Christmas 2020 - In Terra Pax - Gerald Finzi
Dec 1, 2020 22:37:25 GMT
julesd68 and jandl100 like this
Post by Slinger on Dec 1, 2020 22:37:25 GMT
Valentines cards and Easter eggs are in the shops, it must be Christmas. To celebrate this glorious time of year I've already put my Christmas Tree up. Up in the fekkin' loft,where it's fekkin' staying.
Tis the season to be jolly, ticka-ticka-Timex, tra-la-la. I shall now smoke a tiny cigar to the music of the Jacques Loussier jazzing up Air on a G-String. That was for anyone else in my age group, the rest of you are welcome to stare at me as if I'm insane.
And so to Christmas music, possibly the best thing about Christmas as far as I'm concerned, and oft times it's one saving grace. I have a ton of it, including Christmas albums by people you wouldn't believe ever recorded Christmas albums. (Can we say "B.B. King", and quite possibly, in the same breath "contractual obligation"?) But, onward to the classical that we're all here for, both of us.
My first thought was "avoid the obvious," e.g. Bach, Prokofiev, Andre-bloody-Rieu, Tchaikovsky, that sort of thing.
My next decision was between "traditional" and "not-so-traditional," and in the end Hely-Hutchinson's Symphony of Carols was narrowly beaten into second place by this two-movement feast of English gorgeousness, and the piece I want ot highlight is just the first two tracks on this album. That's not to say the rest isn't good too. Try it if you've not listened to Finzi, other than his popular clarinet concerto.
In Terra Pax - Gerald Finzi (1901 - 1956)
A series of tragedies profoundly affected Finzi in his early years. By the time he was eighteen he had lost his father, three elder brothers and his much-loved music teacher, killed in action. This dreadful sequence of events, and the appalling losses of the First World War that formed the backdrop to his adolescence, gave Finzi an acute awareness of the impermanence of life, confirmed with grim finality when at the age of fifty he discovered that he was dying of leukaemia. These experiences to a large extent account for the hint of melancholy underlying much of his music.
Finzi’s musical inspiration sprang primarily from his love of literature and the English countryside - the same sources that inspired Elgar and Vaughan Williams. In Terra Pax was composed in 1954 and was almost the last piece that Finzi wrote, though its genesis can be traced to an event some thirty years previously, when one Christmas Eve he had climbed up to the church at the top of his beloved Chosen Hill, between Gloucester and Cheltenham. The sound of the midnight bells ringing out across the frosty Gloucestershire valleys evidently made a lasting impression on him, retrospectively providing the idea for In Terra Pax, as he told Vaughan Williams.
The work is a setting of two verses from Robert Bridges’ fine poem, ‘Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913’, subtitled Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis (Peace and goodwill to all men), which Finzi imaginatively and skilfully uses to frame St Luke’s account of the angels’ appearance to the shepherds. In Terra Pax is subtitled ‘Christmas Scene’, and Finzi explained that ‘the Nativity becomes a vision seen by a wanderer on a dark and frosty Christmas Eve in our own familiar landscape’. This placing of the Biblical story into an English pastoral context is entirely consistent with Finzi’s close affinity with the English Romantic tradition, and his lifelong dedication to the creation of his own rural paradise at his home in Ashmansworth, near Newbury.
The two soloists and the chorus have clearly defined musical roles; the baritone soloist takes the voice of the poet, the soprano is cast as the angel, whilst the chorus narrates the familiar biblical text. In the opening section the poet is standing on a hill contemplating the events of the very first Christmas, the sound of the distant church bells becoming for him the sound of an angel choir. This image is expressed in a pealing-bells motif which, together with the refrain from ‘The First Nowell’, provides the musical fabric of the piece.
Finzi, perhaps more than most, must have been aware of the terrible irony of Bridges’ reassuring Pax hominibus being swiftly followed by the outbreak of World War I, yet despite this, and despite his own terminal decline, In Terra Pax is a radiant, optimistic work of great beauty and sincerity; a miniature masterpiece that unites emotions, images and the familiar events of the Christmas story into a compelling musical narrative that is at once personal yet universal.
