THE PASSING OF THE YEAR
PROGRAMME
WELCOME
Good evening and a very warm welcome to tonight’s concert, the last of our 2023-24 season before we tour to Vilnius, Lithuania next weekend. Our concert features in its first half Francis Poulenc’s Mass in G, a tour de force of a setting of the liturgical text which stretches the limits and abilities of any chamber choir. In the second half we are joined by the hugely talented Robert Allan on the piano in a performance of Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year, a virtuosic meditation on the seasons.
It has been twelve years since our first season as a choir, a season which incidentally also saw us perform the Poulenc in just our second concert, and the choir is in excellent health, with a talented pool of singers from across London of all ages and from different backgrounds. This past season we’ve performed music by Parry and Ted Hearne, performed in two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, put on our annual Christmas spectacular, and joined with our good friends the Academy of St Mary-le-Bow in a remarkable performance of Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony. Exciting plans for next season will be released in the coming months, but you can expect the usual smorgasbord of choral favourites, contemporary repertoire and immersive musical experiences!
My last note is to our singers who I wish to thank for their dedication this season, and to our executive committee who work behind to scenes to enable concerts like this evening to happen. Special thanks must go to our Choir Manager, Tom Hansell, for his management of the ensmble in this busy season. Thank you for joining us and on behalf of all in the Cantus Ensemble, I wish you and your family a happy summer. Enjoy the concert.
Dominic Brennan
PROGRAMME
Mass in G Major Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
I. Kyrie
II. Gloria
III. Sanctus
IV. Benedictus
V. Agnus Dei
INTERVAL (25 mins)
The Passing of the Year Jonathan Dove (b. 1959)
I. Invocation
II. The narrow bud opens her beauties to the sun
III. Answer July
IV. Hot sun, cool fire
V. Ah, Sun-flower!
VI. Adieu! Farewell earth’s bliss!
VII. Ring out, wild bells
THE CANTUS ENSEMBLE
Honorary patron: Sir James MacMillan
The Cantus Ensemble is an amateur choir – one of the many that thrive amongst London’s diverse arts scene – that, in its short existence of just over 10 years, has gone on to be widely recognised as one of the finest such ensembles in the city.
Every member of Cantus does something other than singing in their day job: current professions in the choir include teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, TV producers… the list goes on. In short, we all sing in our spare time because we love doing it, and we believe in the transformative power of the arts to engage friends, family, colleagues and entirely new audiences alike.
Cantus separates itself from its peers not only by often tackling fiercely challenging contemporary repertoire, but in its approach to programming – often juxtaposing the ancient and modern together with distinct narrative threads and immersive staging. We also give emerging young soloists a platform, have commissioned several new pieces from living composers, and have given the world and UK premieres of numerous contemporary works.
Founded by Dominic Brennan in 2011 and recorded by the Decca label on Rebecca Dale’s debut album Requiem for my Mother / When Music Sounds, the choir has featured on radio; on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM, Scala Radio; on TV on ITV’s Live at the Palladium and in worldwide ad campaigns for brands including Dassault Systèmes. The choir is proud to have built up strong relationships with groups including Global Radio, The Ned and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
More information on the choir’s upcoming concerts can be found at www.thecantusensemble.com
DOMINIC BRENNAN
Dominic Brennan graduated with an MA in Music from Durham University in 2010, having previously completed his BA (Hons) in the same subject. Dominic was a first study percussionist, studying percussion and timpani under Daniel Ellis and Markus Gruett. He studied conducting with Peter Stark.
Dominic founded the Cantus Ensemble in 2011 and, now in his elleventh season as Director, has taken the choir on tour to sing at prominent venues around Europe, steadily building up a reputation for innovative programming, multi-sensory concert experiences & engaging outreach projects. Under Dominic the choir has evolved into London’s finest non-professional choir with a reputation for musical excellence.
Dominic is also the Director of Hampstead Chamber Choir. When not holding a score, he can can be found with a glass of wine in hand as a member of the Fine Wine trade and founder of Clos Fine Wine.
* denotes
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THE CHOIR
Sopranos
Fern Ashby
Anna Bailey*
Stella Bracegirdle*
Harri Caddick
Anna Cooper
Abigail Ellison*
Izzie Gardner
Lisa Haseldine*
Anna Nicholl
Lucy Taylor
Anna Von Preyss*
Clemmie Warner
Tenors
Michael Cannon
Will Kilvington-Shaw*^
Tim Round*
Chris Scholtens*
Illias Thoms
Choir Manager: Tom Hansell
ROBERT ALLAN
Robert Allan is a Scottish composer and pianist currently based in London. He is interested in making work which reflects real lives, building on work techniques in documentary theatre, film, sociology, and investigative journalism to examine real events, lives and stories. Working in collaboration with artists in a diverse array of disciplines, his work is radical, bold, queer and political.
