‘Boundless’
Our next performance is truly ‘Boundless’ – celebrating sacred and secular choral music spanning over four centuries, on themes of earth and sea and the celestial.
Here’s the first of two blogs we’ll be posting to introduce the pieces we’ll be performing…
The two great English composers who died exactly 400 years ago, William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, each left a legacy of wonderful vocal music but had very different characters and influences.
The pieces by Byrd in this programme are all settings of religious texts, one in English and two in Latin. Byrd was famously allowed by Elizabeth I to continue to write and publish music, despite being a Roman Catholic. His output is largely sacred music; his secular vocal music was mostly of solo songs.
One of Byrd’s pupils was Thomas Morley, who was the most influential madrigalist of his day, and who had a great influence on the young Weelkes.
For the last part of his life, Weelkes’ output was largely church music, but he is still regarded as one of the finest madrigalists. In this concert we present one of his sacred madrigals, When David heard, one his most personal works written in memory of his great friend and mentor Morley, Death hath deprived me and conclude with arguably his most famous work and a superb example of word-painting, As Vesta was from Latmos hill descending, his contribution at Morley’s request to the famous collection The Triumphs of Oriana (1601).
From the twentieth century, we feature works by Sir William Henry Harris and Sir William Walton. Harris was a lifelong Church Musician – organist, choirmaster, composer and teacher. He won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music when he was 16, and served in a number of prestigious positions in various Cathedrals and University churches until in 1933 he was appointed organist at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, a post he held until his retirement in 1961. Amongst other highlights of his performing life was conducting at the Coronations of 1937 and 1953. He is represented by his two deservedly best-loved anthems, the setting of Spenser’s Faire is the Heaven, and the John Donne setting Bring us, O Lord which was sung at the funeral of the late Queen last year.
Walton’s Cantico del Sole seems to imbue all parts of nature with almost human attributes. He wrote the piece for the Cork Festival where it was first performed by the BBC Singers under Stephen Wilkinson in 1974 – a time when the BBC maintained two professional choirs of the highest quality!
Coming right up to date, our Composer-in-Association Zoe Dixon has chosen for her third commission from the JCS to set a poem by Wordsworth. Contrasting Nature’s goodness with “what man hath done to man” was one of the ideas which sparked the emphasis of this programme. The romantic language of Wordsworth is echoed in Zoe’s setting by a harmonic richness and a very natural expression of the text.
Do look out for our next blog post about this programme – which we will perform on Friday 23rd June 2023 at St. Gabriel’s Church, Pimlico.
More details and ticketing links are on our Performances page – click here.
[‘Boundless’ photo – Sunset over the Sound of Mull, August 2022, by Christopher Williams]