Parish of St Bartholomew

The choir has released two other CDs; Sing Praises (1998) and Laudate Dominum (2006).

Laudate Dominum

Laudate Dominum was released in early 2006 following a lengthy remastering process. Due to the lengthy delay in production no formal launch took place.

Track List

1. Magnficat from Evening Service in D - George Dyson (4:44)

2. Lord, let me know mine end - Maurice Greene (6:02)
Solo Trebles: Sebastian Adams, Killian Horan

3. All for Jesus (2:18)

4. Ave verum [Op.2, No.1] - Edward Elgar (2:26)
5. Ave Maria [Op. 2, No.2] - Edward Elgar (2:26)
6. Ave Maris Stella [Op.2, No. 3] - Edward Elgar (3:58)

7. Hear my prayer - Felix Mendelssohn (10:34)
Solo Treble: Andrew Dempsey

8. Ubi Caritas - Maurice Duruflé (2:20)

9. O blest creator (2:52)

10. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace - Samuel Sebastian Wesley (3:20)

11. Laudate Dominum - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (3:32)
Solo Treble: Emmet Kiberd

12. Insanae et vanae curae - Franz Joseph Haydn (7:06)

13. Nunc Dimittis from Evening Service in D - George Dyson (3:04)

The Music

Born in Yorkshire in 1883, Sir George Dyson studied at the Royal College of Music under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, before embarking on a career as music master at a succession of well-known English public schools. He taught at the Royal College of Music before becoming, in 1937, the College's director, a post he retained until his retirement in 1952. His compositions include a symphony in G major and a violin concerto. His comment "Ours is an age of texture" sums up his compositional style which is well demonstrated in this setting of the canticles for the Anglican Evening Service in D. He died in Winchester in 1964.

Maurice Greene (1696-1755) was born in London, the son of a clergyman. He became a choirboy under Jeremiah Clarke at St Paul's Cathedral where he later became organist. With the death of William Croft in 1727, Greene also became organist at the Chapel Royal, and in 1730 he became Professor of Music at Cambridge University. In 1735 he was appointed Master of the King's Musick. Many items from his collection Cathedral Music are still used in Anglican services today. Greene wrote a good deal of vocal music, both sacred and secular, including a collection of anthems, of which the best-known is Lord, let me know mine end.

Edward Elgar was born, a Roman Catholic, in 1857 at Broadheath, a village near Worcester. His father had a music shop in Worcester and tuned pianos. The young Elgar, therefore, had the great advantage of growing up in a thoroughly practical musical atmosphere. He studied the music available in his father's shop and taught himself to play a wide variety of instruments. It is a remarkable fact that Elgar was very largely self-taught as a composer. Shortly after Elgar became organist at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester in 1885 he composed the trio of works, Pie Jesu, Ave Maria and Ave Maris Stella. These works held such a lasting appeal for him that some twenty years later he orchestrated them, at which time the Pie Jesu was reworked as the Ave Verum Corpus. Elgar died in 1934.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) composed over 750 works and arranged over 330 songs. Haydn was fortunate to have patrons such as the Hungarian Eszterházy princes which allowed him to compose a vast amount of music over a long career. Haydn died in 1809, after twice dictating his recollections and preparing a catalogue of his works. When the coffin was opened for identification before his reinterment in 1820, the skull was found to be missing. It had been stolen two days after his funeral and subsequently ended up in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. It was finally entombed with his remains in 1954 in a mausoleum that had been erected in the Bergkirche at Eisenstadt. The music of the anthem Insanae et vanae curae ('Foolish and groundless cares assail our minds') was rescued in 1805 from an earlier oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia (1774-5) that had been shelved due to contractual disputes between Haydn and his then patron.

