Iain Farrington: Lay my burden down, Kristina Arakelyan: Star Fantasy, and Widor: Symphonie Romane
🎞️ · 13.03.2023 · 00:41:42 ··· Montag ⭐ 0 🎬 0
📺 Jonathan Holmes
🎬 · 13.03.2023 · 00:41:42 ··· Montag
😎 · 03.07.2024 · 15:40:29 ··· MiTTwoch
Organ Concert St Mary’s Ewell Saturday 11th March 7.30pm Jonathan Holmes
Lay my burden down. Iain Farrington ( b. 1977 )
1 When I lay my burden down
2 Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
3 Amazing Grace
4 Steal Away
5 Every time I feel the spirit
Star Fantasy (Alleluia: vidimus stellam) Kristina Arakelyan ( b. 1994)
Symphonie 10 ‘Romane’ Charles-Marie Widor (1844 – 1937)
1 Moderato
2 Choral – Adagio
3 Cantilene – lento
4 Final – Allegro – poco meno vivo – A tempo ma meno vivo -Andante – Tempo primo – Andante – Andante quasi adagio.
Programme Notes Lay my burden down Iain Farrington
Lay my burden down is a series of pieces based on African-American spirituals and traditional songs. It features five compositions, each one being based on a particular traditional melody. The collection opens with When I lay my burden down, an energetic, positive and gospel-inspired work. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child is an elegiac and solemn piece, building to a passionate climax before subsiding into a reflective resignation. Amazing Grace is a continuous sequence of jazz/gospel variations on the well-known tune, full of joy and optimism. Steal Away is mostly simple and reflective, the melody sounding over a rocking accompaniment, becoming gradually more intense, then disappearing in the highest register. The final piece in the set is Every time I feel the spirit, a jazzy display piece that develops into a toccata to finish the group.
Star Fantasy (Alleluia: vidimus stellam) Kristina Arakelyan ( b. 1994) The influence of the great French organist-composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992) is acknowledged in this piece; in particular, his delight in the harmony of F sharp major with an added sixth as a symbol of joy, which – both chord and rapture – are likewise integral to the Star Fantasy. The structure of the piece might be described as being in reverse-variation form,commencing with an abridged,hushed version of the chant as if from afar, and returning to it – but now in exultation and splendour – at the conclusion. In this powerfully cumulative work the composer uses a variety of textures and different playing techniques, rendering the piece as an etude too, and adding to the organ repertoire by modern women composers based on Gregorian Chant. It is from Anna Lapwood’s new anthology ‘Gregoriana’.
Widor played his Romanesque symphony for the first time in January 1900 at the Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche in Berlin. The composer’s preface describes best how the music grows out of the plainchant, in this work the Haec dies, an elegant arabesque embellishing a few words of text - about ten notes per syllable - an elusive vocalise like the song of a bird, a sort of cadenza conceived for a virtuoso free of all constraint. To keep the listener’s attention on such a fluid theme there is but one means: repeat it ceaselessly.
Thus, is conceived this first movement of the Symphonie romane, which, sacrificing everything to the subject, risks here and there some timid attempt at development, only to abandon it rapidly and return to the original idea.
The second movement is entitled Choral, perhaps because it opens with a harmonization of the chant in four parts, faintly suggesting a Bach chorale. Its form is episodic and appears to introduce a series of new themes and motives - until one looks more closely at them and discovers that almost everything that happens is generated from the Haec dies melody by techniques of fragmentation and derivation characteristic of Beethoven
The Cantilène abandons Haec dies for the first three phrases of the sequence Victimae paschali laudes two sections of uniformly textured accompanied melody, identical except for their endings, separated by a brief passage of louder four-part harmony, and rounded off by a short coda. The chant tune seems to enter only in bar 11, as the continuation of an intensely expressive cantilena filled with wide, upward-striving intervals.
The finale returns to Haec dies, now transformed into single line of rapid eighths, high on the keyboard, with full organ: a stunning and original beginning. The rest of the movement proceeds in a series of dynamic surges, as suggested above, the last being on the broadest scale and demanding every ounce of wind the blowers of the organ can supply. Here the chant returns in its original form for the first time since the first movement, played high, pianissimo, over a throbbing bass; then another crescendo to full organ for the greatest sustained climax of the symphonies, during which the chant is heard four more times.
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