John Blow (1649 - 1708)
Anthems



Winchester Cathedral Choir
The Parley of Instruments

David Hill - conductor



COMPACT DISC 1
01. God spake sometime in visions
02. How doth the city sit solitary
03. The Lord is my shepherd
04. God is our hope and strength
05. I beheld, and lo! a great multitude
06. Turn thee unto me, O Lord
07. Blessed is the man that hath not walked

COMPACT DISC 2
01. Lift up your heads, O ye gates
02. O Lord, I have sinned
03. O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious
04. O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me
05. Cry aloud and spare not
06. Lord, who shall dwell in thy tabernacle?
07. I said in the cutting off of my days


Where did the big, imposing, public quality of Handel's English choral music come from? Listening to the music of John Blow (1649-1708) uncovers part of the answer. Blow, organist at the Chapel Royal and later the impressively titled "Composer of the Chapel Royal," was the preeminent church composer of the English restoration. His anthems, 14 of which are recorded on this two-disc set, set biblical texts in a splendid style that adopted the latest Baroque developments but strove for neither deep expressiveness nor interiority. All the music here has organ continuo accompaniment, and the "symphony anthems" have string parts; the short notes by Peter Holman effectively clarify these unfamiliar genres. Blow's settings are sectional, with full-choir passages alternating with those for soloists, often paired. He emphasizes key text passages effectively, often repeating a single phrase or tossing it back and forth between choir and soloists in a very Handelian manner. This 1995 recording, with its men-and-boys Winchester Cathedral Choir and historically oriented Parley of Instruments ensemble, seems to fall into the "authentic" category, but its vibrato-heavy countertenor, tenor, and bass soloists (who tend to get lost in the sonic spaces of New Hall at Winchester College) create an effect that's unusual in historical recordings. The angelic choir, the rather operatic soloists, and the accompanying instruments form three distinct planes of sound, sharpening the basic contrasts of Blow's music. The results are curiously modernistic in a way, although the boy treble soloists offer fine, clear-as-a-bell examples of English children's singing.

The rest of the works recorded here are ‘symphony’ anthems, with obbligato passages for violins (and, in one work, recorders). In a famous passage, Thomas Tudway wrote that this form owed its existence to the personal taste of Charles II, ‘a brisk, & Airy Prince, comeing to the Crown in the Flow’r, & vigour of his Age’ who was soon ‘tyr’d with the Grave & Solemn way, and Order’d the Composers of his Chappell, to add Symphonys &c with Instruments to their Anthems’. The architecture of the small chapel in Whitehall Palace, where most symphony anthems were performed, dictated the subsequent development of the genre. We know little about it (it was destroyed by fire along with most of the rest of the palace in 1698), but it seems that galleries ran round most of the building, and that one of them housed the organ and another was used for the string players, who were drawn from the royal string orchestra, the Twenty-four Violins. It must have been small since the groups that played there were limited to five or six-which is why we have used one-to-a-part strings for all but one of the anthems. The exception, the grand anthem God spake sometime in visions, was written for the coronation of James I in Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1685, and was performed with large forces, including the complete Twenty-four Violins. In the chapel, the choir would have sung in stalls on the floor of the building, so all verse anthems performed there were effectively polychoral works-which explains why there is so much interplay between the soloists, instruments and choir. We have tried to suggest this spatial layout in our recording, though we have been limited by the fact that stereo equipment cannot properly convey the impression of vertical space.