Cathedral Music: Spring 2008

Cathedral MUSIC

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Cathedral Music

CATHEDRAL MUSIC is published twice a year, in May and November

ISSN 1363-6960 MAY 2008

Editor

Andrew Palmer

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Assistant Editor Roger Tucker

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‘ CM Comment Andrew Palmer’

From: Stephen Shipley, Series Producer, Choral Evensong. BBC Manchester

Sir: I trust your readers are delighted with the announcement that BBC Radio 3 made in January about the restoration to Wednesday of the live weekly Choral Evensong broadcast. The first Wednesday live transmission will be after the Prom season has finished on 17 September and will come from the London Oratory. Radio 3 also announced that each week the programme will be repeated on Sunday afternoon at 4.00pm. There will be two exceptions: Advent Sunday and Easter Day when the service will be live. As Roger Wright, Controller of Radio 3, pointed out, there is evidence that there have been new listeners to Choral Evensong since it moved to Sunday afternoons in February 2007, but many more have missed it on Wednesday afternoons. The new schedule will allow a choice of listening, and of course each programme will still be available for seven days on the Listen Again facility on the BBC Radio 3 website.

I think this is a highly satisfactory outcome and an encouraging indication of the confidence and increased

Thank you Radio 3

Enthusiasts of BBC Radio 3’s longrunning programme Choral Evensong will be rejoicing at the news from Stephen Shipley (see letter above). Roger Wright, Controller of the music station, has reversed the decision made last year to move the popular programme from Wednesday to Sunday. From September the live broadcast Choral Evensong returns to its Wednesday slot, but will now keep the 4.00pm slot on Sundays for a repeat.

As ardent supporters of cathedral music, FCM has always zealously guarded the tradition of broadcasting Choral Evensong live (as does the BBC), and our members will be grateful for the restoration of the midweek transmission with the additional bonus of keeping the Sunday afternoon slot. The experimental shift to Sundays has increased the programme’s audience reach, with many people hearing it for the first time. It is very encouraging to hear that this has increased its popularity. Stephen Shipley’s letter is welcome, for not only does it recognise the importance of this programme but he writes about his concern for the reduced number of psalms in the broadcast services. Thinking back over the years of listening to the programme

investment that Radio 3 has in the programme. One feature of the Sunday service, the homily, which I know has exercised some of your readers, will now only happen from time to time, but I do hope that I can persuade more cathedrals to sing more psalmody. It concerns me that fewer and fewer choirs seem to be singing the daily psalms according to the Book of Common Prayer pattern. I understand that more cathedrals are devising their own lectionaries and choosing appropriate psalmody but the amount of psalmody in broadcasts over recent years has gradually decreased leaving space for anthems and organ voluntaries which can often be unwieldy in length and affect the overall shape of the service. No doubt your readers will have views on this and I’ll be happy to hear them. Meanwhile, I would like to thank the musicians, clergy and vergers of the cathedrals and college chapels we have visited over the past year on Sundays for their cooperation and flexibility. There have been many memorable broadcasts, enjoyed not only by Radio 3 listeners but also by much larger congregations in the cathedrals than we would normally expect on Wednesdays. It has been a pleasure to have been welcomed so warmly.

I realised we have lost the musicallyinspiring effect of the linked chant sequences, one of the delights of the programme. I particularly recall how well this was done at Blackburn Cathedral in the days of David Cooper.

The psalmody of course is one of the joys of cathedral Evensong and I endorse Stephen Shipley’s concern at its demise, we need to speak up before the tradition is completely lost. Cathedral chapters would do well to heed this information and note that CD collections of psalms are bestsellers.

One of the other strengths of Choral Evensong , bearing in mind the reduction of organ music elsewhere on the network, is that it always includes a good slice of the repertoire in the form of the concluding voluntary. It’s thanks to Stephen Shipley that these voluntaries are never faded out, even if the programme overruns. It is greatly to Radio 3’s credit that they have listened to the views of their supporters.

Westminster Cathedral Emergency Appeal

It has caused great concern to all cathedral lovers, that one of our 20th century cathedrals (the seat of our copatron, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster), has been obliged to launch an emergency appeal to deal

with recently discovered problems affecting the interior of the four great saucer domes. The Cathedral was only completed in 1903 but the domes were shaken by the bombs that fell close to the Cathedral during WW2. To strengthen the internal masonry a protective wire mesh was applied to the inside of the domes after the war and this is now disintegrating and must be replaced as a matter of urgency. The appeal will also raise funds to modernise the electrical and mechanical systems. The Cathedral’s Administrator, Monsignor Mark Langham, writes evocatively: ‘Westminster Cathedral is one of the greatest secrets of London; people heading down Victoria Street are astonished to come across a piazza opening up the view to an extraordinary facade of towers, balconies and domes. The architecture of Westminster Cathedral certainly sets it apart from other London landmarks, owing more to the Byzantine style of the eastern Roman Empire than the familiar Gothic of our native cathedrals.’

We will keep readers updated in future editions. In the meantime more information on the £3m General Restoration Appeal can be found at www.westminstercathedral.org.uk

In praise of boarding

Penelope Martin-Smith writes about: The British Chorister –an invaluable creature whose existence could be threatened by its parents!

As I write this the cathedral and collegiate communities of Great Britain are in the throes of recruiting the new intake of choristers for the next academic year. My perspective of the process is that of a dedicated and enthusiastic chorister parent on the one hand, and on the other as the director of a boys’ choir in Oxford which tends to serve in part as a feeder for the various choral foundations in and around the city.

Firstly I will relate my parental experience. It has been obvious to me as a musician with many years of experience in training children of all ages in choral and solo situations that my second son George has outstanding musical talent. From the age of about 18 months he would imitate vocal exercises which he heard during the lessons I was giving at home. They were always in tune and rhythmic (I mean the baby’s attempts

but also hopefully my own renditions!) and I was delighted that he showed signs of following a strong tradition of musical involvement which exists on both sides of his family. When he reached the requisite age we started the rounds of pre-voice trials, first in Oxford and then further afield. George’s younger brother William was a very young baby and that winter stays in my memory as a time of driving for hours and then hauling boobs out to feed him in a number of choirmasters’ and headmasters’ studies all over Southern England! To their collective credit not one of those gentlemen (in what can be a rarefied environment) was in the slightest bit fazed by my request to do so.

As soon as George met David Flood I knew that he must attend Canterbury if he was offered a place, despite the 140ish mile journey from our Oxfordshire home. I did visit some

other places thereafter and a couple of other institutions came close but he, his father and I were beguiled by the whole package in that awe-inspiring place.

So how were we as a family to cope with the boarding side of it? It was something that I had no real problem with despite the prospect of missing one of my brood during term-times and, of course, up to Christmas and Easter Days. Perhaps this is because I was a clingy child for far too long who felt unsafe when away from my mother and that dependency certainly held me back during my formative years. The situation was almost encouraged by her and I have come to realise that her need for me to be around was as great as, or maybe greater than, mine for her. I have therefore always striven with my own four children to encourage them to be independent in small but increasing measure as early as possible in their lives. The key thing with George was that he was willing to try boarding; whether this was influenced by the likes of Harry Potter I know not and it matters not!

When he began we had two terms of intermittent homesickness in the form of sad phone calls, tearful partings at the end of visits and on some occasions anguished crying and hanging on to me as I attempted to leave. Despite the emotional strain, I knew he was in fact very happy in his second home because whenever I called, sometimes just a few minutes after the outburst, I was told that George was perfectly fine and playing with his fellow choristers. I have, as confirmation that we did the right thing in sticking at it, only to observe my fine mature and confident 12 year old who now

Installation of choristers and organ scholar, last September, with the Dean and David Flood. Commonly called ‘Chorister Making’, when George received the Senior Chorister’s medal.

has the responsibility of being Head Chorister, achieving high marks in practical music exams, playing enthusiastically in football, hockey and cricket matches and coping well with the academic pressures which are considerable due to the extra time constraints on a typical chorister. This has been calculated at an average of 20 hours per week on top of the normal school activities which means that choristers work considerably harder and longer hours than most adults. All this information is leading to the most important point: it is often easier on the chorister if he/she does board.

Homesickness apart, and both of my children who have boarded (George and his older sister for her sixth form years at Marlborough College) say that it can still pop up later on but you learn to deal with it by distracting yourself, the schedule in a choir boarding house is designed to accommodate the children doing the job. They do not have to fit around the other family members whilst trying to fulfil their demanding role: on the contrary the boarding house staff fit around their needs and timings. Better for the choristers? No question in my mind. For the whole family trying to juggle the needs of everyone and maintain sanity, boarding eases the pressure. Family members can dip in and out of the chorister’s life at times convenient to themselves, knowing that the choir schedule runs very efficiently without having to rely on anyone but the appropriate staff. As well as this, families can and do at Canterbury and I’m sure at many other places, host social occasions for the whole choir at times or for small groups when it can be fitted in.

Boarding also allows great team bonding for the children. They live together, play together and work together at school and in choir and leisure times. A team like that creates an extended family environment, in fact not just for the choristers, but for the families. Siblings get to know each other and become friends and parents enjoy a common and collective pride not just in their own children but in all of the achievements of any child in the choir coupled with some good-natured rivalry! We all have a high old time at the big Festivals too with bring-and-share meals, revues and carolsinging being traditional highlights. I have noticed that all of the boys at Canterbury hug their family members warmly whenever they meet them. I doubt if this happens habitually in families when proximity is part of the daily routine.

