W. Denis Browne attended Clare and became organ scholar. He is best known for the wonderful song 'To Gratiana dancing and singing'. He was a friend of Rupert Brooke and one of the group that buried him on the island of Skyros. He died at Gallipoli.
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Reminder: today @ 3.30 p.m.Comment
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The friendly crook, of which you speak, resides in my still much-used copy of Hymns for Church & School, appropriately at No. 23.Originally posted by Roger Judd View Post
This indispensable volume includes tunes named after Cornish settlements (St Enodoc, Padstow and St Keverne) written by C S Lang, sometime Organist of Christ's Hospital, Horsham and editor of the previous incarnation of The Public School Hymn Book. All seem to have fallen into disuse, save perhaps at Christ's Hospital ('where [there] is a robust quality to the congregational singing of hymns' - CH website). Perhaps the fact that all three are in minor keys reflects the dull weather during Dr Lang's visits to Cornwall.
One of the best features of HCS is Eric Routley's 35-page preamble Hymns and their Tunes - An Historical Survey, often browsed by choirboys/girls during unintelligible sermons.
(A personal aside, Roger - We spent half term at a cottage near Tenbury: sad to feel famous ghosts in St Michael's chapel, but glad to visit St Laurence's, Ludlow with its historic organ and A E Housman's ashes; Butterworth's settings were constantly in mind, amplified by the WW1 centenary.)Comment
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Yes!One of the best features of HCS is Eric Routley's 35-page preamble Hymns and their Tunes - An Historical Survey, often browsed by choirboys/girls during unintelligible sermons.Comment
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Liked the Muhly - not his best, but nicely done, Howells had its moments, appreciated that as it was written for Clare, presumably he would have known how precise the acoustic was, so did he thus write into the piece some nice hanging lines that appear to make textures resonate?
But star of the show for me was the Litaize vol! Very sparky and spikey.Comment
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The Armstrong Gibbs tune called "Crossings" - written for Charterhouse School. It is in "Songs Of Praise" I think Durham recorded it on an "In Quires And Places" disc some years ago.Originally posted by ardcarp View PostComment
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...but sounding very un-French. And indeed the organ sounded very un-English in the rest![Gaston Litaize] Very sparky and spikey
It was a strange CE in some ways. The canticles were of interest to Clare and of some relevance to the present WW1 remembrances, but were something of a sub-Stanford harmony exercise. No reason why items in a CE should 'match' in style, but I found myself strangely unsettled by lurching from one to the next. (Probably old age.
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Yes, I agree. But W.D.B. was just 25 when he died (his main influence having been E.J.Dent) - much younger than George Butterworth (31) who had himself not yet settled in his style. If we can't recall them now, then when can we?Originally posted by ardcarp View Post...It was a strange CE in some ways. The canticles were of interest to Clare and of some relevance to the present WW1 remembrances, but were something of a sub-Stanford harmony exercise. No reason why items in a CE should 'match' in style, but I found myself strangely unsettled by lurching from one to the next. (Probably old age.)Comment
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Quite so, Pabs, and I was aware that when I wrote the curmudgeonly post above I might be offending some sensibilities. I am sorry if that applies to you, with so great a knowledge and love of that period of English musical history.If we can't recall them now, then when can we?Comment
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Oh no. Adcarp. I just feel sorry for them (and frustrated at our loss!).Originally posted by ardcarp View Post
This was a contemporary (and friend) of Arthur Bliss. Had he lived he might have lasted till the 1960s, 1970s or even perhaps the 1980s. What might that have brought us?
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Your mention of Bliss prompts me to enquire whether anyone is aware of any performances of Morning Heroes (1930) during the 1914 centenary so far. The composer's granddaughter asked the same question after two Britten War Requiem performances in Truro Cathedral recently.Originally posted by Pabmusic View Post
I would be interested to know how others regard this piece, 'the personal [response] of an eye-witness of self-sacrifice in the trenches... [after Cambridge and the RCM, Bliss did] five years war service, crucial years during which he lost many near and dear to him. Principal among these was a younger brother, Kennard - "poet, painter and musician, he was the most gifted of us all" (from a note by Felix Aprahamian in the reissued 1974 RLPO/Groves EMI CD, incidentally c/w Rattle's CBSO War Req.). Although rarely heard, Morning Heroes seems to me to be richly rewarding (as Ted Greenfield might say), but possibly hampered by including a major role for speaker; Elgar's three recitations for speaker & orchestra, Opp.75,77 & 79 on The Longed-For Light CD, have similarly fallen into neglect.Comment
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Morning Heroes is going to be performed at next year's Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, together with Sibelius's Fifth Symphony.My boxes are positively disintegrating under the sheer weight of ticks. Ed ReardonComment
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Was Dent his teacher? I can't think otherwise how he could have been much of an influence. When I was as Cambridge I recorded (with the choir of St Catharine's College) a set of six anthems by Dent, written between the wars. We were told that Dent didn't write anything else, but as he convalesced from a serious illness he felt moved to write these pieces as a kind of thank-offering. They were in a curious mixture of styles. Don't go looking for the recording because it was never released; I felt a bit sorry for the choir which had been performing the anthems all year in order to learn them.Originally posted by Pabmusic View PostComment
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Many thanks, MC.Originally posted by Miles Coverdale View Post
Hope to find myself in Hereford on 27 July 2015. Andrew Davis, Paul Daniel or one of the DoM may be conducting the Philharmonia; we won't know until spring.Comment
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I feel I ought to revive Quilisma at this point, primarily for old times' sake, as he-or-she was born in the aftermath of a Clare broadcast about a decade ago which had caused great consternation among a couple of outspoken regular correspondents on the old message boards. They had been saying that it had confirmed all their hypotheses about (alleged) BBC nepotism and (alleged) Oxbridge narcissism, and a robust defence had to be offered. How we have all progressed since then!
