Release Date: 10 January 2005
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313296521
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: CHRISTMAS WITH WINCHESTER COLLEGE CHAPEL CHOIR
Description
Christmas with Winchester College Chapel ChoirThe music for Christmas presented by WinchesterCollege Chapel Choir and the Hong Kong PhilharmonicOrchestra starts with unaccompanied works performedby the singers. The first of these offers verses from anEnglish version of the hymn of St Ambrose, Veni,Redemptor gentium (Come, thou Redeemer), sung to themelody Puer nobis nascitur (A boy is born to us)adapted by the Wolfenb??ttel organist and KapellmeisterMichael Praetorius, an important figure in thedevelopment of Lutheran church music in the earlyseventeenth century.There follow three twentieth-century compositions.The first, by the versatile English composer RichardRodney Bennett, is a setting of an anonymous fifteenthcenturypoem, one of a set of five carols published in1967. After this comes a setting of William Blake'spoem The Lamb composed in 1982 by the contemporaryEnglish composer John Tavener. Music of relativelysimple structure, written for the composer's youngnephew, matches the seeming simplicity of the text. Thegroup of unaccompanied choral works ends with a 1985setting of Illuminare Jerusalem, a fifteenth-centuryScottish poem, by the British composer Judith Weir, atone time a pupil of John Tavener. O come, all yefaithful, a familiar carol stemming from the eighteenthcentury, equally well known in its Latin version, Adestefideles, has become an inevitable musical concomitantof Christmas.Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a musicaldynasty in Eisenach in 1685 and trained, after the deathof his musician father, by an elder brother to embark ona career that demanded a great degree of musicalversatility. Early appointments as an organist and at thecourt of Weimar, led to the prestige of a position asdirector of court music to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen, a happy period, brought to an end by the youngPrince's marriage to a woman without musical interest.After six years or so at Cothen, he moved to Leipzig asCantor at the Choir School of St Thomas, with dutiesthat involved him in the provision of church music andhumbler occupations as a schoolmaster, some of which,at least, could be delegated. He remained in Leipzig inthe same employment, subject to the demands of the citycouncil, until his death in 1750.The first Leipzig years found Bach busy with thecomposition of cycles of cantatas for the Lutheranchurch year. The cantata Am Abend aber desselbigenSabbats, BWV 42 (On the evening of the same Sabbath)was written for the first Sunday after Easter, known asQuasimodo Sunday from the opening of the Introit tothe Mass on that day, or, familiarly, as Low Sunday. Itwas first heard on 8th April 1725 and is scored for twooboes, bassoon, strings and continuo, opening with thepresent Sinfonia.Bach, like other composers of the period, was in thehabit of making additional use of earlier compositions.His settings of the Lutheran Mass, which, by his time,could preserve the Kyrie eleison and Gloria of thetraditional Catholic Mass, were made in the late 1730
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Veneto Po:Maag
Various
Various
