Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924)
Requiem, Op. 48

Déodat de Séverac (1872 - 1921)
Tantum ergo

Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924)

During the last thirty years many of our most treasured choral works have been deliberately defamiliarized. Bach's St Matthew Passion, Handel's Messiah, and Mozart's Requiem are celebrated examples of works whose present form and performance standard would have been unrecognizable to audiences three decades ago. As the historical performance movement has crept inevitably towards the music of our own century, performers have begun to reinterpret the music of the nineteenth century in the light of current musicological thinking.

Before John Rutter's edition of the early 19805 Fauré's Requiem was generally known as a concert piece for large choir and full orchestra. The original instrumentation was, however, quite different, in some performances using a choir of around thirty singers accompanied by four violas, four cellos, solo violin, and organ. The intimacy of the scoring was a deliberate reaction against Berlioz's Requiem which Fauré detested because of its use of massed forces to emphasize the horror of purgatorial suffering. The first performance of the Requiem took place liturgically at the Madeleine in Paris in 1888. There were at that stage only five movements; the Offertoire and Libera me (the two movements involving the Baritone soloist) were added later. In fact the Libera me had been completed as an independent work for voice and organ ten years before; the Offertoire was the only movement to postdate the first performance of the Requiem. The performance presented here uses the work's original instrumentation whilst including all seven movements of the finished Requiem. It is based upon the edition prepared by Denis Arnold in 1983 for Schola Cantorum of Oxford which was subsequently performed at St Louis-des- Invalides in Paris in July 1984.

Vierne was a generation younger than Fauré, but like Fauré had been assistant to the charismatic organist Charles-Marie Widor at the church of St Sulpice in Paris. Vierne was soon appointed organist of the great cathedral of Notre Dame where he died at the organ console, as had been his wish, in 1937. The Andantino was purportedly written in a single evening as a sight-reading test for students. Although the piece appears technically straightforward, the subtlety and precision required of a good performance make it easy to judge an unintelligent rendition harshly. Such academicism was despised by de Séverac who forsook the traditionalism of the Paris Conservatoire within months of his arrival there and transferred to the newly-formed Schola Cantorum. De Séverac was not attracted to musical life in Paris: he preferred the provincial life of southern France. For this reason de Séverac's music frequently possesses a pastoral charm and Tantum ergo shows the composer at his most simple and traditional. Like Fauré and Vierne, de Séverac's formidable ability as an improviser meant that much of his most inspirational music was never written down. While it is precisely this improvisational facility that makes the music of Fauré, Vierne, and de Séverac so immediately appealing, it is easy unjustly to resent the French tradition of organ improvisation for the loss of those musical gems that might otherwise have survived for posterity .

The appearance of Fauré's Requiem in the 1880s, a decade during which the composer's most successful compositions were songs and piano pieces, can on I y be explained by the fine choral music which preceded it. The Messe basse represents Fauré at his most practical. Written in conjunction with the French composer and organist André Messager (also at one time assistant to Widor at St Sulpice) during a holiday in Normandy in 1881, the Messe basse was composed for the modest forces of a local church. A setting of the motet O salutaris hostia and the Kyrie were Messager's contribution; the remaining movements of the Ordinary, without the Credo, were set by Fauré. When revising the score in 1906 Fauré adapted the violin and harmonium accompaniment for organ, at the same time excising the Gloria and replacing Messager's Kyrie with one of his own. The final version of the Messe basse is one of the few existing settings of the mass for female voices and organ. The youthful Cantique de Jean Racine dates from 1865 when Fauré was studying with Saint-Saëns at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris. The Cantique earned Fauré a premier prix in composition and is a testament to the young composer's melodic genius and to his penchant for rich textures.

This recording is an attempt to move Fauré's liturgical music from the concert hall to the church. In particular, the reconstruction of nineteenth-century French ecclesiastical pronunciation and the restoration of Fauré's preferred phrasing are just two of the most useful elements in the search for the composer's intentions. To those familiar with the more expansive versions of Fauré's Requiem there will inevitably be unfamiliar textures in this performance. However, few of Fauré's romantic gestures are lost in the chamber version, and moreover, the reserved translucence of the instrumentation emphasizes the fact that the Requiem -and indeed all the choral music recorded here - was originally designed for liturgical performance.

Schola Cantorum
Schola Cantorum is Oxford University's longest-running chamber choir. It was founded in 1960 by the Hungarian dissident Laszló Heltay, and over the last three decades many of the choir' s former members have become involved in professional music at the highest levels. Former singers include Emma Kirkby and Jane Glover, while Andrew Parrott, Nicholas Cleobury, and Ivor Bolton are among the choir's former conductors. Schola Cantorum's patrons are Sir Michael Tippett and Lord Menuhin, and for specific projects the choir has worked under Leonard Bernstein, Gunstav Leonhardt, Sir Colin Davis, and Sir Neville Marriner as well as Britten, Tippett, and Stravinsky in performances of their own music, since 1990 Schola Cantorum has been conducted by Jeremy Summerly under whom the choir has released many recordings and has toured extensively, both in Britain and abroad.

Oxford Camerata
The Oxford Camerata was formed by Jeremy Summerly in order to meet the growing demand for choral groups specializing in music from the Renaissance era. It has since expanded its repertoire to include music from the medieval period to the present day, using instrumentalists where necessary. The Camerata has made several recordings for Naxos, and future plans include discs of music by Hildegard of Bingen, Dufay and Tye.

Jeremy Summerly
Jeremy Summerly studied Music at New College, Oxford from where he graduated with First Class Honours in 1982. For the next seven years he worked for BBC Radio and it was during this time that he founded the Oxford Camerata and undertook postgraduate research at King's College, London. In 1989 he became a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music and in the following year he was appointed conductor of Schola Cantorum of Oxford. In 1991 he signed a long-term contract with Naxos to record a variety of music with Schola Cantorum of Oxford and the Oxford Camerata.