CE St John's College, Cambridge May 2nd 2012

[DracoM]

Any reason why these canticles are not sung / less sung than perhaps they might be?

[orbis factor]

Any reason why these canticles are not sung / less sung than perhaps they might be?

Quite difficult

[secret squirrel]

They were staple fare under Michael Nicholas at Norwich...

SS

[DracoM]

" Astonishing virtuosity from top trebles to bassi profundi – good soloists from both ends of spectrum, fine discipline all round, inventive sounds, innovative and anything but run of the mill, very well held together by the DoM.

Just a pity that the Harvey canticles struck me as having very little to say apart from being a very, very serious workout for the singers – in which task it succeeded memorably. Whether it was any more than a singing-gym is another matter. "


Well, that's what I wrote back in 2010, and actually, not sure I see any reason to change much. I've heard some Jonathan Harvey more recently and the language seems now to be rather different from this 1978 canticle set.

Listening again quite carefully, it seems to me now that there was back then an almost wilful desire to shuttle the singers up and down the staves just because he could. They deserve medals riding the hair-raising roller-coaster and still trying to keep disciplined and accurate.

Great stuff for Timothy Ravalde, except that they seem to have edited out the Howells voluntary. Wonder why.

[Gabriel Jackson]

" Astonishing virtuosity from top trebles to bassi profundi – good soloists from both ends of spectrum, fine discipline all round, inventive sounds, innovative and anything but run of the mill, very well held together by the DoM.

Just a pity that the Harvey canticles struck me as having very little to say apart from being a very, very serious workout for the singers – in which task it succeeded memorably. Whether it was any more than a singing-gym is another matter. "


Well, that's what I wrote back in 2010, and actually, not sure I see any reason to change much. I've heard some Jonathan Harvey more recently and the language seems now to be rather different from this 1978 canticle set.

Listening again quite carefully, it seems to me now that there was back then an almost wilful desire to shuttle the singers up and down the staves just because he could. They deserve medals riding the hair-raising roller-coaster and still trying to keep disciplined and accurate.

Great stuff for Timothy Ravalde, except that they seem to have edited out the Howells voluntary. Wonder why.

What's remarkable, important and unique about the Jonathan Harvey canticles is that while the musical language and the techniques employed are nothing out of the ordinary (in terms of newness, and "strangeness") in the world of concert music in the late 1970s - for all that Jonathan's sensibility and imaginative world is a personal and distinctive one, it is also a product of the post-war European avant-garde - nothing like it had been heard before (or since, actually) in a liturgical work.

[Simon]

As regards the "canticles" - abyssus abyssum invocat for sure, but apart from them the inserted service from 2010 was another chance to hear Johns on great form. I remember that recording from its first outing primarily for the near perfect psalms. The Parry was a favourite for us, as I expect it is for most trebles.

[Magnificat]

I am reminded by the sad loss of the service from St John’s last week of a Radio 3 broadcast on 2 May 1984, 28 years ago to the day, just down the road at Jesus College, when there was a power cut about 30 seconds into the broadcast. As the introit (Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh) was unaccompanied and the chapel was candlelit, nobody realised to start with, except the organ scholar, that the power had gone. During the responses it dawned on the director of music what had happened, but he assumed that the broadcast would have been lost as a result. What he didn’t know was that there was an emergency generator which was keeping the transmission going. So when the psalms, for the second evening, were announced, he hummed the opening chord of Psalm 12, fondly imagining that the only people listening were a couple of dozen people in the chapel and the Almighty. He didn’t realise that there were a few more listening on Radio 3 as well. So he was quite relaxed as well when it came to humming the first chord of Psalm 13 and then Psalm 14. The choir got through those unscathed, although one person present learnt the valuable lesson that you should always rehearse psalms unaccompanied, especially changing from one chant to another, rather than experimenting with the idea for the first time live on Radio 3.

Then came the first lesson. If you listen to a tape you can hear a furious banging sound. This is the producer, whose first live broadcast it was, banging on the chapel door, which had been locked against interruption by the over-zealous chapel clerk. Eventually the producer gained admittance, and the director of music, the producer and the organ scholar had a hurried conference about what to do next. By now they had realised that the broadcast was still going out live. The next item was the office hymn, ‘Ye choirs of new Jerusalem’. It was decided to accompany this on the piano in the south transept of the chapel. The canticles which followed the hymn were appropriately enough, William Mathias’ Jesus College Service, and it was agreed that if the power still wasn’t back by then, the service would have to be abandoned, as it wasn’t feasible to accompany the Mathias on the piano, round a corner with a large screen in the way.

The lesson ended, and the organ scholar struck up the hymn on the piano. Half way through verse 4 the power came back on, so the organ scholar’s girlfriend made an unscheduled debut on Radio 3 and completed the hymn on the piano while he ran up the stairs to the organ loft. Again, if you listen to the tape, you can hear the rapid footsteps. Then if you listen really carefully, you can hear a word not often heard on Radio 3, not before the watershed anyway, when he realised that the blower needed to be turned on again. The switch was at the bottom of the organ loft stairs. He got onto the organ bench just in time to play the introduction to the Mathias, and the rest of the service proceeded without incident.

Radegund

Obviously the chaos at Jesus in 1984 is the reason why the BBC no longer use emergency generators!!

VCC