashioned, unsophisticated charm. Indeed, I think the more you understand the genius loci, the "spirit" of the landscape and people, the more you value the music.

In Gloucester the past hangs heavily on the present. There's a timelessness in this part of the world that's hard to express. It feels very different from London, and from Aldeburgh. Different threads of Englishness. Britten did come to Three Choirs, reluctantly I suspect, and Finzi went to Aldeburgh, but I'm not sure RVW did. Very different vibes. Some London-based folk don't seem to know these alternative worlds even exist.

To quote Ivor Gurney, Gloucester born and bred :
If England, her spirit lives anywhere
It is by Severn, by hawthorns and grand willows.
Earth heaves up twice a hundred feet in air
And ruddy clay falls scooped out to the weedy shallows.
There in the brakes of May Spring has her chambers,
Robing-rooms of hawthorn, cowslip, cuckoo flower —
Wonder complete changes for each square joy's hour,
Past thought miracles are there and beyond numbers.


If for the drab atmospheres and managed lighting
In London town, Oriana's playwrights had
Wainlode her theatre and then coppice clad
Hill for her ground of sauntering and idle waiting.
Why, then I think, our chiefest glory of pride
(The Elizabethans of Thames, South and Northern side)
Would nothing of its needing be denied,
And her sons praises from England's mouth again be outcried.

 (photo credit: Phil Draper)

Gloucester 2010 - 3 Choirs Festival

Gloucester 2010, the hip new tag for the 3 Choirs Festival, which started in 1719. The longest-running music festival in the world!  It began as a meeting of the choirs of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester.and has shaped the course of English music. The massed choir tradition, the genteel propriety, the jolly unassuming mentality, all these threads flow from the 3 Choirs ethos.

The photo shows the fan vaulting in Gloucester Cathedral. There's plenty to look at too. Indeed churches are best seen at night, when shadows and light accentuate the stonework.

Every year, 3 Choirs opens with a church service, because piety is fundamental to the 3 Choirs purpose, though it's genuine piety, they don't force it on anyone else. This is the Holy Grail of religious singing. Try and catch the Complines, Evensongs, and Eucharists, because these are authentic, sung by people who believe. For people like me it's a kind of secular worship, but for many 3 Choirs people, it's central to their lives.

Elgar, of course, was a Catholic, at a time when Catholicism certainly wasn't Establishment, but 3 Choirs was part of his life, as he himself is central to the 3 Choirs Festival. This year The Kingdom on 7th August. This piece suffers sloppy performance, so avoid most "local" versions and go for the ultimate best, which is 3 Choirs. This will be spectacular, as they pull out all the stops for Elgar. Soloists are Roderick Williams, Adrian Thompson, Susan Gritton, Pamela Helen Stephen.  I'm sitting behind stage and choirs to be "within" the atmosphere.

Sunday of course is one of the big social days, with religious services as music, and hearty roast lunch. Oddly enough the big evening concert is Mahler 2, obviously chosen for the massed voices parts.  Of course M2 is spiritual, but fundamentally Mahler's mindset is too quirky to really fit group worship. Besides Evensong will be Finzi, Lo, the Full Final Sacrifice, which should be wonderful.

Gloucester 2010 will be important too because they're featuring early music in-depth. The Pipe and Tabor Society is hosting several events, Venetian and Renaissance and early English music, including a talk on one of the earliest notated carols, with origins in Gloucester itself.

Because I left it too late, I can't get to Ian Venables' talk on the orchestral music of Ivor Gurney - front line, first person research, as Venables, a good composer in his own right, is a Gurney devotee. Frustrating as anything, because it follows the Gurney Society Lunch, where all the serious fans will be. After that, a concert where Gurney's A Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Mendelssohn "Scottish" and Schumann Piano Concerto . Martyn Brabbins conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra. In London this would be a big draw,  yet here it's just one of many gems. In the evening, Monteverdi L'Orfeo.