Felix Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy, cultured family in 1809. Mendelssohn was a child prodigy and made his first public appearance as a pianist when he was only nine. Mendelssohn's significance lies in the unusual quantity of good music he wrote in relatively few years - he died in 1847 at the age of 38. He wrote his finest music before he was eighteen and among his later works only his chamber music fulfills his early promise. Mendelssohn wrote a number of works for possible church use, both Protestant and Catholic. Ernest Lough became a chorister of the Temple Church, London in 1923. "I remember having to read an extract from a murder trial in the News of the World. Doctor [George Thalben-Ball] accepted me with a warning: 'You're getting a bit old,' he said, 'you had better hurry up.' I was only twelve years old!" Dubbed 'the most famous choirboy in the world', Lough was responsible for bringing the anthem Hear My Prayer to a wider public with his great recording of 1927, when the technology involved recording directly onto a disk of hot wax.

Samuel Sebastian Wesley was born in London in 1810, the illegitimate son of the composer Samuel Wesley and grandson of the hymn writer Charles Wesley. He was organist of the cathedrals of Hereford (where he eloped with the Dean's daughter), Exeter, Winchester and Gloucester and of Leeds Parish Church. He declared that "My published 12 Anthems is my most important work." His other works include Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace. Many of the difficulties he encountered in a turbulent career reflected the circumstances under which church musicians were forced to work. "This state of things," he once said "is the natural result of such an anomaly as that of one professional calling being wholly supervised by another - viz, Musicians by Clergymen." His struggle to improve matters became a lifelong crusade whose fruits were only beginning to appear when he died in 1876.

Baptised Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (after the Saint's day on which he was born) Mozart was appointed Konzertmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1772 and during this period wrote many of his sacred works. In 1779, unable to find a court position in Europe, he returned to Salzburg where he was appointed court organist to the Archbishop. It was there in 1780 that his Vesperae solennes de Confessore KV 339, from which Laudate Dominum comes, was written. Two years later Mozart resigned from his position due to increasing tension and disagreements with the Archbishop.

Two hymns complete this collection. All for Jesus! with words by W.J. Sparrow-Simpson is taken from the oratorio The Crucifixion by Sir John Stainer (1840-1901). "Musicians today," wrote composer Ernest Walker in 1924, "have no use for The Crucifixion." Stainer himself, late in life, condemned his composition as "rubbish". Yet both he and Walker must have known that these judgements were neither fair nor true. Following its 1887 première, it was given more performances than any choral work except Handel's Messiah, and Mendelssohn's Elijah and St Paul. The chorus God so loved the World enjoys an independent existence as an anthem.

The second hymn, O blest creator of the light, is the Office Hymn for Sundays between Trinity Sunday and the beginning of Advent. The Office (or Vesper) Hymn is traditionally sung before the Magnificat at Evensong. The words were most probably written by Pope St Gregory the Great (560-604) and were translated from the Latin in 1851 by John Mason Neale. The tune is a Mode VIII plainsong melody, Lucis Creator, which dates from the 8th century or earlier and is taken from the Sarum Antiphoner - more correctly the Antiphonale Sarisburiense - a thirteenth century manuscript from Salisbury Cathedral in England.

© AJM 2006

Sing Praises

The choir's first CD was launched at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Thursday, November 5th, 1998 by Alexander Anissimov, the conductor of the RTE Symphony Orchestra. This CD is now completely sold out.

Track List

1. How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair - J. Brahms (1833-97)

This anthem is a movement from the Deutches Requiem which Brahms began composing in 1866. The Deutches Requiem is a requiem in name alone, since it is not a setting of the liturgy of the dead but of a series of biblical texts.

2. Psalm 121 - Plainsong tone VIII

The psalms have always been sung to plainsong at St Bartholomew's, as is the common practice in churches of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism. Initially, Hebmore's Plainsong Psalter was used, but since 1940 the Vale Psalter has taken its place. The Psalter, which uses the more elaborate Solesmes tones, was the work of Walter Vale, organist of All Saints, Margaret Street, London. He personally presented it to St Bartholomew's.

