Jeremiah CLARKE
(1674-1797)
The Prince of Denmark’s March [2:18]
Orlando GIBBONS (1583-1625)
Fantasia of Four Parts (Parthenia XVII) [5:01]
Christopher GIBBONS (1615-1676)
Voluntary in A minor for Double Organ [2:13]
John BLOW
(1649-1708)
Voluntary in C [5:02]
Matthew LOCKE (c.1622-1677)
Voluntary in A minor [1:32]
CLARKE
Trumpet Tune [1:21]
BLOW
Cornet Voluntary in A minor [5:14]
LOCKE
Voluntary in A minor (from Melothesia) [2:17]
Henry PURCELL (1659-1695)
Voluntary in D minor Z718 [3:39]
Voluntary in G Z720 [3:13]
Voluntary in C Z717 [1:21]
Voluntary for Double Organ Z719 [5:09]
John STANLEY (1712-1786)
Trumpet Voluntary in D minor and major op.6/5 [6:15]
William CROFT (1678-1727)
Voluntary in A minor for Double Organ [5:22]
STANLEY
Voluntary in G minor op.5/9 [5:35]
William BOYCE (1711-1779)
Trumpet Voluntary in D major [4:18]
William WALOND
(1719-1768)
Voluntary in G major (Set III/2) [4:30]
George Frideric HANDEL (1685-1759)
Overture to “Samson” [8:26]
This CD offers a survey of British organ music in the 17th
and 18th centuries. The reflections that follow may
be too musicological for some readers so if you’re a novice
and wondering if you’re interested, just read the paragraph
immediately below.
This collection draws on an important if not very large repertoire.
The earlier composers built on the inheritance of Elizabethan/Jacobean
fantasy. Their severe counterpoint requires concentrated listening,
but is worth the effort. As Blow and Croft moved towards the
baroque – though the pieces here are not among their more forwardly-looking
ones – the music became simpler, more melodic. What the Handel
followers – Stanley, Boyce and Walond – lost in depth, they
gained in sheer attractiveness. The music is heard here on a
suitably scaled organ, well recorded in a clear but not dry
acoustic. It is played with good style and musicianship. As
I suggest later, some performers have brought more flair to
the task. Nevertheless, you can go ahead with reasonable confidence.
Though the programme is arranged more or less chronologically
Costin has elected – maybe in the interests of listener-friendliness
– to help the earlier, more intellectual section along with
two highly famous and popular pieces of Purcell-that-isn’t,
the charming miniatures by Jeremiah Clarke. Few people will
need telling that the first of these is the “Trumpet Voluntary”.
Less widely-known, because it came to light more recently, is
the fact that the “other” favourite Purcell trumpet melody is
by Clarke too – from the semi-opera “The Island Princess” in
which Clarke collaborated with Purcell’s brother Daniel.
It seems a little disingenuous, however, to say, as Costin does
in his generally excellent notes, that these two pieces “are
amongst the most popular organ works of the period”. Surely
Costin must know that they are not organ works at all? “The
Prince of Denmark’s March” was written for the harpsichord,
the “Trumpet Tune” for instrumental ensemble, though the version
usually played is again for harpsichord. This is not to say
that they are ineffective on the organ, but an 18th
century organist would hardly have thought them suitable as
voluntaries for church performance. Not because composers of
the time were opposed to lively tunes in an ecclesiastical setting
– listen to their trumpet and cornet voluntaries – but because
the idea of sending the congregation away to the strains of
a sturdy march just wasn’t on their agenda. I’ve never seen
such a piece prior to the mid-Victorian age and I suspect it
was the popularity of Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests”,
transcribed for organ, that “legitimized” the march as an outgoing
voluntary and spawned a myriad imitations. I wonder, too, if
the sort of listeners who would most enjoy Clarke’s agreeable
trifles would not lose their way among the intricacies of the
more extended and substantial works of Gibbons, Blow or the
real Purcell, though they should enjoy the lively inventions
by Handel followers Stanley, Boyce and Walond.
Listener-friendliness also induced, presumably, the concluding
Handel arrangement. Costin tells us that this overture “became
one of the most frequently published transcriptions from Handel’s
oratorios”, but it would be nice to know which transcription
he is using. Moreover, while Handel was notoriously unenthusiastic
about the organ as a solo instrument, he did publish a set of
voluntaries in the English style, so maybe one of these fairly
rare works would have been a more logical choice. However, the
“Samson” piece inspires Costin to play with a flair that is
sometimes lacking elsewhere from his accurate, careful, stylish
but sometimes slightly cautious performances. The Vivace
section of the Boyce, for example, has more dash on an old
Archiv LP by Simon Preston. I can imagine zippier performances
of the faster sections of the Walond and the Stanley G minor,
too. Preston is also more mobile in the Purcell G major Voluntary.
