Program Notes

John Rutter (b. 1945)

John Rutter was born in London and received his first musical training as a chorister at Highgate School, Oxford. He sang in choral-orchestral and a cappella performances of very high quality, which deeply affected him. Rutter knew then that music would be his life, and only later realized “that I might earn a living from it.” Indeed, Rutter hit the jackpot for earning a living as a ‘classical’ composer: he has written an inordinate amount of carols, many of them getting published in Oxford’s various carol compilations with the help of Sir David Willcocks. Early success with this, and composing in general, allowed him to leave his job as Director of Music at Clare College and devote his time to composition and the Cambridge Singers, a professional ensemble he formed mostly for the purposes of recording his own music on his own label, Collegium.

 Hans Leo Hassler (1562—1612)

The composer Hans Leo Hassler was the first great composer of the German speaking lands to travel to Italy as a musical apprentice. To his enduring benefit it was to no lesser a city than Venice, arguably the most musically fecund city in all of Europe at that time. Carl Schalk, in his splendid book, Music in Early Lutheranism, calls Hassler Lutheranism’s “Herald of the Transition to the New Style.” This style has two chief components: 1) less elaborate polyphony than the previous generation (such as Josquin – much revered by Luther), and 2) antiphony. Verbum Caro Factum Est is one of Hassler’s works which excellently represents the antiphonal aspect of the “new style.” It may strike some as odd that a Latin setting might be a signature piece of the great Lutheran composer, but one must remember that Luther himself had no objections to Latin and even encouraged its use wherever it could flourish.

 Jean Mouton (c. 1459 – 1522)

Mouton is one of those composers most remembered for his relationship to other, better known composers. His style is considered to be very close to that of Josquin and, as noted above, he was Willaert’s primary teacher. He has also influenced many composers in that his compositions were widespread. According to the Choral Public Domain Library, the motet Quaeramus cum pastoribus was the basis for a number of parody works by later composers, including parody masses by Morales and Willaert as well as motets by Crecquillon, Pedro de Cristo and Giovanni. It was so popular in its day that it was sung everywhere from the Sistine Chapel to Guatemalan frontier missions.

 Mark Sirrett (b. 1952)

Mark Sirett, is a native of Kingston and graduate of Queen's University. He holds both masters and doctoral degrees in choral conducting and pedagogy from the University of Iowa and has taught at the University of Alberta, the University of Western Ontario and Queen's University. For six years he served as Organist/Music Director at St. George's Cathedral, Kingston. Under his direction the Cathedral Girl Choristers won first prize in the 1996 CBC Choral Competition for amateur choirs.

 Dr. Sirett has won two international awards in conducting: the Jury Prize for Imaginative Programming and Artistry at the 2002 Cork International Choral Festival, and Outstanding Conductor Award at the 2004 Young Prague Festival. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Presidents Leadership Award presented by Choirs Ontario for his contribution to the choral art in the province.

 Bradley Ellingboe (b. 1958)

Bradley Ellingboe has led a wide-ranging career in the world of singing, including accomplishments as a choral conductor, soloist, composer, scholar and teacher.  As a choral conductor he has led festival choruses in 40 states and 14 foreign countries.  He will be making his operatic conducting debut in 2011, leading the world-premiere performances of Stephen Paulus’s opera Shoes for the Santo Niño in a joint production by the Santa Fe Opera and the University of New Mexico.  As a bass-baritone soloist he has sung under such conductors as Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling, Karl Jenkins and Sir David Willcocks.  Ellingboe has over 110 pieces of music in print, including his largest work, the Requiem for chorus and orchestra, which made its Carnegie Hall debut with the composer conducting in 2010.  Ellingboe led the European debut of his Requiem in 2011, with concerts in Budapest, Bratislava and Prague.  For his scholarly work in making the songs of Edvard Grieg more accessible to the English-speaking public, he was knighted by the King of Norway in 1994.  As a teacher, the University of New Mexico Alumni Association named him Faculty of the Year in 2008.

 Bob Chilcott (b. 1955)

Bob Chilcott has been involved in choral music for most of his life. He was a chorister and choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and for twelve years was a member of the vocal group The King’s Singers. Since 1997 he has worked as a full-time composer and has written a wide variety of choral music, including a significant amount of music for young choirs. He has over one hundred pieces published by Oxford University Press, and a number of his choral works have been published in German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Slovenian.

 As well as being Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Singers, he has conducted many other leading choirs in their field, including the World Youth Choir, the RIAS Kammerchor, Orphei Drangar from Sweden, Jauna Musika from Lithuania, the Taipei Chamber Singers, and the Tower New Zealand Youth Choir. He has worked in 23 countries on six continents, and at festivals from Festival 500 in Newfoundland to Tallinn, where in 2004, as the first foreign musician to be invited, he conducted a choir of 7000 young singers at the Estonian Song Festival in one of his most popular pieces, “Can you hear me?”.

 Olav Ehala (b. 1950)

Born in Tallinn, Estonia, Olav Ehala studied at the conservatory there, graduating in 1969. He quickly went on to a career in film, composing dozens of scores. Ehala has also written musicals, music for his band, Kristallid [Crystals], and is a jazz pianist. His setting of Jõuluingel is simple but fetching, perfectly capturing the innocence and expectation of a particularly Estonian Christmas Eve.

 Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928)

Einojuhani Rautavaara is a leading composer of our time. Last season Bella Voce performed one of his major works, the Magnificat. A few seasons before that Bella Voce performed the Vigilia under the direction of Anne Heider, for which Dr. Heider and the choir received a national award for musical adventurousness. Marjattan Jouluvirsi (Marjatta’s Christmas Hymn) is quite different in tone and substance from those two works, yet undeniably belongs to Rautavaara. The folk-like character of both the music and the text is charming and engaging. Rautavaara writes, “Marjattan jouluvirsi...comes from my mystery play or choral opera Marjatta matala neiti (Marjatta, Lowly Maiden), a setting of the last canto of the Kalevala, depicting the shifting of the ancient Finnish shamanistic view of the world towards a Western Christian one.”

 Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 – 1924)

Charles Villiers Stanford was a composer and conductor of huge renown in England and his native Ireland during his lifetime. Save for a few of his Latin motets and Evening Services, not much of his music is performed today despite the fact that he wrote numerous operas, symphonies, chamber music of many kinds, and large works for chorus and orchestra. Perhaps his greatest legacy is that he was a principal teacher to nearly all of the greatest of the next generation of English composers, including Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Charles Wood, and John Ireland.

 Jackson Berkey (b. 1942)

Graduate of Juilliard, keyboardist for Mannheim Steamroller, and composer of many choral works for the professional chorus, Soli Deo Gloria, Jackson Berkey has been a “cross-over” artist well before the term took on its current popularity.

 C. Hubert H. Parry (1848—1918)

The year 1880 is held by many as marking a “renaissance” of English music. In that year Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry finished a choral setting of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and its first performance was given. Himself influenced by Bach and Brahms, Parry developed a diatonic style that was to wield great influence on later English composers such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Howells. But Parry’s own development as a composer became somewhat stilted by the fact that he had taken on the directorship of the Royal College of Music and a professorship at Oxford University. He resigned his professorship at Oxford in 1908 because of failing health; subsequently he managed to produce some of his greatest works, including the Songs of Farewell, which has been performed and recorded by His Majestie’s Clerkes/Bella Voce. Welcome, Yule! is a very simple, straightforward, yet jubilant choral fanfare.

 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)

Palestrina’s music is often heralded as the apogee of Renaissance polyphony. His lucid, fluent, serene vocal lines convey a sense that the music could be nothing but as it is. While this means that there are no delicious harmonic surprises or turns of phrases, as there are in the Spanish composers Guerrero, Morales, and Victoria, one still feels the spiritual satisfaction that everything is in its proper place. This artistic stance is wed perfectly to the principles of the Roman Counter-Reformation, for which Palestrina was musical spokesman. A solis ortus cardine is a Christmas hymn from the Sarum rite. Palestrina sets the chant in alternation with different polyphonic configurations.

 Urmas Sisask (b. 1960)

Urmas Sisask is a musical eclectic. He has developed a language of composition based on astronomical observations. From these observations of planetary cycles he has developed a mode consisting of c#, d, f#, g#, and a. The first piece written using this system is a piano cycle called Starry Sky (1980). He frequently performs this and other music at the so-called “one-and-only musical observatory in the world, ” in the town of Jäneda, about 75 kilometers from Tallin, the capital of Estonia. Sisask writes, “Our 17–billion-years-old universe is a huge ’organ’ invented by Jehovah. Due to the force of gravity galaxies, stars, planets, comets, and other constellations form gigantic organ pipes. That is the Credo of my life and work. To learn the harmony of the musical instrument of the universe and to make it heard to the people is my mission. Thus, I do not consider myself a composer but a recorder of music.”

 Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

Arvo Pärt might very well be the most famous living composer in the Western world. After beginning a career of writing highly complex atonal music, Pärt broke with his past and became a kind of retro-renegade. That is, he returned to a simple, diatonic form of music composition that, to most ears, is exceedingly naive. But it is because of this that Pärt, more so than any other art composer of our day, has almost become a pop icon. Chances are that if there is a twenty- or thirty-something choral enthusiast sitting next to you right now, Pärt would be on their short list of favorite composers. Magnificat may be the single most important piece leading to this popularity. Pärt writes of his artistic stance, “The complex and many-faceted only confuse me. I search for unity. How do I find my way to it? Traces appear in many guises. Everything that is unimportant falls away.”

 Ken Burton (b. 1970)

Ken Burton -conductor, composer, arranger, performer, choral judge and music educator- studied music at Goldsmiths’ College University Of London, and continued with a Trinity College Of Music affiliated professional course in Voice Education. He studied piano under Andrew Ball (currently professor of piano at Royal College Of Music), and voice with the tenor Charles Corp, as well as receiving further education in voice care, anatomy, and technique with Janice Chapman, Professor Graeme Welch, Thomas Hans & Jakob Liebermann, and Colin Durrant.

 As a composer and arranger, he has a number of books published by major music publishers, Faber Music, and Oxford University Press. His ‘Feel The Spirit’ has been a best-seller in the Faber Choral series. His works include music in both classical and contemporary idioms for a variety of forces from solo voice to full symphony orchestra.

 His arrangements and compositions are performed all over the world, and seen and heard regularly on television programmes. He is a regular arranger for BBC Songs Of Praise.

 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958)

Ralph Vaughan Williams received his formal musical education from the Royal School of Music, studying with Charles Villiers Stanford and, later, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Vaughan Williams would prove to be Parry’s leading pupil. Throughout his life Vaughan Williams was an active conductor, scholar, editor, and compiler of music as well as a composer. Some of his most cherished work was editing and contributing to the English Hymnal, in which many of the tunes Vaughan Williams found in the countryside were used for new hymns. They are classics now for just about any church choir in England and North America.