It is fair to say that David Briggs is probably the only person in the world—at least outside France—for whom, at the age of just nine, the death of Marcel Dupré was a major event. Other nine-year-olds, back in 1971, might have registered the deaths of Nikita Khruschchev and Ogden Nash, or more mainstream musicians such as Igor Stravinsky, Jim Morrison and Louis Armstrong. But the passing of one of French music’s legendary organist-improviser-composers would surely have passed every other single-digit youth by.Improvising at the keyboard—and, by association, that very special form of keyboard improvising at the console of a French electro-pneumatic organ—is in Briggs’ bloodstream. His grandfather, Lawrence Briggs, was a well-known liturgical improviser in Birmingham, where he was Organist of St Jude’s Church on Hill Street for over forty years. ‘I always loved to improvise, since I was six years old, and I remember very well the day Marcel Dupré died’, David Briggs remarks. ‘And nowadays, hearing famous improvisers like Olivier Latry, Philippe Lefebvre, Pierre Pincemaille, Jean Guillou and Daniel Roth is a source of endless stimulation and excitement.’In the same year as Dupré’s death, Briggs encountered another huge musical presence on the Parisian scene: Pierre Cochereau (1924–1984), Organist Titulaire at Notre-Dame Cathedral from 1955 until his death. ‘I first became addicted to Cochereau’s sound-world as a nine-year-old chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, when John Pryer (the Sub-Organist, himself a brilliant improviser) lent me an LP of the maître improvising a set of Variations on Alouette, gentille Alouette. I heard Cochereau three times at Notre-Dame in the early eighties, and each occasion was a life-changing experience.’A few years before Briggs’ own close encounters with Cochereau, Stephen Layton was also in Notre-Dame being transported by the cataclysmic blast of Cochereau’s playing. As a ten-year old chorister in Winchester Cathedral Choir, he vividly remembers Cochereau anointing their presence at High Mass with a gradually climaxing, throbbing processional. Those moments in Paris, spine-tingling and affirming, set something off for Layton too. Both he and Briggs ended up, many hundreds of hours’ organ practice later, at King’s College, Cambridge; Briggs was Organ Scholar from 1981 to 1984, Layton from 1985 to 1988 (with Richard Farnes, now Music Director at Opera North, as the link-man from 1983 to 1986).Layton, since, has focused on conducting (though he still ascends to the organ loft once in a while, always keen to improvise). Briggs, though starting out post-Cambridge in the English cathedral Kapellmeister world, now immerses himself totally in the life of a virtuoso organist-composer. And although he now lives in the USA, he may as well have a French passport. Rather like an Olympic ski champion from the United Arab Emirates, or a prize bull-fighter from the vegetarian heartlands of Totnes, Briggs has broken through robust barriers—infiltrating another culture to the point that he instinctively inhabits it. But amidst that incense-smoked air of the French liturgical organ tradition, he brings to it, significantly, the complementary riches of a very different, equally strong tradition from the other side of La Manche. How extraordinary that socio-historical events across many centuries (Reformations, Revolutions) conspired to create such different musical cultures separated by just twenty-one miles of sea. With its blend of the English liturgical choral tradition and the unique role the organ plays in French liturgy as ersatz choir, this disc is a musical Entente Cordiale indeed.To inhabit a musical world as much as Briggs does requires what he himself acknowledges as ‘addiction’. In 1984, newly arrived as Assistant Organist at Hereford Cathedral and taking lessons from Jean Langlais, he started transcribing a recording of Cochereau’s improvisations from Christmas Eve 1968. This was ‘primarily with the intent of sharpening my own aural senses, as well as examining in some detail the ravishing and generous harmonic and emotional language which was (and is) unique to Cochereau. I didn’t realize at the time that this was to be the beginning of an extended eleven-year process, on an almost daily basis. It was certainly a labour of love, and it’s not something you get quicker at—I worked out that the average time to transcribe one minute’s music was four hours.’ He should compare notes with two other kinds of musical transcribers of our time: on the one hand, the keyboardists of Progressive Rock tribute bands (notably, facsimiles of Genesis and Yes), whose ambitious, fiddly roles for Hammond organ and synthesizer have to be picked out, note by note, from original recordings; and on the other, the re-creators of film soundtracks whose original manuscripts have been lost or discarded. The most heroic of these is the conductor John Wilson, who has brought back to life several sumptuous MGM film scores in the last decade (the originals’ somewhat tragic destiny was as landfill for a Californian golf course). Like Briggs, Wilson knows how laborious this transcription process can be: he once spent four hours deciphering the pitches and orchestration of a single bar from The Wizard of Oz.The Messe pour Notre-Dame on this disc is a fusion of Cochereau transcription and Briggs’ own compositional voice. ‘About 15% is based on some wonderful Cochereau improvisations for the Feast of the Assumption in 1962’, he says. ‘I transcribed them from an unedited reel-to-reel recording made in Notre-Dame that day by Fred Tulan, a well-known American organist and great friend of Pierre. You can hear—in the ‘Domine Deus’ section of the Gloria and introductions to the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei—Cochereau’s incredible invention and ravishing harmonies. I’ve tried to make the link into my own music as imperceptible as possible, but it is for others to say if it’s successful or not!’ Additionally, this recording of the Mass intersperses four movements of David Briggs’ own improvisations—the Introït, Offertoire, Élévation and Sortie. Very much aligned with French liturgical practice, this is Briggs captured in the heat of the improvised, unedited moment—in some cases performing with suitably awestruck members of the Trinity Choir bearing witness in the organ loft.Messe pour Notre-Dame was indeed conceived specifically for the great Parisian cathedral and its mighty 1868 Cavaillé-Coll organ. The choir it was written for was an English one, however—commissioned by Neil Shepherd and the choir of Keynsham Parish Church, near Bristol, they performed it with Briggs in Notre-Dame on 28 July 2002. What a magnificent gift to that most endangered musical species of the early twenty-first century, the English Parish Church Choir.In February 2002, when the Mass was composed, Briggs’ musical home and employer was Gloucester Cathedral (though it was a period of transition, swapping roles with his Assistant Organist and Choirmaster, in preparation for his subsequent freelance existence as organist and composer). Gloucester’s organ is unique in English cathedrals, as its reeds are voiced in the French classical style. This was the result of major rebuilds of the 1660 Thomas Harris organ by Hill, Norman and Beard (1971) and Nicholson (1999). Controversial at the time, this Gallic voicing and lower, Continental European wind pressure ensured a snappy start to the note and an ‘open-vowelled’ tone. Free and brassy, with that gloriously flatulent, fairground sound at full blast, it is an instrument à la française that is uniquely apt in Britain for this recording.For Briggs, ‘composition is the same as slowed-down improvisation—it comes from exactly the same place, although of course you have the opportunity to hone and refine your thoughts’. In the same way, improvisation is composition in real time: a captured instant of creativity, and in the hands of masters—be they Cochereau, Briggs, Jimi Hendrix, Mozart impersonator Robert Levin or any jazzer you can think of—a jaw-droppingly wonderful firing of split-second impulses from brain to fingers and feet. Briggs’ improvisations on this recording—before, in the midst of and following the Mass movements, and as responses to the choral plainchant of the Te Deum—display a masterful range of mood and colour. There is delicacy, reflection and repose, alongside mighty bombast and truly gothic ‘shock and awe’ that humble an American president’s bellicose use of the words.Just as the Mass takes its lead from settings by Vierne, Widor and Langlais, immediate comparisons with Cochereau’s teacher Duruflé are tempting in the setting of Ubi caritas et amor. Briggs takes the plainchant in different directions harmonically, however, and avoids a mere refurbishment of the Duruflé setting. This a cappella motet, like the Mass, was composed for a Bristol church—Bristol City Church—and first heard too in Notre-Dame de Paris, at Grand-Messe on 30 July 2006.A few days earlier, in Devon’s Buckfast Abbey, the Exon Singers and conductor Matthew Owens performed Briggs’ setting of Psalm 121 for the first time on a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of Choral Evensong. Without the Frenchified flavours of Briggs’ organ-writing to underpin this work, I will lift up mine eyes is a more overtly English piece, very much in the Anglican mould and sans ail.Perhaps because the evening canticles are so intrinsic to that Anglican choral tradition, Briggs’ Trinity Magnificat and Nunc dimittis—even with organ accompaniment—feel closer to Dover than to Calais. With a fine sense of architecture and alternations of choral texture, this pairing is the most recent work here—composed for the forces on this recording in 2008.Briggs’ musical ocean crossing is the English Channel, but for several years now the Atlantic forms the divide between his earlier British life and his current residence in Boston, Massachusetts. The final work on this disc was composed for that remarkable island of musical Anglicanism amidst the bustling commerce of Manhattan. St Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, sustains a fine choir of boys and men, and it was for these forces and their conductor John Scott that Briggs wrote O Lord, support us in 2005. Commissioned by the then Assistant Organist Jeremy Bruns for his wife Kathy, this setting of an exquisite evening collect from the Book of Common Prayer is a tender wash of unashamed loveliness.Meurig Bowen © 2010

