Psalms, Stars and Light – Review by Laudate Magazine
“This CD is highly recommended. It offers a wide-ranging and skilfully selected series of psalm settings, with various styles of music: it features Anglican chant, but much more besides.”
22nd January 2025
Psalms, Stars and Light – Review by Laudate Magazine
“This CD is highly recommended. It offers a wide-ranging and skilfully selected series of psalm settings, with various styles of music: it features Anglican chant, but much more besides.”
22nd January 2025
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This CD is highly recommended. It offers a wide-ranging and skilfully selected series of psalm settings, with various styles of music: it features Anglican chant, but much more besides. Daniel Trocmé-Latter’s Programme Note is a model for writers of such documents, and there is a full set of texts and translations. Incidentally, the latter part of the CD’s title can apparently be traced back to Psalm 148: 3.
The choir of just over twenty is in very good voice, and clearly enjoys singing under their conductor, Daniel Trocmé-Latter, Director of Music at Homerton College, and a writer on Renaissance music among other things. The name of the choir refers to its foundation in 2009–10, which co-incided with the College’s being granted a Royal Charter. This CD is their third commercial release.
Shanna Hart and Lorenzo Bennett each play a psalm-related solo: Bach’s ‘An Wasserflüssen Babylonis’ (relating to Psalm 137) and Howells’s Psalm Prelude, Set 1, no. 1 (Psalm 34: 6) respectively. The former is appropriately followed by Palestrina’s motet based on verses 1–2 – ‘Super flumina Babylonis’.
The CD begins and ends with hymns, a sensible ploy that helps to give shape to the non-specialist listener’s journey through the collection. Richard Bewes’s ‘God is our strength and refuge’ (1983), a paraphrase of Psalm 46, is sung to John Barnard’s arrangement of Eric Coates’s ‘Dambusters’ March’. The tune for Henry Baker’s ‘O praise ye the Lord’ (based on Psalm 150) is Parry’s ‘Laudate Dominum’, complete with the unison version for verse 4, whose active pedal part is clearly relished by Lorenzo Bennett.
Plainsong has a very special place in Christian music, and not least for the psalms. This is acknowledged in Track 9 (Psalm 8), which uses tone viii.1, and has words beginning ‘O Lord, our governor’ as in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 (the translation of Myles Coverdale). Sheena Hart has provided a tasteful harmonisation.
Book of Common Prayer psalm texts are widely sung to Anglican chant, and this is what we hear in track 12 (Psalm 62), the music by Daniel Trocmé-Latter. Track 3 is a setting of Psalm 23 (1990) to a remarkable chant composed by Bobby McFerrin (b. 1950) and transcribed by Dan Stolpher. The text is independent of Coverdale’s translation, most strikingly in its use of feminine pronouns, and in consequent changes to the ‘Gloria’, which begins: ‘Glory to our Mother, and Daughter, And to the Holy of Holies’. The work is dedicated to the composer’s mother: see the Programme Note, and for some additional information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYTd3Yp3iMg
The BCP text is used in two very different anthems by Anglican composers. Henry Purcell’s setting of ‘O God, thou art my God’ (verses from Psalm 63) provides plenty of opportunity for soloists from the choir. The closing chorus ‘Hallelujah’ was later adapted as the hymn tune ‘Westminster Abbey’. Herbert Sumsion’s ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’ (verses from Psalm 107) is very fine, and of interest not only for the depiction in music of the sentence ‘They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man’.
The King James (‘Authorised’) Version of the Psalms is employed for two other anthems, both settings of Psalm 148 in part or complete. ‘Praise ye the Lord’ by Carol J. Jones (b.1993) is stylistically and texturally imaginative. The complete setting by Douglas Coombes was composed for the choir in 2019 as one of his Five Psalms of Praise’.
The two items not mentioned above are both settings, from the continental 16th-century Calvinist tradition, of verses 1–2 from Psalm 72 (beginning, in the French of Clément Marot, ‘Tes jugements, Dieu véritable’). Both employ the same melody, which is heard alone without accompaniment on track 10 in the manner approved by the strictest Protestant elements of the time, and then as the cantus firmus of a four-voice polyphonic version by Lois Bourgeois (1510–59). The melody itself may be by Bourgeois, who provided many hymn tunes for the Calvinists. It is widely thought that he wrote the familiar ‘Old Hundredth’ tune now sung to ‘All people that on earth do dwell’.
