St Matthew Passion (c.1492)
Part 1
solo tenor, solo bass, four-part choir

In mediaeval religious life the Passion narrative was recited four times during the week leading to Easter, starting with the version from Matthew’s Gospel on Palm Sunday. The versions from Mark followed on Tuesday, Luke on Wednesday, and John on Good Friday. Unlike the normal gospel readings in the Mass of the day throughout the year, the Passions were chanted by three singers, dividing the narrative between a medium tenor (narrator), bass voice (Jesus), and a high voice (all other speakers such as Judas, Peter, Pilate and the crowds).

The Passion according to St.Matthew by Richard Davy (c.1465–1507) is the earliest setting by a named composer which extends this basic liturgical theatre into a musical composition, by providing a polyphonic choral version of the high voice’s segments – a structure that remained intact through to the Passions of J.S.Bach and beyond. Davy was master of the choristers at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1490-92, where this Passion may have been first performed. A half-century before the development of the madrigal, his polyphonic settings for the gallery of individuals and groups who form the human actors of the story show a remarkable range of musical characters and shapes, each contained in a small musical space of a few measures.

Davy’s Passion itself had to live through the turmoil of its time, surviving Henry VIII’s ransacking of the monasteries in the Eton Choir Book, where Davy’s works show him to be one of the finest composers of a large, lost repertoire. The Passion survives in damaged form – in Part 1, some segments have been editorially borrowed from the second Part, or have had missing voices completed.

Three other English composers represent generations succeeding Davy across the decades of the Reformation. John Taverner (c.1495–1545), regarded then and now as the greatest English composer of the era, was briefly arrested as choirmaster at Cardinal College, Oxford for possible Lutheran sympathies, and later became an agent of Thomas Cromwell in the dissolution of the monasteries. The late style of his Dum transisset Sabbatum moves away from the florid late-mediaeval character of his well-known Masses, in a serene melodic flow around the plainsong cantus firmus for the responsory at Easter dawn.

John Sheppard (?– c.1559) was based like Richard Davy at Magdalen College, and became attached to the prestigious Chapel Royal. He remained unpublished in his lifetime and was largely re-discovered in the late 20th century as a composer of extraordinary originality in voicings and textures of choral sound. His six-voice Media vita in morte sumus throws an intense melodic emphasis on a trio of high soprano with a pair of tenor-alto lines, and has the Gregorian cantus firmus melody moving in regular note-values at twice the normal speed in the baritone. Thomas Tallis (c.1505–85) was the only composer of the three to write for the reformed liturgy, and published his well-known sonorous hymn-setting O nata lux in the joint collection Cantiones Sacrae, with the younger William Byrd, in 1575.

The poems of Anna Akhmatova with their incantational, traditional rhyming qualities had wide popular currency in Russia through the Stalin years, and were written against the background of her husband’s arrest and murder in prison and her son’s long imprisonment (for being the son) until his release under Kruschev. Australian composer Helen Gifford has a large output engaging with texts and poetry in the forms of vocal and operatic music. Her setting of Akhmatova opens the three pieces of Catharsis (with Kathleen Raine and Elizabeth Riddell), her second cycle for the Astra Choir, composed in 2001. It followed the earlier Choral Scenes for speakers, chorus and instruments, with multi-lingual settings of poetry from the First World War, planned for CD release in the new Astra Concert Archive series.

JMcC