ClassicsOnline Home » HURD, M.: Pop Cantatas - Jonah-Man Jazz / Prodigal / Rooster Rag / Swingin' Samson / Captain Coram's Kids (New London Children's Choir, Corp) > Review List



HURD, M.: Pop Cantatas - Jonah-Man Jazz / Prodigal / Rooster Rag / Swingin' Samson / Captain Coram's Kids (New London Children's Choir, Corp)

Composer(s):Hurd, Michael
Artist(s)
Period(s) 20th Century
Genre Classical Music
Category Choral - Secular
Catalogue 8.572505
Label Naxos
Quality   320kbps
Album Price
 
MP3
USD 6.99
 

 


Michael Hurd was a pioneer in composing brief, witty and, above all, performable choral music for children to enjoy. When Jonah-Man Jazz arrived in 1966, young singers and their teachers had modern-sounding music to make and share. Pastiche jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll rhythms, memorable tunes and entertaining lyrics proved a winning combination, as they also do in Swingin’ Samson, Rooster Rag, Prodigal and Captain Coram’s Kids. This recording is the first to be supported by the British Music Society Charitable Trust Michael Hurd Bequest, established to further the appreciation of the composer’s output.


   




Review By Nick Barnard,MusicWeb International,May 2011

The five cantatas here are presented in bright-as-a-button performances by the New London Children’s Choir. I have one little negative—just a couple of times I feel conductor Ronald Corp chooses tempi that are a fraction steady. The upside is every word stays commendably clear which reduces the problem that there are no words printed in the liner—although they are available to download from the Naxos website I believe—but overall I think he could have pushed his young singers more. I remember we had just a pianist and I did not realise a version existed with an instrumental accompaniment. This is very simple, I guess aimed at school performers too. In Jonah-Man Jazz this accompaniment does sound rather perfunctory. But with those two minor carps out of

The pianist is the choir’s regular accompanist Alexander Wells who does a commendably good job throughout the whole disc. For my taste producer/engineer Michael Ponder has given the piano a slightly recessed position in the sound picture which detracts from the sharpness of attack of some numbers—an effect which compounds the impression that certain sections would have benefited from an extra 10% vim from the stick. The latest of the five works presented here is Prodigal from 1989. It seems irrelevant to state that stylistically little has changed in the near quarter century since Jonah. The formula works, the performers are not bothered about any musicological time-line so why change?

The most ambitious work here is Captain Coram’s Kids. At nearly nineteen minutes this is significantly longer than any of the other four cantatas as presented. It differs in other ways too; the story is historical rather than allegorical or biblical and the music is more overtly serious in relative terms. Thomas Coram was an 18th Century Philanthropist who founded the Foundling Hospital to care for destitute children. Famously Handel gave a charitable performance of The Messiah for the hospital as well as donating the manuscript of the Hallelujah Chorus. All of which rather neatly gives Hurd an ‘in’ to write pastiche baroqueries as well as music of a gently more lyrical and serious nature. One moment had me thinking of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast which came as a bit of a surprise! The accompanying group is expanded—logically—to include a string quartet and four woodwind. All of the playing here is a delight and adds to the impact of the piece.

This recording has been made with the support of the British Music Society Charitable Trust which in turn made use of the Michael Hurd Bequesmore....

Review By Rob Barnett ,MusicWeb International,April 2011

The works on this Naxos disc are lightly jazzy and must have turned generations of children on to concert music. They make confident and fearless communion with West End show-time, dance-band drum-kit and light Radio 2 style middle-of-the-road idioms. Jonah-Man Jazz is irresistibly swung, concise and just sentimental enough to snag its barb on the emotional apparatus. The unison children’s voices, whether in choral or more rarely in solo participation, have impudence and the aplomb to tease out the tension between occasionally grown-up emotions and young minds. They’re all a delight to hear and very much in the same line as the Horovitz and Flanders Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo though that post-dates by four or five years the first Hurd work. They all,

The present disc is a project financially supported by the British Music Society Charitable Trust Michael Hurd Bequest. The Trust was established to further the appreciation of the composer’s output. I do hope that there will be more Hurd works recorded with support from this source especially the complex ambitious pieces.

The cantata texts are not in the CD booklet but are on the Naxos website.

Corp has worked these many years with children’s choirs. He clearly has a sure judgement which aids in inspiring well-placed confidence in his young charges. It also instils in them an evident pleasure in music-making.

more....


Review By John Sheppard ,MusicWeb International,March 2011

Singing in schools is at last coming back into fashion. In the immediate post-war period it was a normal part of any child’s education but by the 1960s many teachers felt a need for some kind of updating of what was being sung. Possibly the first “pop cantata” was Herbert Chappell’s “The Daniel Jazz”, a setting of Vachel Lindsay published in 1963, but it was soon followed by a dozen or so by Michael Hurd, starting with “Jonah-Man Jazz” in 1966. The five examples on this disc give a good idea of the genre. The composer makes it plain in his introductions to the works that they were written for fun and should be performed with that in mind. Inevitably they are most effective in a school situation where the whole class or even

The composer offers performers the option of using only a piano as accompaniment or of adding jazz percussion and bass. These options are used in Prodigal and Swingin’ Samson respectively along with even more elaborate orchestration in Jonah-Man Jazz and Captain Coram’s Kids. Although John Addison acts as narrator for those two works children are employed as narrators in Rooster Rag and Swingin’ Samson. I found this and the more sparse instrumentation more effective as being more in keeping with the unpretentious nature of the music. In general the performances are effective and spirited although they would have benefited for much of the time by a closer balance for the choir—the piano does tend to grab all the attention at times.

I mentioned the amusing lyrics but you need to access them from the Naxos website (all nine pages of them) to read them. It is tiresome but worth it—and then you are able also to join in the delightful audience song in Swingin’ Samson. Unsurprisingly it would be a mistake to listen to more than one Cantata at a time, but they are worth hearing in that way. I hope that this disc, sponsored by the British Music Society using the Michael Hurd Bequest, will be followed with another including other pop cantatas including Hurd’s splendid “Hip-hip Horatio” with its parody of oratorio recitative, Herbert Chappell’s “The Daniel Jazz”, Joseph Horovitz’ “Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat” in the 20 minute version made before it became grotesquely extended. In the meantime this reminder of a genre which must have introduced a whole generation of children to the pleasures of simore....






 

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