Christmas Music by Vaughan Williams, Finzi and Rutter

To start off the holiday season this year, we have Christmas music from three favorite English composers - Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and John Rutter. These come to us from a 1983 LP by Philip Brunelle and his Plymouth Festival Chorus and Orchestra.

The "Plymouth" in the title refers not to Massachusetts, but to Minneapolis' Plymouth Congregational Church, where Brunelle was and still is the choirmaster. Brunelle has had a notable career, making quite a few recordings, some of neglected operas (he was music director of Minnesota Opera for 17 years). I have in my collection his pioneering recordings of Britten's John Bunyan and Copland's The Tender Land.

In recent years, the Plymouth Festival Chorus has become known by the new-agey name "VocalEssence."

Vaughan Williams - Carols from The First Nowell

Philip Brunelle

Vaughan Williams' Christmas cantata Hodie is fairly well known, but his second effort at a holiday work, The First Nowell, much less so. In part this is because the latter is a very late work - so late that it was unfinished at the time of the composer's 1958 death. (Roy Douglas completed it.) But it is also because the music was written to accompany a nativity play, and is largely carol settings. Vaughan Williams arranged quite a number of carols through the years, so these are not unusual in his output.

Even so, these particular carols are treasurable pieces. Three are familiar - "On Christmas Night" (here in both orchestral and choral settings), "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," and "The First Nowell." "How Brightly Shone the Morning Star" is based on a chorale that Bach used in his cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.

Finzi - In Terra Pax

Gerald Finzi's In Terra Pax is, like The First Nowell, a late work, dating from 1954, two years before the composer's death. Similar to much of Finzi's music, it is both gorgeous and poignant. An article by John Bawden explains that "its genesis can be traced to an event some thirty years previously, when one Christmas Eve he [Finzi] had climbed up to the church at the top of his beloved Chosen Hill, between Gloucester and Cheltenham. The sound of the midnight bells ringing out across the frosty Gloucestershire valleys evidently made a lasting impression on him, retrospectively providing the idea for In Terra Pax, as he told Vaughan Williams."

The bells can be heard in the opening of the work, along with the melody of "The First Nowell." The words are a setting of Robert Bridges' "A Christmas Poem," dating from 1913, together with Biblical passages. (The texts can be found here.)

Brunelle and his choir

As Bawden writes, "Finzi, perhaps more than most, must have been aware of the terrible irony of Bridges’ reassuring Pax hominibus being swiftly followed by the outbreak of World War I, yet despite this, and despite his own terminal decline, In Terra Pax is a radiant, optimistic work of great beauty and sincerity; a miniature masterpiece that unites emotions, images and the familiar events of the Christmas story into a compelling musical narrative that is at once personal yet universal."

In Terra Pax is another English work that is in part a contemplation on the English countryside, a theme that flows through Vaughan Williams' work. On this blog, we have encountered this tendency most recently in his An Oxford Elegy.

Rutter - Carol Settings

Brunelle completes his program with the open rejoicing that John Rutter's contemporary carol settings represent. The conductor begins with "In Dulci Jubilo," another theme that was utilized by Bach, for both a chorale and chorale prelude.

Rutter also sets "Away in a Manger," "The Sans Day Carol" (which is related to "The Holly and the Ivy"), the French carols "Quelle Est Cet Odeur Agréable" and "Il Est Né le Divin Enfant," "Don in Yon Forest," and "I Saw Three Ships."

Philip Brunelle and John Rutter

These all display Rutter's gift for airy but satisfying settings, often flute-led, which are most appropriate for this joyous season.

Together with the Vaughan Williams and Finzi works, they make for a diverse but unified program that is a credit to this fine ensemble.

The sound as recorded was - as sometimes happened with early digital productions - both wooly and a bit strident, which I've addressed in the transfer. The result is very good.