Some great tracks from Cantoris

Cantoris

Cantoris is a chamber choir of 15 members based in Frodsham, Cheshire.  It was founded in 2002 by Ken Fayle and Cath Shaw with a view to performing works that would perhaps be beyond the scope of most amateur choirs.  The singers are an interesting mix of professional musicians, gifted amateurs and students with the shared aim of performing great choral music to the highest standard we can manage. 

The eighteen works on this CD, which is available from the online shop of Sheer Joy Music,  are some of the shorter unaccompanied items they have performed in concerts in recent years, sacred and profane, serious and silly! You can also purchase individual track or the whole album on CD Baby and most digital download sites such as iTunes and Amazon.

Track List

Locus Iste        Anton Bruckner (1824-96)

Ave Maria        Anton Bruckner (1824-96)

My bonny lass she smileth    Thomas Morley (1557/8-1602)

If ye love me        Thomas Tallis (1505-85)

Lord, For Thy Tender Mercy’s Sake  John Hilton (1599-1657)

The Blue Bird        Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924)

Exsultate Justi        Lodovico Viadana (1560-1627)

Thou knowest, Lord      Henry Purcell (1659-95)

The silver swan      Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)

Now is the month of maying    Thomas Morley (1557/8-1602)

Ave verum corpus      William Byrd (1543-1623)

Never weather-beaten sail    Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

My love dwelt in a Northern land  Sir Edward William Elgar (1857-1934)

Ave Maris Stella      Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843–1907)

Fair Phyllis        John Farmer (1570-1605)

Dum Transisset Sabbatum    John Taverner (1490-1545)

Hide not Thou Thy Face    Richard Farrant (1530-80)

Bogoroditse Dyevo      Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

Programme Notes

Anton Bruckner is perhaps best known for his orchestral symphonies, which were written late in his life.  He composed the two beautiful motets, Locus Iste (for the dedication of  a church) and Ava Maria much earlier, when he was organist at Linz Cathedral during the 1860s. 

Having started as a singer, then Master of the Choristers, at Norwich Cathedral, Thomas Morley found his vocation as the foremost composer of secular music in Elizabethan England.  Unlike the more serious works of his contemporaries, Morley’s madrigals are usually light, quick-moving and easily singable.  My Bonny Lass She Smileth and Now is the Month of Maying are definitely in this vein. 

Thomas Tallis is considered as one of the best composers of early English church music.  Somehow, he managed to avoid the religious controversies that raged around him while he served Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary as a composer and performer before serving Elizabeth I, during which time he wrote If Ye Love Me. 

Little is known about the organist and composer, John Hilton, except that his father was also an organist and composer called John Hilton.  He composed several madrigals, services and anthems, including the lovely Lord For Thy Tender Mercy’s Sake. 

The irascible Sir Charles Stanford quarreled with most of his contemporaries, including Elgar and Parry, in a career which established him as one of the leading figures in English music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The Blue Bird is a beautifully simple setting of a poem by Mary Coleridge, balancing very quiet choral singing with a haunting soprano solo. 

Lodovico Viadana held a succession of posts in Italian cathedrals in the early 17^th Century.  Exsultate Justi is a joyful piece of sacred music, possibly owing a lot of its appeal to Viadana’s extensive knowledge of secular music. 

Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of our Hears was written by Henry Purcell for the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1694 while he was organist at Westminster Abbey. 

Orlando Gibbons was one of the most versatile composers of his time, producing a large amount of keyboard works, choral works and madrigals, many of which are still popular today.  The Sliver Swan is the best known of his madrigals and is based on the myth of a dying swan singing for the first time on her death-bed. 

As a Roman Catholic, William Byrd did not find it as easy to adapt to the English Protestant establishment as his teacher and friend, Tallis.  To the end of his life, in spite of holding a post at the Chapel Royal, he continued to produce church music exclusively in Latin.  Ave Verum Corpus is a masterful example of the music he was able to compose under such tension. 

Never Weather-Beaten Sail is a fine example from a set of songs with words and music by Thomas Campion.  The elegant simplicity and perfectly matched poem and tune explain why this piece is still popular with choirs four hundred years after it was written. 

My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land was one of Elgar’s earliest partsongs.  He received no fee from the publisher, Novello, and had to pay the poet a guinea for permission to use the words.  By 1908, it was a highly popular work (as it remains today), but in 1890 it was considered “crude, ill-written for the voices, laid out without knowledge of the capabilities of the human voice etc.”! 

Edvard Grieg wrote very little sacred music.  Ave Maris Stella dates from 1898 and is, not surprisingly, a great favourite with Norwegian choirs to this day. 

John Farmer is one of the lesser known English madrigal composers.  Fair Phyllis is his best remembered piece.  Phyllis is represented by the sopranos and the rest of the choir are the sheep! 

John Taverner is regarded as the most important English composer of his era.  Dum Transisset Sabbatum  is probably his best-known motet.  It is based around a cantus firmus, with the baritone soloist singing the plainsong melody with long note values as an inner part to the overall choral texture. 

Richard Farrant was a composer, playwright and theatrical producer.  Sadly, very little of his music and none of his plays survive.  Hide not Thou Thy Face is a powerful short anthem which is still regularly performed by church choirs. 

The final piece is the remarkable Bogoroditse Dyevo (Ave Maria) from Rachmaninov’s Vespers.