The English composer Sir Hubert Parry is one of those figures mainly known today for some of his less-significant compositions. His fame in Canada is mostly confined to Anglican church musicians, and mainly rests on a couple of hymn tunes and one anthem. A little more of his music has received attention more recently in England, yet even there much is relatively unknown.
In this first of two blog posts about Parry's music, I will talk about three choral works.
Anyone who has ever attended, or watched a telecast of, the famous "Last Night of the Proms" concert from London has heard Parry's famous hymn, Jerusalem. Few outside of England, perhaps, are even aware of the composer's name. He lived during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century. As a teacher and writer about music, he was enormously influential to the next generation of English composers.
His own music is of higher quality than is generally admitted. He had a powerful sense of structure and an innate gift for setting words to music, an art which is harder than many people realize.
Many church and cathedral choirs around the world have sung his magnificent anthem for the Coronation of King Edward VII, I was glad. It's probably also been recorded more often than any other work by Parry, but most often in the reduced version for chorus and organ. To get the full and true impact of I was glad, you need to go to one of the rare recordings which present the work complete and uncut, with full orchestra.
That's because most versions omit the central 2 pages of the anthem, where Parry incorporated the traditional trumpet fanfares and the shouts of Vivat, vivat rex!/regina! which are contributed at a Coronation by the King's/Queen's Scholars of Westminster School. The printed music neatly shows how this section can be eliminated for all other uses, and so it usually is. But Richard Hickox on Chandos Records, as a fill-up to his recording of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, gives the piece whole, with the fanfares resounding and echoing splendidly in the church where the recording was made. The choir re-enters with the lyrical line to "O pray for the peace of Jerusalem" and then the sound swells mightily to a glorious climax at "...and plenteousness within thy palaces." The extra brass return at the end to crown the final orchestral bars with appropriate pomp.
The same recording also contains Parry's ode Blest pair of Sirens, a setting of a poem by Milton entitled At A Solemn Musick. This work, vastly under-rated today outside of England, is (for my money) one of the most perfect settings of words to music from any composer of any period. That is not least because the very clear structure of Parry's musical paragraphs exactly matches the structure of Milton's poem. The poem as printed basically falls into two sentences: the first running through 24 lines of poetry, with one clear break in the meaning at the mid point, and the last encompassing the remaining 4 lines. Parry's composition matches this poetic structure with a lengthy opening flow of music taking in the first half of the long first sentence, a distinct change of tone and style for the second half, and then a short interlude and a completely new melody for the final 4 lines.
Parry opens with an orchestral introduction, scored for strings and winds, which generates several melodies that will be intertwined throughout the first part of the piece. The choir enters, singing in continuous 8-part harmony, which is also much more difficult to write than it seems. The music flows along in the most natural and organic way, matching the sense of the lines beautifully. At the mid-point break in the first section, the orchestral introduction resumes, with the choir re-entering almost at once and turning the music into darker regions as required by the text. At the end of that long first sentence, there is another orchestral interlude, and then the last part begins with a brand-new tune from the sopranos. This soon gives rise to a vigorous fugue built up on top of a continuous pedal point (as in the third movement of Brahms' German Requiem). It's the use of this fugue that enables Parry to build a concluding portion equal in weight to the long opening section. The pedal note is sustained while the fugue grows in power, strength, and velocity until the climactic moment when the bass note suddenly rises by a fifth, lifting the whole mass of choral and orchestral tone boldly towards the heavens -- a thrilling moment indeed. The final cadence on the words "And sing with Him, in endless Morn of Light" is accompanied by the third and grandest appearance of the orchestral introduction.
Late in life, Parry composed a cycle of six motets for a cappella choir which he entitled Songs of Farewell. That great gift of matching words to music was still working at full stretch, and with much more daring harmonic progressions than are found in the two earlier works -- proof positive that Parry was not simply trapped in the past, as many of his contemporaries mistakenly believed. The cycle is noteworthy for the way that the number of parts expands from four voices in the first motet to seven in the fifth and to eight voices in the sixth and last. The texts are a mixture of sacred and secular writings, characteristic indeed of a man who was a prominent agnostic or "freethinker" as the term was in his day.
There's a definite cumulative arc to the increasing complexity of the dissonances as the cycle proceeds, and also a building of emotional intensity which truly requires the motets to be performed as a group -- although separate performances of individual numbers do occur. I've had the good fortune to hear the Songs of Farewell sung in concert, and it was very moving. You can read about that concert here: Choral Splendour
Plainly, Sir Hubert Parry was a noteworthy composer for the human voice massed in chorus. Not less noteworthy were his orchestral works, and I'll be discussing several of those next.
No comments:
Post a Comment