DESCRIPTION:
This unbelievably beautiful work was performed live on 5th July 2010 in the Église de Saint Merry, Paris with 18 years old Martial Pauliat (Solo tenor).
Sung by the Maîtrise de l'Académie Vocale de Paris; directed by Iain Simcock. Morgane Collomb - Soprano
Laura Jarrell - Soprano
Rebecca Winckworth - Soprano
Brian Cummings - Counter-tenor
Pierre Verneyre - Alto
Elie Enthoven - Ténor
Ivar Hervieu - Ténor
Martial Pauliat - Ténor
Alexandre Ducène - Baryton
Théo Bouvier - Baryton
Marco Godawatta - Baryton
Julien Godawatta - Basse
Lucas Golse - Basse
Merwan Touati - Basse

In the year 2000 The Souls of the Righteous was privately commissioned as a memorial to a member of the congregation at Winchester Cathedral, who for over thirty years had travelled regularly from Folkestone in Kent to share in its worship and to hear Winchester Cathedral Choir under its erstwhile Master of Music, Dr David Hill. This motet sets words which turned out to have been in the minds of both composer and commissioner before either had specifically suggested any text to the other. The music was first heard in Winchester Cathedral on 20 May 2000. The tenor solo part was sung by (and, at the commissioner's request, especially conceived for) William Kendall, who marks his own thirtieth year as a serving member of the Choir in 2005 and enjoys also a solo career of international distinction. It was he who had effected a meeting of commissioner and composer. Although a member of Winchester Cathedral Choir myself (1991-2001), sadly I had not had the privilege of knowing Sheila Bushnell, to whom the music is dedicated. This seemed to augment an already daunting compositional responsibility. In the event, two memories guided my response. One was that of the sublime setting of these words in Latin [Justorum Animae] by William Byrd, known and loved from the moment when I first encountered it as a chorister at New College, Oxford, in the late 1960s. Though lighting the humblest of candles beside such work, the present setting may at least claim as its point of departure some generalised glimpse into the spiritual and musical sensibility of Byrd. My second prompting, more personal and, in the end, perhaps more pertinent still, is the cherished memory of my own parents. Whatever the merits or otherwise of these compositional results, I hope that a certain authenticity of feeling may be found in them, as happily it was by the commissioner, who has wished to remain anonymous but who welcomed disclosure of so personal a perspective. The Souls of the Righteous stands, then, partly as a private tribute to two people known and loved, but primarily --and in some curious sense, more poignantly --to Sheila and to those whom the poet Matthew Arnold identifies for us as 'The friends to whom we had no natural right, The homes that were not destined to be ours'. © Francis Pott, 2005