Of course there are many highly successful foundations without boarding houses but surely the decision on where

your child would best thrive as a chorister should not rest solely on that one factor.

Now then, how do the parents cope? Well that is an entirely different matter. Many of us are wimps where our children are concerned. There is always the occasional concern or perhaps for some the constant worry about whether the child is happy and being properly cared for. However, children of 8+ do have a voice and if you know your child as most parents do, you will soon be aware if their lives are not going as they should.

When families in my own choir start to consider the chorister option I hear time and again, “I/we don’t want him to board. We couldn’t cope with it.” It is nearly always the parents and not the child who expresses this. I have one exmember’s mother who has said to me that in retrospect she wishes they had cast the net wider and feels that her very talented son was held back by their narrow vision. This is a pity, but more of a pity is the child who was offered a place at a boarding institution but did not get into the chosen choir that has day pupils. He evidently said to his mother; “I want to be a chorister, but you won’t let me board.”

Oh dear! Parental guilt is bad enough without that sort of possible lifelong resentment hanging around.

Boarding in these days of strict child protection policies can be, and nearly always is, a positive experience for a child. If it doesn’t work for any reason then choirs are not prisons and the child’s future can be re-thought. If it does work parents are likely to end up with an organised and independent teenager with skills in time management, planning, team-building, diplomacy and, of course, live performance and all aspects of singing well in advance of his/her years, plus a splendid work ethic. I emphasise though that most of the responsibility for the experience working well sits firmly in the lap of the parents, especially in the early boarding days.

So I shall, if all goes according to plan, in about 21/2 years deposit my youngest child at Choir House in Canterbury with a mixture of excitement and lumpiness in the throat, then a few days later have the privilege of attending his first service in that great cathedral and watch him process angelically (hopefully), hear him sing angelically (hopefully), and go home to reflect proudly that two of my children have joined the wonderful and fruitful fellowship of the ancient chorister tradition. As a bonus I shall have more child-free time for my husband and myself whilst William is still young in the knowledge that he is likely to benefit big-time.

The Inscoes enjoy Christmas at Choir House CDs are available at www.georgeinscoe.co.uk

In conversation with James MacMillan

Cappella Nova, under its conductor, Alan Tavener, have recently released a recording of music by the contemporary composer James MacMillan, on Linn Records. To coincide with the release, the group’s Creative Director, Rebecca Tavener, talks to the composer about his choral music, including his recently published Missa Brevis (written when he was 17) and the recent Strathclyde Motets which the group recorded.

You have always been associated with music that has meaning, particularly works that have an historical, political, or spiritual significance, but it seems as though you are producing more acappella sacred music nowadays, is that correct? Has it become more of a priority and, if so, why do you think this is occurring at this time?

I’ve always loved writing for voices and choirs, with or without accompaniment, and it’s something that became ingrained very early on, round about the time I was a teenager, when in fact I wrote the Missa Brevis. Obviously there was something very important going on there at school with the school choir and Bert Richardson, my teacher at Cumnock Academy, and

that experience has lived with me. I have noticed, especially in the last five years or so, that the amount of choral writing, both accompanied and a cappella, has increased a lot, and there’s a facility there that comes very fluently from me and I love doing it.

The music on this disc actually spans around thirty years of your career, so starting in chronological order with that early Missa Brevis, what were the circumstances of its composition?

I was just experimenting on my own, I was 17 at the time, and I was hearing a lot of music and developing an early interest

James MacMillan with Alan Tavener

in song and also early polyphony. The choir at school was singing Palestrina, Lassus and Byrd as well as J.S. Bach and Telemann, and it just sparked something in me, and I was writing lots of things, but the one piece I really enjoyed writing was this Missa Brevis. I was discovering lots of 20th century choral music as well, particularly music by Benjamin Britten and Kenneth Leighton, and in fact it was at that time that I decided to go and study with Kenneth Leighton in Edinburgh after school. Listening back thirty years on for the first time, in some of these movements of the Missa Brevis, I can hear those influences, Britten and Leighton, and certainly something of the species counterpoint that I was trying to absorb as well: although it’s not Renaissance pastiche, it’s a form of archaic counterpoint given a modern flavour.

The Missa Brevis speaks in a very different voice from the a cappella music you are producing today: there is a ‘straightness’ of line and a minimal/restrained use of drama that evokes the sacred music of the high Renaissance, the post-Council of Trent approach, if you like. How much did you feel the shades of composers like Palestrina and Victoria looking over your shoulder at the time you were writing it? How did you feel about it when you got it ‘out of the drawer’ again? Having decided to revisit it and prepare it for performance and publication today, did you feel it needed any revision?

Yes, it did. Just little tweaks here and there –it was like the adult composer helping the boy composer out, I suppose, but it’s 97% the way I wrote it. It has always been in the background –I’ve gone through my life taking things out of my catalogue if I thought they were mundane or not mature, but there was always something about this piece that made me feel very proud of it. We sang the Sanctus with the school choir and I liked the way it worked, and I remember Paisley Abbey Choir singing the Sanctus under George McPhee while I was still at school –it was very nice. On making a renewed study of it, I decided I liked it a lot and I wanted to get it out there so I tidied it up really, I tidied up the Kyrie and some of the wordsetting in the Sanctus, but the Gloria, Agnus Dei and the Ite Missa est are as they were.

The Missa Brevis is probably the most obviously ‘useful’ and userfriendly music on this CD, suitable probably for most good parish church choirs, but when we move onto your cycle of Strathclyde Motets the technical demands go up a gear, and we can also see a distinct journey in terms of the musical and technical devices you have employed as the cycle has progressed. Where did the idea for the cycle come from?

The Strathclyde Motets grew out of ongoing discussions between Alan Tavener, Brendan Slevin, the Roman Catholic Chaplain at Strathclyde University, and myself. We drew the Strathclyde University Chamber Choir into an ongoing project at the Chaplaincy, and now at St Columba’s Church in Maryhill, that they would come a few times a year and sing the liturgy for us and I would write a series of new Communion motets for them.

Has the connection with the University of Strathclyde in some way informed the way you write, or was this entirely dictated by the strengths and characteristics of Strathclyde University Chamber Choir? Has the scoring, of the divisi, etc, been influenced by the make-up of that choir?

I think so. I’m aware that some of my choral music that has been commissioned by or for groups such as Cappella Nova, Westminster Cathedral or the BBC Singers, is of a technical

difficulty that some very good church choirs can find quite awkward at times, so I wanted to do experiments on a technical level, but maybe dropping the difficulty notch just a little bit, maybe not as much as the Missa Brevis, but just enough so that good church choirs or good amateur concert choirs could have a go at without causing them too much stress. I also wanted to write music that would work for the liturgy –our liturgy at the University and also at the Dominican Parish in Glasgow –and which also might have a life beyond the liturgy, and also beyond the Roman Catholic Church, so that other denominations and even secular choirs would be able to take this music on.

I have noticed a change in style: the sparse, strictly contrapuntal style of the Missa Brevis has evolved, and there’s a greater concern for colour, I think, and also a different approach to time liturgical time –maybe because of having spent a lifetime attending liturgies and being interested in what a choir can bring to sacred worship, especially while people are in quiet meditation after receiving Communion.

Does their position in the liturgy, within the drama of the Mass, inform their style? It seems to me that they share, to a greater or lesser extent, a mystical quality –designed to hang in the air at that most mystical moment as people are receiving the host –do you think about the communicant’s personal response at that moment? I think so. Having heard these motets in context, there’s a kind of suspended animation about them. They don’t seem to go anywhere, they kind of float as an entity, and there are one or two ideas that sort of ease into being and just exist, and then it stops. For that reason I have noticed a different mood and a different sensation about these motets.

I’m getting more and more interested in what liturgy is, and exploring what might work best for Mass, either in the music that I write or the music that I use, because I have my own little choir at St Columba’s now. There are important node points in the Mass that seem to attract some sort of spiritual energy. One of those is the Sanctus, where the congregation on earth is united, as it were, with the choirs of angels and saints in heaven in a kind of cosmic liturgy. Something changes there, and of course the culmination of that great movement in the liturgy is the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the reception of the Eucharist, so that in a sense the culmination of all that is this moment of reflection where the communicants and congregation are deep in introspection as individuals, and also as a community, reflecting on this mystical but loving union that they have.

There’s a strong link here to the medieval concept of earthly choirs joining with the heavenly chorus Hildegard of Bingen believed, for example, that this mystical conjunction occurred when all sacred music was sung. So far, you have concentrated on Communion motets, in other words each text is the Latin ‘Proper’ for the feast concerned that would have been sung for many centuries in Gregorian Chant at the moment of Communion. Did you set out only to write Communion motets? Did you prefer those texts to the other Propers, or was the decision simply practical?

I wanted there to be a common denominator in the first batch, but also the nature of the liturgy at the University and St Columba’s allowed me to really explore the text at that point. I knew there would be silence in the church –Catholic churches can be very noisy places sometimes because of the children and all the movement but usually at communion it is quiet, so it seemed the best time to have the singers do something a little bit more complex.

There is an obvious comparison to be drawn with William Byrd’s monumental collection of Gradualia –is there a game-plan here or are you just seeing how it goes? Are settings of the other Propers on the cards? This could be the most significant British collection of Latin motets since Byrd!

Well I am seeing how it goes! I’m sure Communion motets will continue but I’m branching out –one possible new direction might be a forthcoming BBC broadcast from St Columba’s which looks as though it may be morning prayer –Lauds rather than Mass –in which case what I’d really like to do for the SUCC is a setting of the Benedictus, the Canticle of Zachariah, that’s not usually set to music.