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This CD is highly recommended. It offers a wide-ranging and skilfully selected series of psalm settings, with various styles of music: it features Anglican chant, but much more besides. Daniel Trocmé-Latter’s Programme Note is a model for writers of such documents, and there is a full set of texts and translations. Incidentally, the latter part of the CD’s title can apparently be traced back to Psalm 148: 3.
The choir of just over twenty is in very good voice, and clearly enjoys singing under their conductor, Daniel Trocmé-Latter, Director of Music at Homerton College, and a writer on Renaissance music among other things. The name of the choir refers to its foundation in 2009–10, which co-incided with the College’s being granted a Royal Charter. This CD is their third commercial release.
Shanna Hart and Lorenzo Bennett each play a psalm-related solo: Bach’s ‘An Wasserflüssen Babylonis’ (relating to Psalm 137) and Howells’s Psalm Prelude, Set 1, no. 1 (Psalm 34: 6) respectively. The former is appropriately followed by Palestrina’s motet based on verses 1–2 – ‘Super flumina Babylonis’.
The CD begins and ends with hymns, a sensible ploy that helps to give shape to the non-specialist listener’s journey through the collection. Richard Bewes’s ‘God is our strength and refuge’ (1983), a paraphrase of Psalm 46, is sung to John Barnard’s arrangement of Eric Coates’s ‘Dambusters’ March’. The tune for Henry Baker’s ‘O praise ye the Lord’ (based on Psalm 150) is Parry’s ‘Laudate Dominum’, complete with the unison version for verse 4, whose active pedal part is clearly relished by Lorenzo Bennett.
Plainsong has a very special place in Christian music, and not least for the psalms. This is acknowledged in Track 9 (Psalm 8), which uses tone viii.1, and has words beginning ‘O Lord, our governor’ as in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 (the translation of Myles Coverdale). Sheena Hart has provided a tasteful harmonisation.
Book of Common Prayer psalm texts are widely sung to Anglican chant, and this is what we hear in track 12 (Psalm 62), the music by Daniel Trocmé-Latter. Track 3 is a setting of Psalm 23 (1990) to a remarkable chant composed by Bobby McFerrin (b. 1950) and transcribed by Dan Stolpher. The text is independent of Coverdale’s translation, most strikingly in its use of feminine pronouns, and in consequent changes to the ‘Gloria’, which begins: ‘Glory to our Mother, and Daughter, And to the Holy of Holies’. The work is dedicated to the composer’s mother: see the Programme Note, and for some additional information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYTd3Yp3iMg
The BCP text is used in two very different anthems by Anglican composers. Henry Purcell’s setting of ‘O God, thou art my God’ (verses from Psalm 63) provides plenty of opportunity for soloists from the choir. The closing chorus ‘Hallelujah’ was later adapted as the hymn tune ‘Westminster Abbey’. Herbert Sumsion’s ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’ (verses from Psalm 107) is very fine, and of interest not only for the depiction in music of the sentence ‘They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man’.
The King James (‘Authorised’) Version of the Psalms is employed for two other anthems, both settings of Psalm 148 in part or complete. ‘Praise ye the Lord’ by Carol J. Jones (b.1993) is stylistically and texturally imaginative. The complete setting by Douglas Coombes was composed for the choir in 2019 as one of his Five Psalms of Praise’.
The two items not mentioned above are both settings, from the continental 16th-century Calvinist tradition, of verses 1–2 from Psalm 72 (beginning, in the French of Clément Marot, ‘Tes jugements, Dieu véritable’). Both employ the same melody, which is heard alone without accompaniment on track 10 in the manner approved by the strictest Protestant elements of the time, and then as the cantus firmus of a four-voice polyphonic version by Lois Bourgeois (1510–59). The melody itself may be by Bourgeois, who provided many hymn tunes for the Calvinists. It is widely thought that he wrote the familiar ‘Old Hundredth’ tune now sung to ‘All people that on earth do dwell’.
