Monthly Archives: December 2018

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Advent Calendar Day 7: Comfort Ye / Ev’ry Valley – Handel

Well, now, I could hardly have a ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord / make His path straight’ theme and not include Handel, now could I?  I’m pretty sure there is a law about that sort of thing.

The trick with this piece is, of course, that so many people have sung it that it’s really difficult to pick a favourite recording of it.  And I really can’t have Ian Bostridge every year.  Well, I mean, I could, but it seems like cheating…

So this year, I’ve found a rather delightful recording by Kurt Streit.  There are some flaws in the recording (for some reason, it’s squished and compressed, and someone cut a bunch of the accompaniment – why would you DO that?), but there are really none in his performance.  I love the effortlessness with which he sings, and how much joy he brings to the performance – it’s absolutely contagious, and I’d basically follow him anywhere if he sang at me like that.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do!

PS – OK, I simply cannot mention Handel’s Messiah without drawing your attention to this completely bonkers production, directed by Claus Guth.  It’s impeccably sung, but the staging is bizarre and includes interpretive dance, a sign language interpreter, and significantly more seductive intent than one usually finds in either ‘He Shall Feed his Flock’ or ‘How Beautiful Are the Feet’.  (And yes, it goes precisely where you think it does in the latter case.)

If you have a couple of hours to spare and have a taste for high-quality Baroque music made completely bizarre, I highly recommend this to your attention.

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Advent Calendar Day 6: Prepare ye the way of the Lord – Wise

I think we’ve milked the Rorate theme as far as we possibly can, so it’s time to move on to our next Advent theme (which probably should have been my first theme, only I got my Advent texts mixed up…), which is all about preparing the way of the Lord.  Because let’s face it – you really can’t have Advent without some serious time spent on Isaiah 40:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

There are several really obvious possibilities here, and I promise, you’ll be getting them all in good time, but I wanted to start with this slightly less-well-known anthem by Michael Wise, who was an English organist and composer born just after the English Civil War. He wrote several really gorgeous verse anthems, which are one of my favourite forms of music, because they combine choral sections, solos and duets or small ensemble pieces into one piece of music.

(I also like them because they usually feature the alto pretty heavily; the Puritans didn’t approve of church music, and it took a while after the Restoration for cathedrals to train up a new set of really good boy sopranos.  Verse anthems were a good solution, because you could give the tricky bits to the adult tenors, basses and counter tenors, and just bring the boys in for the chorus.  Having said that… Wise was clearly writing for boy sopranos who knew their stuff, so presumably he just liked the form.)

I have not been able to find what I view as a perfect recording, but this one is pretty lovely.  I love the way Wise mixes and matches his voices in this piece.  But I think my favourite part is the bass solo in the ‘every valley section’, with its brilliant low notes.  The duet about all flesh being grass, and the chorus which follows, is also pretty amazing, though I’m less keen on the boy sopranos’ voices than I am on that of the bass.

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Advent Calendar Day 5: Rorate Caeli – Weir

Our last Rorate Caeli brings us into the 20th century, via the early Middle Ages.  This setting is by Judith Weir, and was written in 1983.  She uses the melody from the Gregorian chant as her base, then adds in harmonies that are very much 20th century, but give another nod to the Middle Ages with their open fifths.

I have to say, I absolutely love this – my only complaint is that it is far too short, and I want more…

… which is what sent me down the 20th century Rorate Caeli rabbit hole to this very modern Rorate by Leo Nestor, composed in 2011.  This is another composition that uses the plain chant as a starting point, but it has a completely different feel – one I associate with American close harmony singing.  There’s a little bit of jazz to the harmonies, and a fairly fabulous bottom D for the basses.  I don’t love it as much as the Weir, but it’s an interesting addition to the genre.

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Advent Calendar Day 4: Rorate Caeli – Rheinberger

Our survey of Rorate Caeli settings now enters the swoonily romantic (not to say sentimental) territory of the 19th century, with this pensive and occasionally dramatic setting by Josef Rheinberger.  Rheinberger was born in Liechtenstein and spent most of his working life in Germany.  And it shows – you can see that he would have gotten along very well, musically speaking, with the likes of Brahms and Brückner.