Previous and current collaborators include writer-director Gareth Mattey; videographer Sasha Balmazi-Owen; actor-dancer Richard Court; Ensemble Modern; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; Psappha Ensemble; EXAUDI; Red Note Ensemble; Nevis Ensemble; trumpeter Elisabeth Lusche; and pianists Rolf Hind and Zubin Kanga. In 2021 he joined the Sundance Institute’s Art of Practice Fellowship, developing collaborative partnerships with interdisciplinary artists in the US and around the world.
In addition to his composition work, Bob is regularly in demand as a pianist and organist, working with churches and choirs across London, is sought after as a music copyist and engraver, and is currently undertaking doctoral research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
With writer Gareth Mattey, he formed fledgling company Forensis Music Theatre in 2023, creating space to develop new political music theatre works in the UK.
Altos
Belle Allan
Philippe Barbaroussis
Eleanor Cozens
Hannah Foakes
Lorraine Crowley
Alycia Jewes*
Ellie McCowan
Eleanor Schranz*
Emma Smellie*^
Angela Waters
Basses
Max Cockerill
Quentin Couradeau
Jonathon Grant
Tom Hansell
Ed Parks*
Jonny McNaul*
Tom Robinson-Woledge*
James Townsend
Daniel Trott
Michael Woodley
Piano
soloist in the Poulenc
soloist in the Dove
THE MUSIC
Francis Poulenc is now considered to be among the most important composers of choral music of the 20th Century. Yet his early career reveals no trace of the dazzling and idiosyncratic unaccompanied choral textures so abundantly produced in the second half of his life. Poulenc’s Parisian forebears were often reluctant choralists, and his contemporaries in the modernist world were disinclined to explore an antiquated and even discredited form associated most recently with the German Romantics. Up until 1936, Poulenc wrote only one piece of choral music, and even that is a slight and whimsical offering for male voices—the Chanson à boire of 1922. Yet by the end of his life Poulenc had so fully embraced the idiom that he felt able to assert: “I think I’ve put the best and most genuine part of myself into my choral music…If people are still interested in my music fifty years from now it will be more in the Stabat Mater than in the Mouvements Perpétuels”.
A gradual reawakening of Poulenc’s dormant Catholicism (handed down by his father but neglected in the Parisian social whirl of the 1920s) was suddenly intensified after one of his closest friends, the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, was killed in a road accident in 1936. Poulenc was devastated, the more so after the gruesome details of the accident were disclosed (Ferroud was apparently decapitated), and he travelled to the great Catholic pilgrimage site of Rocamadour in the Pyrénées in search of consolation. At the foot of the famous statue of the black virgin he found it, and from this point embarked on a decade-long period of almost exclusive choral and vocal writing.
The Mass in G was composed in 1937 in memory of his father now 20 years deceased but exerting renewed spiritual influence over his son. Here we experience for the first time that fusion of playfulness and devotion which characterises Poulenc’s sacred music, sometimes referred to as ‘half monk, half hooligan’. Listening to the juxtaposition of the comically marcato bass part in the “qui tollis peccata mundi” section of the Gloria, alongside the chant-like three-part setting of “qui sedes ad dexteram patris” which immediately follows, it is hard to imagine the composer writing without a little smirk on his face.
Describing the opening of the mass, Poulenc wrote:
‘As my ancestors are from Aveyron, that’s to say mountain and Mediterranean people, the Romanesque style has naturally been my favourite. So I tried to compose this act of faith, which is the essence of the Mass, in this rough, direct style. The roughness is particularly striking in the opening Kyrie, but don’t forget that in the early Church those who had not been baptised were al-
lowed to sing it with the priest. This explains the almost savage side of my Mass.’
The aforementioned Gloria bounds upwards (writing of his later orchestral Gloria, Poulenc recalled the sight of a group of Benedictine monks playing football). He omits the Credo. ‘In the Sanctus I thought of the mingled heads of angels in Gozzoli’s fresco in the Riccardi Palace in Florence. It’s a vocal carillon.’ (Poulenc doesn’t mention here that one of Gozzoli’s angels is sticking its tongue out.)
The beautiful, vocal tightrope of a Benedictus translates the lush harmonies of a disciple of Debussy into divine language, full of grace.
‘As for the final Agnus Dei, sung by the soprano in the high register, it’s the symbol of the Christian soul, confidently looking forward to life in Heaven…forgive my immodesty, but it’s without question one of the pieces in which I’ve most completely realised my intentions.’
INTERVAL
Poulenc at his desk
Born in 1959 to architect parents, Jonathan Dove’s early musical experience came from playing the piano, organ and viola. Later he studied composition with Robin Holloway at Cambridge and, after graduation, worked as a freelance accompanist, repetiteur, animateur and arranger. His early professional experience gave him a deep understanding of singers and the complex mechanics of the opera house. Opera and the voice have been priorities in Dove’s output throughout his subsequent career. Starting with his breakthrough opera Flight, commissioned by Glyndebourne in 1998, Dove has gone on to write over 20 operatic works.
