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Millennium of Music
Music Lists # 10-05 #10-06
Spotlight on the Netherlands: Odes and Motets I and II
We continue our long and fruitful association with our partners at Radio Netherlands in presenting a series of concerts from the 2009 Holland Festival of Early Music at Utrecht. The RNW web site provides more in-depth information about the music and performers we hear as well as more information about the festival (www.rnmusic.nl). The primary theme for 2009 was the 250th anniversary of the death of Handel and the 350th of the birth of Purcell.
RNW has also prepared a short YouTube video introduction to the festival for this year:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8gw2qGUaBw
NOTE: All of the music on these programs is performed by the ensemble B'rock with the Innsbruck Festival Chorus. For more information on B'rock:
www.loganartsmanagement.com/ensembles/B-Rock
and for the Innsbruck Festival Chorus:
www.altemusik.at
B’Rock
Innsbruck Festival Chorus
Timothy Brown
Judith van Wanroij, soprano
Maarten Engeltjes, countertenor
Christopher Ainslie, countertenor
Tom Raskin, tenor
Stephan Varcoe, baritone
Giles Underwood, bass
Odes & Motets
1 Henry Purcell 1659-1695
Ode for St Cecilia Z 238 (1692)
1 Jeremiah Clarke ca. 1674-1707
Come, come along for a dance and a song,
on Purcell's death (1695)
2 Georg Friedrich Händel 1685-1759
Caroline Te Deum in D major
HWV 280 (1714)
Encore
3 Henry Purcell 1659-1695
Hear my Prayer (1680)
Recorded by Bert van Dijk, Helix
From All Music Guide on Purcell's Ode for St. Cecilia:
The celebrations of the Feast of St. Cecilia in Purcell's day were not a result of these earlier celebrations. There was no continuum, as far as anyone knows. A group called the "Musical Society", a group of men that included the publisher John Playford, initiated the celebrations in 1682. The singers that took part were from Westminster Abbey Choir, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Chapel Royal. The musicians were from the King's band and from the theaters, so many of them were professionals. In 1683, the "Musical Society" commissioned the first of Purcell's Odes for St. Cecilia's Day. It was a choral work on a grand scale, and for the next twenty years it was the model that other composers emulated. The "Musical Society" didn't commission another Ode for St. Cecilia's Day from Purcell until 1692, but other composers such as Blow, Eccles, and Clarke wrote odes for the Festivities in the meantime.
In 1692, the "Gentlemen Lovers of Musick" commissioned another ode from Mr. Purcell. "Hail, Bright Cecilia!" is a brilliant work for large choruses, orchestra, soloists and vocal ensembles. It has thirteen movements and sets a poem by the Reverend Nicholas Brady in praise of Cecilia, music, and the instruments of music. Large scale choral works were new, and were inspired, in part, by a man named Giovanni Battista Draghi, an Italian with whom Purcell had studied. It is the type of choral writing that influenced Handel's compositions, and marks the beginning of the secular choral tradition in England. It was secular choral music because the celebration of St. Cecilia's Day was a civic entertainment, put on for the entire population. The musicians that took part made money off it; it was a commercial venture for them, and the Odes that were commissioned for the celebrations were performed in public concert halls. They added to the professional musical life of the city.
In the composition of "Hail, Bright Cecilia!", Purcell supplied an unbelievable amount of variety and diversity, coupled with unifying forces that resolve the diverse elements into a complete whole. One of the unifying elements is the structure. Purcell walks the listener through eight key centers; he begins in D Major and minor, and two third of the way through the piece ends up in E minor. Then he travels back again to end the work in D. He composed two large choruses, one after the opening symphony, and one at the very end, that balance one another. And at the very center is a third chorus entitled "Soul of the World". It is about the creation of the world, the creation of music, and of the resolution of all into "Perfect Harmony."
Grant Colburn on Jeremiah Clarke's Ode to the Death of Henry Purcell:
The Ode "Come, Come Along For a Dance and a Song" is by Jeremiah Clarke. Yes, THAT Jeremiah Clarke, who wrote the tuneful yet simplistic and overplayed Trumpet Tune and Prince of Denmark's March (both used to be thought by Purcell). Its a small half hour drama which is believed to have been acted out on stage where nymphs and shepherds are happy frolicking and dancing when a messenger comes interrupting them with the new that Henry Purcell has died. From the the mood apruptly shifts into melancholy and sadness climaxing with a remarkable funeral dirge/march with tympani and trumpets tolling out the death knells of funeral bells. The piece is really spectacular and should be heard by anyone who has an interest in English baroque music, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas or Blow's Venus and Adonis.
On the Caroline Te Deum, Agnes van der Horst writes:
Purcell's music echoed down the years long after his premature death in 1695. Twenty-five years later, Handel paid public tribute to his predecessor in the composition Te Deum for Queen Caroline; an homage to God, but in essence a tribute to Purcell, the god of 17th century English music.
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