After 88 Compline Offices with our Compline groups; ATBarB, AATB, SSAT, and never exploring SATB, it has finally come to pass. It started simply enough as a midsummer night's dream, hoping to get enough of each gender who would be in town to put up an SATB Compline. You know it well: the pickup band. 22 of my 32 singers responded in the affirmative, and were in town. So now I had to put together a program. I scoured my files and came up with, what I think are some of the best Compline tunes to fill the 5 changeable 'slots' in the Order. We chanted this SATB Compline on Aug. 7th to a full house and it turned out better than i could imagine. I thought i would share the program with you, as I can't take it with me. The only thing you won't see is Psalm 33:1-11 setting by Peter Hallock. It is part of his collected Psalm Settings that will be available on line from The Compline Choir in Seattle, WA. Some notes: The Orison, Hear my prayer, O Lord by Purcell is a shoe-in to set the prayerful, soul searching mood. The assigned Psalm for that date was Ps. 33:12-22, but since there is no Anglican Law against doing the entire Psalm, i decided to do the entire Ps. 33 using two different formats: Hallock's through composed masterpiece (v.1-11) segue to John Randall's 18th cent. harmonized Anglican Chant (v.11-22). For the Nunc I started with a Kievan Chant and back dated it to Greek Orthodox style by adding Bill Bertolas' fine antiphon and a 'dronus' part. We use the 2005 edition of the "An Order for Night Prayer, COMPLINE, in traditional language" published by the Royal School of Church Music for The Plainsong and Medieval Music Society as our basic starting point. I re-honed their version into 'our' version that we now use every time. Now a deviation. Usually it is a short Kyrie, "Lord have mercy upon us. Christ have mercy upon us. Lord have mercy upon us" is offered. For this occasion I chose T.L. Victoria's Kyrie I from Mass Officium Defunctorum with chants as a more than worthy, if glacial speed replacement. The second section, SSAT is all women on the recording adding a lightweight contrast.
The anthem is my edition of Abendlied in German by J. Rheinberger with an oh-so-appropriate Compline text : "But they constrained him, saying: 'Stay with us, because it is towards evening and the day is now far spent'." I say my edition because the dynamics were way to harsh for the soothing level of compline. I split the principal duties up with a male cantor and a female speaker. It starts with a spoken preface Psalm 50: 1. The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken;* he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting 2. Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty, * God revels himself in glory. The rest is below.
Our recording on dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1bdoqlapy8oyvrb/20160807.mp3?dl=0