St Just in Roseland
Organ Week 2012
___________________________
GORDON PULLIN
Tenor
JONATHAN BIELBY
Organ & Piano
Thursday 13th September 7.00 pm
Tickets at the door £6
Accompanied under 16s FREE
Wine will be served after the concert
For future local and national concerts, see
www.organrecitals.com
PROGRAMME
Jubilate Deo
Notre Pere
These are thy wonders
The Holy Boy
André Campra
(1660-1744)
Maurice Durufle
(1902-1986)
Kenneth Leighton
(1929-1988)
John Ireland
(1879-1962)
Might I in thy sight appear Samuel Wesley
(1766-1837)
In Memoriam
Jonathan Bielby
(born 1944)
i Unlocking the human voice
ii What is this life
with Jayne Bielby (flute)
King David
Evening Hymn
Herbert Howells
(1892-1983)
Henry Purcell
(1659-1695)
These are thy wonders
(A song of renewal)
Kenneth Leighton
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring,
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring,
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss,
This or that is.
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
O that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring shower,
My sins and I joining together.
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more swell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
GEORGE HERBERT
Unlocking the human voice
Jonathan Bielby
Wherever there is speaking and listening to be done, rejoice in
the humanity of God, (gods, mortals) and the essential divinity of
human beings.
Believe, believe in honest communication: trust in it, commit
yourself to it, and hope for it in others.
Be honest in speech, thought and action, display the creativity
that forms the world, lights it up and directs it to glory.
Focus on the little things: breath and tone, pitch and rhythm.
Technique is a measure of one's sincerity.
Unlock the voice, the human voice, open up and live the
generous loop of communication, the bedrock of faith, by which
the word of God is made flesh and dwells among us.
PAUL WIGNALL (Priest-in-charge, St Just in Roseland, 19992001)
GORDON PULLIN was a Choral Scholar at St John’s College,
Cambridge, and studied singing with Robert Poole and Wilfred
Brown. He has had a distinguished career as a solo performer,
giving a number of broadcasts, mainly of English Song, on Radio
Three, and singing all over the United Kingdom as well as in
Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
Malta, Canada and the USA. He has a wide knowledge of the
standard repertoire, but has also given first performances by
modern composers of opera, oratorio, songs and song-cycles. He
has made a series of recordings of English Song, in eight
volumes, and has also recorded Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ and
‘Bound for Glory’, a CD of songs and piano music on a railway
theme. He has made a CD of well-known hymns, with organ
music based on the hymns played by Jonathan Lilley on the Ely
Cathedral organ, and has recorded settings of the poems of John
Clare, Christina Rossetti and Charles Causley on three separate
CDs. His most recent recording is of Brahms’ Four Serious
Songs. He has always been associated with choral and ensemble
music-making, directing the Priory Singers in the Midlands in
nearly two hundred concerts and broadcasts, and more recently
the Kirbye Consort in Bury St Edmunds in over a hundred
concerts. He is now Musical Director of the Bristol Chamber
Choir. He sang with the BBC Northern Singers for fifteen years,
and has been a member of a number of cathedral choirs, notably
York Minster and St Paul’s. Now living in Somerset, he is an
occasional deputy at Wells and Bristol Cathedrals.