Alexander Campkin (b. 1984)
I Saw Eternity
Choral Works
Contents are listed after the review
Phoenix Consort/Adam Whitmore
rec. 2023, St Hild and Bede College Chapel, Durham, UK
Texts included
Convivium Records CR100 [57]
Though subtitled ‘Choral Works’ this album is not simply an anthology of choral works written over a period of several years. Rather, the choice of works and their placing in sequence creates a “journey from darkness to light, reflecting the composer’s own personal journey from darkness to light, influenced by his own experiences” (Quoted from the back cover of the CD box).
At the age of 17 Alexander Campkin was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, cutting short his career as a viola player. In an interview, from December 2023, he has spoken of how this was “a confusing time… it stopped me playing viola, but it strengthened my passion and drive for composition”. What also unifies the music on this disc is the fact that five out of the fourteen tracks are settings of words by Henry Vaughan, a great religious poet and mystic of the Seventeenth Century. My very good friend (and fine novelist) Stevie Davies has written of him(Henry Vaughan, Poetry Wales Press, 1995, p.16), “poem after poem records the baffled straining of his eyes towards a light intuited as shining just over the hill, a music just out of earshot … Nature at once signalled the immanence of the Divine everywhere around him, flashing its light to him”. A moment of full awareness is recorded in the first stanza of Vaughan’s poem ‘The World’:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driven by the spheres
Like vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled;
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain,
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights
Wit’s sour delights
With gloves, and knots the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flower.
The opening phrase of this poem provides the title of this disc and a setting of the lines from “I saw Eternity” to “Driven by the Spheres” (line 5) is track 6 on the disc. The poem – I don’t propose to offer a full reading of it here – contrasts Eternity (“All calm, as it was bright”) with Time (“in which the world / and all her train were hurled”). Fittingly, Vaughan’s poem, when published, was accompanied by two verses from The Gospel According to St. John, ii, 16-17:
“All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the father but is of the world.
And the world passeth away, and the lusts thereof, but he that doth the will of God abideth for ever”
Alexander Campkin’s own note on his setting tells us that “I Saw Eternity sets an evocative text by Henry Vaughan. I was inspired to compose the piece one evening whilst I was on tour in France. I was greatly honoured that the choir received an invitation to give the piece its first performance just two days later in La cathédrale Saint-Samson de Dol-de-Bretagne”. That invitation had a particular relevance to Vaughan and his work, although those extending it may well have been unaware of the connection. Saint Samson was a Welsh saint, born c.500 in south-eastern Wales, who established the cathedral in Dol c.550; born in south-eastern Wales Samson might well have identified himself as a Silurian or Silurist (a descendant of the Welsh tribe, the Silures who long resisted the Roman invaders). Henry Vaughan identifies himself in this way both on the titlepage of his major collection, Silex Scintillans: Sacred Poems and PrivateEjaculations (1650/1655) and in the wording (“Henricus Vaughan – Siluris”) on his grave in the churchyard of Lansantffraed. Save perhaps for the church in Lansantffraed (of which Vaughan was vicar), or Brecon Cathedral, it would be hard to think of a more suitable venue for the premiere of a setting of lines by Vaughan.
This setting of the opening lines of Vaughan’s poem is powerfully attractive. Written for high voices, the radiance of which effectively evokes Vaughan’s “pure and endless light”; the moving “ring” of which Vaughan writes in the opening lines of this poem is evoked in the sequence of changing harmonies which appear to circle back to where they began. In short, this is a superb setting of the opening lines of Vaughan’s poem. The frustrating thing is that it is only the opening lines of the poem that we get. What we have is so much in sympathy with Vaughan’s verse that it leaves the listener who knows the poem, very disappointed that more of the poem has not been set, though perhaps that was Campkin’s intention. I would love to know whether or not, Mr. Campkin has set the poem’s representation, in its remaining stanzas, of the life lived in the “vast shadow” of Time, peopled by the “doting lover” (l.8), and “the down-right epicure [who] placed heaven in sense” (l.38). If not, I very much hope that he will. That he had taken an interest in Vaughan’s poem on other occasions is evident from ‘I saw Eternity like a shadow’ (track 11), which sets the opening line, followed by lines 6-7 of the same poem:
I saw Eternity the other night.
Like a vast shadow moved;
In which the world
And all her train were hurled.
