PRECIOUS THINGS: CHORAL MUSIC BY BERNARD HUGHES (b. 1974) THE EPIPHONI CONSORT
|
TIM READER
1
Perhaps
[3:37]
2
Psalm 56
[3:50]
Precious Things 3 4 5
Two 16 17
1. All the gold in the world [2:42] 2. Helium [2:31] 3. Crude [2:07]
18
Songs of Spring 1. Spring, the sweete spring 2. It was a lover and his lasse
Jesus, Springing
Milly Pelmore soprano; Jess Haig, Abaigh Wheatley altos; Greg Windle, Christopher Pelmore tenors; Amatey Doku bass
The Linden Tree
[3:14]
7
The Singers
[3:30]
20
8
If we shadows have offended
[1:41]
21
9
Jubilate Domino
[2:56]
22
Seek the peace of the city
23
Vocalise
I
Sing of Love 10 1. Meditation I 11 2. ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one’ 12 3. Meditation II 13 4. ‘Through love’ 14 5. Meditation III 15 6. ‘Love is patient, love is kind’ Becky Ryland-Jones soprano
[1:55] [3:29] [1:43] [3:41] [1:52] [4:04]
[4:14]
A Ternary of Littles
6
[2:25] [2:13]
19
1. I saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail 2. A Ternary of Littles, upon a Pipkin of Jelly Sent to a Lady 3. A New Song
Total playing time
[2:29] [3:23] [2:06] [4:33] [4:18] [68:47]
All tracks except 10–15 are premiere recordings
The Epiphoni Consort acknowledge the ongoing support of their Benefactors and Friends Recorded on 3-5 September 2021 in All Hallows’, Gospel Oak Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: James Waterhouse 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover art: FLY:D/unsplash Session photography: Ben Tomlin Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records
Notes on the music Bernard Hughes’s lucid, ‘useful’ music almost always tells stories – whether in concert, in the theatre, on film, in sacred ritual or preserved on record. It is often written to serve a specific purpose, to fill a particular space or to unite performers of varied disciplines. ‘Having a particular occasion in mind can really help shape a piece,’ commented the composer recently, who started his career as a comedian and continues to augment his composing by writing words. He counts Igor Stravinsky as one of his major influences, in discipline of approach rather than style; Hughes’s musical language can change entirely depending on the work in hand. ‘Writing a piece is finding a solution to a problem,’ he has said; ‘when the initial restrictions vary, so does the end result.’
the choir of St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, where he is composer-inresidence (the school’s sometime director of music was Gustav Holst). A straightforward but steadily augmenting tune carries a poem by Vera Brittain that laments the early death of her beloved in the First World War, its grief lined with optimism at the last. The setting was originally scored for the upper voices of the St Paul’s choir, but was later arranged for SATB choir. It is retrospectively dedicated to Tom Hammond, the conductor and friend of the composer who died suddenly over Christmas 2021.
Hughes enjoys a particularly close relationship with the BBC Singers, which drew him into writing for grouped voices after a workshop at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2002. Back then, the ensemble reportedly enjoyed what Hughes wrote for it: music that rejoiced in the expressive power of the singing voice without need for extended techniques, and that took a sideways look at tonality despite its firm harmonic footing. In that sense, Hughes’s musical worldview has remained constant. Much of the music on this album was written for the BBC Singers.
Hughes is drawn to poetic texts and never allows his music to trample on them; in a good performance, the words in his music are always decipherable. In his settings of Psalm 56 and Jubilate Domino (both from 2016), the sacred texts are selectively edited. In the former, Hughes has ‘stripped out all the direct references to God, leaving a slightly confrontational and aggressive text which dissolves into piety only in the last few bars’. The largely homophonic texture, cumulatively augmented, propels that text as if the music isn’t there at all. The text of Jubilate Domino is not redacted but rather augmented, supercharged by Gerard Manley Hopkins’s exuberant professions of faith.
Perhaps, however, was written for another institution with which Hughes is associated:
In Precious Things, first performed by the BBC Singers in 2020, Hughes sets verse
by poets he knows personally and has felt himself aesthetically close to (the composer was at university with Antony Dunn and Andrew George). These pieces are unusually political in the context of the rest of his output. The innocent, childlike word-painting of the lighter-than-air ‘Helium’ is obvious enough. There is something unsettlingly luxuriant and even blingy about ‘All the gold in the world,’ while ‘Crude’ gets stuck in to the sickly mess of human greed and environmental damage. The Linden Tree is one of two carols included on this album, another homophonic work that makes no attempt to reinvent the harmonic wheel but whose harmonies glow nonetheless. Jesus, Springing (2014) sets a joyous expression of faith by Kevin Crossley-Holland, dancing through a compound time signature. With similar spirit, celebrating not faith through singing but simply singing itself, The Singers sets a text by Henry Longfellow and uses the characteristic Hughes device of having the two halves of the choir sing the same material but from a staggered start. Puck’s final words from Shakespeare’s play are given a reflective, inviting homophonic treatment in If we shadows have offended from Four Songs from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I Sing of Love was written for the American choir Seattle Pro Musica, and first performed by that ensemble in 2012. It uses three texts from different religious traditions: the Old
Testament Song of Solomon; a devotional poem by the Islamic mystic Rumi and verses from the First Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament, divided by three ‘Meditations’ which reflect solely on the words ‘I sing of love’, lending them the power of a mantra. That phrase is repeated with increasing intensity in the first Meditation, which layers up statements of the phrase from the alto register outwards. The Song of Solomon passage is shapely and sensual, prompting a Meditation of greater frisson that splits the choir in two. The Rumi text ‘Through love’ undulates and soars towards a rippling intensity. The third Meditation sounds less at ease, with sustained cluster chords in upper voices set against chanted phrases in lower ones. The setting of Corinthians is an exploration of harmony in the form of a slow-moving chorale, solidified by parallel harmonies and ultimately adorned by a solo soprano. Two Songs of Spring, first performed in 2018, were written for the upper voice of the choir of St Paul’s Girls’ School choir. They set texts by Thomas Nashe and his contemporary Shakespeare respectively; Nashe’s text Spring, the sweete spring bounces along before dissolving into an enchanting mist of ad libitum nature noises; the three verses of Shakespeare’s It was a lover and his lasse are carried by individual voice sections which