Ludus Baroque
Richard Neville-Towle
Mary Bevan soprano
Ed Lyon tenor
Handel Song for St CeCilia’S day
look down HarmoniouS Saint ConCerto groSSo in B flat op 6 no 7
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
Song for St Cecilia’s Day hwv 76 Look Down, Harmonious Saint hwv 124
Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 7 hwv 325
Mary Bevan soprano
Ed Lyon tenor
Ludus Baroque
Oliver Webber orchestra leader
Will Dawes chorus leader
Richard Neville-Towle conductor
Delphian Records and Ludus Baroque gratefully acknowledge support from the following in making this recording: Terpsichore Trust, the Binks Trust, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Plum Trust, Mrs Norah Helen Spurway’s Charitable Trust, Mr David McLellan, Mr Hedley Wright and many other individual donors.
Recorded on 8-10 August 2011 in Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh, by kind permission of the Minister and Kirk Session
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: John Christ
Booklet editor: Henry Howard
Cover image: volcanic lightning, Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, April 2010 © Science Photo Library
Photo credits: © Stuart Barrett Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
Song for St Cecilia’s Day
1 Ouverture [00:00]
2 From harmony, from heav’nly harmony (Tenor recitative) [00:00]
3 From harmony, from heav’nly harmony (Chorus) [00:00]
4 What passion cannot music raise and quell? (Soprano air) [00:00]
5 The trumpet’s loud clangour (Tenor air and Chorus) [00:00]
6 La Marche [00:00]
7 The soft complaining flute (Soprano air) [00:00]
8 Sharp violins proclaim (Tenor air) [00:00]
9 But oh! what art can teach? (Soprano air) [00:00]
10 Orpheus could lead the savage race (Soprano air) [00:00]
11 But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r (Soprano recitative) [00:00]
12 As from the pow’r of sacred lays (Soprano and chorus) [00:00]
Concerto Grosso in B flat Op. 6 No. 7
13 Largo – Allegro [00:00]
14 Largo e Piano [00:00]
15 Andante [00:00]
16 Hornpipe [00:00]
Look Down, Harmonious Saint
17
Look down, harmonious saint (Tenor accompanied recitative)
Musick! That all-persuading art (Tenor recitative)
Sweet accents all your numbers grace (Tenor air) [00:00]
Total playing time [00:00]
Song for St Cecilia’s Day
After the success which Handel had enjoyed in 1736 with his setting of John Dryden’s great Cecilian ode Alexander’s Feast, it was inevitable that he should, sooner or later, investigate the same poet’s Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687. Brimming with the same extraordinary vividness of detail as Alexander’s Feast, and with the same metrical virtuosity, the Song was the earlier of the two odes which Dryden had contributed to London’s annual St Cecilia’s Day celebrations. Naturally, therefore, it approached its theme more simply but more broadly. In fact, it provided a fair survey of all that music had meant to civilisation from the myth-makers and cosmologists of the ancient world down to the poets and musicians of the late seventeenth century. Music was the founding principle of cosmic order (stanza I); its divine origins were instinctively recognised by men (stanza II), not least because, to the question ‘What passion cannot music raise and quell?’ the answer is that it can raise and quell them all: martial, erotic, sacred (stanzas II-V); the magical powers once confined to mythology have been brought down to earth by St Cecilia (stanza VII); but as music had, in the beginning, been the divine principle of cosmic order, so, on the Final Day, it will be the force that dissolves the universe (final stanza).
When Handel took up the poem some fifty years later, in 1739, he found the associations which Dryden made between the human passions and the various musical instruments entirely congenial: ‘the trumpet’s loud clangour’, ‘the soft complaining flute’, the ‘sharp violins’, ‘the sacred organ’; for the trickier case of ‘Jubal’s chorded shell’ he supplied a ’cello. And one of the delightful features of the Song is the conspicuous part which these instrumental colourings play in the central sequence of arias. In several of them the featured instrument is accorded the same kind of interpretative freedom that a first-rank singer of the day would have expected to enjoy; and the instrumental ritornellos tend to be proportionally longer than in most Handel arias, because they do not simply frame the singing, they are demonstrations of the powers of which the poem speaks. Two of the arias stand slightly apart from the general scheme. In ‘The trumpet’s loud clangour’ the communal nature of the passion concerned prompts Handel to enlarge the picture with chorus and an additional instrumental march; while in his setting of stanza VII he abandons aria for accompanied recitative after the third line. According to an anecdote recorded at the London Society of Antiquaries, Handel regarded the hornpipe as a dance particularly suited to English taste. So, by using that particular dance to depict the ‘savage race’, is he having a private joke at the expense of his London patrons?