Byrd lived through a time of religious persecution and his music was the fruit of deeply-held faith expressed against a backdrop of danger. Those intense levels of persecution may be a thing of the past, but do you feel there are any significant obstacles put in the path of a Roman Catholic composer today?

It’s not just an issue for Roman Catholic artists, but we live in a time of renewed secular aggression about religion and a lack of understanding of the nuances of religion born out of perceived fundamentalism in a number of different religions. We live in a time of religious fanaticism as well, and the mainstream churches: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, etc, are taking the brunt of this, not just in the world of the arts, but also in the wider world, and there is a kind of secular fundamentalism, almost as a counterpart to the religious fundamentalism, which has taken root in the public debate. This is very worrying and it doesn’t make for a complex and nuanced understanding or even discussion about religious matters.

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Does this have the potential to erode the church’s traditional role as a patron of the arts?

Yes, well there’s a lot of suspicion about the religious artist but there needn’t be, and in the artistic world music especially has always held a candle for the sacred right through the 20th century. Perhaps in the other arts they’ve gone down other roads, round corners and even into cul-de-sacs, but in music composers especially have always been on a search for the sacred –whether it’s actually writing for the churches or not. You can detect this degree of searching in Shoenberg, Stravinsky, even in the work of John Cage with his interest in eastern religions, and in British composers like Britten, Leighton, John Tavener, and Jonathan Harvey and so on… and you see it in eastern Europe too, when the Iron Curtain came down this whole abundance of religious composers: Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Silvestrov, Arvo Pärt etc. Music has always held this candle for the sacred and for that reason I feel quite confident in what I’m doing. I feel very much part of the mainstream rather than a kind of rebel.

You’ve also been producing quite accessible and simple Introits and Responsorial Psalms as you go along for your own choir at St Columba’s, and we’ve included one such item, the Introit Give me Justice, on the disc –it seems to us that there would be a great demand for a formal collection of similar congregational items from you, perhaps covering the major festivals? It is a distinct possibility –I had been thinking of gathering a full Psalter before doing anything about it, but I decided that would take years. What I’ve decided to do is put together a collection of disparate items that I’ve written for the congregation and for the SUCC, and bits from here and there.

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There’s stuff I’ve written for an Edinburgh parish: a new setting of the Our Father, a Doxology and the Great Amen. There’s another thing I wrote for my eldest child’s First Communion which is sung in some parishes –just items that have collected and they work for RC parishes and choirs, but I think they have a life beyond in other denominations as well. Choirs are always looking for something simple to sing and I can see these working in many different ways as well as fulfilling the need for quite elementary choirs to sing something new.

In a recent interview about your new opera for Welsh National Opera, The Sacrifice, you spoke of a liturgical influence on your operatic choral writing, has this influence been working the other way? One review of Cappella Nova’s performance of Videns Dominus at the St Magnus Festival mentioned its operatic intensity, do you see any real difference in writing for a church choir or opera chorus? I hadn’t thought about the cross-fertilisation of the two worlds, but I’m sure it must be there –I’m certainly aware of the different sound worlds and traditions, and was aware of the different sound quality that the WNO Chorus produces, and the fact that they would be involved in a very dramatic narrative –very much part of the action in the new opera –but I’m sure that some cross-fertilisation is going on. The big piece I’m writing just now is a setting of the St John Passion and there is a very liturgical influence occurring, with almost chant-like writing for some of the choruses, especially for the narrator’s choir, but the composition of this has just come off the back of completion of the opera so it is very dramatic and theatrical. There is a kind of hybrid world, some conscious and some subconscious.

So there is musical baggage travelling around between small and large-scale works and, perhaps, unfinished business from one work that gets rounded off in another?

I think so, that’s right, absolutely.

When you use self-quotation it is not usually in a very obvious way. When we spot such self-quotation the listener is bound to feel some resonance from the earlier work. For example, you seem to refer to the ‘It is finished’ chords from The Seven Last Words in Dominus dabit benignitatem, is there a theological significance there?

That’s the first time I’ve realised that, so it certainly wasn’t conscious. Yes, I can see that it’s there, especially in that similar repeated cadential formula. Now you mention it I can see it, although it wasn’t deliberate.

Amongst the Strathclyde Motets, In splendoribus sanctorum stands alone in having a semi-improvised trumpet accompaniment. How did that come about and do you have plans for incorporating instruments into future works in the cycle?

I’ll certainly be thinking about it. This was the odd-one-out for a couple of reasons. It was written for my own little ad hoc choir at St Columba’s rather than the visiting SUCC. That’s a choir who come together because they love singing, but who maybe don’t have the skills of a regular group. Some members read music but most don’t, so there’s a lot of notebashing involved, and so I wanted to write something that would be much more simple. It’s a kind of repeated chant, there’s not much in the way of harmonisation, just a couple of drones and a shifting middle part. There was a request from the clergy for a motet for Midnight Mass so I wrote a

fairly virtuosic trumpet part and we got a student along to give the first performance. St Columba’s has a beautiful acoustic and I think we’ll be wanting to use it more for music and we might have students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama involved as instrumentalists, which could impact on what I write in the future.

In the Tenebrae Responsories the level of technical difficulty for the singers rises perhaps another two gears! Your setting is madrigalian (in the purest sense) in its episodic, close attention to the words, and virtuosic did –you find the commission to write for eight soloists rather than a choir liberating from a technical point of view?

Yes, in that case in particular I knew who the singers were going to be, and there’s no point in shirking the realities of these commissions –that some commissioning bodies, in a sense, invite you to write for their strengths –their professional strengths and their virtuosic strengths, whether its Cappella Nova or the BBC Singers or The Sixteen. You rise to those challenges with the hope that the piece will have a life beyond the first performances, of course, but I think it’s important both for the composer and the choral world to have different levels of difficulty, and I’ve certainly enjoyed over the years writing those virtuosic pieces like Mhairi that I wrote for the BBC Singers some time ago, but that still that leaves a vacuum for simpler pieces. As far as the Tenebrae Responsories are concerned, I was aware of the great historical settings by Victoria and Gesualdo and they overruled my head a bit.

How did you select from all the texts on offer? I think I suggested anything from the three great Holy Week Offices of Tenebrae, opening up possibilities that included all twenty-seven Tenebrae Responsories, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, penitential Psalms such as the Miserere etc. What was it about these three texts that compelled you to select them?

I think I decided to focus on the Good Friday Responsories, but I didn’t want to set them all from the same Nocturne (each Office contains three Nocturnes, each of which contains three Responsories), but I may go back to them in the future and write more. I wanted to spread the chronology a bit on the Friday by choosing two from one Nocturne and one from another.

Did you feel the weight of the great Renaissance masters who set these words bearing down on you at all? I’m thinking particularly of Gesualdo, of course, whose anguished way with harmony you seem to be making a tribute to in passages such as ‘et sicut gigantes’. I think I was very aware of that context behind me, also the Responsory texts have been with me a while. I even used bits and pieces in The Seven Last Words at moments where those texts are interpolated. Even in the Passion setting, as well as the St John narrative, I’m interpolating Latin motets at moments of reflection throughout, and most are from the Good Friday liturgy, and there’s also an extra one. I’m hoping

eventually to siphon off these motets so that they can be done separately. One of them is the Judas mercator which would also work on its own, and it came from the same experience as writing for Cappella Nova, the same sort of world.

What about more recent composers such as Poulenc? Was his influence present at all?

Yes, I think he has to be. I’ve conducted some of his choral music quite recently, and he brings a different, non-British perspective, and it’s important to remember this other world beyond the great wealth of British repertoire. In the 21st century now it seems as though the great 20th-century French choral tradition of Poulenc and Duruflé has died, or is dying, which is a great shame. But now we have the Baltic states with composers like Pärt, etc, so it’s important to be open to those different worlds. Poulenc’s music is so colourful and expressive in different ways –there’s a great joy in his music, and I’m very attracted to it.

This is not Cappella Nova’s first MacMillan premiere, of course, it’s the third, in fact. We were touched and delighted that the work is very ‘us’, to hold much of our own history as a group in it. We found references, we felt, to The Seven Last Words and to the ornamental virtuosity of the maverick late-medieval Scottish genius Robert Carver –the latter particularly in the trio sections –were you thinking of him?

I think so, he has been very much in the background of my thoughts for lots of reasons, but particularly since writing my own O bone Jesu for The Sixteen when I made a study of the Carver. Carver is such an important figure for Scottish music –he’s the great Scottish pre-Reformation composer who gives us this wealth of music, and I think Scottish musicians hungrily look back to his music and that era as a time of great outpouring of fruitfulness.

This work contains a number of stylistic features that are appearing in your choral music at the moment, the most significant being the ornamentation which reflect both Celtic and middle-eastern traditions. This east/west feeling comes together particularly at the cantorial lament at the end of the Tenebrae Responsories but, as far as I am aware, these highly ornamented lines have been a feature in your work for more than a decade. Did this arise out of your interest in Scottish traditional music?

I think so, yes, I used to play and sing a lot of Scottish and Irish traditional music, when I was younger, in a band that went round the pubs and clubs. I think that was a very useful way of absorbing that world and the musical style got under my skin. Initially I began by making allusions to it very consciously, but it’s become more unconscious ever since, so it has got under my skin and I’m glad it’s there. But it also has connections with the middle-eastern world. The two traditions share a similar concern for ornamentation, which I’m getting more and more interested in.

