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8.553183

A Ceremony of Carols Friday Afternoons • Three Two-part Songs

New London Children’s Choir Ronald Corp

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Benjamin

BRITTEN (1913 - 1976)

A Ceremony of Carols Friday Afternoons • Three Two-part Songs

Alexander Wells, Piano • Skaila Kanga, Harp New London Children’s Choir

Ronald Corp

0Q-B2 Friday Afternoons, Op. 7

01 Sweet was the Song

05 King Herod and the Cock

05] The Oxen

01 Fancie

IH The Birds

03 - HI Three Two-part Songs

|2j A Wealden Trio: Christmas Song of the Women

H-H A Ceremony of Carols

(16)5537)

NAXOS

Recorded at AH Hallows, Gospel Oak, London

on 17th and 18th September 1994.

Producer: Ate§ Orga

Engineer: Ken Blair (BMP Recording)

Music Notes: Ate§ Orga

Cover Painting: The Adoration of the Shepherds by Hugo van der Goes

MADE IN

730099

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Playing Time: 62’09”

(22:41)

(2:48)

(1:24)

(2:55)

(1:06)

(1:38)

(5:26)

(2:34)

(21:38)

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Benjamin Britten (1913 -1976) Choral Music

Friday Afternoons, Op. 7 (1933 - 35) for choir & piano 3] Begone, dull care! (Anon 17th cent) [30 July 1935]

[2] A tragic story (Thackeray) [13 November 1933]

[3] Cuckoo! (Jane Taylor) [11 November 1933] Solo: Deborah Dover

0] "Ee-oh!" (Anon) [15 - 20 December 1933]

[5] A New Year Carol (Anon) [15 May 1934]

\6\ I mun be married on Sunday (Nicholas Udall) [2 November 1933]

[7] There was a man of Newington (Anon) [11 May 1934]

[8] Fishing song (Izaak Walton)

[9] The useful plough (Anon) [14 May 1934]

00 Jazz-Man (Eleanor Farjeon) [15 November 1933]

[0 There was a monkey (Anon)

3H Old Abram Brown (Anon) [27 November 1933]

31 Sweet was the song (1931, rev 1966) Carol for unaccompanied women's voices (William Ballet's Lute Book, early 17th century) Solo: Cecilia Osmond

33 King Herod and the Cock (arr 3 May 1962) for unison voices & piano (words & melody collected by Cecil Sharp)

31 The Oxen (19 April 1967) Carol for women's voices & piano (Thomas Hardy)

31 Francie (1961 rev 1965) for unison voices & piano (Shakespeare)

32 The Birds (June 1929 rev 1934) Song for medium voice & piano (Hilaire Belloc) Solo: Catherine Hopper

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Three Two-Part Songs (1932) for boy's or female voices &

piano (Walter de la Mare)

01 The Ride-by-nights

01 The Rainbow

SSI The Ship of Rio

HI A Wealden Trio: Christmas song of the women (April 1929 rev 1967) for unaccompanied women's voices (Ford Madox Ford) Soprano I: Catherine Hopper, Soprano II: Emily Attree Alto: Anna Kenyon

A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28 (March 1942) for treble

voices & harp

[22] Procession (accompanied)

[23] Wolcum Yole! (Anon 14th century)

[24] There is no Rose (Anon 14th century)

SI That yonge child (Anon 14th century) Solo: John Addison

[26] Balulalow (James, John & Robert Wedderbum, 16th century)

Solo: Alex Temmink

[27] As dew in Aprille (Anon c 1400)

H This little Babe (Robert Southwell, 16th century)

(2| Interlude Andante pastorale (harp solo)

123 In Freezing Winter Night (Robert Southwell) Solo I: Alison Naftalin, Solo II: Anna Kenyon

M Spring Carol (William Cornish, 15th/16th century)

Solo I: Susanna Flett, Solo II: Emily Attree

[32] Adam lay i-bounden (Anon 15th century)

M Recession (unaccompanied)

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"It is a good thing to please people, even if only for today. That is what we should aim at - pleasing people today as seriously as we can, and letting the future look after itself'

- Benjamin Britten, on receiving the first Aspen Award, July 1964

"At the centre of his music there is an intensely solitary and private spirit, a troubled, sometimes even despairing visionary, an artist much haunted by nocturnal imagery, by sleep, by presentiments of mortality, a creator preternaturally aware of the destructive appetite (the ever-hungry beast in the jungle) that feeds on innocence, virtue and grace"