• Wykonawca Various Artists
• Data premiery 2010-01-01
• Nośnik CD

Double-bill of live performances by English rock and roll band The Dogs D'Amour, recorded in Japan in 1989 and Wolverhampton in 2013.

• Data premiery 2014-01-29
• Nośnik DVD

Tracklista:1. See Them A' Come2. English Black Boys3. If You Want My Lovin'4. Take It from Me5. Society6. Leaders7. Imagine8. We Can Feel It9. Dance

• Wykonawca X-O-Dus
• Data premiery 2012-04-02
• Nośnik CD

Tracklista:   1. Dusseldorf 2. Fall In Time 3. Glory Hallelujah 4. Brilliant Sanity 5. Superglue 6. Canvas Shoe 7. Tangerine 8. English Architecture 9. Melrose 10. Drop Out 11. Devil In My Shoe

• Wykonawca Teleman
• Data premiery 2016-04-08
• Nośnik CD

Tracklista:1. Stranger2. Hitchhiker3. Failure to See4. English Rose5. Not Here, Not There, Not Anywhere6. Halflight7. Sly Whispers8. Erase9. Blackjack, Whisky & Gin10. Winter's Stroll

• Wykonawca Jenna
• Data premiery 2013-07-22
• Nośnik CD

Koncerty fletowe różnych kompozytorów tworzących w Anglii w XVIII wieku będące aranżacjami sonat triowych op. 5 Corellego. Wykonawcy to Maurice Steger - flet prosty oraz zespół The English Concert. Płyta jest wydana jako CD-katalog, czyli zawiera katalog firmy Harmonia Mundi na 2015 rok.

• Wykonawca Steger Maurice , The English Concert
• Data premiery 2014-11-14
• Nośnik CD