The creative power of music is splendidly evoked in the setting of Dryden’s first stanza, to begin with groping its way through the formless darkness, but finally closing in a blaze of glory created from the simplest things: diatonic 4-part harmony, scales (‘thro’ all the compass of the notes’) and pedal notes (‘the diapason closing full in Man’). Nor is the grandeur of the scene compromised by the touch of humour when ‘the tuneful voice … from high’ has the atoms leaping to attention. The resplendent D major of all this is balanced by more resplendent D major in the ‘Grand Chorus’ that closes the work. Its start shows Handel at his most rhetorically thrilling, with the angel’s unaccompanied solo soprano ringing out in space and answered phrase-for-phrase by full choir and orchestra; in the same style she leads bravely on into the gathering shadows of the ‘last and dreadful hour’.
But whatever can Dryden have expected a composer to do with his vision of universal dissolution, of music not tuning, but untuning the sky? It might just be conceivable as an imaginative feat for a post-Beethoven German Romantic, but hardly for one of the poet’s contemporaries, and still less for an eighteenth-century composer as affirmative as Handel. After the last trump has sounded, he embarks on a chorus vast enough indeed to navigate the whole (diatonic, tonal)
universe, but bent less on dissolving it than on reinforcing its ‘flaming ramparts’ with adamantine counterpoint.
Concerto Grosso in B flat Op. 6 No. 7
It was proving a fruitful autumn. Having composed the Song for St Cecilia’s Day in 10 days in the latter part of September, Handel took a few days off before embarking on the composition of the twelve ‘Grand Concertos’, which were ready before the end of October. He was preparing for the first theatrical season he had ever attempted without any Italian opera in his repertory, and had decided, in Donald Burrows’ charming metaphor, ‘to lay down a cellar of masterpieces’ against every eventuality. The first public performance of one of the concertos (unfortunately it is not known which) was indeed given at the premiere of the Song , on St Cecilia’s Day itself, 22 November 1739.
In composing his concertos purely for strings Handel was certainly paying some kind of tribute to Arcangelo Corelli – long dead by now, but in Handel’s Roman years an influential colleague – whose own Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, remained, in Britain at any rate, the best-loved orchestral music of the age. The B flat concerto is the only one of Handel’s set which makes no use of a concertino group of soloists, except such
as the performers choose for themselves at the ad libitum cadence points; and it is one of the finest examples of what Arthur Hutchings described so enthusiastically in his classic and idiosyncratic book on the Baroque Concerto: ‘[When a whole piece] seems to have grown by impulse, and when both the ideas and their growth are of superb quality, we can hardly praise it more highly than to say that it sounds spontaneous throughout, and still sounds so when we hear it for the hundredth time.’ There are five movements, but each except the second moves away from its home key at the close to provide a harmonic link into what follows.
1. Largo – 2. Allegro
The concertos contain no better example of the kind of opening movement that so impressed John Hawkins when he heard Handel playing the organ: ‘When he gave a concerto, his method in general was to introduce it with a voluntary movement on the diapasons, which stole on the ear in a slow and solemn progression; the harmony close wrought, and as full as could be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art, the whole at the same time … giving the appearance of great simplicity.’ It provides an admirable foil for the following movement, the most friskily capering of all Handel’s fugues, which wittily grows out of a subject sometimes described as being
‘on one note’. In fact the subject is one of accelerating repetitions of a single note, and the capering begins in its fourth bar. It is the countersubject, however, which chiefly supplies the episode material, notably a fournote figure which leaps about in the void as eagerly as the elements ‘cold and hot and moist and dry’ in the first movement of the St Cecilia Song.
3. Largo e piano – 4. Andante – 5. Hornpipe
The second Largo returns to the dark colouring of the first movement. An unusual, but ostensibly straightforward design of four 10-bar phrases of which the last is the same as the first (except in the viola: a typical Handelian idiosyncrasy), is disguised by the exceptional richness of the detail, with entwining violins and bass all sharing in the unfolding of the melody, and by the sheer amplitude of the phrasing that results from this.
Amplitude of phrase is no less the hallmark of the final movements, an Andante in ritornello form, and a hornpipe in a ‘simple’ binary form of two repeated halves. In the Andante the very gentleness of the music makes this imaginative energy the more unexpected: the lulling sing-song repetitions of the ritornello itself (the first four bars) frame episodes in which the first violins flow along, rarely repeating themselves, always with further
fresh thoughts on the matter in hand: one thing just leads to another, one might say. As for the ‘simple’ hornpipe, it is surely one of Handel’s most dazzling improvisations. The first violins dance on and on, never pausing for breath, and providing all the music’s rhythmic vitality with rather little support from the inner voices. Even the basses break out from their heavy-footed stamping only to salute in passing the occasional harmonic landmark.
