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Details
St Peter and St Paul Church
The Street
Salle
Reepham
Norfolk
NR10 4SE
England
Programme
Orlando Gibbons – O clap your hands together
William Byrd – Lift up your heads
Orlando Gibbons – Fantasia for double organ
Orlando Gibbons – Prelude in G major
Thomas Weelkes – When David Heard that Absalon was slain
Thomas Weelkes – Hosanna to the Son of David
Orlando Gibbons – O Lord in Thy Wrath
Orlando Gibbons – Lift up your heads
William Byrd – Great Service: Magnificat; Nunc dimittis
Orlando Gibbons – Hosanna to the son of David
Thomas Tomkins – Almighty God the fountain of all wisdom
Thomas Tomkins – A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times
William Byrd – O Lord give ear
Thomas Tomkins – When David heard
Performers
Gavin Turner – Director
Richard Powell – organ
William Byrd Choir
Programme Note
William Byrd - Great Service
After last year’s sold-out and very successful concert at St Andrew’s Gunton Park with a male voice sextet, lutenist and speaker, this year the William Byrd Choir will be back at the magnificent and spacious Salle Church with a full mixed choir of sixteen voices.
In contrast to our usual Latin texted Catholic church music, this programme is entirely from the English cathedral repertoire from what was a golden age for Anglican liturgical music.
The Byrd Great Service is one of the masterpieces of English church music, Until relatively recently it was not regularly performed by either cathedral or professional chamber choirs. It is written in a grand manner with expansive exuberance but also has passages of delicate expressiveness: a work not to be missed by either its fans or those who have never heard it before.
Accompanying this work will be a selection of well-known anthems, familiar enough in the cathedral repertoire, but not so often performed by specialist professional choirs for the benefit also of those who are not church-goers. These are anthems mainly written by composers associated with the Chapel Royal. The Great Service itself was almost certainly performed mainly by the Chapel Royal choir which probably alone had the resources for large-scale and more ambitious works.
The Catholic Byrd was only briefly associated with Anglican cathedral music as a young man at Lincoln, but the other three composers all had cathedral posts as well as Chapel Royal duties (apart from Weelkes): Gibbons (Westminster Abbey), Weelkes (Chichester Cathedral), and Tomkins (Worcester Cathedral), where these anthems were no doubt variously performed. Three of these composers died in the 1620s; only the younger Tomkins lived into the Puritan Revolution when Cathedrals were closed to religious worship, and Tomkins was banished from his cathedral. In 1649 (the year of Charles I’s execution) Tomkins wrote A Sad Pavan for these Distracted Times, which will be one of the organ pieces by Gibbons and Tomkins that Richard Powell will play at this concert.
