A Garland for the Queen

To celebrate a coronation 70 years ago, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned 10 leading composers to provide choral works in honor of the new Queen, Elizabeth II. In doing so, it was in effect recreating the famous choral compilation, The Triumphs of Oriana, that had attended the accession of Elizabeth I nearly 400 years earlier.

Sheet music

The resulting Garland for the Queen is unlikely to leave such a lasting impression, and was not particularly well received following its premiere by the Cambridge University Madrigal Society in the Royal Festival Hall. As critic John France noted, "it is conventionally regarded as being a generically substandard work from its ‘composer collective’."

That said, it is hard not to enjoy the works as prepared by the "collective" - Arthur Bliss, Arnold Bax, Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley, John Ireland, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, Alan Rawsthorne and Edmund Rubbra. The first performance was led by Boris Ord, who recently appeared here leading music for an Easter service. He and his choir then recorded the program for a 1953 UK Columbia LP.

Today's post is devoted to what I believe to be the second recording of the "garland," as done by the Exultate Singers, conducted by Garrett O'Brien. That ensemble was previously heard here in a program of choral music composed for the 1953 coronation. (Both records were issued to commemorate the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.) The Singers also have appeared on the blog in a Vaughan Williams choral program.

Ad in The Gramophone, June 1977

In his Gramophone review, Roger Fiske wrote that the Singers "have a clean fresh youthful quality, especially the two soprano soloists. They have all been meticulously trained and agreeably recorded." He did complain about the sameness of the settings and the inability to understand the texts.

The latter complaint is a valid one, especially so in that RCA did not include texts with the LP. It's a shame because the words are by notable poets of the time - Henry Reed, Clifford Bax, Christopher Fry, Ursula Wood, Paul Dehn, James Kirkup, Walter de la Mare, Edmund Blunden, Louis MacNeice and Christopher Hassall. I have partially remedied the text void by hunting down the words for six of the 10 compositions.

Southwark Cathedral

I believe this program was recorded in London's Southwark Cathedral, where O'Brien was on the music staff.

In the process of posting three of the Exultate Singers' LPs, I have yet to find a photo of the group or its conductor. There is an ensemble with the same name today, but it doesn't seem to be related. RCA managed to misspell O'Brien's first name on the cover of this LP. Sic transit gloria mundi musicale.

ADDENDUM - A friend of the blog found a photo of Garrett O'Brien and the Exultate Singers, dating from a program in Grimsby, England in 1972 and taken from the local Evening Telegraph. He admits it is "laughably poor," but we can see O'Brien at the left and note that he wore sideburns in the fashion of the time, also glasses. See below.

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.

English Songs from Wilfred Brown

The English tenor Wilfred Brown (1921-71) is best known for his recording of Gerald Finzi's "Dies Natalis," which I have cited here before as one of my favorite records.

To my knowledge, Brown did not make other records of similar repertoire. That's why I was so excited to learn of this rare recording, uploaded to another site by my friend David (aka "dances"). It presents Brown in a recital of songs by 20th century English composers, and it is a treasure to those who, like me, love this material.

David, a reader of this site, graciously offered to let me present the record here. I am very grateful for the opportunity.

Wilfred Brown

As noted, Brown is best known for his recording of "Dies Natalis"; he was a friend and associate of the composer, who appears here with three of his settings of Thomas Hardy. Brown was a member of the Deller Consort for some years. He also appeared on recordings of Handel, Purcell, Bach and Haydn, one duo recital with guitarist John Williams and a few other LPs for small labels.

This recital was made for the Jupiter label in 1962. That imprint was apparently started by the business executive T. Wallace Southam, a part-time composer who is represented by two songs on the compilation. One, a setting of "Nemea" by Southam's friend Lawrence Durrell, is quite good.

Beside Finzi and Southam, the other composers represented are Peter Warlock, George Butterworth, W. Denis Browne, Lennox Berkeley, Ivor Gurney and William Walton. Browne, like George Butterworth, perished in World War I. His setting of Richard Lovelace's "To Gratiana singing and dancing" is a high point of the program.

Several of the songs represented have appeared on this blog in other performances. Warlock's "Sleep" can also be found in the Warlock collection from Alexander Young. Butterworth's "Loveliest of Trees," the first song in his first group of Housman settings, "Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad," has appeared here before in the recording by Roy Henderson.

