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Edward Bairstow (1874 - 1946)
Choral Music
Performers:
Paul Provost - organ
Roderick Williams - baritone
Britten Sinfonia
The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
David Hill - Director of Music
Another great disc from the dazzling Choir of St John’s College Cambridge under their Director of Music David Hill, collaborating with great musicians including Roderick Williams, Paul Provost and the Britten Sinfonia.
The music of Edward Bairstow (1874–1946) is an essential part of the British cathedral music tradition. He set his texts ‘with a beauty which makes one never able to think of the words without recalling the music’, as the Dean of York wrote on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Certainly the more well-known works on this disc eminently fulfill this criterion. St John’s’ inspired recordings of these classic numbers in the matchless acoustic of the chapel make this a disc to treasure on these grounds alone.
However it also includes some glorious rarities from different points in Bairstow’s career, which demonstrate his mastery of different styles and developing harmonic language. The Five Poems of the Spirit are a particular highlight: beautiful and unusual settings of metaphysical poetry for solo baritone, choir and orchestra, performed with passionate commitment by the wonderful Roderick Williams.
An excellent disc in regard both to the standard of performance and to the selection of Bairstow’s music. And to that should be added straight away the quality of recorded sound, for in choral music of this type it is particularly important to allow for enough reverberance and sense of space without loss of clarity; also to balance choir and organ so as to keep a focus upon the singers and their words while enabling the organist to exploit the full range of the instrument in tone and volume. The comparable recital disc from York Minster (where Bairstow was Master of the Music from 1913 to his death in 1946) is also a very fine one and has the additional appeal of its special association; but whatever St John’s loses in comparative grandeur in a few expansive points of climax, it gains more in a sense of immediacy and personal contact during the many passages of quiet reflection. But the recommendation for this new issue in preference is confirmed most decisively by the inclusion of the Five Poems of the Spirit. This seems not to be claimed as a first recording but I know of no other, nor can I remember hearing the work before. Completed in 1944, it remained unpublished till after Bairstow’s death. The orchestration was provided by Sir Ernest Bullock, and with its baritone solos and (largely) early-17th-century texts it stands, not unworthily, alongside Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs. Particularly memorable is the fourth, Raleigh’s "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet", but all are attractive. Roderick Williams is the ideally suited soloist and the Britten Sinfonia do justice to a delightful score. In the accompanied anthems and services the organ parts are played with skilful registration by Paul Provost, and the choir sing throughout with their customary expressiveness and variety of colour: exquisitely (for instance) in the unaccompanied Jesu, the very thought of Thee.
