PHI CD 505

PHI CD 505: REQUIEM - The Music of Christopher Rathbone Volume 3

[1] - [9] Requiem op 92 (2003) [37.10]
[1] Requiem aeternam [2] Kyrie [3] Domine Jesu Christe [4] Sanctus/Benedictus
[5] Pie Jesu [6] Agnus Dei [7] Lux aeterna [8] Libera me, Domine [9] In paradisum

[10] - [22] Variations on 'Dundee' op 95 for organ (2003) [10.00]

[23] God is our hope and strength: motet for unaccompanied choir op 93 (2003) [3.57]

[24] - [26] Miniature Suite for organ op 39 (1981)
[24] Minute march [0.56] [25] Blue chorale [1.36] [26] Fanfare and epilogue [2.45]

[27] Paean for organ op 26 (1972) [2.45]

[28] - [38] Variations on a French Psalm-tune for organ op 96 (2003) [15.00]

[1]-[9] St Peters Singers, Simon Lindley, organ, conducted by Christopher Rathbone recorded at Leeds Parish Church 15/5/05
[23] St Peters Singers conducted by Christopher Rathbone recorded at
Leeds Parish Church 6/6/04
[10]-[22] & [24]-[38] Christopher Rathbone, solo organ recorded at Leeds Parish Church

TOTAL PLAYING TIME: 75.00

Released 12/4/06

Acknowledgements are due to:
Martin Monkman, engineer, producer and editor.
St Peter's Singers and Simon Lindley who generously gave their services.
The Precentor and Churchwardens for permission to record in the Parish Church of St Peter at Leeds.
Isobel Rathbone for typing the booklet notes.

THE COMPOSER AND HIS MUSIC
The main work on this recording is the Requiem of 2003, along with a motet written during the same period, two sets of organ variations from later the same year, together with a Miniature Suite dating from twenty years earlier, and the Paean of 1972.
Christopher Rathbone was born in 1947 in Selsdon, Surrey. He began composing as a schoolboy at Whitgift School, South Croydon, and went up to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, with a choral exhibition, to read music. His supervisors included the late Alan Ridout for composition. Under Peter le Huray's direction he took a B A and then a Mus B in organ playing and composition. He added an FRCO to his qualifications whilst at Cambridge. He married the day after graduating in 1969, producing an anthem 'A New Commandment' for his colleagues in the St Catharine's Chapel choir to sing at the wedding. In 1970 he became the first assistant organist at Carlisle Cathedral where he served for three years under Andrew Seivewright before moving south to take up the post of Organist and Assistant Director of Music at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. Much of his compositional activity was directed to music for school and house plays, culminating in a full-scale opera called 'Pierce's Cave'. This work, to a poetic libretto by Robert Avery has been followed by a recent cantata and a song cycle to words by the same hand. The jaunty Marlborough Mass and its recent successor the Meanwood Mass are regular parts of the repertoire at Meanwood. A song cycle, 'The Turning Year' dates from 1983 and was recorded on Volume 2 of Amphion's series of the music of Christopher Rathbone.
Chamber music, including a cello sonata (on Volume 1) and a violin sonata, a clarinet quintet, and trios for cello, clarinet and piano and flute, clarinet and piano, have been followed recently by a quartet for string trio and organ, op 100 (2004).
From 1990 - 1996 Christopher conducted annual productions of Swindon Opera; and from the 1970s until now he has taken part in the annual Summer School at Marlborough, but in 1996 he left Wiltshire and moved to Leeds, becoming a busy freelance composer, organist, continuo harpsichordist, piano accompanist and choir director. He has composed much music for the various choirs with which he works - anthems and a communion service setting for Meanwood, where he is organist and choirmaster, carols and arrangements of spirituals for the Morley Music Society, and the Requiem and two carols (2005) for the Bradford Chorale. He has also been commissioned to write music for other choirs: the cantata 'The World's a Stage' was written for the Otley Choral Society's Diamond Jubilee Concert in 2003; the motet 'God is our Hope and Strength' for the Bolton Chamber Choir; the carol 'Nunc natus est Altissimus' for the choir of Leeds Parish Church (on 'The Music of Christopher Rathbone Volume 1). He has composed much music for organ, some of which has been championed by Simon Lindley, the dedicatee of 'Scenes and Antiphons' op 80. Recent compositions include four sets of variations (on this recording and vol 2, as well as the newest, a half-hour set of variations on 'Angel Voices', op 102). Altogether there are 15 organ solos (of which 10 are of at least 10 minutes duration). There are also a number of concerted works with organ, notably the recent Quartet for string trio and organ op 100 (2004).
Christopher gives weekly recitals on the recently (2001) enlarged organ at Meanwood, and also gives up to 12 recitals per year at Leeds Parish Church, where recent month-long series have featured music by Hollins, Whitlock, Franck and Howells, Leighton, Bach and French Fantasies. He has also included his own complete organ music to date in these recitals, as well as programmes based on Symphonies, Paeans and Passacaglias.