Merry Christmas, one and all. I deliberately haven't set a poll. You can tell me what you thought of it. I can take it.
Tis the season to be jolly, ticka-ticka-Timex, tra-la-la. I shall now smoke a tiny cigar to the music of the Jacques Loussier jazzing up Air on a G-String. That was for anyone else in my age group, the rest of you are welcome to stare at me as if I'm insane.
And so to Christmas music, possibly the best thing about Christmas as far as I'm concerned, and oft times it's one saving grace. I have a ton of it, including Christmas albums by people you wouldn't believe ever recorded Christmas albums. (Can we say "B.B. King", and quite possibly, in the same breath "contractual obligation"?) But, onward to the classical that we're all here for, both of us.
My first thought was "avoid the obvious," e.g. Bach, Prokofiev, Andre-bloody-Rieu, Tchaikovsky, that sort of thing.
My next decision was between "traditional" and "not-so-traditional," and in the end Hely-Hutchinson's Symphony of Carols was narrowly beaten into second place by this two-movement feast of English gorgeousness, and the piece I want ot highlight is just the first two tracks on this album. That's not to say the rest isn't good too. Try it if you've not listened to Finzi, other than his popular clarinet concerto.
In Terra Pax - Gerald Finzi (1901 - 1956)
A series of tragedies profoundly affected Finzi in his early years. By the time he was eighteen he had lost his father, three elder brothers and his much-loved music teacher, killed in action. This dreadful sequence of events, and the appalling losses of the First World War that formed the backdrop to his adolescence, gave Finzi an acute awareness of the impermanence of life, confirmed with grim finality when at the age of fifty he discovered that he was dying of leukaemia. These experiences to a large extent account for the hint of melancholy underlying much of his music.
Finzi’s musical inspiration sprang primarily from his love of literature and the English countryside - the same sources that inspired Elgar and Vaughan Williams. In Terra Pax was composed in 1954 and was almost the last piece that Finzi wrote, though its genesis can be traced to an event some thirty years previously, when one Christmas Eve he had climbed up to the church at the top of his beloved Chosen Hill, between Gloucester and Cheltenham. The sound of the midnight bells ringing out across the frosty Gloucestershire valleys evidently made a lasting impression on him, retrospectively providing the idea for In Terra Pax, as he told Vaughan Williams.
The work is a setting of two verses from Robert Bridges’ fine poem, ‘Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913’, subtitled Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis (Peace and goodwill to all men), which Finzi imaginatively and skilfully uses to frame St Luke’s account of the angels’ appearance to the shepherds. In Terra Pax is subtitled ‘Christmas Scene’, and Finzi explained that ‘the Nativity becomes a vision seen by a wanderer on a dark and frosty Christmas Eve in our own familiar landscape’. This placing of the Biblical story into an English pastoral context is entirely consistent with Finzi’s close affinity with the English Romantic tradition, and his lifelong dedication to the creation of his own rural paradise at his home in Ashmansworth, near Newbury.
The two soloists and the chorus have clearly defined musical roles; the baritone soloist takes the voice of the poet, the soprano is cast as the angel, whilst the chorus narrates the familiar biblical text. In the opening section the poet is standing on a hill contemplating the events of the very first Christmas, the sound of the distant church bells becoming for him the sound of an angel choir. This image is expressed in a pealing-bells motif which, together with the refrain from ‘The First Nowell’, provides the musical fabric of the piece.
Finzi, perhaps more than most, must have been aware of the terrible irony of Bridges’ reassuring Pax hominibus being swiftly followed by the outbreak of World War I, yet despite this, and despite his own terminal decline, In Terra Pax is a radiant, optimistic work of great beauty and sincerity; a miniature masterpiece that unites emotions, images and the familiar events of the Christmas story into a compelling musical narrative that is at once personal yet universal.
Merry Christmas, one and all. I deliberately haven't set a poll. You can tell me what you thought of it. I can take it.