- Donald Mitchell, 1972

Britten was to English vocal and choral music in the twentieth century what the great Henry Purcell had been in the seventeenth. "It would be strange," his friend and life-companion, Peter Pears, has written (in Donald Mitchell's & Hans Keller's 1952 Benjamin Britten commentary), if "Britten had never written for the voice. He was surrounded by singing as a child. He was not brought up on a gramophone or a wireless set. (Perhaps he will be the last composer of whom that can be said.) ..." Britten, Pears confirms, "never claimed to be an innovator; the generation of revolutionaries was the previous one to his". In endeavouring "to build his own tradition" he turned instead to "the purest stream of modern music. Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi and, of later figures, Mahler, Berg and Stravinsky - from all these he has learnt much in his search for the classic virtues of a controlled passion and the 'bounding line'... there blows in his vocal music ... a strong revitalising south¬ east wind which has rid English song of much accumulated dust and cobwebs, and has renewed the vigour of the sung word with Purcellian attack. If Britten is no innovator, he is most certainly a renovator, and having thus cleansed his house he has a right to feel at home in it". "It is as a choral composer," Hans F. Redlich adds, "- apart from his probably even more popular achievements as a

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musical dramatist - that Britten seems to stand head and shoulders above his contemporaries (on both sides of the Channel). It is here more than in any other sphere of his work that the break with Edwardian conventions in particular, and with the nineteenth century in general, has become completest. It is here that he sets a shining example by creating a new musical style of idiomatic inevitability within a sonorous medium of very real limitations... Britten's choral style may (in the eyes of posterity) have the same significance as did Schubert's cyclically conceived Lied for the dawn of the Romantic movement".

This album brings together some of Britten's most celebrated music for treble voices, accompanied and unaccompanied, ranging in period from 1929 (when the composer was still in his mid teens and a pupil of Frank Bridge) to 1967. "A triumph of the realist Britten" (Redlich) drawing largely on texts from Walter de la Mare's collection Tom Tiddler's Ground, Friday Afternoons (1933- 35), the first of Britten's many works for children, was written for his schoolmaster brother, Robert ("a nondescript and not specially intelligent teacher," Eric Crozier remembered, "anxious to please but out of place in the social and artistic world of his younger brother") and the boys of Clive House preparatory school, Prestatyn: choir practice used to take place on Friday afternoons. The twelve settings, with their witty piano accompaniments, belong to an England between two world wars, to an age of innocence, to a childhood time of Meccano sets and Hornby trains, of model boats and Arthur Ransome. These "enchanting fresh songs," Pears says, "a performance of which, given by well-trained boys and girls with their intelligent teacher at the piano, once heard is never forgotten". Their imagination and economy remains extraordinary. All are beautiful. Most are short. The last - Old Abram Brown - aspires to Wunderhorn Mahler (the slow movement of the First Symphony).

Together with Hymn to Saint Cecilia and Rejoice in the Lamb, A Ceremony of Carols, written "at sea, MS Axel Johnson March 1942" en route from New York to Liverpool via Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, helped establish Britten "as a master of English song" (Pears). For the unusual combination of trebles

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Alexander Wells

Alexander Wells has been accompanist to the New London Children's Choir since its foundation. He has been associated with children's choirs in North London since 1978, starting his career while still a student at the Royal College of Music and after taking a degree in Russian and French at Cambridge. In 1987 he spent a year as a trainee repetiteur at the National Opera Studio and has since worked at Glyndebourne, the Wexford Festival and The Royal Opera House. He is also accompanist to the London Choral Society.

Skaila Kanga

Born in India, the harpist Skaila Kanga studied as a pianist, before turning, at the age of seventeen, to the harp, which she studied with Tina Bonifacio, the harpist in Sir Thomas Beecham's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. She began her own professional career with the BBC Concert Orchestra and as a free¬ lance player with major regional and London orchestras. Her work as a soloist has brought concerto performances, broadcasts and commercial recordings with such artists as Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Elton John, Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Kiri te Kanawa and with composers such as John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Richard Rodney Bennett and Michel Legrand. In 1977 she joined with Tommy Reilly to form a harmonica and harp duo, a collaboration that brought original compositions and recordings of British folk-songs and popular melodies. Skaila Kanga has also recorded all the major French chamber works with harp, Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, and music by Kreisler and Heifetz with the violinist Xue-Wei. In 1988 she was appointed Professor of Harp at the Royal Academy of Music and in 1994 was awarded a fellowship of the Academy.