There have been various records of this kind over the years.
The one I mentioned by Simon Preston (LP Archiv 415 675-1) began
a little further back with Byrd and Tomkins and ventured ahead
to Samuel Wesley. Since the 17th century composers
offer much fine invention and the Handel-inspired ones are uniformly
attractive, collectors who have a few such discs may be wondering
whether it isn’t time for something a little more systematic.
The repertoire itself is not large, after all. The same number
of discs that would be needed to encompass all the organ music
by just one continental figure such as Frescobaldi would probably
be in excess of those needed to carry the complete surviving
organ works of all the composers in this anthology. Most of
them left too little even to fill an entire disc by themselves
and only Blow and Stanley wrote enough to spill onto a second
CD. The four works played here by Purcell, for example, are
very nearly his Opera Omnia for organ – lacking are only
a brief Verse in F, which might have been slipped in, and the
“Voluntary on the Old Hundredth” which may be by Purcell, or
by Blow, or – most likely of all it seems – by neither, but
is nevertheless attractive and effective.
Considering how small the repertoire is, it struck me as remarkable
how much scope for confusion there is over labelling, especially
when the present disc gives minimal information – I’ve added
a little to the header here and there. Rustling up scores and
hunting for alternative recordings revealed that these pieces
go under a variety of names. Likewise, a variety of pieces go
under the same name. To have added “Parthenia XVII” after the
O. Gibbons “Fantasia of Four Parts”, for example, would have
wasted little ink or paper and would have helped clarify what
we are going to hear. Similarly, the Stanley G minor gets its
opus number but the D major doesn’t, and isn’t in D major anyway,
the outer movements being in D minor. The Blow “Voluntary in
C major” led me on a particularly wild goose chase since the
piece in question is called a “Verse” in the only source that
gives it a title at all. Conversely, at least two other pieces
in C major by Blow really were called Voluntaries in at least
one source. Nor is “Cornet Voluntary in G” very helpful for
the Walond piece when Walond’s third set of Voluntaries – the
one published by Hinrichsen – contains two such voluntaries
in G. And, what’s more, Gordon Phillips, in his introduction
to the Hinrichsen edition, points out that no registration is
given in the original edition of the piece played here, so this
is only hypothetically a “Cornet Voluntary” at all, though it
is certainly effective and convincing on the cornet stop.
On the subject of editions, too, it would be nice to know which
are being used. The disc has forcibly brought home to me the
fact that several editions that seemed the latest thing when
I bought them a quarter of a century ago have been superseded.
Compared with the edition by Howard Ferguson, “The Prince of
Denmark’s March” reverts in several places here to the shape
the melody used to have when we thought it was the “Purcell
Trumpet Voluntary”, so it would be interesting to know what
sources there are apart from “The Harpsichord Master” which
Ferguson followed. The Blow C major piece has an extra movement
which Watkins Shaw rejected in his edition since the source
that includes it gives the music anonymously. But the preferred
edition of Blow nowadays, if you’ve got seventy-odd pounds to
spend, is the Stainer & Bell/Musica Britannica one by Barry
Cooper. Presumably Costin is using this. No doubt Cooper explains
there his reasons for accepting the extra movement into the
canon. There are rhythmic changes to the middle movement of
the Stanley Voluntary in D – this trumpet tune is probably Stanley’s
best-known single movement – compared with the Hinrichsen edition
edited by Gordon Phillips, who was usually rather pernickety
about getting things right. There’s also an edition for free
download at the IMSLP-Petrucci site which is identical to Phillips
at this point. Further, the tempo given by Phillips and others
is “Andante vivace”, not just “Vivace” as printed in the CD
booklet. To judge from the way Costin jollies it along he may
be unaware of the “Andante” qualification.
However, I am straying into general points about the repertoire
rather than these performances of it. Non-specialists who are
still with me can be assured, as I said at the beginning, of
well-prepared, idiomatic performances. Organ fanciers wishing
to sample the Pembroke instrument will find it well displayed
both by the performer and by the sound engineers. Collectors
of British organ music of this period are no doubt resigned
to buying as many similar anthologies as are issued in the hope
– probably vain – that they will gradually accumulate a complete
collection of the repertoire between one disc or another. More
likely, though, they will pile up multiple recordings of the
Boyce in D. People who collect recordings of the “Purcell Trumpet
Voluntary” – better that than the “Albinoni Adagio” among misattributed
baroque pops – will welcome the latest arrival.
Christopher Howell
Robert Costin (organ) 