It seems to be what the human voice naturally wants to do, a kind of inbuilt vocal instinct that crosses cultural boundaries. More recently still, humming is becoming a regular colour. In the Tenebrae Responsories I interpreted this as a device used to signify almost inexpressible feelings that go beyond words –was this a fair analysis? It reminded me at times of a work for humming solo octet by Rihm, Mit geschlossenem Mund, in which the composer was trying to express the voicelessness of political prisoners. The closed mouth thing has begun to enter my palate, as it were, and I’m trying to remember where I first used it. I think it might have been in The Quickening, actually, where there’s a line that talks about ‘the dumb choirs of Pentecost’ and I think that had a big influence. I also think it’s a way of, in a purely practical sense, extending the palate and making another almost orchestral colour available to the choir, especially when you combine normal singing with humming so you’ve got a kind of background and foreground effect.

Yes, there’s a particularly interesting and unusual moment in the Tenebrae Responsories where the sopranos are humming up high above the stave while the rest are singing below –the opposite in pitch terms of how these effects are usually created, but have I over-signified the effect of the corporate humming moments such as the end of the second Responsory by suggesting the ‘helplessly voiceless’ interpretation?

In the political sense, yes, it’s more about pushing more and more possibilities out of the sound of a choir without going into perverse territory, I want these things to be a natural extension of what the voice can do.

You have now produced a vast corpus of Holy Week works in varied scorings such as: voices with instruments (Seven Last Words); orchestral (Triduum); a cappella (Tenebrae Responsories) and now the large-scale St John Passion. Do you think that you will be returning again and again to the narrative of Holy Week and its liturgies as a major ongoing creative influence?

Probably. It certainly has been the case that I’ve been circling around those days in a series of different ways, not just the ones you have listed. There’s also Visitatio Sepulchri which is a masque-type opera –I’m re-working that as a choral piece, actually –and then things like Fourteen Little Pictures for piano trio which represents the Stations of the Cross. I will keep going back, one way or another, and there are always new seams of territory there: the Lamentations of Jeremiah that you mentioned earlier might be something for the future.

What role does today’s creative artist have in interpreting or promulgating the concept of spirituality in art? Is there an element of exegesis, like a priest interpreting scripture through a sermon, in the music when you set Biblical and/or liturgical texts? Looking at your back-catalogue, works such as Cantos Sagrados seem to have a subtext of Liberation Theology –was, or is, this still important to you? Certainly there was – Cantos Sagrados was written at the time of Busqueda in the late 1980s and there was something in the Church and the wider world about Liberation Theology: some simply call it the ‘preferential option for the oppressed’, which has transformed itself. Liberation Theology has had its day and become an historical thing, but the experience the church is going through has been invaluable because it has reminded us of the central importance within the Gospel of taking the poor’s side, as it were, and that’s not a political statement, it’s in with the bricks of the Gospel.

I think that lots of people, regardless of what they believe, if

they are lovers of music, think of it as the most spiritual artform, and I think that’s absolutely true. You can see even in our own times this search, as I was saying earlier, by so many different types of composers with different world-views to explore the reality of what music as a spiritual artform means. So for me, I’m just another of those people involved in that journey to discover, or rediscover, the sacred in our world through music.

My approach to text is very instinctive and comes from the kind of person I am. I never set these texts simply as a musical exercise, I am inspired or pushed to write the music in the first place by the text and its theology and its background, so it’s absolutely rooted in the tradition –an inspiration that comes from the tradition and from the scripture and a desire to interpret it. I never want my music to ‘preach’, and I don’t use my music to push some kind of agenda. I am a lay Dominican and the Order is called the ‘Order of Preachers’, and it is an interesting concept in a world where preaching is such a loaded and negative word that you have to remind yourself continually of the charisms of St Dominic. What he and others such as St Thomas Aquinas and St Catherine were about was witnessing the love of God through their own lives, one way or another, and you become aware of other ways of being witnesses, not just by what you say but also through what you do. What I do is write music, so in that sense I see it as flowing from a kind of Dominican charism, and therefore it’s probably best to avoid the word ‘preacher’ and see it in terms of the word ‘witness’.

Finally, can you give us a hint about any future a cappella works in hand or in mind?

I’m actually involved in writing a few choral pieces just now, some with organ accompaniment, one of which is for a Presbyterian church in the USA, and there’s a setting of a Psalm in German I’ll be doing for Helmut Rilling. I’m also writing something for Nigel Perrin’s choir, the Bath Camerata –a kind of hybrid piece with texts mostly from the Stabat Mater but also bits of carols, actually.

Another Holy Week work? Absolutely.

This article is © Linn Records and is reproduced by kind permission. Cappella Nova’s CD of music by James MacMillan. Tenebrae is produced by Linn Records (CKD 301) and is available from all good record shops or directly from Linn Records (www.linnrecords.com).

Cappella Nova is Scotland’s leading professional vocal ensemble specialising in early (medieval and Renaissance) and contemporary music. The group was formed by Alan and Rebecca Tavener in 1982, and has just celebrated its silver jubilee.

“I never want my music to ‘preach’, and I don’t use my music to push some kind of agenda.”

THE HERBERT HOWELLS TRUST

Following the death in October 2005 of Herbert Howells’s daughter, Ursula, and in accordance with her wishes, the Herbert Howells Trust has been set up to be administered by St John’s College, Cambridge where Howells was Organist during the Second World War. The Trust receives all royalties and performing rights dues, previously received by Ursula Howells. The Organist and Senior Bursar of the College have been appointed as her Literary Executors. The Trust, which will consult the Herbert Howells Society (set up at her instigation in 1987), exists to promote Howells’s works, by supporting performances, research, publications, recordings, archives at the Royal College of Music and other means. It also exists to give financial support for the music of St. Johns, including the choir, organ, and the musical education of the choristers. Any applications for financial support for the music of Herbert Howells should be sent in the first place to the Hon. Secretary of the Society: Andrew Millinger at andrew.millinger@virgin.net or at 32 Barleycroft Road, Welwyn Garden City, Herts AL8 6JU. Tel: 01707 335315.

News from Choirs and Places where they sing

NEW ‘SALISBURY’ FIGURE JOINS ODYSSEY EXHIBITION IN SALISBURY CATHEDRAL

Sculptor Robert Koenig has finished carving the female ‘Salisbury’ figure, the latest addition to his marvellous Odyssey Exhibition. This exhibition, which is currently on display in Salisbury Cathedral, consists of some thirty well-travelled wooden figures, two and a half metres tall. This latest addition has been carved from a fallen sycamore tree from the Wilton Estate, kindly donated by Lord Pembroke. It has been an extraordinary experience for the sculptor who said: “It has been a week of firsts. The mallet I have used to carve over 75 trees and to create all the other figures in Odyssey broke in the first hour of work on the sycamore. So I have had to create this new figure with a new mallet which I have owned for fifteen years but never used. It was almost as if it was waiting for its special moment. And the figure has a name –another significant first. Many of the hundreds of people as they have seen her evolve have said she should be called ‘Mary’. However, it was only when one small child said that she should be called Mary that I knew this was the right name. Canon Mark Bonney, Chairman of the Cathedral’s Exhibition Committee said: “It is fitting that this ‘Salisbury’ figure reflects the Cathedral’s own roots, as we celebrate our 750th anniversary.

SALISBURY 750 EXHIBITION

The fascinating history of Salisbury Cathedral throughout the centuries will be retold in words and images in the impressive Salisbury 750 Exhibition which opens on 25 April and runs until 30 September. Located in the Cathedral’s West and South Cloisters, this major new exhibition which is free to enter and is open during normal cathedral opening times, explores chronologically the changing nature of the Cathedral since the building’s foundation stones were laid in 1220, right up to the present day. The text has been written by the Cathedral’s Canon Chancellor, Edward Probert, a historian by background, with assistance from Tim Tatton-

Brown, the Cathedral’s archaeologist (whose new book on the Cathedral will be published this autumn to coincide with the actual 750th anniversary) and Suzanne Eward, the Cathedral’s librarian and archivist. The exhibition has been designed by Christopher Tunnard of Elliott Tunnard and Mark Greaves Smith of Mark Smith Typographics. Canon Probert explained the thinking behind the exhibition. “We love Salisbury Cathedral, partly because it seems so timeless. In fact, change has been almost constant and this exhibition vividly communicates the ways in which the many generations before us have left their own traces, and left us a heritage which is as vibrantly alive today as at any stage in the last 750 years. The exhibition comprises 14 free-standing frames, each of which will cover one century or a particular theme, for instance, the Sarum Rite.

FCM GRANT TO BUFFALO CATHEDRAL CHOIR MARKS FIRST AWARD TO NORTH AMERICA

The first-ever FCM grant to a North American cathedral choir was presented to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, New York state by Council member Neil Page. The cheque for £6,000 ($12,000) was handed over at a special ceremony after Evensong on the eve of their patronal feast day, Thursday 24 January. The Very Revd Deliza Spangler, said: “I am absolutely thrilled and so much appreciate the action of FCM.” The choral foundation at Buffalo Cathedral dates back to 1867, making it one of the first men and boys’ choirs in North America. Now, it is one of only 30 remaining in the USA. There are currently 15 boy choristers and 12 salaried lay clerks (or choir men). The choir has travelled overseas extensively, making eight trips to the United Kingdom in the past 20 years. The girls’ choir consists of 15 choristers and has developed a reputation as one of the finest ensembles of its kind in an American cathedral. During the past decade they also have toured extensively overseas including singing in several British cathedrals.