THE ST PETER'S SINGERS
This chamber choir, attached to Leeds Parish Church (St-Peter-at-Leeds) was founded by Harry Fearnley, an LPC alto lay-clerk, in 1977, with Simon Lindley as Musical Director. With its sister ensemble, the St Peter's Chamber Orchestra, the Singers present regular performances of major works by Bach and Handel. Their repertoire is very wide and the Rathbone Requiem joins similar works by Anerio, Mozart, Durufle and Rutter,as well as other contemporary composers. Francis Jackson's Stabat Mater was composed especially for the choir's 20th anniversary in 1997.

SIMON LINDLEY
Simon has been Master of the Music at Leeds Parish Church since 1975,and is also Leeds City Organist, responsible for organising and frequently playing the immensely popular series of Monday lunchtime organ recitals at Leeds Town Hall. He is a frequent guest recitalist throughout the U K and beyond. He was President of the Royal College of Organists from 2000 to 2003 and of the Incorporated Association of Organists from 2003-5. Two years ago he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leeds Metropolitan University in recognition of his services to the musical life of the city. He is Musical Director of the Leeds College of Music Choral Society and the Halifax Overgate Hospice Choir, as well as the St Peter's Singers.

Notes on the Music
[1]-[9] The Requiem op 92 was composed in late 2002 (the Pie Jesu) and early 2003. The Pie Jesu was a deliberate attempt to write a "popular" setting in the Rutter/Lloyd Webber vein. The rest of the Requiem seemed to grow naturally out of this, expanding the choir to four voices from the 2-part trebles of the Pie Jesu. During and shortly after the composition of the work several friends of the composer's family died: John Hanson, a colleague in the LPC choir, Jenny Lebon, wife of a musical colleague at Marlborough, Bishop Frank Weston, friend and mentor, and Mac Coventry, an old friend from Swindon Opera. To them the work is dedicated, along with the composer's parents who died in May 1995 almost exactly ten years before the date of this recording.
The Requiem was modelled very closely in text and form on the framework of the Requiem (1948) by Maurice Durufle, though the actual melodic and harmonic material is original. The Requiem was first performed in April 2004 by the Bradford Chorale in the famous church at Saltaire (Shipley), with Stephen Power, organ conducted by the composer. The St Peter's Singers performed it (and the motet 'God is our hope and strength') in Leeds Parish Church with Simon Lindley, organ in a concert in 2004 called 'The Composers Conduct', shared with Dr Francis Jackson. In September 2004 the work had its first liturgical performance in Wakefield Cathedral (St Peter's Singers and Bradford Chorale, Stephen Power, organ), at a Mass in memory of the disaster of 11th September 2001. St Peter's Singers sang it again on All Souls Day, November 2nd, at a Eucharist in Leeds Parish Church; while in April 2005 a third choir, the Morley Music Society, performed the work interspersed with the Songs of Palestine op 97, written after a visit to Israel and the West Bank in November 2003 (Geoffrey Dunn organ). The score has been superbly type-set and published by Barry Jordan of Calverley.
[10]-[22] Variations on Dundee op 95 were composed over the summer of 2003. The melody is a Scottish Psalm-tune, published in the 1615 Scottish Psalter, and is regularly sung to John Morison's (1750-98) Epiphany hymn 'The race that long in darkness pined/ has seen a glorious light'; and Charles Wesley's 'Let saints on earth in concert sing/ with those whose work is done'. Unlike the variants on 'Richmond', (op 91), which appeared in Volume 2, this set is not confined to jazzy styles, though variation 1 (after the initial musing statement of the theme) variation 6 and variation 9 are jazzy in effect. All the first nine are very brief, no 2 linking the notes of the theme with running semiquavers, no 3 building chords from the notes of the tune by accumulation, no 4 declaiming the theme on the sesquialtera stop, no 5 distorting both melody and rhythm and harmonising each note of the theme richly, but staccato. No 7 again links the shape of the theme with semiquavers, but with some mysterious gaps in the tune. No 8 is a piquant trio, the melody in the right hand. After no 9, a jazz ballad, we hear a parody of Bach's 'Wachet auf' prelude, with the hymn tune (as in Bach) soloed out on a reed stop in the left hand (but omitting notes 2 and 3). Variation 11 is a slow statement of the melody over rich chords somewhat in the Messiaen style, and the final variation, marked 'Chorale con pedale precipitoso', is a show-case for the organist's feet, while the melody is harmonised somewhat in the style of Flor Peeters.
[23] God is our hope and strength op 93
This motet, a setting of verses from Psalm 46, was requested for the Bolton Chamber Choir by its director Peter Gunstone (a former organ scholar at Leeds Parish Church). The request came whilst work proceeded on the requiem in January 2003 and was completed in two days. It was performed during the spring at two concerts by the choir in Bolton Parish Church and West Houghton Parish Church, in a programme which included exclusively music by Britten and Rathbone. Besides "Rejoice in the Lamb" and "Hymn to St Cecilia" (plus the "Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria") by Britten, the concert included the anthems "God is gone up" op 74, and "The House of God" op 76, the latter written for the 150th anniversary of Meanwood Parish Church in 1999. The motet is scored for unaccompanied four-part choir, with divisions, and brief soprano and tenor solos taken from within the choir.

