Session Report: Parry's Choral Music
James McCarthy
Monday, October 22, 2012
For most people, Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry probably means little more than Jerusalem, perhaps I Was Glad or even Blest Pair of Sirens. So it’s gratifying that, for the first time, a disc devoted to largely unknown music by the composer has being making significant inroads on the classical charts.
That’s thanks to the untiring industry of Chandos Records and the musicological nous of Parry’s biographer, the Gramophone critic Professor Jeremy Dibble. At the sessions in mid-May at BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff, home of the National Orchestra of Wales, Dibble beams like a child at Christmas at the sounds filling the control room. The work is the 1911 Te Deum, composed for the coronation that June of King George V. This is rich, romantic music, a large-scale (over 17 minutes) setting of the canticle for full choir, semi-chorus and the characteristically full orchestra of the period (including the six trumpets it has in common with the revised I Was Glad, the anthem for the same event). Parry weaves in snippets of the hymn-tunes St Anne (‘O God, our help in ages past’) and The Old Hundredth (‘All people that on earth do dwell’), ‘found items’ that act as anchor-points for the virgin listener.
The point is that all of us assembled in the control room – me, producer Brian Pidgeon, engineers Ralph Couzens and Jonathan Cooper, fellow Gramophone contributor Geraint Lewis and even Dibble himself – are virgin listeners to a greater or lesser extent. Apart from a subsequent performance at the 1911 Three Choirs Festival, the Te Deum is unlikely to have been performed, at least in its full-orchestral guise, for pretty much all of the ensuing century. Alongside the printed score Dibble himself has prepared from the original publisher’s orchestral plates, he produces a dog-eared Novello vocal score, long out of print but to all intents and purposes the only medium in which this impressive piece has existed for that time.
It’s music that’s existed in Dibble’s head, though, since his undergraduate days at Trinity College, Cambridge. Then he single-mindedly kicked against the prejudices of those around him to defend the music of Parry, Stanford et al; and, gradually, his advocacy has come to fruition with occasional performances and recordings of their lesser-known music. Now, as these composers’ biographer, his enthusiasm has coincided with that of Prince Charles to give a significant boost to the momentum of what might be termed the Parry renaissance. The Prince’s recent appearance in a documentary on Parry and his choice of three of the composer’s anthems for his son’s wedding last year brought Parry on to the front pages.
That documentary, The Prince and the Composer, featured the Fifth Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic conducted, perhaps unexpectedly, by Vassily Sinaisky, who was unstinting in his praise of the piece. These Chandos sessions in Wales are also conducted by a perhaps unlikely figure, Neeme Järvi, working for the first time with the BBC NOW. When I talk to him after the session, he is full of admiration for Parry’s music. In fact, though, it is as new to him as it is to those of us eavesdropping from upstairs. A conductor of his ability and experience grasps the music’s thrust straight away, though; and, with staunch support from Brian Pidgeon at the desk, he imparts his vision of the music swiftly and efficiently to the hard-working orchestra.
Edward Greenfield gives a very personal appreciation of this disc in his review in the forthcoming (November) issue of Gramophone. But why did this music fall out of vogue so rapidly? And why has it taken so long for its revival? The world-changing conflict that was already brewing, the decline of the Empire and the fall from popularity of all that was perceived to be redolent of it were among the factors that conspired to erase this essentially Victorian/Edwardian music from our national consciousness. Jerusalem has, of course, maintained its foothold in the repertoire, thanks in equal measure to the WI and the Proms; Repton (‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’), too, thanks to its eponymous institution. The indelible strength of these ever-popular works, though, appears typical of much of Parry’s music. It remains fashionable to pooh-pooh Parry – vide the remarks of another controversial contributor to the Last Night of the Proms in Gramophone’s April 2012 issue passim. The influences may be German; but the music of Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner et al bestrode the musical world as the 19th century wore on into the 20th. The mark of the great composer is to take the sounds around him and fashion them into his own voice – a feat that Parry indubitably managed in the works on the new disc. What remains, all the same – and was powerfully demonstrated by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding – is that this is our national music, music of which we in Britain should ever be proud. It’s one thing to belt out Jerusalem at the Albert Hall each September but it would be a worthwhile (if belated) tribute to Parry were a work such as the Te Deum to be reinstated as a concert piece worthy of choirs up and down the country. Thanks to Chandos and Jeremy Dibble, the common misconception of Britain as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ is slowly but surely being peeled away and revealed as the lazy, empty trope it assuredly is.
