The World's Greatest Choral Music - Buywell

someone being arrested for possessing a
copy of Byrd’s Gradualia, his setting of all the
mass texts for the major feasts of the
Catholic church year. Ave verum corpus, for
the feast of Corpus Christi, comes from this
collection: music for private, even secret,
worship. It is an intimate and concentrated
work; as Byrd wrote in the dedication of
Gradualia, ‘There is a certain hidden power,
as I learnt by experience, in the thoughts
underlying the words themselves; so that, as
one meditates upon the sacred words and
constantly and seriously considers them, the
right notes, in some inexplicable manner,
suggest themselves quite spontaneously.’
0 SIBELIUS Be Still, My Soul
Katharina von Schlegel’s six-verse hymn
Stille, mein Wille; dein Jesus hilft siegen (‘Be
still, my soul, your Jesus will help you
overcome’) appeared in a book of sacred
songs in 1752; Jane Borthwick’s translation
was published in Edinburgh in 1855 in a
series called Hymns from the Land of Luther.
In 1899, Sibelius composed a series of
dramatic historical tableaux as a contribution
to the anti-Russian Press Celebrations held in
November. The following year, Sibelius
rearranged the seventh tableau, ‘Finland
Awakes’, into the orchestral piece Finlandia,
but it was not provided with words until
1937, after which Sibelius rearranged it as a
16
male-voice nationalist song (1938) and finally
for mixed voices in 1948. It is not known
who first decided that the tune was suited to
Schlegel’s German hymn, but its earliest
appearance in English is in the Revised
Church Hymnary (Church of Scotland) of
1927, well before its use as a hymn in
Finland itself.
! MONTEVERDI Cantate Domino
Monteverdi is best known as the Maestro
di cappella (Director of Music) of St Mark’s
in Venice, a post he held from 1613, and for
writing large-scale works such as the
Vespers of 1610 and the operas Orfeo and
The Coronation of Poppea. He introduced a
revitalised and vibrant style of sacred music
to Venice, and this work, published in 1620,
contrasts sections of older-style polyphony
with rapid, homophonic passages. The text,
from Psalms 96 and 98, is not specific to
any one day, so this motet may have been
written for performance at any of the many
religious festivals held at the cathedral.
@ RACHMANINOFF Virgin, Mother of God
from All-Night Vigil (Vespers)
Audiences without the key to the language
of his vocal works know Rachmaninoff
largely through the piano. Many Russians,
however, prize his vocal music even more
highly, and above all his greatest contribution
to the Russian Orthodox liturgy, the All-Night
Vigil (Vespers) of 1915. Here Rachmaninoff
was drawing on an age-old tradition of
unaccompanied chant and choral music for
Orthodox worship, clothing it in his own
lyricism and affecting harmonies. Wonderfully
satisfying to sing, this music asks its
interpreters to sound like the deeply resonant
Russian voices for which it was written.
£ ELGAR Land of Hope and Glory
‘I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em – knock
‘em flat,’ announced Elgar in May 1901. It was
the melody of the middle section of his march
in D major, the first of what was to become a
series of five marches that Elgar named Pomp
and Circumstance. Elgar was of course quite
right about the impact his melody would have,
to the point where he came to resent the
work’s mammoth success, as its popularity
eclipsed much of the rest of his output. That
popularity came especially with the marriage
of the music to A.C. Benson’s patriotic poem;
God Save the Queen may be the national
anthem of the United Kingdom, but Land of
Hope and Glory is the anthem of England –
the official anthem at the Commonwealth
Games, and of course unofficially at the Last
Night of the Proms!
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$ HUGHES arr. Weymark Guide Me, O Thou
Great Jehovah
William Williams was an 18th-century
Anglican priest who spent 43 years travelling
throughout Wales on horseback, preaching
and singing the gospel in his native Gaelic.
This ‘sweet singer of Wales’ wrote some 800
hymns, but very few of them have been
translated into English. The tune, Cwm
Rhondda, was written in 1907 by the Welsh
composer John Hughes for the annual
Baptist singing festival at Capel Rhondda
church in Pontypridd, near Cardiff.
% HOLST I Vow to Thee, My Country
Sir Cecil Spring Rice was a career diplomat
who served in the British Foreign Office and
then in Berlin, Constantinople, Tehran, Cairo,
St Petersburg and Stockholm; his final
posting, from 1912, was as Ambassador to
the United States. Spring Rice originally
wrote this poem during his Stockholm
posting (1908-1912); the first verse
concerned allegiance to one’s country, while
the second paralleled this with religious faith
in heaven. After his sacking as ambassador in
1918 (and only weeks before his death), a
depressed Spring Rice rewrote the first
verse to reflect the losses of the world war.
The poem was put to music by Gustav Holst,
set to the ‘Jupiter’ theme from his orchestral
suite The Planets.