My singing commitments these days prevent me from going to hear Clare nearly as often as I used to, but as Wednesday is typically girls-only chez nous I was keen to be at this service in person, especially as the more recent set of BBC sound engineers have an unenviable record of making Clare Chapel sound far worse than it does when you are in the building. (I have occasionally half-wondered if this is a deliberate policy with the possible hope of undermining the choir's reputation, but that is unduly paranoid and far-fetched.) As soon as I saw spot microphones directed at the love-it-AND-hate-it 1971 Von Beckerath organ, which has a tendency to thrust raucous sound into the building without any extra help, I realised that the engineers would indeed end up messing with the overall balance and acoustic unity. The choir microphones were also placed a bit close in (although not as extremely as on some previous occasions), which encourages the mixers to turn down their levels. When the engineers have done this in past broadcasts it has given a false impression of frantic, edgy but substance-less singing. I do wish they wouldn't insist on making Clare Chapel (and as a result Clare Choir) sound hollow and metallic; as a result, some people genuinely believe that's how the choir always sings, but it is very far from the reality! I'm very glad I went in person, because the broadcast sound bears only passing resemblance to the breathtaking pearl of a service that I attended. I can vouch for the fact that it sounded far better in the building, although of course the broadcast does at least give some indication of the fact that it was indeed a very polished performance throughout. (Incidentally, as of a couple of months ago there are now permanent in-house microphones in the Chapel, which presumably will be called into use at some point as in certain other places. I have no doubt that these would have done a far better job at capturing the sound of the building faithfully and sympathetically.)
As for the music, I'm not going to join the doubtless fascinating discussion about the merits and demerits of various hymn settings, although perhaps for some people this really is a more interesting pursuit than listening to an evensong broadcast. Far be it from me... As far as I'm concerned, Coe Fen is always exhilarating, particularly with a descant, so let's leave it at that. I'm sorry some people found the organ unsuitable for the Litaize voluntary (and for the other pieces too, it seems, for different reasons), but I actually found it quirky and bizarre and great fun, just the thing for a jangly organ like the one in Clare (although in real life it's not as unsubtly foregrounded as the BBC make it sound), whether or not it sounded French enough for those who think the organist's job runs to providing an instrument fitting for every piece he or she plays! Matthew Jorysz is a star and he played fabulously. I also really enjoyed the Howells piece, which should be performed more widely. It was indeed written for that choir (in the Rutter era), that chapel and indeed that organ (about which Howells reportedly reserved judgement when he heard it), but I can imagine it working excellently elsewhere. The Browne canticles are indeed a tantalising glimpse of a young composer who was thought to have great promise but was killed in the First World War. Sure, there are settings out there which are more fascinating, but there are also very many which are very much more dull, ungainly and plodding, some of which are for some reason rated highly by self-styled aficionados... The psalms were far from run-of-the-mill, and the Muhly introit would bear repeated hearing, I think, although here the blend and balance between choir, cello and organ was not best captured by the engineers. And let's have a mention of the responses, shall we? Joshua Pacey is a second-year student, but he has come up with a set which certainly stands comparison with other "repertoire" sets. I'd be delighted to import these into our choir library chez nous (and possibly even ditch one of the more boring sets to accommodate it!), and I feel that with time they should percolate through to many of our cathedrals and chapels. Let's hope he keeps it up!
The only thing that marred this service for me was the incessant coughing, snuffling, throat-clearing, floor-creaking and other noises off from what was actually a rather small congregation (something between twenty and thirty at a guess). We're all a bit ill at the moment, including me, but there are ways of overcoming it to minimise disturbance. Luckily, much of that didn't get picked up by the microphones, but some of it did, of course. Oh well.
All in all, an exquisite service, but up to a point I guess you just had to be there...Last edited by Quilisma; 20-11-14, 12:38.Comment
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