Thomas Tertius
NOBLE (1867-1953)
John Scott Whiteley on the organ of York Minster (recorded April 2015)
PRIORY PRCD1152 [77:00]
Among those composers
who are remembered today just for one single work is Thomas Tertius Noble,
former organist of both York Minster and St Thomas’s Fifth Avenue New
York. Those with an interest in English
church music know of Noble in B minor, one of the classic settings of the
Evening Canticles, but few know of anything else; except, perhaps, a handful of
hymn tunes and psalm chants whose authorship usually passes unnoticed. John Scott Whiteley describes Noble as “one
of the last of the great Victorian cathedral organists”, and clearly thinks
highly enough of Noble’s work to record his complete organ works for
Priory. This is the third and final
volume.
As Whiteley points out
in his extensive and extremely detailed booklet notes, Noble was very much a
musical chameleon, “latching onto whichever currents of influence found their
way into his life”. Certainly the 15
pieces on this disc show no common stylistic thread, and while they are all
utterly typical of English organ music of the era, they lack any kind of distinctive
voice. Add to that a sense that the
craft of composition concerns Noble more than its results - as the late Arthur
Wills so memorably put it in his published guide to the organ, referring to
Noble’s French conytemrpaories, “the craftsmanship of their work is never in
question, but the musical content is frwquently too arid to interest musicians
outside the organ world” – and we have rather a lot of well written but
ultimately unmemorable pieces here.
Possibly
because it comes from a much larger work – a canatat written for York Minsuter
in 1904 – the The prepondarnce of hymn tune preludes on the disc point to the
practicality of Noble’s organ music, although it remains an intriguing puzzle
as to why so many of them on this disc are based on Welsh melodies. They generally tend to be soft and harmless,
their structure governed by the tune itself, which mercifully means that their
rambling nature does not let any of them go on too long. Another aspect of Noble’s life which prompted
him to write organ music, was his prolific recital-giving, and for a major
recital tour of the USA in 1913 he composed his Finale in D. While Whiteley
suggest that in it Noble is paying lip-service to Vierne’s famous Finale has neither the melodic interest
nor the general mood of excitement of his Parisian counterpart.(This is a review for musicweb-international.com from which website the disc can be purchased)
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