Christopher Gower, FCM’s Grants Secretary said today, “As we are a worldwide organisation of nearly 4,000 members, with a significant number in the USA, we are keen to support cathedral music wherever it is being maintained. We hope our grant will be both a support and an encouragement to all those involved with the music at Buffalo Cathedral. I have had personal experience of the great work being done there which is set in quite a challenging urban environment.”

FCM NATIONAL GATHERINGS

2008

Friday 13 - Sunday15 June Leicester Cathedral to include AGM

Friday 10 - Sunday12 October Blackburn Cathedral

2009

Friday 20 Sunday - 22 March Lichfield Cathedral

Friday 5 Sunday - 7 June St Albans to include AGM

Friday 16 Sunday - 18 October Manchester Cathedral

Details of National Gatherings are sent to those members who have asked for their names to be included on the National Gatherings Mailings List. If you wish to add your name to this list please contact the Membership Secretary, see page 3 for details.

Age: 38

60Seconds in Music Profile Katherine Dienes-Williams

Education details

St. Mark’s Church School, Wellington, New Zealand, Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, Wellington, New Zealand, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, Leeds University, UK.

Career details to date

Richard Prothero Organ Scholar, Wellington Cathedral, New Zealand (1988-1990), Assistant Organist, Wellington Cathedral, New Zealand (1991), Organ Scholar, Winchester Cathedral and Assistant Organist, Winchester College (1991-1994), Organist and Assistant Master of the Music, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (1994-1997), Assistant Organist, Director of the Girls’ Choir, and Assistant Diocesan Music Adviser for the RSCM, Norwich Cathedral (1997-2001), Director of Music, the Collegiate Church of St. Mary, Warwick (2001-2007), Organist and Master of the Choristers, Guildford Cathedral (2008-).

You must feel proud to be the first woman organist at a Church of England Cathedral.

I feel elated –it is the achievement of a lifelong dream for me since I arrived in the UK in 1991. I have to admit that the overriding concept of doing my job well has, for a long time now, been a priority for me –but the offer of the post in Guildford, and with it, this achievement, has been marvellous. I am only sorry that my father did not live long enough to witness it –although I am sure he knows!

What are you looking forward to most at Guildford?

Working with a fabulous team of people, and building on the excellent musical foundations already put in place by my predecessors. I am already enjoying working with the boys and men and playing for the Girls’ Choir.

What did you enjoy most at Warwick?

Working with such a diverse and dedicated group of people in particular, performing large-scale works with the choral society and training the choristers.

What organ pieces have you been inspired to take up recently and why?

Pastorale by Roger-Ducasse. I have always wanted to learn it because of its impressionistic nature and I have also put it down to play in a recital in May!

Have you been listening to recordings of them and, if so, is it just one interpretation or many, and which players?

I prefer to learn first and listen later although I rarely do the

‘listening’ part, unless I am particularly curious to hear another person’s interpretation.

Will you be introducing new repertoire at Guildford?

Yes, but gradually. I have already introduced ‘new’ repertoire this term but most of it is patching up areas of repertoire unfamiliar to the boys such as Tomkins’ 5th service, Tallis’s In ieunio et fletu, Orlando Gibbons’s O Lord, in thy wrath, Maurice Greene’s Lord,let me know mine end and even Dyson in F!

What or who made you take up the organ?

A combination of things –the organist at my local parish church –Jack Hucklesby –whose playing I always enjoyed. Also, my piano teacher in New Zealand, Miss Kate Jourdain. Kate was a Christian Scientist, and the organist at her church. She suggested to me that one day it would be a good idea for me to learn. I was also offered a scholarship to learn at my secondary school, which I took up in my last year at secondary school, beginning to learn in 1987.

Which organists do you admire the most?

Dame Gillian Weir and Olivier Latry

What was the last CD you bought?

Road Movies by John Adams

What was the last recording you were working on?

A Spotless Rose, which was a disc of Christmas music with the choirs of St. Mary’s Warwick.

What is your favourite organ to play?

Westminster Cathedral.

What is your favourite building?

For its architecture Winchester Cathedral; for its ambience, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral; for its huge organ loft, Norwich Cathedral; for its spirituality and soaring, light arches, Guildford Cathedral.

What is your favourite anthem?

Too many to name! But Ubi caritas by Maurice Duruflé is an absolute gem. Brahms’s Amen from Geistliches Lied,How lovely is thy dwelling place by Peter Aston, Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten –I love the arrangement of the Corpus Christi carol contained within the larger work by Britten – A Boy was born –J.S.Bach motets, Mendelssohn motets –I love them all! I think there are certain anthems which, when set in a certain liturgical context, can be profoundly moving.

What is your favourite set of canticles?

Too many to name! Howells in G, B minor and the Gloucester Service I’m also very fond of a set of canticles written for St. Mary’s Warwick by Grayston Ives.

What is your favourite psalm and accompanying chants?

For its text, Psalm 104 –it’s like a day in the life of mankind. I also love the verse in Psalm 85 –‘Mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other.’ A favourite chant? How about Terence Allbright –to the text of Psalm 15.

What is your favourite organ piece

Dieu parmi nous –Olivier Messiaen, with J.S.Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor a close second –or maybe vice versa?

Who is your favourite composer?

I’ll have to go for two –Olivier Messiaen and J.S.Bach.

What pieces are you including in an organ recital you are performing?

Pastorale by Roger-Ducasse and Sonata by Francis Grier.

Any forthcoming appearances of note?

Organ recitals in Stratford-upon-Avon and Alton coming up, and my next week-long choral engagement is in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Have you played for an event or recital that stands out as a great moment?

Performing the Poulenc Organ Concerto with the RLPO was tremendous –and the Saint-Saëns with the Hallé in the Bridgewater Hall.

Has any particular recording inspired you?

I enjoy Gillian Weir’s complete Messiaen and Olivier Latry’s Pièces de Fantaisie by Vierne.

How do you cope with nerves?

Deep breathing, drinking water, preparation, self-belief and prayer!

What are your hobbies?

Reading, swimming, walking, travel and although it’s not a hobby, spending time with my daughter Hannah.

Do you play any other instruments?

I play the piano, and I enjoy singing. I broke my left wrist very badly as a child, and then broke my left arm four times after that and my right arm once –oh, and my right leg, and had stitches in my head, and peritonitis along the way before I was 13! Because of limited mobility in my wrist I was never able to play a stringed instrument, and I was too keyboard oriented and beginning to compose.

What was the last book you read?

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick theGreat in the Age of Enlightenment by James Gaines.

What are your favourite radio and television programmes?

BBC Radio 4 news, E.R. and Neighbours!

What Newspapers and magazines do you read?

The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, North and South (a New Zealand publication), Private Eye and The Independent on Sunday as well as the Observer. I often receive a copy of Inside Soap magazine in my Christmas stocking…

What makes you laugh?

Funny stories, good jokes, happy memories, choir tour incidents and silly things I manage to do.

If you could have dinner with two people, one from the 21st century and the other from the past, who would you include?

From the 21st century, dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury would be fascinating, and I would love to have dinner with J.S.Bach from the past.

What should be the role of the FCM in the 21st century?

Supporting and encouraging cathedral music all over the country, encouraging a breadth of excellence in musicmaking and publicising and enthusing about the wonderful work which goes on in our cathedrals every day to as many people as possible!

Singing the Lord’s Song... in the Land of Song

Timothy Noon, Director of Music at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and formerly at St Davids, Wales, explores the Welsh cathedral music scene.

‘The English choral tradition’ is a handy moniker to use when trying to describe the music and heritage which we love. But it has never been particularly helpful to use a strictly geographical frame of reference, any more than it is factually accurate to describe the object of our interest as, simply, ‘cathedral music’. For what we recognise as both ‘The English choral tradition’ and ‘cathedral music’, is alive and well, in all corners of the English-speaking world, and in many different types of church.

This is particularly true in relation to Wales, where ‘cathedral music’ flourishes right now in seven very different choral foundations, each making a glorious and vital contribution to the cultural health of the Principality, whilst responding to widely differing situations and challenges.

The Anglican Church in Wales was disestablished and disendowed in 1920, and, with the creation of the Dioceses of Monmouth in 1921 and Swansea and Brecon in 1923, the six cathedrals have each had to grow and develop unique ministries suited to their locations and circumstances.

The leafy suburb of Cardiff, Llandaff, is the site of the most ‘English’ of the Welsh cathedrals and home to Wales’s only Anglican choir school, Llandaff Cathedral School. Having undergone a hugely successful expansion recently, it is now amongst Cardiff’s most sought after schools, and provides the Cathedral with expert top lines of boy and girl choristers. Between them they sing at

eight fully choral services per week, the most of any cathedral in Wales, with the boys, under the measured and meticulous direction of Director of Music, Richard Moorhouse, taking the lion’s share of the work, backed up by a fine team of dedicated lay clerks.

The musical foundation is shortly to receive a massive boost in the form of a completely new organ. Commissioned from the English firm of Nicholson’s, with some 4,870 new pipes, this will be the largest ‘from scratch’ project undertaken by a British cathedral for many years, and Richard Moorhouse is confident that it will help to put the cathedral firmly on the musical map of South Wales when completed in 2010.

