Classical Music Magazine (31 July 2010) have dedicated a page to the various premieres taking place during the festival week with an editorial piece by Clare Stevens on the festival commission 'An English Requiem' by John Joubert our composer in residence, to be premiered on Monday 9th August in Gloucester Cathedral.
Premiere of the fortnight - John Joubert - An English Requiem by Clare Stevens
As director of music at the host cathedral, Gloucester, it fell to Adrian Partington to put together the programme for this year's Three Choirs Festival (7-15 August, www.3choirs.org) the first time he has undertaken the role. The core of this programme is English music, but the invitation to be composer-in-residence went to John Joubert, who was actually born in South Africa. Growing up in Cape Town in the thirties and forties, however, Joubert was steeped in the music of the Anglican choral tradition, thanks to the influence of the head of music at his school, Claude Brown, who was English and had been an assistant to Sir Ivor Atkins at another 'Three Choirs' cathedral, Worcester. 'He used to regale me with stories of working with Elgar,' recalls Joubert. 'It was my big ambition to get to England; I was also encouraged by my mother, who had studied there with Harriet Cohen. I was lucky enough to be awarded a Performing Right Society scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, for two years, extended for a further two years.'
By then Joubert was 'thoroughly entrenched' in the UK, where he has lived ever since. Adrian Partington describes him as one of the country's greatest living composers, and says that his English Requiem, to be premiered on 9 August in Gloucester Cathedral, a 'beautiful, haunting work', is the most important Three Choirs Festival comission for many years.
Best known for his carols and short anthems, in particular There is no rose, O Lord the Maker of al Thinge and Torches, Joubert has written two sets of evening canticles and two settings of the Latin mass, together with a substantial oratorio commissioned by the Birmingham-based chamber choir Ex Cathedra, which was completed in 2007. He also has a large portfolio of non-choral works and says that the concentration on sacred music at the beginning of his career was partly serendipitous, prompted by his good fortune in being taken on by Novello, then the leading publisher in the field.
His new work is a response to the German Requiem by Brahms, and was instigated by Joubert's friend and frequent collaborator Nicholas Fisher, a former policeman who is also an English graduate and authority on the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; a keen choral singer and now a non-stipendiary priest in the Cotswolds. Fisher has chosen the Biblical texts for the Three Choirs commission, and has follwed Brahms's example in avoiding the liturgy for the dead. He has also used a modern translation, which Joubert says he found very rewarding to set. 'It was helpful to get away from all the associations of other people's settings of the King James version.'
The result is 'a series of meditations on the subject of death', scored for soprano and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra. 'It is almost like a song cycle, in six sections: Intimations; Prayer; Judgement; Hope; Faith and Solace,' says Joubert. 'The first three focus on contemplation of death as the end of life, with elements of fear and guilt and prayer for forgiveness, while the final three look forward. I've tried to use musical imagery that reflects the religious themes, concluding for example with a passsacaglia, an open-ended form that suggests the idea of eternity and infinity, leading the whole subject beyond death to what may lie beyond.'
The commission for the English Requiem is supported by the Grimmett Trust. Joubert has also written a new setting of Psalm 100 for the festival's opening service and a new set of preces and responses for Evensong on 11 August, which will be broadcast live on Radio 3.
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