Rubbra: Nine Tenebrae Motets / Magnificat And Nunc Dimittis

Description

Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986)Sacred Choral WorksEdmund Rubbra was born in 1901 to poor, working-?¡class parents in Northampton. His father was employed in a boot factory and the young Edmund was running errands to supplement the family income long before he left school at the age of fourteen to work as a railway clerk. His mother sang in the local Congregational church choir and took care to encourage his musical development at the piano. In 1920 he gained a scholarship in composition to Reading University where he studied with Gustav Hoist, study which was further encouraged by an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1921. Rubbra left the RCM in 1925 and supported himself by teaching privately; composing, contributing to music journalism and playing the piano. During the course of his war service with the Royal Artillery he was seconded to give chamber music concerts (he was an excellent pianist) and formed an ensemble which later became the Rubbra-Gruenberg-Pleeth Trio. From 1947 to 1968 Rubbra lectured in music at Oxford and was awarded a fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford in 1963. From 1961 to 1974 he also served as professor of music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He died at his home in Gerrards Cross in 1986.Rubbra is a composer who defies easy description. He embraced traditional forms and structures with ease but with a unique voice and a sophisticated concept of tonality and harmony. This concept seems to grow from the starting point of a composer such as Debussy, where harmonic inventiveness is always logical but often breath-takingly wonderful. Tonality is clear but not set in stone and the context in which it is presented opens up endless possibilities. This combined with Rubbra's innate sense of melody and a love of counterpoint shines through in his compositions.The other defining characteristic of Rubbra was his firmly held religious belief. Of his colleagues few had definite ideas of faith. Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Britten and Tippett always felt uncomfortable with set forms of religion and indeed both Britten and Tippett had to sublimate their personal feelings in order to produce music for the Church, but for Rubbra spirituality was the starting point for work, an inexhaustible wellspring from which flowed not only choral and vocal music but also much of his instrumental and orchestral writing. His reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1948 was to prove the inevitable point of rest for a man who had begun his spiritual journey many years earlier. His belief was not simply a gut reaction, its gestation period was lengthy and when it finally emerged it was intellectual, wide-ranging, consistent and deep. Reflected in his output are not only the influences of major Catholics such as Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Teilhard de Chardin (whose name the Eighth Symphony bears) but also English metaphysical writers and elements of Buddhism and Eastern mysticism.The Magnificat and Nunc