Posted in Folk Music, Choral on Oct 10th, 2009 No Comments »
Another evocative choral sound - and a quite extraordinary one. A Russian folk song, sung by a tenor (anonymous) in an almost impossible high falsetto across a ground of deep basses. It’s like a distant animal cry, a wailing carried on the wind across the endless Russian steppes. There are moments when the voices of the other tenors straining into falsetto too move up towards his, and surround him like a flock of starlings. Utterly strange and haunting.
It is sung by the Don Cossack Choir conducted by Serge Jaroff, recorded almost fifty years ago.
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I’ve never really understood the music of Igor Stravinsky. I like bits of it - ‘The Firebird’ and the exciting bits in ‘The Rite of Spring’, but the rest has rather passed me by. His music is more approachable that a lot of modern music, but I felt there was something arid about it, and slightly phoney. I know what I mean, but having recently listened to some of his religious music (’The Symphony of Psalms’ particularly) I know I haven’t got it quite right. There is something honest and deeply felt here which I hadn’t recognised before. There is no showing off - but trying to recapture a distant, hidden part of himself.
Here’s a short choral work, his ‘Pater Noster’. It lasts two minutes - about as long as it takes to read the prayer properly and mean it. In it there is an echo of Stravinsky’s Russian past, seen without nostalgia. It hasn’t the technicolor of Russian Orthodox choral music (see here for a comparison) but it is simple, clear, uncluttered and very beautiful.
It is sung by the Westminster Cathedral Choir conducted by James O’Donnell.
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Posted in Classical, Choral on May 29th, 2009 No Comments »
A month late, but still welcome, and forever evocative of my childhood. The Glasgow Orpheus Choir, founded by undertaker Hugh Roberton in 1906, finally folded in the year of my birth. But the sound of it seeped into my childhood, like gravy, in the same way as Kathleen Ferrier, Bing Crosby and Billy Cotton did, forever on the ether that was radio - the ‘wireless’ as we called it then.
I have a 78rpm record of this, but listening to it now is like listening to the sound of a distant choir of angels singing in a thunderstorm sifted through a fish fat fryer.
Here’s a recent recording, made in homage of the original, by the Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by David Temple.
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Posted in Classical, Choral on May 22nd, 2009 No Comments »
Charles Villiers Stanford’s classic English Choral piece to words by Mary Coleridge.
‘The lake lay blue below the hill. O’er it, as I looked, there flew across the waters, cold and still, a bird whose wings were palest blue. The sky above was blue at last, the sky beneath me blue in blue. A moment, ere the bird had passed, it caught his image as he flew.’
It has that indefinable English quality, unmistakeable but impossible to explain, alluding to a world of lost content, forever out of reach, around the bend of a river, lost in the mists beyond the meadow, on the far side of the hill.
It is sung by the BBC Singers.
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This is the most moving of all choral versions of The Lord’s Prayer, in the Russian Orthodox rite. The opening chant, in the bass, is as cavernous as the cathedral it was recorded in. Instead of the English choral tradition of vibrato-free, neutered sopranos, we hear women’s voices floating over those dark basses, bringing real colour to the choral sound. It’s a sound that resonates with love and tragedy. Nothing compares with it.
This Bulgarian choir from the capital, Sofia, is conducted by Georgi Robev.
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A late carol for the end of this Christmas season. It is by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge conducted by Stephen Cleobury. The music is by John Rutter, a composer much loved by choirs throughout Britain, though rather looked down upon by other professional composers - largely, I suspect, because his music is approachable and popular. Listened to without modernist prejudice his music is straight, direct, sometimes complex, sometimes simple, but without ideology or side. Just music. And this is delightful - a late carol - perfect for the season. The recording is not the best - an old cassette tape - but the music shines through lovingly.
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‘In sweet joy’ is announced the arrival of the Christ child in this rendition by the Taverner Consort of Praetorius’s famous carol. For me, after two days of attendance at English Carol Services, with all the reticent and inhibited singing that inevitably represents, this is a splash of true exhilaration.
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The most famous Christmas song of all, Franz Gruber’s Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht. It was sung by German soldiers in the trenches of the First World War to signal the Christmas Truce in 1914. In its naive simplicity it has become, since then and at this time of year, the song eternal for everlasting peace - Christ the Saviour is here.
Here it is sung, most beautifully, by the RIAS Chamber Choir conducted by Uwe Gronostay.
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This is an example of ‘West Gallery Music’, the choral music sung in country churches up to the middle of the 19th century. It is ‘west gallery’ because that was where it was sung, at the west end of the church accompanied by a local band of mixed instruments - in the place later occupied by an organ, whose introduction, and new Anglican Liturgy, pushed it out for good. It was also much looked down upon by the more sophisticated and conventionally ‘musical’ as common, peasant music. But it had a liveliness of its own, and I am glad to say, has been revived in England by amateur choirs over the last twenty years.
Here’s a west gallery version of ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’. If you think you know the tune, you do - it later became the famous Yorkshire song, ‘On Ilkley Moor baht’ at’. It is perhaps rendered with rather more sophistication here than it would have been by a rural choir of farmers, labourers and village women, but it has great vigour.
Of course, in whatever version this is sung, no schoolboy worth his salt would sing the first line straight, as written. So join in with me and schoolboys everywhere and sing ‘While shepherds washed their socks by night’.
It is sung by the English Choir, Psalmody.
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This is one for younger listeners who didn’t hear this version of this simple American hymn first time round. Judy Collins sings it straight with choir. No instruments. It is wonderful.
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