Richard Davy (c1465 - 1507): St Matthew Passion; Sunday, 4:00pm

[greenilex]

Turned it on, got the prophecy about division of garments, and chickened out. Will try listening later on if I can face it all.

[BBMmk2]

I'll have to catch up on this one. I have The Sixteen/Harry Christophers in The Eton Choir Book. Be worth revisiting.

[jean]

Turned it on, got the prophecy about division of garments, and chickened out. Will try listening later on if I can face it all.

It can't have been Frank's (I'm not making any more attempts at his full name) reconstruction, because it didn't start until 4.25 I think.

I want to go back to the beginning of the concert from Copenhagen and try to work out what the first piece was, before we got the Lotti and There is a Green Hill..., but the whole of the evening until midnight counts as part 2 and it's is still going on and the iPlayer won't let me, so that will have to wait.

Meanwhile, here are Frank's thoughts about what he did with the material at hia disposal. (He has more to say about the evolution of the Passion form, and about how he thinks this particular example - which is early, but not quite the earliest to survive - might have been performed.)

...Davy followed the practice, by now presumably well-established in England, of writing part-music only for the alta vox charcters [ie those other than Christ, whose part would be chanted at a lower pitch]. Unfortunately some choruses are missing from the MSS at the beginning of the work, and some of the others lack two of their four voices. A complete performing version has been made by adapting music from other choruses to the words whose music is missing, and supplying music for the missing voices...

[jean]

I've been able to listen properly at last. That odd programming at the beginning wasn't the fault of Copenhagen - the BBC were still waiting fro the recording to arrive, so they filled in with Lambe's Nesciens Mater and the rather odd double-texted Jesus autem transiens / Credo in Deum from the Tonus Peregrinus disc. The Lotti Crucifixus and There is a Green Hill were KCC.

I'll listen to the concert later. It seemts to start from the beginning of the Passion text and the concert overran, so it probably is a reconstruction, but is it Frank's?

[Miles Coverdale]

The problem with Davy's Passion (as was noted upthread) is that it survives in a pretty incomplete state. Of the 42 polyphonic sections, nos 1–11 are completely lost, and only two of the four voices of sections 12–23 survive. On the plus side (depending on your point of view), the music, which is in quite short sections, is much easier than most of the other things in Eton. By comparison with, say, Browne’s Stabat mater, it is a teensy bit dull though...

One interesting feature of the work is that the four voices conform pretty closely to what we would now call SATB scoring. To judge from their overall ranges, the same may be said of the four-voice Magnificats for full choir in the Eton Choirbook, though they have now all been lost.

[jean]

...it is a teensy bit dull though...

That's why I was so disappointed that the Purcell Consort filled a whole LP with it!

It is also very repetitive, and clearly this is why:

Of the 42 polyphonic sections, nos 1–11 are completely lost, and only two of the four voices of sections 12–23 survive.

Frank is quite coy in the sleeve note I quoted above about how much he's had to reuse, but it's obviously a lot.

...the music, which is in quite short sections, is much easier than most of the other things in Eton.

Which means no space for those long melismata, and sudden dropping from six voices to two or three, and that rhythmic trick of three-against-two. Hence

... if I didn't know what it was, I wd've surmised Schütz, I think...

You could never confuse John Browne with Schütz!