medieval.org
Naxos Early Music · Alte Musik 8.553209
1995
01 - Hosanna to the son of David [1:51]
02 - Give ear, O Lord. [5:38]
03 - All people clap your nands [1:50]
04 - What joy so true [5:11]
05 - O Lord, grant the king a long life [3:10]
06 - Lord, to thee I make my moan [2:43]
07 - All laud and praise [6:29]
08 - Lachrimae Pavan (Morley) [2:41]
09 - A remembrance of my friend Thomas Morley [3:37]
10 - Passymeasures Pavan (Morley) [3:09]
11 - Gloria in excelsis Deo [3:27]
12 - When David heard [4:02]
13 - Give the king thy judgements [5:18]
14 - O Lord, arise [3:18]
15 - O how amiable are thy dwellings [3:25]
16 - Most moghty and all-knowing Lord [2:36]
17 - Alleluia, I heard a voice [3:08]
Oxford Camerata
Jeremy Summerly
Carys-Anne Lane, Rebecca Outram
Lisa Beckley, Alison Coldstream
Robin Blaze, Deborah Mackay
Stephen Taylor, Steven Harrold
Daniel Norman, Jonathan Arnold
Robert Evans, Michael McCarthy
Gary Cooper, organ
Track analysis - verse sections
Track 2 - RB ST / CL LB / DN
Track 4 - RO / RB / LB CL / CL LB RB
Track 7 - RB LB / RB CL RO / RB LB / LB CL RB
Track 9 - RO CL RB SH RE MM
Track 13 - RB LB / LB CL / RB LB CL
Track 16 - RB
Track 17 MM
Recorded in the Chapel of Hertford College, Oxford,
on 3rd and 4th January, 1995.
Continuo organ by Kenneth Tickell & Co. (1990)
Producers: Judy Lieber and Jeremy Summerly
Engineer: John Taylor
Thomas Weelkes (1576
- 1623)
It is not just the approach of a new millennium which encourages
ideological diatribes about change and fortune: fins de
siècle are adequate enough, so history relates, to stimulate
new directions and a sense of quest. Modern music history can thus be
broadly pinned on five important dates: 1499 - Josquin and the
flowering of vocal polyphony; 1599 - Monteverdi, opera, and music
written in a definite key; 1699 - Corelli, the concerto, and
discovering how to make movements longer; 1799 - Beethoven Symphonies
and revolution; 1899 - Debussy and the abuse and decline of tonality.
However simplistic, the implications for the rest of the century of
these milestones of musical thinking cannot be underestimated.
Yet the way in which individual composers react to times of intense
change is not so straightforward. This is where chronological studies
of the 'development' of music history often reveal their shortcomings.
1599 is one of the bigger dates on account of the radical polemics
brought about by Italian dare-devils who, literally, wanted to create a
scene. Small groups of arty folk met for lunch in Rome and invented a
new musical language: a type of speech in tones called recitative whose
freedom from the shackles of the strict rules of the Renaissance would
allow music to reach the parts to tickle the senses and stir the
passions as never before. The fact that little of this pioneering fare
is memorable tells much. If Monteverdi is the father of modem music
then this is because his genius was for understanding where innovation
was truly liberating and established principles of order, beauty, and
balance were unnegotiable.
Thomas Weelkes would not have known much about Rome in the early 1600s
nor would he have been aware of Monteverdi's successful synthesis of
old and new. He was a busy Church of England musician whose music is
distinctly "Clog'd with somewhat of an English vein". This description,
employed by Roger North over a hundred years later to describe
Purcell's Sonatas, is as apt for Weelkes and his generation as it was
for the great 'Orpheus'; the vein is clogged with the same infusion,
that of an unusually enterprising and timeless affinity to
counterpoint. This shows, above all, that England - if not entirely
oblivious of the ultimate importance of the new Baroque - had its own
sense of values and destiny according to a national temperament, one
which found continental histrionics and emotional outpourings rather
embarrassing.
So, no opera in England. Nevertheless, enough changes were afoot at the
turn of the seventeenth century, as Elizabethan culture drew to a
close, for Weelkes to realise that he was operating in a world of
transition and he took advantage of it. The power of representing words
and images, central to the Italian baroque ethos, was not lost on those
composers involved in lute-song and particularly madrigal writing. The
fact that Weelkes, Gibbons, Dowland, Byrd, Wilbye, and Tomkins were not
at the forefront of the latest Italian innovations is irrelevant: they
had a taste of the expressive devices which could illuminate texts,
although textual images were more compelling than merely setting words
in the abstract world of English counterpoint. This is born out in
Weelkes's exquisitely focused and atmospheric sacred madrigal When
David heard.
If Weelkes stands slightly apart from his contemporaries then it is
because he was perhaps the nearest the English got to a 'dare-devil'.
The traits of the boldest compositions of his 1600 madrigal collection
dig surprisingly deeply into the baroque psyche without ever drawing on
specific 'baroque' practices: impetuosity, restlessness, a love of bold
and startling symbolism, concentrated gestures, and an ambition for
large structural coherence - all characteristics which would have found
a natural home fifty years later. But when the madrigal soon, and
ironically for Weelkes, became an anachronism he willingly turned his
attention to the church, committed as he was to the bastion of
counterpoint. However tempting it is to think of an innovator stifled
by the conservatism of his age, the relatively experimental devices in
the madrigals are surprisingly unintegral to Weelkes's musical style.
He was never particularly responsive to words; as Hosanna to the
son of David and Alleluia! I heard a voice display, his
music is essentially driven by sonorous textures and an engagingly
direct desire to set a text with the minimum of fuss. At its best, his
fertile imagination engages us in its virility and a thrilling organic
growth. At his least inspired, his melodic lines can appear pedestrian
and strangely austere and unambitious. This honest cross-section of
Weelkes's church output conveys a flawed genius but one with a capacity
for invention and individuality without which his fin de
siècle would be the poorer.
© 1995 Jonathan Freeman-Attwood