Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY ALTERNATIM! 4
Alan Cooper
23 October 2009
KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL
For the fourth recital in the Alternatim series, Roger Williams stood in for Jane Leatherbarrow who was indisposed. He gave an absolutely heroic performance leading and directing the Friday Schola, changing stops and playing the organ all without the slightest hitch in presentation. Although this week, the music was not strictly in the full Alternatim tradition it was so to speak a close relative in that the organ music was so intimately related to the accompanying plainchants.
We were back this week with the English tradition and two composers of the generation just before Tallis and Byrd. The first of these composers, John Redford would have been twenty when Tallis was born while Byrd would have been seven or eight years old when Redford died. Having heard the music of John Redford and Thomas Preston, I feel that both deserve to be better known to the general listener, so Friday’s recital was an especially mind-expanding experience.
Roger and the Schola performed two works by John Redford. The first, Christe Redemptor Omnium, is centred on a plainchant hymn for the first Vespers of Christmas Day. The organ fantasy which followed was for full organ and had a regal and processional feel to it. It was however the second of the two pieces, Precatus est Moyses that was truly impressive with a beautifully sung extended plainsong melody that soared weightlessly out of the organ gallery followed by a long and intricately developed organ piece that with its robust imitative polyphony suggested one possible source of inspiration for Byrd’s choral writing. This was a glorious piece that could stand proudly on its own as a concert solo for organ.
Thomas Preston’s Offertory on Felix Namque was based on a very short plainsong sequence, just one word really, but it was brilliantly expanded and built up into a remarkably fine composition. One was reminded that the creations of later composers whether in the development of symphonic movements from simple thematic ideas or even Wagner’s extensions of leitmotifs though not directly related to what Preston was doing were nevertheless the flowering of similar mental processes. In other words this was not primitive music but rather the artistic product of musical minds that had a considerable degree of sophistication and ingenuity wired into them, and this over five hundred years ago!