Gustav Holst was closely involved with choral music throughout his career. As a schoolboy in Cheltenham he helped his father with music for church services and soon became a choirmaster himself at two Cotswold villages. He composed anthems and partsongs which won prizes in competitions organized by The Boy’s Own Paper, and then went to London to study at the Royal College of Music where he continued to write partsongs as exercises for Sir Charles Stanford’s composition classes. In 1896 his Light leaves whisper, to words by fellow-student Fritz Hart, won a prize offered by the Magpie Madrigal Society and was performed at Stafford House – his first important premiere. This was also Holst’s first published composition, and although it is in the conventional Victorian manner, with little trace of the individual character of his later works, it shows that he was developing his ability as a composer and could invent and handle contrasting musical materials with confidence. But his first real demonstration of skill in choral writing was the Ave Maria of 1900, an eight-part setting for double female chorus which evokes archaic styles without descending into pastiche, taking the cori spezzati of the Venetians as a model for the layout of the voices. Despite the evident influence of Verdi, a few personal touches such as unusual shifts of tonality, the use of seventh chords, and the piling up of contrapuntal entries give hints of Holst’s later mature style. He dedicated this moving and tender piece to the memory of his mother, who had died when he was only seven years old.   Having earned his living as an orchestral musician for some years after leaving college, in 1904 Holst embarked on a new career as a schoolteacher, adapting his skills to the task of providing suitable music for his pupils. His first appointment was at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich, South London, for which he wrote settings of words from Tennyson’s The Princess – music which is interesting and effective, yet within the vocal capabilities of schoolgirl singers. Two of these settings include an additional ‘echo’ choir placed in an adjoining room, so that an intervening door could be gradually closed at the words ‘dying, dying …’, an early example of the fade-out which he later used so effectively at the end of The Planets. To this period also belongs the mixed-voice partsong In youth is pleasure to words by Robert Wever (1565), whose conventional writing suggests a ‘potboiler’ produced to supplement his earnings; or perhaps it was intended for one of the adult education evening classes which he taught at this time.   During the early 1900s the rediscovery of English folksong by such collectors as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger helped Holst to simplify his style and rid himself of the heavy legacy of the nineteenth century. He became interested in modal scales and flexible metres, which he realized were more appropriate to settings of the English language than the diatonic system and regular rhythms of the Germanic tradition. Vaughan Williams was also working on the music for the new English Hymnal during this period, and besides contributing some of the tunes himself Holst was intrigued by the simple beauty of the plainsong melodies which were included in the collection. These influences began to have an effect on his own music, especially when allied to medieval words, as is evident in such pieces as Jesu, Thou the Virgin-born (No 3 of the Four Old English Carols of 1907) and A Welcome Song (of similar date) with accompaniment for oboe and cello.   Another interest of Holst’s in the early years of the century was Sanskrit literature, and he made several settings of his own translations of hymns from the Rig Veda for various combinations of voices. For the Two Eastern Pictures of 1911 for female voices and harp, he chose words from the Spring and Summer cantos of Kalidasa’s poem Ritsusamhara which describes the six seasons of the Indian year, following his usual method of making his own version of the words and then comparing his results against published translations, making any amendments which might be necessary.   In 1913, while on a walking tour in Essex, Holst discovered the village of Thaxted with which he was to be associated for the rest of his life. Here he met the vicar, Conrad Noel, a medievalist whose enthusiasm for folk-dancing and church music affected all who came into contact with him. Holst had the idea of organizing a Whitsun festival there, bringing singers and players from St Paul’s Girls’ School and Morley College in London to join with local people in a weekend of musical festivities, and in 1916, once work on composing The Planets was finished, he was able to devote time to writing and arranging music especially for Thaxted. The carols Bring us in good ale (dedicated to Conrad Noel), Lullay my liking and Of one that is so fair and bright originated in this way, together with Terly, terlow which was given an accompaniment of oboe and cello to form a companion piece to the earlier Welcome Song. But his most outstanding achievement was This have I done for my true love (also dedicated to Noel), an evocation of the medieval notion of dancing and religious worship being closely intertwined. The melody of this piece is so lyrical, with a strongly modal character, that many people thought that Holst had used a genuine English folksong, but in fact it was his own.   