Pity they didn't switch Monteverdi with the concert on Fri 13th which includes Gurney's rarely heard The Trumpet, and Finzi's Intimations of Immortality, with James Gilchrist, who sings it better than anyone else.  But maybe that's because the concert includes Elgar's Sea Pictures and it's Elgar Day, with talks, and the Elgar Society Lunch (important social event).

Many people who go to 3 Choirs stay the whole time, so mix and match is a good idea, but for others, it's a long drive, so concentrating connected works is better for them. For example, I'd love to go to the Roderick Williams concert on Saturday morning, but it will mean staying overnight, which is pricey. He's singing Finzi, Butterworth, Gurney, Venables and Moeran. He's just recorded a Butterworth CD with the Sussex songs. I'm looking forward to that, even though I loved Mark Stone's pioneer recording.

3 Choirs is a must if you've any interest in English music, medieval to modern. Hearing lesser known composers like Joubert (who isn't "that" lesser known, Gilchrist has recorded his songs) at 3 Choirs puts their work into context. Those who go to 3 Choirs for the whole week and soak up the social side and history know what they're doing.

This year, 3 Choirs introduces massive technological revolution - online booking for the first time! Yow! The bad news is that it's bug ridden, and no doubt they'll streamline it for next year. But it's a step in the right direction. Still, the fact that the system's so clumsy is actually quite charming, and says a lot about the innocence of 3 Choirs, which is a good thing. You can get a whiff of the old system when you hear the recorded message on the phone. Miss Marple, tweed suits, sensible virgins cycling to church through country lanes etc. .That England still does exist, so savour it while you can. PLEASE READ my more detailed reviews and articles on Gurney, Parry, Finzi, Elgar Butterworth and 3 Choirs. Use search or labels at right

June - English Song Weekend Shropshire

June in Shropshire, by the banks of the river Teme, the perfect image of England in summer. The English Song Weekend takes place in Ludlow 3 to 6 June. This is the absolute, ultimate Festival of English Song, lovingly organized by Finzi Friends, who know and care passionately about the genre. It's only held once every three years, so it really is a special occasion. People come from all over the world. Link HERE.

This year's schedule is good. Well chosen programmes. One's called "A Satnav of English song", with songs about different parts of England. It's one of Iain Burnside's witty compilations: Roderick Williams and Andrew Kennedy sing with Burnside at the piano.

But devotees come because this is a gathering of anyone who's anything in English song. It's a meeting place for old friends and new: great atmosphere. The talks and workshops are good, and quite in-depth. Being in Ludlow to hear Kate Kennedy analyze By Ludlow and Teme will make the performance specially interesting. Pam Blevins will talk on Howells and Gurney. Hilary Finch and Huw Watkins (who played Henze piano solos at the Barbican, Saturday) will discuss song in the 21st century. This is a progressive festival - new talent always supported. There's a competition for composers, and Ann Murray will give masterclasses.

Two unusual events, too. Burnside's created a fully staged theatre piece linking songs and poems about war. There'll also be another concert mixing singing and acting: different responses to poetry.

Then there's the food. Shropshire is traditional market garden and orchard country, and Ludlow is home to some of Britain's top restaurants. More Michelin starred places than anywhere outside London, including the culty La Bécasse and Mr Underhill's, both foodie pilgrimage sites. The local market (with traditional bakers and cheese makers) is so good that you can get way above average picnic stuff too.

And of course the countryside! June is the best time to explore the English countryside, everything's lush and green. Ludlow is still well preserved, medieval buildings and an old castle, no urban sprawl, a huge area of natural woods and parkland, and of course the river. That's part of the attraction, which London cannot possibly match. The pace of life here is not, perhaps, all that different from the early years of the last century, if you lie on a hillside and look out on the rolling fields around, and hear the blackbird's song:
"Lie down, lie down, young yeoman;
The sun moves always west;
The road one treads to labour
Will lead one home to rest,

And that will be the best."

Gerald Finzi's New Year's Eve Epiphany

Chosen Hill in Gloucestershire is one of those "power spots" which attract creative energy. In the early 1920's, shy, repressed Gerald Finzi started to visit. He met up with Detmar Blow and other arts and crafts types, who introduced him to exotic things like yoghurt and alternative living. In many ways, Finzi's life was an extension of the William Morris ideal.

