Music for the Last Sunday of Epiphany — February 19 2023

Jesu, the very thought of thee – Edward Bairstow (1874-1946)

View video here

The music of Sir Edward Bairstow is an essential part of the British cathedral music tradition. He set his texts ‘with a beauty which makes one never able to think of the words without recalling the music’, as the Dean of York wrote on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

Born in Huddersfield, Bairstow showed a keen interest in music as a very young child. After some disjointed early music lessons, he was taught more formally by John Farmer, and later by Sir Frederick Bridge, organist of Westminster Abbey. In July 1913 he succeeded T. Tertius Noble as organist and Master of the Music at York Minster. He was a highly respected teacher, with several of his students making their names in the musical world. Among the most distinguished are Elsie Suddaby, Dr Francis Jackson, his successor at York Minster, Sir Ernest Bullock and Gerald Finzi.

Jesu, the very thought of thee, the communion motet in church this Sunday, is one of three unaccompanied anthems Bairstow wrote in 1925. There are some telling tenutos at the word ‘thought’ and some warm harmonies as the work progresses. The strongest moment, using the chord of a seventh, comes at ‘thy face to see’, after which there is a gradual diminuendo towards peace and repose. There is copious use of rests.

Jesu, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast;

but sweeter far thy face to see, and in thy presence rest.

Gerald Harder

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Music for Epiphany 6 — Sunday, February 12 2023

Missa brevis – Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012)

 

Kyrie: view video here

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.

Sanctus/Benedictus: view video here

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Agnus Dei: view video here

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world, grant us peace.

As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Richard Rodney Bennett produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Studies with Pierre Boulez in the 1950s immersed him in the techniques of the European avant-garde, though he subsequently developed his own distinctive dramato-abstract style. In recent years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom. He was knighted for Services to Music in 1998.

Bennett’s choral pieces are all possessed of a gift for heart-melting, memorable and quintessentially English melody – and an instinctive lyric responsiveness to the text.

The Missa brevis, this Sunday morning’s setting of the Mass ordinary in church, and his only piece of liturgical music, was composed in 1990 for Canterbury Cathedral Choir. The piquant harmonic world of this work owes a good deal to Francis Poulenc and to Bennett’s composer hero William Walton.

Gerald Harder

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