Look Down, Harmonious Saint
Sometimes also known as ‘Praise of Harmony’, this miniature cantata for tenor, strings and continuo was composed in 1736, apparently intended to serve as a supplementary item at performances of Handel’s setting of Dryden’s ode, Alexander’s Feast. In fact it was never so used; instead a revised version for soprano voice was incorporated into a more extended Italian cantata, Cecilia, volgi un sguardo, which was indeed sung at early performances of Alexander’s Feast in 1736 and 1737.
The English words are by Handel’s friend and occasional librettist, Newburgh Hamilton, who claimed to have been instrumental in persuading Handel to set Alexander’s Feast in the first place, and who had organised Dryden’s verses into recitatives and airs and choruses for Handel’s greater convenience.
To form a closing chorus Hamilton had added some lines of his own, taken from his 1720 ode The Power of Music ; and it was from this same ode that the text for the present cantata was taken.
Notable in the accompagnato setting of the first quatrain is the way in which key words – ‘harmonious’, ‘celebrate’, ‘Heav’n’ – are picked out with a rhetorical finesse which Purcell might have applauded. In the aria too, one of the longest and most virtuosic Handel ever wrote for tenor voice, it is the occasional detail in the text that fired his imagination. Solemn adagios punctuate the flow of the music to invoke ‘sweet accents’, while formidable flights of coloratura are devoted to the ‘trembling strings’. The expressive core of the aria is found, however, not in all this virtuosity, but in the extensive and richly harmonised central section (quatrain 4).
© 2012 David Kimbell
David Kimbell is Professor Emeritus of Music in the University of Edinburgh, now living in the Fens. He continues his scholarly work on Handel and aspects of Italian opera.
Song for St Cecilia’s Day
1 Ou V erture
2 I From harmony, from heav’nly harmony, This universal frame began: When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, ‘Arise, ye more than dead.’ Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And Music’s pow’r obey.
3 From harmony, from heav’nly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Thro’ all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.
4 II What passion cannot Musick raise and quell! When Jubal struck the chorded shell, His list’ning brethren stood around, And, wond’ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound: Less than a God they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell, That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot Musick raise and quell!
5 III The Trumpet’s loud clangour Excites us to arms, With shrill notes of anger, And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund’ring drum Cries ‘Hark! the foes come; Charge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat!’
6 La MarCH e
7 IV The soft complaining Flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling Lute.
8 V Sharp Violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains, and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame.
9 VI But oh! what art can teach, What human voice can reach, The sacred Organ’s praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their heav’nly ways To join the choirs above.
10 VII Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees uprooted left their place, Sequacious of the Lyre;
11 But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r: When to her Organ vocal breath was giv’n, An angel heard, and straight appear’d Mistaking Earth for Heaven.
12 Gra ND C HOruS
As from the pow’r of sacred lays
The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator’s praise To all the bless’d above; So, when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The Trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune the sky!
Look Down, Harmonious Saint
17 Accompanied recitative
Look down, harmonious Saint, whilst we Do celebrate thy art and thee! Of Music’s force the wonders show, The most of Heav’n we here can know.
Recitative Music! that all-persuading art Which soothes our griefs, inspires our joys, Soft love creates, stern rage destroys, And moulds at will each stubborn heart.
Air
Sweet accents all your numbers grace, Touch ev’ry trembling string, Each note in justest order place, Of Harmony we’ll sing.
It charms the soul, delights the ear, To it all passions bow, It gives us hope, it conquers fear, And rules we know not how.
