Philip Jones Brass Ensemble

Composer, writer, lecturer and broadcaster Anthony Payne was born in London and educated at Dulwich College and Durham University.

His completion of Elgar’s Third Symphony in 1997 brought him worldwide acclaim and numerous awards, including the Elgar Medal and awards from the South Bank Show and Evening Standard as well as the New York Critics’ Circle. Its premiere recording on NMC is still our best-selling recording (NMCD053).

Commissions include four major premieres at the BBC Proms and works for the BBC Philharmonic and London Sinfonietta. He has won British Composer Awards for his orchestral piece Visions and Journeys and his Second String Quartet, commissioned by the Allegri Quartet.

His orchestrations include a suite of Warlock songs, Elgar’s Crown of India, and Vaughan Williams’s Four Last Songs.

Phoenix Mass, written in 1965, was originally to have been a liturgical setting only for school choir but soon turned into something much bigger and more technically demanding. As Anthony Payne elaborated the project he experienced what he recalled as ‘the natural emergence of a new manner – long sought but previously only partly envisaged’ and despite the Medieval and Baroque connotations of its techniques and scoring, and a few passing resemblances to Britten and Maxwell Davies, this is the earliest of Payne’s acknowledged works that reveals a completely integrated musical character of its own.

Also on this recording is the Horn Trio, a piece symbolising marital harmony, written in 2006; The World's Winter (1976) for soprano and piano, setting two early poems of Tennyson – Nothing Will Die and All Things Will Die and Paean (1971) for solo piano.

Phoenix Mass, Paean and The World’s Winter have been transferred from LP in the absence of the original masters. The Horn Trio was recorded live for BBC Radio 3.

‘This is a gem of an album, containing not only some glorious and seldom heard pieces, but also the only available recorded version of "Soberana Maria" (anon.), a piece of heart-breaking beauty, sung exquisitely a capella’ wrote a reviewer on Amazon.com of this admirable recording made in 1968 – one of Roger Norrington’s earliest recordings, and made for the Decca label before his extended recordings for EMI. Featuring choral music for the Christmas season from the early Baroque era, the music is sung in Spanish, Latin, English and German. The original title of the LP ‘Glad Tidings’ has been restored for this reissue.

Jean-Baptiste Duval of the Venetian Republic’s French Embassy records that on Christmas Eve 1607, Midnight Mass in St. Mark’s was celebrated by the light of more than one thousand candles, sixty huge torches and silver lamps. He counted no less than eight ‘choirs’ of voices and instruments sounding back and forth across the gilded vaults from the high organ-galleries and the pulpit below. At Mass on Christmas Day the accompaniment was provided by two organs and several other instruments, notably trombones, cornetti and violins blending with the voices of the singers. Duval was too caught up in the ceremony to tell us who composed this magnificent music, but we may reasonably assume that the Christmas music he heard was by one of the resident musicians at St. Mark’s – possibly the maestro di cappella, Giovanni Croce, but more likely the first organist, Giovanni Gabrieli, to whom Croce tended to leave the composition of music for the big festivals. It might also have been by Giovanni Bassano who was in charge of the instrumental ensemble at St. Mark’s, and the composer of the vivacious motet for Christmas Day, Hodie Christus natus est.

Some of John Eliot Gardiner’s very first recordings were made for Decca, before he proceeded to make a series of celebrated recordings for Philips and Deutsche Grammophon. Christmas in Venice was recorded with the Monteverdi Choir and the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and included festive music of the early Baroque by Gabrieli, Monteverdi and Bassano. To this has been added the great ‘Magnificat’ section from the 1610 Vespers of Monteverdi, in Gardiner’s first recording of the work, in January 1974.

The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were originally intended to confer. Similarly, the appeal of ceremonial music from former ages is for modern listeners primarily aesthetic.

This 75-minute collection brings together music heard at a staggering variety of British royal occasions. Zadok the Priest has been included in every coronation service held in that building ever since the coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline in Westminster Abbey on 11 October 1727. There is music for the coronation of King James II in 1685 (Purcell’s I was glad), and a later setting of the same verses by Parry for the coronation of Edward VII in Westminster Abbey on 9 August 1902.

Of course, there’s music for Queen Elizabeth II – Walton’s Coronation Te Deum and Orb and Sceptre for the coronation on 2 June 1953 and Bliss’s march Welcome the Queen, which commemorated the return of the monarch from her Commonwealth tour in 1954.

The British national anthem hardly needs an introduction. Benjamin Britten’s distinctive arrangement was first performed in Leeds on 7 October 1961 and has been heard countless times since.