To the East of Cardiff lies the city of Newport, Gwent, where, on Stow Hill, Christians have been praying since the year 470. St Woolos, the church that now stands on that site, attained full cathedral status in 1949, having previously served as the pro-Cathedral of the Diocese of Monmouth. The choir’s all-male tradition has been lovingly nurtured and developed by Christopher Barton, Organist & Master of the Choristers since 1979, and since September 2007 he has been assisted by Christopher Denton and Organ Scholar Andrew Hayman. Through their hard work and determination, choir numbers are remarkably healthy and stable, with a training choir which boasts a dozen or so members and a first team of eighteen choristers. With boys joining the training choir as young as six and often migrating to the back rows for their

teenage years, the choir is steeped in a great sense of pride and loyalty which was seen at its keenest when the choir sang at the Enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury (who had formerly been Bishop of Monmouth) at Canterbury Cathedral in 2003. Future plans include a tour of Germany in the summer and the possibility of a CD recording in the autumn.

The other Welsh parish church to be elevated to cathedral status also sits on a hill above its city, though in the case of Brecon, it is in reality a small rural market town, nestling in the austere majesty of the Brecon Beacons National Park. The cathedral began an important new chapter in its musical history in June 2007 when Mark Duthie succeeded David Gedge MBE who had held the position of Organist and Master of the Choristers for the previous forty years. With the help of the newly-appointed and extremely talented Assistant Organist, Meirion Wynn Jones, Mark has embarked on a massive and ambitious recruitment campaign, which has re-cast the treble line with an intake in September of around fifteen boy and girl probationers. This expansion and redevelopment has been possible due to the success of the Choir Endowment Appeal, launched a few years ago by the energetic Dean, John Davies. In a wonderful service at the beginning of February, these new recruits were formally admitted to the choir with the presentation of surplices, by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, underlining just how seriously Brecon

St Asaph Cathedral

St Davids Cathedral

regards its musical heritage. Further partnerships with Christ’s College, Brecon, are being explored for the back rows, and Mark has firm and clear plans to lead the foundation to a secure future.

Although the administrative centre of the Church in Wales is based in Llandaff, few would argue that the spiritual heart beats from St Davids. Situated at the extreme South West tip of Wales, this remarkable little village boasts city status (its charter having been presented by the Queen in 1995), and Wales’s largest cathedral. A bold and determined plan to refurbish and enhance the cathedral was instigated by the charismatic Dean, Wyn Evans, ten years ago, and it has seen the manifestly successful complete restoration of the west front and the bell tower, the rebuilding of the cloisters (which had been in ruins for half a millennium) into a fabulous Refectory, with a state-of-the-art choir room underneath, and the fantastic new organ, built by Harrison & Harrison in 2000 (incorporating much of the Father Willis pipework from 1883).

Recruited entirely from the miniscule local population of around 1,400, through the sheer hard work and determination of all concerned, the Cathedral maintains separate choirs of boys and girls, a team of lay clerks and a voluntary choir: a musical foundation which sings six choral services per week. The Cathedral’s dynamic music festival goes from strength to strength, with loyal support from its patrons, who come from all over the UK and the rest of the world. It is a matter of great pride that standards are kept high: St Davids is the only Welsh choir to have participated in BBC Radio 3 broadcasts of Choral Evensong over the past decade. Newlyappointed Organist, Alexander Mason, has exciting plans for future development, with the addition of Choral Scholars to the back row, made possible by an extremely generous gift from the Friends of St Davids Cathedral.

The sparsely populated middle and

north of Wales is shared between the Dioceses of Bangor and St Asaph. The latter is similar to St Davids in that it, too, is little more than a village, but is host to a prestigious music festival (The North Wales International Music Festival), and boasts a thriving choral foundation. The workload is split evenly between teams of boy and girl choristers and Organist and Master of the Choristers, Alan McGuinness, is proud of the fact that he has a waiting list for membership of both. This is due to the hard work and commitment of the music staff, with the keen support of the Dean and Chapter and an eager congregation.

The Cathedral has the services of a fine four-manual organ, rebuilt in 1998, played by the equally fine John Hosking, Assistant Organist. Recently choir and organ were featured in Songs of Praise and the cathedral hosted a successful National Gathering of the Friends of Cathedral Music.

At the other end of the A55, where mainland Wales meets Anglesey, lies the University town of Bangor, which has had a cathedral since seventy years before Augustine arrived in Canterbury. Its Organist and Master of the Choristers, Andrew Goodwin, can make a similarly justified claim of extraordinary longevity, being now in his thirty-sixth year in post. During this time, Andrew has seen many generations of choristers pass through his hands, including Aled Jones, but he says that the challenges and opportunities are much the same now as they have always been. Recruitment is steady, but Andrew admits that he is “constantly looking for new ideas” to keep it so. March 2008 saw the grand opening of the restored Compton organ (rebuilt by David Wells) by Carlo Curley, and the completion of this project, as well as providing a huge boost to cathedral worship, will free up a lot of fund-raising energy, which Andrew Goodwin hopes to be able to direct towards his Music Endowment Fund, to develop further the educational

privileges offered to the choristers.

Bangor is very proud of its all-male tradition, but Andrew is not at all ideologically opposed to girls. “...but I would want to do it properly,” he said, “and we just don’t have the financial resources at the moment.”

Money is, of course, the greatest concern for Deans and Chapters in the Church in Wales. Since losing its endowments in the 1920s, the Church has been overly reliant on its congregations for financial support, and, as costs have risen, due to heightened ambition and rightfully raised expectations, the collection plate has struggled to keep pace.

But, despite this, the six Anglican cathedrals in Wales are collectively facing the future with justified confidence and optimism, and music is stronger now than at any point in their history.

It would be unfair to survey the cathedral music scene in Wales without including the choir of the Metropolitan Cathedral of St David in Cardiff. One of only three Catholic cathedral choir schools in the UK, St John’s College is the country’s leading Catholic independent school, and one of the best schools in Wales. Its Headmaster, David Neville, has been Organist and Director of Music at the Cathedral (whilst still somehow finding time to teach advanced level chemistry!) for twenty-five years, and the current musical foundation owes its existence entirely to his energy and commitment. Recently, the boys’ choir was joined by choirs of senior and junior girls, and, with David’s son Dominic now taking responsibility for choral music, the Metropolitan Cathedral faces as exciting a musical future as its Anglican counterparts.

The Land of Song really is overflowing with cathedral choirs, eager to sing the Lord’s Song! With the help of organisations like the Friends of Cathedral Music, let us hope that this situation will continue to develop and grow.

The Choir of St Davids CathedralSt Asaph Cathedral Choir

““I know now that our Metropolitan Cathedral has an organ of which it can be rightly proud I know now that our Metropolitan Cathedral has an organ of which it can be rightly proud and one which will enhance, not only t and one which will enhance, not only t he music of our Cathedral, but be available for other he music of our Cathedral, but be available for other events of civic interest here in our Capital.” events of civic interest here in our Capital.”

MATTHEW COPLEY

Keith Patrick Cardinal O’ Keith Patrick Cardinal O’ Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh Organist, Simon Nieminski, at St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, (Photograph by Ian Georgeson) tel: 020 8390 5059 e: info@matthew-copley.co.uk web: www.matthew-copley.co.uk Edinburgh.

ORGANDESIGN87MapleRoad,Surbiton,Surr

PROBATIONERS, PANCAKES AND PALMS

The young probationers of Salisbury Cathedral Choir learnt about the meanings of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday when they enjoyed cooking, tossing and eating delicious pancakes for breakfast with the Precentor, Canon Jeremy Davies, before helping him to burn last year’s Palm Sunday crosses to create the ash to be used in Ash Wednesday’s services in the cathedral. They heard that ‘Shrove’ comes from the early English word ‘shrive’, meaning to forgive. It is also a Carnival (literally a ‘farewell to meat’) when all the fats and flesh are eaten up to prepare for the forty days fast of Lent.

MOVES

Huw Williams is shortly moving from St Paul’s Cathedral to Philadelphia to be Director of Music at Bryn Mawr Church of the Redeemer, Pennsylvania. USA.

The Chapter of Truro Cathedral is delighted to announce the appointment of Christopher Gray as the cathedral’s new Director of Music. Christopher has been the Assistant Musical Director at Truro Cathedral since September 2000 and so has a deep and intimate knowledge of the musical workings of the Cathedral. In particular his outstanding work on musical outreach has gained national recognition and he has been part of the pioneering Chorister Outreach project which has seen Cathedral Choristers visit more than 90 primary Schools in Cornwall. Christopher, who hails from Bangor in Northern Ireland, began his musical education at Bangor Grammar School and continued as Assistant Organist of St. George’s Parish Church, Belfast, before taking up the organ scholarship at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1996, where he read music. The Dean of Truro, Dr Christopher Hardwick said, “We are very keen that there should be a strong sense of continuity for the Choir and the Cathedral’s musical life, and consider that in Christopher we have a person of outstanding ability and proven experience who can build on our past and present achievements.” Simon Neiminski has left the Anglican cathedral in Edinburgh to take up the appointment as Organist at St. Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral (R.C.) in the city. Chichester Cathedral is delighted to announce that Sarah Baldock has accepted the position of Organist and Master of the Choristers, with effect from Easter. Sarah has been at Winchester Cathedral since 1998 –for the last five years as Assistant Director of Music. Prior to joining Winchester, Sarah was Organ Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. The Dean of Chichester, The Very Reverend Nicholas Frayling said: “We are delighted that Sarah will be joining us at the Cathedral. She is a wonderful musician and I am sure she will be a worthy successor to Alan Thurlow who has contributed so much to the worship and life of the Cathedral for over a quarter of a century.”