Ivor Gurney used to come here most days, walking the 5 miles from Gloucester each way. But it was worth it – from this hill there's a panoramic view across the Cotswolds, only broken by mists on the horizon (or smog). At the top of the hill is a church tower, dangerously poised on a cliff – parts are now blocked off. Below is a tiny cottage, low slung, almost invisble from the road. On New Year's Eve, 1925, Finzi went to a party in the cottage. At midnight, they came outside, into sharp frost, the night sky filled with stars, and "heard bells ringing across Gloucestershire from beside the Severn to the hill villages of the Cotswolds".

Stephen Banfield, Finzi's biographer, calls this the "hilltop epiphany", for it released in Finzi a surge of original music. This was the inspiration for In Terra Pax and Nocturne whose sub-title is in fact New Year's Music, filled with bells and joy. Finzi needed an impetus to find himself and something happened that night under the stars. "I love New Year's Eve," he told a friend later, "Though it's the saddest time of the year..... a time of silence and quiet". And soon after asked himself "must knowledge come to me, if comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by the familiar process (of reading other's work)?" ie Finzi was learning to trust his own artistic instincts.

Chosen Hill remained so dear to Finzi that nearly 30 years later, he took Ralph Vaughan Williams up the steep hill. The new tenants of the cottage had small kids. Finzi, weakened by cancer, caught their illness and died three weeks later.

In Terra Pax was also the last piece Finzi conducted, on 6th September, at the Three Choirs Festival (which is how he and RVW came to be on Chosen Hill that week)

"A frosty Xmas Eve, when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone, where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village in the water'd valley,
Distant music reached me, peals of bells a-ringing"

Then an angel appears and sings "Fear not, fear not, fear not!" and the choir bursts into a song like multi layered pealing of bells, the orchestra throwing out chords like shards of light.

"The old words came to me by the riches of time,
Mellowed and transfigured as I stood on the hill,
Harkening in the aspect of th'eternal silence"

sings the baritone, and the choir sings "Peace, goodwill towards all men".

Song of Pain and Beauty, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott

Pamela Blevins' dual biography Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, Song of Pain and Beauty will be published by the Boydell Press in November. Based on original research and newly discovered material, Song of Pain and Beauty is the first biography of Gurney since 1978 and the only biography of Scott. It tells the dramatic story of two geniuses who met at the Royal College of Music in 1911 and formed an unlikely partnership that illuminated and enriched the literary and musical worlds in which they moved. Gurney's poetry and songs have taken their place as "part of the inheritance of England". Marion Scott, Gurney's strongest advocate, emerges from his shadow for the first time. Her own remarkable achievements as a pioneering music critic, musicologist, advocate of contemporary music and women musicians place her among the most influential and respected women of her generation.

Song of Pain and Beauty explores Gurney's relationships with his parents and siblings, with Herbert Howells, Arthur Benjman, F. W. Harvey, the Hunt sisters, Sir Charles Stanford, Alfred Cheesman, Annie NelsonDrummond, Marion Scott and others against a backdrop of their times. It provides details into Marion Scott's remarkable background -- her American and Russian heritage -- and career along with insights into her unconditional devotion to Gurney, her gift for friendship, her vision, courage, strength of character and inner spiritual depth. Song of Pain and Beauty explores Gurney's attempts to create music and poetry while struggling to overcome the bipolar illness that eventually derailed his genius, and it restores Marion Scott's rightful place in music history. The title is taken from a poem that Gurney wrote and dedicated to Scott during World War I. Song of Pain and Beauty is now available via pre-order from the publisher

http://www.boydell.co.uk/43834219.HTM

and from Amazon US

http://www.amazon.com/Ivor-Gurney-Marion-Scott-Beauty/dp/1843834219/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213217554&sr=1-1

or from Amazon UK

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ivor-Gurney-Marion-Scott-Beauty/dp/1843834219/ref=
sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216308985&sr=8-1