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New London Children's Choir

The New London Children's Choir was launched in 1991 and gave its inaugural concert to considerable acclaim at St. John's, Smith Square, in a programme that included four new commissions. The choir has performed on London's South Bank, at the Barbican and in the Promenade Concerts, and has broadcast for the BBC and for Italian Radio and Television, as well as taking part in commercial recordings with Mariss Jansons, Ashkenazy and Rostropovich. Recent engagements have included a performance of Stravinsky's Persephone at the 1993 Promenande Concerts, a staged performance of Krasa's opera Brundibar with Mecklenburgh Opera, the BBC Tavener Festival, a Mahler recording with Sinopoli and concerts of Mahler and Berlioz with the Philharmonia Orchestra and James Levine. Ronald Corp's policy of commissioning new works has resulted in the performance of sixteen new works for the choir, all of which have been broadcast by BBC Radio 3.

Ronald Corp

Ronald Corp is founder and Musical Director of the New London Orchestra and the London Children's Choir. He is also Musical Director of the London Choral Society, the new London Collegium and the Highgate Choral Society. He made his London Promenade Concert debut in 1990 with an acclaimed performance of Britten's Noyes Fludde, followed by further Promenade Concert appearances in the following years. Regular broadcasts for the BBC include performances with his own New London Orchestra and with the BBC Singers. He has also worked with the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, the Wren Orchestra and with the Leipzig Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Ronald Corp is well known as an expert on choral training and has himself contributed significantly to choral repertoire in a number of compositions.

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(originally women's voices) and harp, it has been described as "neither a medley of carols - something quite different from the Christmas story is being narrated - nor a ceremony" but, rather in the Yeats sense, "a ceremony of innocence, a musical representation of life before the fall" reminding us (in the exuberant closing "Adam lay i-bounden”) "that without the Fall of Man there would be nothing, no Christian story, no love, no life, no art" (Humphrey Carpenter, 1992). The (identical) Latin plainchant Procession and Recession (a favourite device of Britten's, witness the later church parables) are based on the "Hodie" Antiphon from the Nativity Vespers - at the suggestion, it has been said, of Alec Robertson. In this performance the former is accompanied, the latter - creating the illusion of voices receding into silence - is not. The predominantly medieval English texts of the cycle are divided by a central Interlude for harp, a striking solo memorable for the "sweet imperturbability" (Redlich) of its four- note ostinato (redolent, celestially, of Mahler's Fourth Symphony).

Britten's earliest writing for voices and piano is found in his Three Two-Part Songs (1932) to words by de la Mare. The first is about the broom-stick ride of the witches from Goethe's Walpurgisnacht. Infinitely subtle in delicacy of counterpoint (the vocal entry is an augmentation of the piano accompaniment), contrast of a cappella sound, and final cadence, the second is about a landscape washed by rain and lit by sunshine. The third is a tumbling shanty. The Birds (for unison chorus but here sung as a solo), A Wealden Trio (boldly identified by its three folkloristic solo refrains, published 1968) and Siueet was the Song (published 1966) comprise challenging examples of apprentice works subsequently revised: the first two Britten originally submitted to the Royal College of Music in the summer of 1930, hoping to be awarded a scholarship (he was successful). King Herod and the Cock (to words and melody collected by Cecil Sharp), The Oxen and Fancie are all late settings, dating from between the War Requiem and The Building of the House.

© 1995 Ate§ Orga

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BRITTEN ^ Alexander Wells, Piano

Skaila Kanga, Harp

New London Children’s Choir Ronald Corp

® 1995 HNH International Ltd. © 1995 HNH International Ltd.

COMPACT mu NAXOS

DIGITAL AUDIO

Q - E Friday Afternoons, Op. 7 E Sweet was the Song El King Herod and the Cock E The Oxen E Fancie

[fl The Birds E - ED Three Two-part Songs A Wealden Trio: Christmas Song of the Women

E0 - E0 A Ceremony of Carols

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