78th NATIONAL OLD CHORISTERS’ FEDERATION FESTIVAL -RIPON

Friday 4th July to Sunday 6th July

2008 sees Ripon hosting the FCOCA Festival for the first time this century, last having hosted it in 1990.

The gathering of old choristers from all of the cathedrals in the UK is a welcome event with many like minded people who recall their singing days as choristers and some of course who carried on and became lay clerks at some stage. As well as exhibitions on Charles Dodgson and Wilfred Owen (who both lived at Ripon) there will be tours of local attractions including Fountains Abbey and nearby Ripley Castle. Added to all that of course will

be services at the Cathedral to which delegates are warmly welcome. Of particular note for this festival is that a book History of Music at Ripon Cathedral has been compiled after much research and hard work. It will be on sale at the festival and a copy will be reviewed in the November edition of CATHEDRAL MUSIC. Any Old Choristers reading this who have not received details and may wish to attend should contact the secretary for the Ripon Old Choristers’ Association, Mr David Suddards. His address is 12 Knaresborough Road, RIPON, HG4 1RQ. Tel: 01765 603391 Email: david@ripon1.orangehome.co.uk

NEW VICE-PRESIDENTS FOR FCM

News from Choirs and Places where they sing

Dame Emma Kirkby is ‘honoured and delighted’ on her appointment as one of our newly-appointed Vice-Presidents. Originally, Emma Kirkby had no expectations of becoming a professional singer. As a classics student at Oxford and then a schoolteacher she sang for pleasure in choirs and small groups, always feeling most at home in Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. She joined the Taverner Choir in 1971 and in 1973 began her long association with the Consort of Musicke. To date she has made well over a hundred recordings of all kinds, from sequences of Hildegarde of Bingen to madrigals of the Italian and English Renaissance, cantatas and oratorios of the Baroque, works of Mozart, Haydn and J. C. Bach.

In 1999 Emma was voted Artist of the Year by Classic FM Radio listeners; in November 2000 she received the OBE, and in June 2007 was delighted to be included in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. BBC Music Magazine, April 2007, in a recent survey to find ‘The greatest sopranos,’ placed Emma at number 10. While such things are inevitably parochial, partial, controversial, and outdated as soon as they appear, she is pleased at the recognition this implies for an approach to singing that values ensemble, clarity and stillness alongside the more obvious factors of volume and display.

Despite all the recording activity, Emma still prefers live concerts, especially the pleasure of performing favourite programmes with colleagues; every occasion, every venue and every audience will combine to create something new from this wonderful repertoire.

Peter Toyne said: “We are really thrilled and excited that Dame Emma accepted our invitation.”

As we go to press we are delighted that Ian Hislop has accepted the invitation to become a vice-president.

LEADING CHURCH MUSICIANS HONOURED BY RSCM

Two chief conductors of the BBC Singers, a well-known songwriter, a choral composer and a cathedral director of music are among the leading church musicians to receive honorary awards in 2008 from the Royal School of Church Music in Britain, as well as one of the most important liturgists of our time. To mark the RSCM’s 80th anniversary, the list is being extended to include leading figures in church music and scholarship in the United States.

‘The sheer breadth and depth of the work in church music and liturgy is celebrated in these awards’ said Mark Williams, chairman of the RSCM Council.

Fellows of the RSCM: Paul Bradshaw, Stephen Cleobury, Llywela Harris, David Hill, Bill Ives, Graham Kendrick, James Lancelot. Associates of the RSCM: Ronald Gill (South Africa), Nigel Groome, Michael O’Connor (Canada), Louise Reid, Fridrik Walker.

Honorary RSCM: Michael Turvey.

Restless Talent

Elsa van der Zee talks to the composer David Bednall

Photograph courtesy of Steve Bevan, Canis Major PhotographyWells Cathedral

Photograph courtesy of Tracy Saunders

David Bednall left Wells in the summer of 2007, where he had been first Senior Organ Scholar and latterly Assistant Organist, on a high note, even in a blaze of glory. Earlier in the year the CD Hail Gladdening Light had been released to great critical acclaim. At the age of twenty-eight he had produced a collection of works, written for various occasions, places and people, of great variety, tonal depth and colour. The Wells Cathedral Choir, directed by Matthew Owens, performed the music, with the composer as organist.

This CD was chosen by the editor of Gramophone, as Editor’s Choice in May 2007; quite an honour for an emergent composer still in his twenties. In his review, Marc Rochester wrote, “… this is immensely inspired writing producing an effect which is never less than deeply attractive, musically rewarding and utterly coherent… this music stands out vividly as much for its musical as for its communicative qualities.”

Of course, playing rather than composing preoccupied the young student at Sherborne School. It was here that after many years at the piano, he first started playing the organ and in time played in Sherborne Abbey for services. It was then, in his own words, that music became “such a big thing.” He might otherwise have become a scientist or astronomer.

Here too he began to discover the choral music world and was bowled over by Howells’s Collegium Regale and even more by Hymnus Paradisi which to him is still important for its harmonic language and emotional drive. “I still,” he says, “find it overwhelming; a blazing light shines through. I experience something new every time I listen to it.”

Although he composed some music at school, composition took a back seat when he arrived at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Martin Schellenberg was his ‘hugely inspiring’ organ teacher and his playing grew in versatility and stature. At the same time he developed his knowledge of choral music by directing the Chapel Choir, with which he toured Paris and performed in, among other venues, Notre-Dame.

It was Gloucester Cathedral though, where he arrived as organ scholar in the year 2000, which was the greatest influence on his early musical flowering, and to a large extent, still holds a special place in his heart. So many things came together at this time. David Briggs as organist became his hero, mentor and friend and together with assistant organist Ian Ball, constituted a formidable duo to guide him. Here he developed an interest in and a flair for improvisation and, through David Briggs, encountered the musical world of Pierre Cochereau, then organist at Notre-Dame. He also started seeing as teacher, Naji Hakim, then and now, organist of L’Église de la Trinité in Paris and a virtuoso in improvisation. David feels that improvisation is heavily linked to composition and helped him personally to develop his harmonic language and texture. In Gloucester, even the surrounding countryside held an emotional pull which speaks to David to this day. The favourite haunt and indeed haunting place, is one he calls Chosen Hill, by the village of Churchdown. For him this is a place of great emotion, both high and low moods, which he feels in the music of Howells and is also present in his own. He still visits Chosen Hill for spiritual sustenance.

In Gloucester too, composition came closer to balancing playing. Year zero as defined by David was 2001, where the day after 11 September and under the influence of that dreadful day, he composed Behold O God our Defender. This was followed by the Gloucester Service and Come Holy Ghost. David says he still has great affection for the canticle Nunc Dimittis even though his composing style has broadened since then.

Wells Cathedral Organ

David Bednall

Photograph courtesy of Steve Bevan, Canis Major Photography

It seems a fair amount to have achieved in two years, but then in 2002, Wells Cathedral beckoned, consolidating a lasting friendship with Malcolm Archer, whom he acknowledges as greatly influencing him as a choir trainer and musician. Together he and Malcolm Archer recorded a CD of improvisations at Blackburn Cathedral, which David particularly remembers for its happy recording sessions and sheer joy. During his early time in Wells he composed several smaller choral works and almost in the first month the Adagio for organ.

When Malcolm Archer departed for St. Paul’s, his successor Matthew Owens asked David to write Easter Alleluia for a radio broadcast on Easter day. Later works included the first part of The Wells Service (Mattins settings of the Te Deum, Jubilate Deo, Benedicite and Benedictus); and Hail Gladdening Light, written for Candlemas 2006, all of which was included on the aforementioned CD.

Towards the end of his time at Wells, he was composing the Missa Sancti Pauli, which to date he considers to be his magnum opus. It was written as a gift and in tribute to Malcolm Archer. He was conscious that in that space and on the occasion of Ascension Day when it was first performed, it had to be a big-

scale work with gravitas. He describes it as the most taxing and difficult work he has yet written and in order to make sure of completion, he spent several days on a composing retreat in Aldeburgh at ‘Cosy Nook’, a cottage in the grounds of Red House once owned by Britten and Pears.

Composition, culminating in the release of the CD Hail Gladdening Light, had become at least a parallel to organ playing and David was very aware that there were wider horizons to explore in this field. This influenced his decision to leave Wells in the summer of 2007, to go to Bristol to study for a PhD in composition in the autumn. In the interim he was still conducting a local choir, playing and composing. In May, for example, he had set a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, Everybody Sang, to music for the wedding of a member of the Vicars Choral at Wells. In July a setting of the Shakespeare Sonnet From you I have been absent in the Spring was premiered at the Guiting Festival, commissioned and performed by the group Opus Anglicanum as part of their programme ‘Love’s Music’. Other works at this time included Salva Regina for the Langlais festival in Brittany and a Gregorian Mass for choir and organ.

In January of this year, David came back to Wells to listen to the premiere of another section of The Wells Service, the canticles, MagnificatandNunc Dimittis. These were performed in Wells Cathedral as part of a broadcast Evensong on BBC Radio 3. Also in January a Missa Brevis was premiered with the choir of St. Mary’s, Calne, in Notre-Dame, Paris, under the direction of Edward Whiting, a former organ scholar at Wells. David’s intention is that this work will develop into a Requiem with a possible premiere in London and then taken to New York in the autumn.