Although he had made several folksong settings during the pre-War years, at Thaxted his interest revived and he made settings such as Diverus and Lazarus for the festivals and also arranged folksongs for other performers. When his friend W G Whittaker asked for some new music for his Newcastle choir in 1916, Holst hesitated at first, and then some ideas for folksong settings came into his head, resulting in the Six Choral Folksongs, of which the first three are dedicated to Whittaker and the remainder to Charles Kennedy Scott and the Oriana Madrigal Society. He chose five of the melodies from the collections of George B Gardiner and one from Baring-Gould’s Songs of the West.   In these arrangements Holst demonstrated his skill in producing a variety of solutions to the problem of how to retain musical interest during several repetitions of a strophic melody, but he later felt that he had virtually exhausted the medium. ‘It’s a limited form of art’, he wrote; ‘when one works so long in a small form mannerisms are almost inevitable.’ He therefore turned to larger-scale choral works such as The Hymn of Jesus and the First Choral Symphony, and operas such as The Perfect Fool and At the Boar’s Head, together with various instrumental and orchestral works.   During the 1920s his stature as a composer increased rapidly because of the widespread popularity of The Planets, and he was often invited to musical events in various parts of the country. One of these was at Aberystwyth where Adrian Boult introduced him to the sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, discreet patrons of the arts and other worthwhile causes. Musical weekends at their house at Gregynog attracted many well-known musicians, and in 1930 Adrian Boult asked Ralph Vaughan Williams to make some choral arrangements of Welsh folksongs especially for Gregynog. Because Vaughan Williams was busy with other projects he turned the task over to Holst, who made twelve settings after listening to the singing of Mrs Dora Herbert-Jones. Although Holst’s settings were made on the basis of the English versions of the words which he had asked Steuart Wilson to prepare from Mrs Herbert-Jones’s translations, there is no doubt that the melodies are more effective with the original Welsh words, as is evident from the very opening rhythm of Mae ’nghariad i’n Fenws (‘My sweetheart’s like Venus’). Compared with the English folksongs of 1916, the style of this later set is generally more ‘Holstian’ – lean, sparse, with occasional dissonant harmonic clashes, while remaining firmly in keeping with the basic tonality of the songs.   In 1933 Holst once again visited Gregynog for the first of the annual festivals which were to be held there, and he was so impressed by the singing of the choir that at the suggestion of Dora Herbert-Jones he wrote a composition especially for them. For his text he selected lines from the fourth Song of James Elroy Flecker’s poem The Gates of Damascus in which a traveller sets out on a journey of pilgrimage southwards across the desert towards the holy city. Holst’s setting, originally inscribed only with the dedication ‘For Gregynog’ but later known by the first phrase of its words O spiritual pilgrim, treats the journey as a metaphor of life itself, and ends with a quiet evocation of spiritual peace and reassurance. This short composition was to be the last choral work which Holst wrote, as he was already seriously ill. He died less than a year later following a major operation.   Michael Short © 1993

• Wykonawca Various Artists
• Data premiery 2006-03-07
• Nośnik CD

Tracklista: 1. Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody 2. La Calinda 3. Closing Scene 4. Irmelin Prelude 5. Appalachia (Variations on an old Slave Song with Final Chorus)

• Data premiery 1999-10-01
• Nośnik CD

Tracklista: 1. English Murder 2. Sawney Bean 3. Gold Is King 4. Media 5. Looking For Europe 6. Here We Stand 7. Michael 8. Deceit 9. Blood Of Summer 10. Trees In Winter

• Wykonawca Sol Invictus
• Data premiery 2019-07-12
• Nośnik CD

A comprehensive programme of arias from such famous English oratorios as Esther, Saul, Belshazzar, Theodora, Judas Maccabaeus and Solomon. These oratorios contain a wealth of arias, duets and splendid overtures, of which one overture, eleven arias, and two beautiful duets are included here. The world-famous countertenor James Bowman is joined by The King’s Consort and the renowned soprano Susan Gritton. ‘This beautiful collection of songs and duets from Handel oratorios finds the 52-year-old English countertenor in quite amazing form... his voice.

• Wykonawca Gritton Susan , Bowman James , The King's Consort
• Data premiery 2012-11-01
• Nośnik CD