CE Clare College, Cambridge 19th November 2014

[Quilisma]

And as for the Rutter Clare Benediction, I have to say it always gets me when sung with the requisite honesty. But I suppose I would say that, as it was written and first performed when I was very much on the scene.

[Lizzie]

Hi Q!
Nice to see you're still around! Just a small mention that Joshua is one of Winchester's former front-liners, now a grown up young man! I remember hearing his voice snap as countless services here. How wonderful to hear him in the next stage of his musical career. Well done, Joshua, from a Winchester pew-dweller.

[Lizzie]

Snap=soar!

[DracoM]

Lizzie

Delighted to see you in the Forum!!

[ardcarp]

Thanks for that Quilisma. I don't think anyone has actually commented on the singing. It came over as very competent (as one would expect) and it comes as no surprise to hear that the sound engineering robbed it of its soul. (They do the same in G&C chapel, which is why, I guess, that choir has lately broadcast from other churches with which they have a connection.)

I must stress immediately that the organ scholar did a great job! I just wish that, having chosen an instrument of (what they think is) the German High Baeoque, they would at least choose a voluntary of that ilk. In my student days, I was the guide and chief stop-puller for a recital given by Gaston Litaize, and the trouble he took to get French sonorities from a massive HN&B instrument was amazing. I cannot think of an instrument less 'authentic' than Clare College's to air that repertoire....and it needs another 10 seconds' reverb as well!

[ardcarp]

Good to see you back Lizzie! Keep 'em coming.

[ardcarp]

P.S. Gaston Litaize was one of the many blind-from-birth children to receive a first-rate musical education at L'Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles a Paris.

Here he is playing the piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNPx1UDcSxM

[Vox Humana]

P.S. Gaston Litaize was one of the many blind-from-birth children to receive a first-rate musical education at L'Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles a Paris.

Here he is playing the piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNPx1UDcSxM

Um... the player is Balázs Szabó.

[ardcarp]

Oops, sorry!

[Pabmusic]

Was Dent his teacher? I can't think otherwise how he could have been much of an influence...

It seems that Dent was his tutor at Cambridge. Browne took classics rather than music, but he was already a prodigious pianist by the time he entered Clare (he gave the first British performance of Berg's Piano Sonata). It seems he was very gifted anyway - he'd already been offered a mathematics scholarship to Harrow and a classics scholarship to Rugby (he chose Rugby, where he became a close friend of Rupert Brooke, whom he followed to Cambridge).

Dent described him as the "cleverest of the Cambridge musicians" (contemporaries including Arthur Bliss, Clive Carey, Steuart Wilson and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs) and he became Organ Scholar while he was at Clare. He sang in the 1909 Cambridge Greek Play (The Wasps, of course) where he met RVW, and conducted the first performance of RVW's Five English Folk Songs.

Before he arrived at Gallipoli, he asked Dent to destroy any music that did not represent him “at his best”, although he said that Gratiana should survive. Dent asked Steuart Wilson and Ralph Vaughan Williams to help with the critical analysis of each work. Within a little more than two weeks after learning of his death, Dent had burned most of Browne’s compositions.

[Condensed from the preface I wrote to a new edition of some songs]

[mw963]

To my ears that organ would be better in The Gaumont Blackpool or similar - excellent theatre organ sound! Not my sort of music but played with admirable joie de vivre.

Enjoyed the rest of the broadcast and was interested to hear from others above that the sound bore little relationship to the venue. And goodness that poor woman overcome by coughing should have quietly left - although I don't know how easy that would have been.

[Despina dello Stagno]

And goodness that poor woman overcome by coughing should have quietly left

I remember when (c.1966) the BBC broadcast matins from Winchester College. All the Quiristers had previously written home to inform their parents at which particular point in the liturgy they individually would be coughing, thus making recognition possible.
When I read recently of the troubles in transmission from Winchester, I wondered whether the old tradition had resurfaced at an unacceptable level.

[Vox Humana]

How about a list of tunes punters might like to hear more often?

This is more a case of "even once" rather than "more often", but the recent mention of Hymns for Church and School had me looking at the book again and recalling what a fine tune is Howells's "Newnham", sadly destined for oblivion because no one seems to sing any hymns in 87.87.887. His "Twigworth" is arguably even finer. What a shame I didn't remember this when casting around for tunes in 87.87 D.