The Walton works comprise his "Three Songs" of 1932. In that group, Walton reset some of the many Façade pieces he composed with Edith Sitwell. These are sung, rather than recited versions that make an interesting contrast to the earlier items, two of which have appeared here before. "Through Gilded Trellises" is contained in the Sitwell-Prausnitz recording of 1949. "Old Sir Faulk" can be heard in the 1929 recording by Constant Lambert and Walton, as well as in a 1950 instrumental version conducted by Lambert, both available via this post.

Accompanying Brown is the excellent Margaret McNamee, who apparently was the singer's regular pianist.

Included in the download are texts of all songs and translations of the two Berkeley items, compiled from web sources, along with a front cover cleaned up from a web source. Good mono sound; David says there doesn't appear to have been a stereo version.

Thanks once again to David for allowing me to make this available here!

Song Settings by Finzi, Butterworth and Vaughan Williams

Gerald Finzi

Recently I have been posting recordings of the Walton-Sitwell entertainment Façade, including the original 1929 version with Dame Edith and Constant Lambert, Walton conducting. That edition came from a LP that also offered the first recordings of two notable sets of English song - Gerald Finzi's Dies Natalis and George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. Today I am posting my transfers of that music, together with the initial recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge - three landmarks in 20th century English song setting.

For Dies Natalis, Finzi set poems by Thomas Traherne, a 17th century poet and clergyman whose work is generally grouped with the metaphysical poets although his writings were virtually unknown until the 20th century. Dies Natalis is in form a cantata, with an orchestral introduction and then settings of four striking poems that convey the wonder and innocence of the newborn child.

Joan Cross

The performance is by soprano Joan Cross and the Boyd Neel Orchestra, dating from October 1946 and January 1947. The legend is that neither the composer nor the singer were happy with the results, and today the set is seldom heard. There is something to that: Cross was a noted actor, but wonder and innocence were apparently not in her artistic arsenal. Still and all, the records are not as bad as one might think. They convey Finzi's gorgeous string writing well, and the singer is sympathetic, clear and in tune.

The full power of Finzi's work would not be displayed on record until 1964, when it was taken up for EMI by tenor Wilfred Brown and the composer's son, Christopher. This remains my own favorite, one I played for myself the night my first child was born nearly 40 years ago.

Gervase Elwes

Both Vaughan Williams and his younger colleague George Butterworth set poems by their contemporary A.E. Housman, drawn from his popular collection A Shropshire Lad. The older composer set six of the poems for tenor, piano and string quartet. The work is here performed by tenor Gervase Elwes, the work's dedicatee, with pianist Frederick Kiddle and the London String Quartet. Elwes and Kiddle both took part in the first performance, in 1909. The recording dates from 1917, and is thoroughly remarkable. Elwes is more declamatory than is the norm a century later. His sense of time is flexible; he and the instrumentalists draw out the concluding "Clun" to powerful effect. It's impossible not to reflect that the sense of loss and impending doom - always implicit in Housman - were especially pronounced during the recording sessions, which took place three years into the horrific first world war.

George Butterworth

Butterworth himself was a victim of the war, killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at age 31. He left relatively few works; notably this collection and the orchestral work The Banks of Green Willow. Both he and Vaughan Williams set Housman's ironic "Is My Team Ploughing?" As you might expect, given their similar styles and close association, the settings have some similarity. Vaughan Williams left out the poem's two stanzas that dealt with football, to Housman's irritation. The composer thought the poet ought to be happy he left out a passage with the clunky couplet "The goal stands up, the keeper / Stands up to keep the goal."

Butterworth set 11 poems from A Shropshire Lad; this is the first set, which strictly speaking is called Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad. The second set, not included here, is Bredon Hill and Other Songs.

Roy Henderson

The present recording comes from 1941, with Roy Henderson, one of the finest baritones of his generation, and Gerald Moore, the most famous accompanist of the time.

The sound on all these issues is well balanced and pleasing - even the Vaughan Williams from a century ago. Using modern tools, it's possible to get good results from many such acoustic recordings, within the limits of their constricted frequency range.