Newburgh Hamilton (1691-1761)
Choir
Soprano
Nicola Corbishley
Ruth Provost
Susannah Vango
Emma Versteeg
Emma Walshe
Amy Wood
Alto
Catherine Backhouse
Dan Collins
Rory McCleery
Martha McLorinan
Tenor
Will Balkwill
David De Winter
Graham Neal
Ashley Turnell
Bass
Chris Borrett
Will Dawes leader
Johnny Herford
Edward Jones
Bartholemew Lawrence
Orchestra
Violin
Oliver Webber leader
Jane Norman
Sarah Bevan Baker
Ruth Slater
Ellen O’Dell
Fiona Huggett
Viola
Rachel Stott
Wendi Kelly
Chris Suckling
Anna Holmes
Bass
Liz Bradley
Flute
Rachel Moss
Oboe
Mark Baigent
Belinda Paul Bassoon
Ursula Leveaux
Zoe Shevlin
Trumpet
Simon Desbruslais
Sandy McGrattan
Timpani
Alan Emslie
Lute
Paula Chateauneuf
Chamber organ / harpsichord
Jan Waterfield
Biographies
Ludus Baroque Twice a year some of the UK’s finest baroque musicians and young vocal soloists come together in Edinburgh’s Canongate Kirk to give sell-out concerts of the great works of Bach and Handel. Ludus Baroque was formed in 1997 by Richard Neville-Towle, whose passion for this music has helped make Ludus’s events unmissable in the early music community. The handpicked chorus comprises a selection of young singers recognisable from Britain’s finest choirs, including the Gabrieli and King’s Consorts, Monteverdi Choir, Polyphony, the Sixteen and graduates from the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. Ludus Baroque’s first commercial recording, of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, was issued by Delphian Records in 2010 (DCD34094); the group’s relationship with Delphian represents an exciting opportunity to explore lesser-known works of the baroque era as well as some of the giants of the repertoire.
richard Neville-towle was educated at Durham University and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, preceded by spells as organ scholar at Ely Cathedral and the Royal School of Church Music. He founded Ludus Baroque to fulfil his passion for the performance of baroque masterpieces on
period instruments, and continues to relish the pleasure in playing this wonderful music with performers of the quality and sense of fun that Ludus is fortunate to attract. In addition to directing Ludus Baroque projects, Richard is Director of Music at Canongate Kirk and conductor of Edinburgh’s Really Terrible Orchestra, a celebrated community orchestra which encourages participation regardless of musical ability.
Mary Bevan studied at the Royal Academy Opera with Lillian Watson and Audrey Hyland, and read AngloSaxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge. She received various awards and prizes at the RAM, and was a member of the Royal Academy Song Circle, and the soprano soloist for the Kohn Foundation Bach Cantata Series. Mary made her English National Opera debut as Rebecca in the world premiere of Two Boys by Nico Muhly. Her other operatic highlights include Barbarina Figaro (Garsington), Despina Così (Vignette Productions) and Papagena Magic Flute (British Youth Opera). Mary is currently an Associate Artist of the Classical Opera Company, with whom she has recently sung Thomas Arne’s Alfred and Handel’s Apollo e Daphne. At the RAM she sang Iris Semele under Sir Charles Mackerras, Despina and
Emmie Albert Herring. On the concert platform, Bevan’s recent highlights include St Matthew Passion, Israel in Egypt, and Nelson Mass with the Hanover Band, St John Passion (Spitalfields Festival), Messiah and Britten Les Illuminations with the English Chamber Orchestra, Christmas Oratorio, Haydn Theresien-Messe and the premiere of Ireland’s Like as a Hart (Cadogan Hall), and Rutter Requiem under John Rutter (Royal Albert Hall). Also an emerging recitalist, Bevan recently sang Zefka in Janáˇcek’s Diary of One who Disappeared (Grimeborn Festival), a solo and also a joint recital with Sophie Bevan at the Oxford Lieder Festival, and at the Wigmore Hall with the Royal Academy Song Circle. Discography includes Fen and Flood by Patrick Hadley (Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Paul Daniel) and Handel in the Playhouse, a selection of Handel duets and songs (L’Avventura London). Current engagements include Barbarina (ENO), Zerlina (Garsington and the Birgitta Festival, Estonia), Pamina (West Green Opera), Tamiri Il re pastore (COC), a studio recording of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.3 (BBCPO/Paul Daniel), a Hugo Wolf recital (Oxford Lieder), a Mendelssohn song recording with Sophie Bevan and Malcolm Martineau, and her debut with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Sir Roger Norrington.
ed Lyon studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio. He made his professional debut at Snape Maltings as the Evangelist in Telemann’s St Matthew Passion, since
when he has enjoyed a busy concert and opera career in the UK and throughout Europe, working with conductors including Ivor Bolton, William Christie, Sir Colin Davis, David Hill, Sir Roger Norrington and Philip Pickett.
Concerts have included Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ with the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg and Ivor Bolton (released as a CD) and also with Musikkollegium Winterthur under Douglas Boyd, Mozart Requiem with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Maxwell Davies’ Solstice of Light at the BBC Proms, the title role in a concert performance of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, extracts from Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Operatic engagements have included the title roles in Rameau’s Pygmalion for the Aix Festival, Lully’s Atys in Bordeaux and New York and Charpentier’s Actéon in Paris, as well as performances of The Fairy Queen in Paris, New York and Glyndebourne.