To me, this particular setting has a pervasive sadness and wistfulness to it – there’s a real feeling of looking back toward a happier past, now irretrievably gone.  The sense of loss reminds me, on some emotional level, of the sort of music written by composers during and just after the Great War – in fact, I looked up Rheinberger’s biography to see if he had actually lived through to the war, but in fact he died in 1901.  I did learn, however, that Rheinberger wrote this piece in 1893, less than a year after the death of his wife, Fanny, a poet who had written the lyrics for many of his vocal compositions. A year later, ill health forced him to give up his post as Court Music Director due to poor health.

So perhaps the sadness isn’t just my imagination…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMo9rdcFsjQ

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Advent Calendar Day 3: Rorate Caeli – Handl

Another Renaissance Rorate Caeli, but the Renaissance in Eastern Europe was clearly a different beast to the Renaissance in Spain!  Jacob Handl (also known as Jacobus Gallus and Jacobus Handelius) was born in Montenegro in 1550, making him about 20 years younger than Guerrero, but definitely a contemporary, and he lived and worked in Germany and Austria, and eventually died in Prague, at the early age of 41.

Depending on which bits of the internet you believe, Handl may or may not have been a Cistercian monk, which is not an order known for its joyous nature (I’ll admit, I still bear a grudge against Bernard of Clairvaux for crimes committed in my undergraduate history studies… and perhaps the order changed after his death, though Handl’s early death suggests that it), but this Rorate is actually quite lively and pretty delightful. I especially like the rippling line that runs through all the parts – if Guerrero’s Rorate is a gentle rain, Handl’s feels like a rapidly running stream, or maybe a river…

Tomorrow, we will leave polyphony behind and move to more romantic heights, but I feel like it would be neglectful not to at least acknowledge what the Renaissance composers were getting up to in other parts of Europe.  So here, if you wish it, is Byrd’s lively English version of the Rorate, and Palestrina’s sweet and reflective Italian version.

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Advent Calendar Day 2: Rorate Caeli – Guerrero

While I was looking for just the right Rorate Coeli/Caeli to share with you yesterday, I fell down a very deep internet rabbit hole where it turns out that pretty much every composer and his cat has written a setting of this text.  Some of them do very little for me, but others are absolutely lovely – lovely enough, in my opinion, to justify a sequence of Rorate Coeli posts for the first few days of this Advent.

Today’s Rorate, however, is in fact the one I was looking for when I stumbled on this rabbit hole in the first place.  It’s by Francisco Guerrero, a 16th century Spanish priest and composer.  It’s a setting I’ve sung a few times in different churches, and it’s very lovely and unexpectedly simple to sing – everyone gets a melody, and they all blend together very beautifully.  I like the word painting in this one – the all those lovely, waterfall-like runs in each voice part, matching the psalmist’s rainy metaphor.

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

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Advent Calendar Day 1: Rorate Caeli – Zebrowski

The classic text for Advent 1 is Rorate Coeli Desuper – Let the heavens open and rain down righteousness. The oldest setting for this is this Gregorian chant, which still gets sung today (literally today, actually – I’ll be singing it this evening), but just about every church composer of note has had a crack at it. I’ve sung a fair number of versions, and cast envious eyes over more (shout out to the setting by Heinrich Schütz, which I passionately adore and annually badger my various choirmasters to let me sing, so far to no avail).

What these settings all have in common is that they tend to be reflective and a bit mysterious.  The Schütz is, admittedly, fairly chirpy, but the overall theme is one of sweetness and stillness.

And then we have this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hYB0RhhWQo

Which is… not. Apparently, this is what happens when you give a Polish Baroque composer the Rorate text.  I’ve never encountered Marcin Zebrowski before, but apparently he was born in 1702 and died in 1770, which puts him in the later baroque period – he’s younger than Bach and Handel, but older than Mozart, and would have overlapped at least a little with all three.

I’m honestly not at all sure what I think of this as a setting for rorate coeli – it sounds almost military to me, which is an odd thing to do with those lyrics – but it certainly starts Advent off with a bang!