Music to End the Day for Sunday, 23 May 2021 Pentecost

Dear Friends,

We begin our musical sequence for Pentecost Sunday with the beautiful Aria from Bach’s Variations written for the keyboard player Johann Goldberg.  Goldberg was a student of Bach.  He was also musician to the Russian Ambassador to the Electoral Court of Saxony, and told Bach that he was often required to play late into the night to soothe his employer, who suffered bouts of insomnia!  Bach composed the masterly Variations for him to use on these occasions.

Now in his mid-eighties, David Mobray was Vicar of St Matthew’s, Darley Dale until his retirement in 2003.  He has served on the editorial committees of various hymnals, and written several fine hymns, including ‘Come to us, Creative Spirit’, which encourages us to make full use of our creative gifts and skills, in worship and in life.  I use the final words of the hymn as a guide for my own work day by day:

In our worship and our living, keep us striving towards the best.

Mobray’s text is perfectly complemented by Monk’s fine tune ‘Angel Voices’.

St John’s great words ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will give you another comforter, even the Spirit of Truth’ are central to the theme of Pentecost.  We hear them now in a setting by Philip Wilby.  Wilby, a music lecturer at Leeds University for many years, is well known as an outstanding composer for brass bands, but his deep Christian faith has led him to write several fine choral settings.

We end this sequence with my own improvisation on the ancient plainsong ‘Veni Creator‘, appointed for the Feast of Pentecost.  The improvisation takes the form of a set of variations, including an expressive Andante, a playful Scherzo and boisterous Toccata, with plainsong melody declaimed in the pedal.

Goodnight everyone.

Adrian Boynton