3. Ascribe Unto the Lord - S. S. Wesley (1810-76)

Wesley was one of the most influential figures in the revival of cathedral music in the nineteenth century. This piece is typical of his large-scale anthems which consist of several movements. His music is always very melodic and he was one of the first composers since the seventeenth century to write independent organ parts for his choral music. Before that time the organ had tended merely to double the voice parts.

4. Soul Of My Saviour - William Maher (1823-77)

This well-known hymn, set to music by William Maher, is popular at St Bartholomew's. The words are a translation of the fourteenth-century Latin hymn Anima Christi.

5. Listen, Sweet Dove - G. Ives

Ives, informator choristorum at Magdalen College, Oxford, set this Pentecost poem of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert to music in 1977.

6. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring - J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

This is a movement from Bach's cantata 147, Herz und Mund und That und Leben. It was popularised in an arrangement by Sir Hugh Allen at the beginning of the twentieth century.

7. O Vos Omnes - P. Casals (1876-1973)

Although principally remembered as a cellist, Casals was also an active composer. This dramatic piece, whose words, the improperia or reproaches, derive from the liturgy of Good Friday, probably dates to 1932. It was originally written for tenor and bass voices, and composed for the Benedictine monks of Montserrat. Casals later recast it for SAATB.

8. This is the Record of John - O. Gibbons (1583-1625)

Gibbons wrote this verse anthem for an alto solo with an SAATB chorus. It was originally sung to viol accompaniment.

9. Panis Angelicus - C. Franck (1822-90)

Franck was titulaire organist at Sainte-Clothilde, Paris. His Panis Angelicus is said to have begun life as an organ improvisation that Franck played at a Christmas service at Sainte-Clothilde in 1861. The original scoring of this piece, which is a movement from his Messe à trois voix, was for a tenor solo, with organ, harp, cello and double bass. The words are from Thomas Aquinas' Corpus Christi hymn Sacris Solemnis.

10. Sicut Cervus - G. P. da Palaestrina (c. 1525-94)

Perhaps the most familiar of Palaestrina's motets, Sicut Cervus is a model of Renaissance polyphony. It is a setting of Psalm 41:2 (Vulgate version), Sicut cervus desiderat at fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus ("Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God"). This Psalm formed part of the Tract used at the blessing of the font on Holy Saturday.

11. Ave Maria - A. Bruckner (1824-96)

Bruckner composed his Ave Maria in 1861 while organist of Linz Cathedral. He wrote three settings of this text. The rich harmonies of the piece are characteristic of those found later in his symphonies.

12. Cantique de Jean Racine - G. Fauré (1845-1924)

Fauré composed his prize-winning Cantique in 1865, the year in which the foundation stone of St Bartholomew's Church was laid. Fauré became organist of La Madeleine, Paris. His text derives from Racine's Hymnes traduites du bréviaire romain.

13. Crucifixus - A. Lotti (c. 1667-1740)

Lotti, a master of elegant counterpoint, lived and worked most of his life in Venice, where he was appointed to the coveted position of maestro di cappella at San Marco in 1736. This motet is part of a Credo written during a period spent at court in Dresden between 1717 and 1719.

14. O Thou, the Central Orb - C. Wood (1866-1926)

Wood was born in Armagh in 1866, where his father was a Lay Vicar at the cathedral. He studied at the Royal College of Music and in 1924 succeeded Charles Villiers Stanford as Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge. He is chiefly remembered today for his church music. This anthem is a typical example of his style and work.

15. Jesu, Gentlest Saviour - Vipond Barry (1858-1938)

The tune of this hymn, called "St Bartholomew", was composed by W. Vipond Barry, organist of St Bartholomew's between 1884 and 1938. Barry inaugurated the church's musical tradition.

16. Nunc Dimittis in A - C. V. Stanford (1852-1924)

Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852. For forty years he was Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge. He composed prolifically, and set a new standard in Anglican church music. His Service in A, whose Nunc Dimittis is heard here, was originally written with an orchestral accompaniment.