November 8, 2009 - 3:00 PM PROGRAM NOTES For the second year, the Anglican Singers have detoured briefly from their usual métier of the sung evening service with the presentation of this afternoon’s concert, as part of the Music at St. James Series. In so doing, they hope to share with their listeners samples of a magnificent repertoire of choral music, sacred and secular, of the past five hundred years. The Anglican Singers, an independently organized ensemble, are artists-in-residence at St. James Episcopal Church. For over a dozen years they have led the service of choral evensong at St. James and in other venues throughout the Northeast and Canada. Choral evensong, whose roots lie deep in the Roman tradition of vespers and compline, is a fusion of those two rites, and was established in the 16th century with the foundation of the Church of England by King Henry VIII and his Protestant successors Edward VI and ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ The first three selections are motets written by exemplars of the English Renaissance – which developed over the 16th and 17th centuries – William Byrd, Richard Dering, and Thomas Tallis. William Byrd (1543-1623), whose later work heralded the English Baroque period of the 17th century, wrote the sprightly six-part unaccompanied “Sing Joyfully,” the text of which is based on the first four verses of Psalm 81. Factum est silentium, composed by a lesser-known contemporary of Byrd’s, Richard Dering (ca. 1580-1630), is the Matins Responsory in the Roman rite (Dering, like Byrd, was Catholic), celebrating the feast day of the Archangel Michael. Fellow Catholic Thomas Tallis (1505-1585), known as the father of English sacred choral music, wrote the delicate “If ye love me,” one of his contributions to the Protestant Church: a spare yet emotive motet in the early, unembellished Anglican style. The next five pieces are the work of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), perhaps best known for his towering symphonies and imposing Masses. Bruckner was a great friend of the German titan of opera, Richard Wagner (1813-1883), so much so that he dedicated his Third Symphony to his mentor and declared the Adagio movement of his Seventh Symphony as a memorial to the recently deceased Wagner. The five Bruckner motets, Ave Maria, Locus iste, Os justi, Ecce sacerdos magnus, and Virga Jesse floruit, are bookended by the luminous Ave Maria and the prophetic Virga Jesse floruit. (As a small example of how influential musically Richard Wagner was on his younger colleague, the opening strains of Locus iste bear a striking resemblance to the opening bars of Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture.) For their finale, the Singers are repeating a performance of the pastoral Mendelssohn’s Seasons which they premiered on July 19th of this year at Connecticut College with the Berlioz Historical Brass. The Dutch conductor Wim Becu led the chorus and an ensemble playing early 19th-century brass instruments, including ones with colorful names like serpent, ophimonocleide and ophicleide. Mendelssohn’s Seasons is a delightfully whimsical adaptation of Felix Mendelssohn’s (1809-1847) musical style by the contemporary British composer, arranger, and instrumentalist Clifford Bevan. And while Bevan disclaims any suggestion that his arrangement of the quartet of songs is a pastiche, it is just that – but in the best possible sense of the word. The text of this work is four poems of the celebrated American poet, professor, and linguist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Individually and collectively they are an ode to the seasons of the year: “An April Day,” Rain in Summer,” “Autumn,” and “King Witlaf’s Drinking Horn” (winter). Together words and music create a programmatic effect, apostrophizing the sun and moon of spring (with the addition, by Bevan, of a perky soprano obbligato); the abundant life-giving rain of summer; equinoctial gusts of wind-driven leaves in autumn; and winter’s frigidity relieved by the camaraderie of a convivial band of monastic topers. This lighthearted work – accompanied today by Mark E. Weaver, principal trombonist with the United States Coast Guard Band, and other brass instrumentalists – evokes strong visual images like oxen with steaming nostrils treading wet, fecund fields after a torrential summer rain, and the “almoner, the wind,” that “scatters the golden leaves” in autumn. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ So, proceeding from the sublime (the customary ambience of Anglican Singers’ offerings) to the jolly, the chorus hopes both to fill contemplative spaces of the soul through the transcendent idiom of the English and European motets, and to tickle a few funny bones and set some toes tapping with the rollicking cadences of Mendelssohn’s Seasons. Anne Carr Bingham |
