Programme

[1] & [4] Gaudete

Music: Traditional
Arranged: Karl Jenkins

Gaudete ('rejoice') is an anonymous composition that was first published in 1582 in a collection of carols and other religious songs called Piae Cantiones. This collection, made by a Scandinavian called Peter Nyland, is very significant because it also included a huge number of other Christmas melodies that have since become ‘standards’, but it only gives music for the chorus of Gaudete; the verses, which tell of the wonder of God’s arrival on earth in human form, have been taken from a Czech medieval song about the Virgin Mary, Ezechielis Porta. Gaudete, made famous in the 1970’s in the recording by Steeleye Span, is on this disc in two new arrangements written for Tenebrae by Karl Jenkins. One has percussion (Jody Jenkins), and the other is a cappella

Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus
Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete.
Tempus adest gratiae
Hoc quod optibamus,
Carmina laetitiae
Devote redamus.

Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus
Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete.
Deus homo factus est
Natura mirante,
Mundus renovatus est
A Christo regnante.

audete, gaudete, Christus est natus
Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete.
Ezechielis porta
Clausa pertransitur,
Unde lux est orta
Salus invenitur.

Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus
Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete.
Deus homo factus est
Natura mirante,
Mundus renovatus est
A Christo regnante.

Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus
Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete.

Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary, rejoice.
The hour of grace is here
For which we have prayed.
Let us sing with devotion
Songs of joy.

Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary, rejoice.
God is made man,
A being of wonder.
The world is renewed
By Christ the King.

Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary, rejoice.
Closed gates of death
Have been passed through.
Light is risen
Salvation is found.

Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary, rejoice.
God is made man,
A being of wonder.
The world is renewed
By Christ the King.

Rejoice, rejoice, Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary, rejoice.

[2] Après Un rêve

Music: Gabriel Fauré
Arranged: Alexander L’Estrange

Après un rêve is one of the best-loved songs of French composer Gabriel Fauré. Fauré, a pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns, worked as an organist and choirmaster for most of his life, with time to compose only during the summer holidays. Despite his subsequent fame and reputation as one of France’s finest composers, his songs brought him almost nothing - his publisher bought them, with full copyright, for 50 francs each. Fauré wrote well over a hundred songs, and developed a very personal style that had considerable influence on many later 20th-century composers, particularly in its subtle but adventurous use of harmony, freed from the restraints of the conventional ‘rules’ of tonality. Après un rêve, written in 1878 and taken from his first published collection of songs, is a good example of Fauré’s genius as a melodist, and shows his predilection for long-spun, gradually-unfolding melodies and charming, rich but rarely self-indulgent harmonies. Its words are from an anonymous Italian poem, translated into French by a friend, Romaine Bussine, and tell of the experience of awaking from a beautiful, romantic dream, only to wish one could return once more into the “mysterious night”. This most romantic of arrangements was written for Tenebrae by Alexander L’Estrange.

Dans un sommeil que charmait ton image
Je rêvais le bonheur, ardent mirage,
Tes yeux étaient plus doux, ta voix pure et sonore,
Tu rayonnais comme un ciel éclairé par l’aurore;
Tu m’appelais et je quittais la terre
Pour m’enfuir avec toi vers la lumière,
Les cieux pour nous entr’ouvraient leurs nues,
Splendeurs inconnues, lueurs divines entrevues,
Hélas, hélas, triste réveil des songes !
Je t’apelle, ô nuit, rends-moi tes mensonges;
Reviens, reviens radieuse
Reviens, ô nuit mystérieuse.

In a slumber charmed by your image
I dreamed of happiness, ardent mirage;
Your eyes were more tender, your voice pure and clear.
You were radiant like a sky brightened by sunrise;
You were calling me, and I left the earth
To flee with you towards the light;
The skies opened their clouds for us,
Splendors unknown, glimpses of divine light...
Alas! Alas, sad awakening from dreams!
I call to you, oh night, give me back your illusions;
Return, return with your radiance,
Return, oh mysterious night!

Romaine Bussine

[3] The Lamb

[6] Mother and Child

Music: Sir John Tavener

Among the most popular of all present-day composers, notably for his piece for cello and orchestra, The Protecting Veil, and for the anthem sung at Princess Diana’s Funeral, Song for Athene, Sir John Tavener has written a large number of sacred choral works, often based on Greek Orthodox texts. The Lamb is a setting of William Blake's poem from Songs of Innocence and Experience and is striking in its simplicity, beauty and economy of expression. It contrasts sections where a simple, short phrase (first heard to the words “Little lamb, who made thee?”) is turned upside-down and back-to-front with sections where the same musical phrase appears in rich four-part harmony, with special dissonance (a chord with an added seventh and ninth) every time on the word “Lamb”. In his programme note for the first performance, which was written for Winchester Cathedral in 1982, the composer explains that “The Lamb came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” Mother and Child was commissioned from Sir John Tavener by Tenebrae in 2003 and focuses on the universal aspects of motherhood, and specifically Mary, the mother of Christ. The extract on this CD is from the full recording by Tenebrae also on Signum Classics SIGCD501.

The Lamb
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, & bid thee feed
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, & he is mild;
He became a little child.
I, a child, & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

William Blake (1757-1827)

Mother and Child
As in the first was adoration
Another consciousness has come to praise
The single theophanic light
That threads all entrants here
Hail Maria, Hail Sophia, Hail Maria
This paradise where all is formed of love
As flame to flame is lit.

[5] Canon

Music: Johan Pachelbel
Arranged: Alexander L’Estrange

The word Canon comes from the Greek for ‘rule’ or ‘precept’ and describes a technique by which a polyphonic (two or more parts) texture is created from a single melody through exact (canonic) imitation by various voices or parts. The earliest known example of this is generally thought to be ‘Sumer is icumen in’, an early medieval English round, but certainly the best-known and perhaps most often performed canon is the one by Johann Pachelbel, a German Baroque composer said to be an important influence on J.S. Bach. Born in Nuremberg in 1653, thirty-two years before Bach, Pachelbel worked as an organist and musician at various churches and courts for most of his life and was remarkably prolific as a composer: he predominantly wrote organ and choral music, but also some instrumental chamber music. In this choral arrangement by Alexander L’Estrange, you can hear a ‘ground bass’, which is a repetitive, two-bar bass-line that happens twenty-eight times in all, while the three ‘violins’ weave a delicate, overlapping filigree above, progressing during the course of the piece from slow ‘crotchets’, moving at the same speed as the bass-line, to ‘demi-semi-quavers’, eight times as fast!

[7] Clapping music

Music: Steve Reich

American composer Steve Reich was and is a pioneer in the minimalist style. Beginning his career as a percussionist, he was fascinated by jazz, Balinese “Gamelan” and also by other world music, travelling to Ghana in 1971 to study African drumming, and his first compositions were almost exclusively for percussion instruments. Clapping Music, from 1972, for “4 hands, no piano” is quintessential early Reich, exploring as it does both the rhythmic energy and repetitive patterns he found in African music and the concept of gradual, overlapping change that marks Balinese music. The result is a type of music in which repeating rhythmic ideas slowly become out of phase with each other, creating gradual, almost imperceptible change and increasing complexity. The basic musical idea of Clapping Music is a simple pattern of “1-2-3, 1-2, 1, 1-2” that you can hear both musicians clapping together in unison at the beginning; one musician keeps this pattern going whilst the other subtly moves ‘out of synch’, one beat at a time, until they end up together again at the end of the piece.

Alexander L'Estrange