Paradoxes Gareth Southwell

SOMM Recordings continues its widely acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with a captivating collection of his Children’s Songs by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan.

For the opening of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, Krzysztof Penderecki set to music the text of the Ekecheiria (Truce) Agreement, agreed in 884 BC to ensure the peaceful running of the Games. In 2022, Munich celebrated and commemorated the 50th anniversary of the ""cheerful"" Games, which unfortunately ended in tragedy. In this context, Fumio Yasuda was commissioned to once again set Ekecheiria to music as a mirror of those events. The result is seven compositions for voices and bass clarinet based on IOC President Avery Brundage's controversial demand ""The Games Must Go On"", interspersed with sound bridges entitled ""Ekecheiria"" by Gareth Davis.

The idea of an afterlife has fired imaginations across cultures for millennia and is one of the earliest belief systems in recorded history. It is fascinating to consider that a type of identity or stream of consciousness might exist in the absence of the physical body.

The choir which David Trendell directed for twenty-two years pays tribute in a collection of specially chosen pieces by Davids colleagues, friends and former students, interspersed with the Renaissance polyphony which was Trendells area of scholarly expertise. His deep love for the Song of Songs has inspired many of the inclusions, and its nature imagery threads through the disc, adding a suggestion of renewal and rebirth to the memorial tone of works written in the difficult months after his untimely death.

Renaissance polyphony is generally held to be stately, calm, reassuring. But this pro- gramme of Palestrina’s six-part Missa sine nomine, complemented by five of his motets and three by Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36–92), was recorded after the Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, had undertaken a tour of Israel and Palestine. There the music and its texts (‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’) took on an extraordinary poignancy, with the dispossession and desperation of thousands of years ago animating the restrained dignity of Palestrina’s counterpoint with an unexpectedly topical intensity.