The last three lines used in Alexander Campkin’s setting refer to the world of “Time”, mere “hours, days, years”: Vaughan’s text contrasts Eternity and Time in a way which Mr. Campkin’s omissions altogether ignore.
Another omission occurs in the text of ‘I saw Eternity and the sun” (track 13):
I saw Eternity the other night.
The way, which from this
dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun.
Here, the poem’s first line is followed by lines 52-54 (taken from the fourth and last stanza of the poem). Again, important elements of poetic context and argument have been lost, but there is a continuity to the revised text.
‘The World’ is not the only poem by Henry Vaughan that has attracted the interest of Alexander Campkin – track 8 sets lines from Vaughan’s ‘The Night’. Again, Campkin sets a very abbreviated text: he gives us the first stanza (six lines), followed by a line from stanza two and part of that stanza’s closing line, the first three lines of stanza four and part of the poem’s last line. The 54 lines of Vaughan’s poem are reduced to 16 in Campkin’s setting. That setting is, however, altogether pleasing, with its many rapid runs and changes of colour, which articulate the energy of Vaughan’s words, and their fusion of mystical serenity and intensity.
One more setting of Vaughan which deserves mention is track 9, ‘Bright Shadows’, which sets the opening stanza of Vaughan’s poem ‘Son-Days’. Vaughan’s text is a series of metaphors ‘defining’ the meaning, and experience, of the Christian day of worship. Only one stanza, the first, is set, but the development matters less in this poem than the effect of single stanzas (of which there are three in Vaughan’s original text). Campkin’s setting is subtle and varied, different images introduced by different voices. The result captures very well the numinous quality of Vaughan’s writing. Indeed, it adds another dimension to the text. This is perhaps the finest piece on the disc.
Other highlights include an attractive choral arrangement of Ivor Gurney’s song ‘Sleep’, with a text by the Jacobean poet and dramatist, John Fletcher, from the play ‘Woman Hater’, c. 1606. The song has been set by several composers, including Peter Warlock. Gurney’s setting, for voice and piano, was composed in 1914 and published in 1920. This is an elegant and astute arrangement. ‘Bright Apollo’, a poem by Thomas Hood, better known for his comic verse (full of puns) has an unexpected Romantic beauty and is set with delicate rapture by Alexander Campkin. Another fine piece is ‘I flying’, by the South African poet and novelist Finuala Dowling, this poem being the title poem of her fifth collection, published in 2002.
Many of the texts Campkin chooses to set, make use of the interplay of light and darkness, whether just in passing, or as a central feature. The poems and passages by Vaughan are related to the contemporaneous popularity of chiaroscuro in baroque paintings, while in other poems, such as Donald Macleod’s ‘Tommy’s Carol’, the traditional ‘Bellman’s Song’ (sometimes referred to as ‘The Moon Shines Bright’) and the aforementioned ‘Bright Apollo’ by Thomas Hood the texts draw on imagery central to Christian iconography and symbolism.
Alexander Campkin perhaps doesn’t as yet have a compositional voice which is fully individual – there are echoes of Rutter, MacMillan and others. But that will surely come if he builds on the solid foundations evident here. Educated at Oxford University and Vienna’s University of the Performing Arts he brings to this music considerable technical assurance and an alert sensitivity to poetic texts (though I am unhappy with the cuts he makes in some of the settings of Henry Vaughan). He is well-served by the Phoenix Consort, made up of students and recent graduates of Durham University under the guidance of their founder and director Adam Whitmore. This youthful, and relatively small ensemble has a wide range of vocal colours and resources at its disposal – as evidenced in ‘Calm me, O Lord’, where they seem equally at home in the meditative calm of the opening homophonic passages, the later use of dissonance and the relatively ambitious polyphony which follows.
Readers with an interest in contemporary English choral music should seek out this disc, which will, I feel sure, be a pleasurable and rewarding listen.
Glyn Pursglove
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Contents
Alexander Campkin (b. 1984)
World of Merriment (2015)
Bright Apollo
Calm me, O Lord
True Love
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) arr. Alexander Campkin
Sleep
Alexander Campkin
I saw Eternity the other night
I flying
Dazzling Darkness
Bright Shadows (2013)
Sleep, Holy Babe
I Saw Eternity like a shadow
Tommy’s Carol
I Saw Eternity and the sun
Awake, Awake!
