2024 has been a major year for composer anniversaries: for death centenaries alone Musicalics lists almost one hundred! Portsmouth Baroque Choir has looked back across 450 years and selected a half-dozen names associated with choral music to celebrate alongside the programme’s main feature, the centenary of the death of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford: Robert White (d. 1574), John Wilbye (baptised1574), Giacomo Carissimi (d. 1674), Anton Bruckner (b. 1824), Edward Bairstow (b. 1874) and Giacomo Puccini who, like Stanford, died in 1924.
The Stanford centenary has provided many opportunities to re-evaluate his operatic, orchestral and chamber music, adjusting the view that his music is “all melody with bass line plus filler”. Singers need no reminders about the quality of his choral music: The Blue Bird remains one of the most celebrated of all partsongs. Everyone in the UK born before 1970 will have benefitted, albeit unaware, of Stanford’s work as the main compiler of the National Songbook (1906), which contains over a hundred folk songs, drawn from across the four nations, such as Men of Harlech from Wales, Charlie Is My Darling from Scotland and The Flight of the Earls from Ireland, alongside English tunes like John Peel, The Mermaid and The Keel Row. As Music was once compulsory in British school lessons, Stanford has become part of the elderly population’s DNA. The Choir will be singing and organist Peter Gould will be playing pieces from the period prior to World War 1: Song of Peace and Song of Wisdom from his 1909 Bible Songs, 3 Latin Motets (1905), For Lo, I raise up (1914, but unpublished until 1939), Te Deum in B flat (1898), Postlude in D minor (1908), Glorious and powerful God (1913).
Ask any choir member what their favourite companion pieces to the Stanford motets would be and it is almost certain the answer will be those monumental equivalents by Bruckner especially Locus iste, committed to memory by most singers at about the age of 21. The Choir will perform three other motets by Bruckner: Christus factus est, Os justi and the rarely heard Pange lingua.
Robert White died of the Plague in 1574. Highly regarded by his contemporaries, our programme opens with the fourth and last of his settings of the Compline hymn Christe qui lux es et dies. Sally Dunkley wrote: “Nowhere is White’s art better displayed than in this exquisite miniature whose penultimate verse opens up absolute simplicity into gently flowing quaver patters”.
Baptised in 1574, John Wilbye’s emotionally charged madrigals are also firm choir favourites, especially the ravishing harmonies of Draw on, sweet night.
Giacomo Carissimi established the characteristics of the Latin oratorio that passed on to Handel. Dramatic energy abounds in his setting of the words of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus.
Puccini’s very short Requiem was written in 1905 to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the death of Verdi and uses the same ‘enigmatic scale’ used by Verdi in his 4 Sacred Pieces.
The most recent piece in the programme is Bairstow’s I sat down under his shadow from 1925. Its mystical flavour suggests a connection with Bairstow’s exact contemporary, Gustav Holst.
Anniversaries benefit cultural recognition, engaging community and media interest. They also help sustain and sometimes rekindle a composer’s legacy.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Church of Saint George, 43 Cleveland Rd, Chichester PO19 7AD, United Kingdom, Chichester