Oliver Webber’s education took him to Wells, Cambridge, London and The Hague, which laid the foundations for an eclectic and adventurous approach to historical performance. He is the artistic director of the Monteverdi String Band and musical director of Ensemble Serse. His skills as an orchestral leader are widely called upon in the UK and abroad: as well as leading Ludus Baroque, he is a principal and guest leader with the Gabrieli Players, the Early Opera Company, the London Handel Orchestra and the Hanover Band. As a soloist Oliver performs regularly at major London venues as well as European festivals such as the Festival Paganiniano di Carro, Italy and the Vrijdag van Vredenburg series, Utrecht. He is also a member of the Parley of Instruments, Passacaglia and the London Handel Players, and his violin and (speaking!) voice are often heard on Radio 3. Oliver makes his own gut strings, and bringing the fruits of scholarly research to life on the concert platform is a driving force behind his work. He is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and lectures throughout Europe on various aspects of historical performance.
Oliver lives in London with his wife and two sons, although they spend as much time as possible in the mountains of Liguria.
Will Dawes is the conductor of Bath Choral Society, conductor of Henley Choral Society, director of Ensemble 45 and Director of Music at the Church of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford. Will’s musical career started as a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. He studied music at the University of Edinburgh and then choral conducting and voice at the Royal Academy of Music under the direction of Patrick Russill, Paul Brough and David Lowe. On graduating, he was awarded the Thomas Armstrong Prize for Choral Direction. Will’s work with Henley Choral society has seen performances of works ranging from the St John Passion to The Company of Heaven (Britten), the latter being hailed as ‘… a musical experience as exciting as you’d get at any major London venue…’ A recent conducting highlight was a performance in Oxford of James MacMillan’s chamber opera Parthenogenesis with Ensemble 45. Aside from his career as a conductor, Will is active as a consort singer and is a member of the internationally acclaimed and multiple-Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble Stile Antico. He is a former Lay Clerk of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and has recently appeared as part of the Gabrieli Consort, Collegium Vocale Gent and Polyphony.
Handel: a lexander’s Feast
Ludus Baroque / Sophie Bevan soprano / Ed Lyon tenor / William Berger bass / Richard Neville-Towle conductor
DCD34094
Handel’s musical illustration of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, first performed in 1736, was a critical and popular success. A day after the premiere, the London Daily Post reported ‘Never was upon the like Occasion so numerous and splendid an Audience at any Theatre in London, there being at least 1300 Persons present.’
‘This lovely oratorio reflects the power of music refracted through the lens of myth, with Handel brilliantly colouring his musical canvas ... Ed Lyon reaffirms his claim to be one of the pre-eminent Baroque tenors of our time’ — The Independent, March 2011 ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Insomnia: a nocturnal voyage in song
William Berger baritone / Iain Burnside piano
DCD34116
For his solo debut on disc, William Berger has devised an ingenious sequence of seventeen songs describing a sleepless night experienced by a man who reflects on his love for an unnamed woman. From Viennese classicism to fin-de-siècle Romanticism, shadowy English pastoral to the contemporary worlds of Richard Rodney Bennett and Raymond Yiu, this wide-ranging programme is brought to nuanced life by an outstanding young baritone. The indefatigable Iain Burnside provides lucid and imaginative accompaniment. Together, their performance vividly captures the full gamut of nocturnal emotions.
‘Berger is a gem of a singer’ — Los Angeles Times, November 2009
‘Burnside handles everything with aplomb and insight‘
— Sunday Times, June 2011
allegri: Missa In lectulo meo, Missa Christus resurgens, Miserere, Motets
The Choir of King's College, London / David Trendell conductor
DCD34103
Gregorio Allegri deserves better than for his reputation to rest on just one piece; alongside his iconic Miserere, which never fails to cast its spell on listeners, The Choir of Kings College London present premiere recordings of two of his five surviving masses. Richly-wrought with consummate skill in the prima prattica of Palestrina, these radiant performances shed new light on a much-loved composer.
‘David Trendell’s fine choir glows with warmth and commitment’ — The Observer, May 2012
the airmen: Martin Shaw Songs
Sophie Bevan soprano / Andrew Kennedy tenor / Roderick Williams baritone / Iain Burnside piano
DCD34105
Despite a compositional career spanning both World Wars, remarkably little is known about Martin Shaw’s music. It has yet to enjoy the revival of interest that has benefited the legacies of close friends such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. His songs range from the whimsical and effervescent to the deeply melancholic, and will be a revelation to many. In rescuing these gems from obscurity, Iain Burnside and his singers have given new life to an unjustly neglected figure.
‘Captivating … beguiling … massively enjoyable disc’ — BBC Review, February 2011