Flight, a rare example of a successful modern comic opera, has been produced and broadcast many times in Europe, the USA and Australia. More recently, The Adventures of Pinocchio, premiered by Opera North at Christmas 2007 achieves another rare feat in contemporary opera, being a successful full-length symphonically-conceived entertainment for a family audience. It too has been produced across the world.
Dove’s innate understanding of the individual voice is exemplified in his large and varied choral and song output. His carol The Three Kings, was commissioned for the famous Nine Lessons and Carols service at King’s College, Cambridge. His Missa Brevis commissioned by the Cathedral Organists’ Association was premiered by the Choir of Wells Cathedral in 2009 and has subsequently been performed in services all over the UK. A set of Canticles
for Wells was composed in 2012 along with a moving setting of a Mark Strand poem for tenor Mark Padmore. Larger-scale works with chorus include Köthener Messe and the epic and moving There was a child. Dove’s confident optimism has made him the natural choice as the composer for big occasions. In 2010 A Song of Joys for chorus and orchestra opened the festivities at the Last Night of the Proms.
Dove writes of The Passing of the Year:
The Passing of the Year is a song cycle for double chorus and piano and was commissioned by The London Symphony Chorus in 2000. The seven poems that I have set in this piece make up three ‘movements’. The first looks forward to summer, beginning with a line from William Blake (“O Earth, O Earth return!”). “The narrow bud” comes from Blake’s “To Autumn”, but is a description of summer; the rapid questions of “Answer July” suggest the quickening of the senses, the excitement of everything bursting into life, and summer’s triumphant arrival.
The second section follows the passing of summer. It begins in sultry heat, with a song from the opening scene of “David and Bethsabe” (“Hot sun, cool fire”): a girl bathing in a spring feels the power and danger of her beauty. The section ends with the sense of mortality that Autumn brings: “Adieu! farewell earth’s bliss”, from “Summer’s Last Will and Testament”, heralds the death of summer.
The cycle ends in winter, on New Year’s Eve, with a passage from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”.
This song cycle is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who died too young.
Dove in an excellent shirtTHE TEXTs
Mass in G - Francis Poulenc
I. Kyire
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
II. Gloria
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. Laudamus te. Benedicimus te. Adoramus te. Glorificamus te. Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. Domine Deus, rex caelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens.
Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe.
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.
Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus. Tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe.
Cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.
III. Sanctus
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Osanna in excelsis.
IV. Benedictus
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Osanna in excelsis.
V. Agnus Dei
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
The Passing of the Year - Jonathan Dove:
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
Glory to God in the highest. And on earth peace to men of good will. We praise you. We bless you. We adore you. We glorify you. We give you thanks for your great glory.
Lord God, heavenly king, God the Father almighty. Lord, the only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father.
You who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. You who take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. You who sit at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us.
For you only are holy. You only are the Lord.
You only are most high, Jesus Christ.
With the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.
Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.
Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
I. Invocation from “Introduction to the Songs of Experience”, William Blake
O Earth, O Earth, return!
II. The narrow bud opens her beauties to the sun from “Poetical Sketches to Autumn”, William Blake
The narrow bud opens her beauties to The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins; Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve, Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing, And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head. The spirits of the air live in the smells Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.
III.
Answer July Emily Dickinson
Answer July Where is the Bee Where is the Blush Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July Where is the Seed Where is the Bud Where is the May
Nay – said the May Show me the Snow Show me the Bells Show me the Jay!
Quibbled the Jay Where be the Maize Where be the Haze Where be the Bur? Here – said the Year –
IV. Hot sun, cool fire George Peele
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair; Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me; Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me: Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, Make not my glad cause, cause of [my] mourning. Let not my beauty’s fire Inflame unstaid desire, Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lightly.
V. Ah, Sun-flower! William Blake
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller’s journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
VI. Adieu! Farewell earth’s bliss! from “In Time of Plague”, Thomas Nashe
Farewell Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss, This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys; Death proves them all but toys; None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made, The plague full swift goes by: I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
VII. Ring out, wild bells “In Memoriam”, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.
OUR PATRONS
We are indebted to our patrons, whose support enables us to push the boundaries of what is possible for an amateur musical ensemble in London, and which allows us to plan exciting future projects.
Our sincere thanks go to:
Mr Michael Hart Silver
Joy and Clive Herring Silver
Barbara Spender Gold
If you would like to discuss becoming a patron of the choir and find out about its benefits, then please speak to a member of the choir this evening, or contact us via www.thecantusensemble.com
The choir performing with the RPO at the Royal Albert Hall