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Orrell: A Benedictine Anthem

In July 1991, the Archbishop of York led a service in Shrewsbury Abbey during the period when Keith Orrell was Director of Music there. He collaborated with the then curate Peter Myers to create a short piece, A Benedictine Anthem, for the occasion.

The piece was enjoyed by choristers and listeners alike and was repeated a few weeks later in the Archbishop's final service before he moved to Shrewsbury RC Cathedral. The music conjures up the medieval world of the Shrewsbury Benedictine monks (reinvented in the Cadfael books by Ellis Peters) whose rule was ‘to work is to pray.'

Finzi: My Spirit Sang All Day

Gerald Finzi is perhaps best known for his sensitivity to the texts he chose to set, and for the iconoclastic nature of his word-setting, scrupulously hewing to the natural speech rhythms of the words. His settings of seven poems by Robert Bridges, of which My Spirit Sang All Day is the third and best known, also clearly showcase his adherence to Archbishop Cranmer's dictum, 'for every syllable, a note' — not the same thing as one note per syllable, as the rule is sometimes mistakenly given.

The immediacy and power of Bridges's words, taken together with Finzi's recent marriage to his wife Joyce (Joy), prompts music of sheer delight and happiness from a composer whose life was full of morbid obsessions. The recurrence of 'my joy' in all possible meanings gives Finzi a hook around which to build as clear a statement of love as exists in choral music

Bruckner: Christus Factus Est

After writing the motet Os Justi in 1879, strongly influenced by the principles of the Cecilian Movement (one of the founders of which is the dedicatee of the work), Bruckner took great exception to one member editing out a ‘dissonance' in another motet without permission. His use of modal harmony broke away from strict adherence to Cecilian principles, and Christus Factus Est in particular clearly shows him moving away from their constraints.

Having spent some time as a chorister at Sankt Florian monastery after the death of his father, Bruckner studied both there and then in Vienna, where he met Franz Liszt. Both composers had strong religious feelings, and Bruckner's in particular was a source of great inspiration for him. Christus Factus Est was written for Maundy Thursday in 1884, one of four settings he made of the text. This recording is of the most familiar — and complex — setting.

Britten: Rejoice in the Lamb (extract)

Rejoice in the Lamb was the first commission made by St Matthew's Church in 1943, and is a setting of part of the poet Christopher Smart's extended poem ‘Jubilate Agno'. Benjamin Britten created what is considered a choral masterpiece for choir and organ, writing it on his return to Great Britain after a stay in USA (having just completed ‘A Hymn to St Cecilia' and ‘A Ceremony of Carols').

Here we have a great collaboration: one of the great eighteenth-century poets who thought beyond contemporary literary norms, and whose father-in-law showed his disdain by criticizing him in the press and having him committed to an asylum; together with one of the greatest British composers of the twentieth century, who re-established Great Britain as a land with music.