[24]-[26] Miniature Suite for organ op 39 (1981)
This work was commissioned by the Calne Festival for a recital by the late John Nourse at St Mary's Church, Calne (on the fine 4-manual organ which owed much of its splendour to the generosity of the famous Harris Sausage Company whose factory used to dominate Calne Town Centre). A five-minute work was requested, but the Festival received a brief three-movement suite - a tiny march featuring the trumpet stop, a gloomy chorale in the Phrygian mode (E minor with F naturals), and an exultant fanfare, some of whose figures are recalled in tranquillity in the serene epilogue.
[27] The Paean op 26 was written in Carlisle in 1972, and first performed at the wedding of the composer's sister, Scilla. It is a turbulent piece, full of contrasts, and ends quietly.
[28-38] Variations on a French Psalm-tune op 96 (2003)
These variations were composed during November and December of the same year, 2003, which saw the Requiem, motet and "Dundee" Variations come into being. They were completed on 1st January 2004! The melody this time is an ancient French Psalm-tune set to psalm 86 in the Paris psalter of 1542, and attributed there to Louis Bourgeois. The melody was used by Holst in his setting of Psalm 86 (the choir sings an early C17th metrical version to Bourgeois's haunting tune while the solo tenor sings the Coverdale translation in the Book of Common Prayer). Holst's piece dates from 1920, and meanwhile in 1905 his friend Vaughan Williams had included the tune in the English Hymnal, setting Bishop Heber's words "Virgin-born, we bow before thee/ Blessed was the womb that bore thee". Of the eleven variations the first three are for manuals only: 4-part harmony, a 2-part Bicinium and a swift variation on the swell (8 foot and 2 foot stops) with triplet arpeggios above and below the theme. No 4 is in 5/8, with a clarinet solo, in which every third bar is a free link to the next section of theme. Variations 5, 7 and 9 are trios, while No 6 is an adagio inspired by the music of Langlais, and No 8 is a minuet. After the jig-like third trio there is another Adagio, this time more in the style of Messiaen, while the finale is a brilliant toccata, not a million miles from the Final of Vierne's First Symphony. Both these variation sets were premiered during February 2004 at Leeds Parish Church, and the op 96 set has also been performed at Wakefield and Bradford Cathedrals, Huddersfield St Paul's, Edinburgh McEwen Hall and Marlborough College Chapel, among others. There is now a fourth set of variations (on "Angel Voices" op 102) completed in March 2005, which comes in at 28 minutes.