So, despite the rigours of a PhD commitment and the beguiling return to student life, composing seems to be unstoppable. His supervisor at Bristol, John Pickard is helping

David Bednall at Blackburn Cathedral organ console

him to develop instrumental writing with a view eventually to an orchestral work on a symphonic scale. To keep himself financially afloat as a student for three years, he is Sub Organist at Bristol Cathedral, playing for some Evensongs during the week, and at a local church he can be heard during the Eucharist on Sunday mornings. He also has a day’s teaching at Downside School, and conducts the Chew Valley Choral Society. His service playing is augmented by various local recitals and in the summer he will be in Notre-Dame with a programme of the great French organ composers, who were significant influences on him: Langlais, Messiaen, Vierne and Hakim.

Already in the pipeline for the future are, another commission for Opus Anglicanum on the theme of St. Peter, part of a new programme entitled Put out into the Deep; an organ work for the Temple Church in London as part of its 400th anniversary celebrations; the alternative canticles (Cantate Domino and Deus Misereatur) to complete The Wells Service (which will be premiered in a new music festival at Wells Cathedral in June) and a piano sonata, as part of his doctorate. It seems the grass will not grow under his feet.

As to the future, post-doctorate David sees himself continuing to develop style and breadth, both in vision and content. His own attitude as a listener is: “I would rather be offended than bored and I suppose as a composer I would rather be offensive than boring. Never,” he says “be formulaic.” Broadening and developing what he calls his composing language and learning how to structure things is of paramount importance to him. He always writes first drafts and subsequent ones in pencil on paper to give himself the flexibility to alter and to fine-tune. “The computer,” he says, “is very much the last stage.” He is very conscious when composing of how important the opening of a piece is as it establishes ‘the sound world’ of the work. He is lucky to have found in Bristol, in John Pickard, a supervisor who talks the same language.

Into the very speculative future: at the moment David’s ideal would be a university lecturing post with the opportunity of directing a choir and with time to compose and play. Maybe, he thinks, there will be a viola concerto and possibly one for the clarinet, both instruments he is attracted to for their timbre; and of course choral work will always remain important and could lead to an oratorio.

Dreams are good to have and with the restless talent of David Bednall, may well be realised.

Prebendary Elsa van der Zee is an associate of LAMDA. She worked in BBC World Service as producer and broadcaster and is a lay member of Chapter at Wells Cathedral.

LEEDS PARISH CHURCH

at the heart of the art of church and organ music

SUNDAY 15 JUNE–3.00pm at Leeds Town Hall

Sacred Choral Classics

The Choir of Leeds Parish Church St Peter’s Singers and The Orchestra of Opera North David Houlder: Organ a gala concert in aid of the Choral Foundation Appeal Tickets [free] from 0113 224 3801

SUNDAY 29 JULY –3.00pm

Festal Choral Evensong

Murrill in E Elgar – Great is the Lord followed by Parish Barbecue BBQ Tickets from 0113 267 7571

FRIDAYS 4, 11 & 18 JULY–12.30pm

David Houlder and friends

Lunchtime Organ Music

Free Admission – Collection

SUNDAYS 3, 10, 17, 24 & 31 AUGUST–7.45pm

Romantic Organ Masterworks

Eleventh Annual Series

Special Guest: Arnfinn Tobiassen [10 August]

Other concerts by Dr Simon Lindley

Free Admission – Collection

MONDAY 6 OCTOBER –1.05pm

Yorkshire Three Choirs’ Festival

Lunchtime Concert

Free Admission –Collection

FRIDAY 10 OCTOBER –7.00pm

Organ Concert by Dr Simon Lindley

60th Birthday Recital

Free Admission –Collection

Further details from choir@leedsparishchurch.com

www.leedsparishchurch.org.uk

“I would rather be offended than bored and I suppose as a composer I would rather be offensive than boring. Never be formulaic.”

Chester Cathedral in Florida Ann Gray

“Life doesn’t get any better than this!” announced 12 year old Alice, a chorister in the Chester Cathedral Choir. At that moment, Alice was standing with her friends by a hotel pool in Orlando, eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream with a plastic spoon, and basking in the balmy breezes at 10:00pm on the final evening of the choir’s tour to Florida.

Mary Queen of the Universe Shrine

All photos by Jim Capper

The boys, girls, and lay clerks of Chester Cathedral Choir, along with David Poulter, their then Director of Music, his successor Philip Rushforth, and a dedicated team of parent supporters spent nine busy days singing and sight-seeing in the Orlando area in October, 2007. The trip, the culmination of almost two years of planning, rehearsing and fund-raising was organised and guided by Richardson and Gray, Ltd, a choral tour operator based in Shropshire.

Of course, for David Poulter and the choir, the music was the main focus. Chester Cathedral has a choral tradition that stretches back to Benedictine monastic times, but these days the choir is made up of boys, girls and lay clerks who sing nine choral services each week and rehearse 17 hours per week. Their repertoire is vast and varied and the music they sang in Florida gave audiences and congregations a good representation of the scope of the English choral tradition, including pieces by Tallis, Purcell, Britten, Handel, Elgar, Bairstow, Parry and Howells, as well as many others.

Chester Cathedral Choir’s first singing engagement was as the visiting choir at the Patronal festival of St. Luke at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in downtown Orlando, a splendid gothic building designed by the same firm that built the National Cathedral in

Washington, DC. The Cathedral has its own extensive music programme, under the direction of Canon Ben Lane, and they enjoyed the opportunity to sing with the Orlando Deanery Boys’ Choir there that morning. Everyone was impressed with the splendour of the service: waving banners and incense in the procession added to the sense of occasion. Later in the week, Chester Cathedral Choir performed a concert at St. Luke’s. Here, as everywhere else, the audience reception proved that appreciation for the English choral tradition is alive and well on the other side the Atlantic.

The choir also sang a concert at Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach, where the musical director, Brady Johnson, made sure that, in addition to singing, the choir had a chance to spend an afternoon on one of Florida’s splendid public beaches. The weather was a bit cool by Floridian standards, but the hardy choristers flung themselves into the sea regardless.

Other venues included singing the Sunday services at St. Michael’s Church in Orlando and at Mary Queen of the Universe Shrine, an enormous and beautiful church with a fine acoustic, built as a spiritual home for the thousands of Catholic visitors who come to the Orlando theme parks each year. At rehearsal there, the Director of Music, Bill Picher, casually remarked that he expected several hundred

congregants at the evening Mass at which the choir was to sing. No one quite believed it, then he was proved right as people began streaming in.

Throughout the trip, a dedicated battalion of parents who had spent many months fund-raising to make the trip a possibility did the important behind-thescenes things that such a concert tour requires. They encouraged and cajoled, sold CDs, chaperoned, oversaw bedtimes, and provided the necessities that every chorister needs, bottles of water and break-time biscuits. They were also a walking advertisement for Chester Cathedral as they wore matching red polo shirts to each singing event. This proved to be a wise sartorial move as members of the congregations could easily spot the English in their midst and make them welcome. However, the effect of all that red in the choir balcony and in the pews did cause the officiating priest at St. Luke’s to remark that “We Americans get nervous when we see that many British people in red!

Americans in general and those in the American South, in particular, are famous for their hospitality. Far from being alarmed by their English visitors in red, the choir was welcomed everywhere with great warmth and generosity. The parishioners of St. Luke’s put on a lavish post-concert reception, Vero Beach provided a home-made chicken dinner with all the

Universal Studios street in Orlando

trimmings, and St. Michael’s served delicious American-style submarine sandwiches after the service.

Of course, the reason most people head for Orlando is for the fun and excitement of its many theme parks. Chester Cathedral Choir took full advantage of their leisure time with day trips to Sea World, Universal Studios, and Disney World. They also toured the Kennedy Space Centre and got to see the space shuttle on the launch pad. A few days later, they watched in awe from the hotel parking lot as the shuttle took off. Though it was many miles away, the

rumble of the rockets was clearly heard –the children will always remember the sight of the shuttle vanishing into the clouds, trailing orange flame.

A trip like Chester Cathedral Choir’s Florida tour is a valuable experience for several reasons. The intense preparation bonds the group and helps them to improve musically. Travelling together and sharing all the fun and excitement makes any choir a more cohesive group. Tours to the United States are particularly good value for British choirs at the moment, as the exchange rate is vastly in their favour. There is also the chance to

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experience a different culture, meet one’s musical counterparts and even to learn a new ‘language’. On the way back to the airport on the final day, Alice and her fellow choristers chanted all the ‘new’ words they’d learned while in Florida: “Crisps are chips, chips are fries, we’re on the highway, there’s a truck, etc.” Alice was right, life doesn’t get much better than a vacation (or holiday) like this.

Ann Gray is a director of Richardson and Gray Ltd and was the tour director for The Chester Cathedral Choir in Florida.

www.richardsonandgray.com

Saturday July 12th

12.45 pm

Ascendance Rep Dance Company: Standing Stones

7.30 pm

Opening Concert with Festival Chorus and Northern Sinfonia in Sands Centre Schubert Mass in A flat major D678 Schubert Great C major Symphony

D944

Sunday July 13th

9 pm

Candlelit Concert

Schutz Schwanengesang

Monday 14th July

10.00 –12.00

West African Drumming Workshops

7.30 pm

D’Arcy Trinkwon organ

Messiaen Recital

9.15 pm

Linda Ormiston & James Nicholl

cabaret

Tuesday 15th July

12.45 pm

Findhorn Trio

Brahms and Lennox Berkeley

7.30 pm

Red Priest Pirates of the Baroque

Wednesday 16th July

3 pm

Illustrated Talk on Vaughan Williams by Andrew Seivewright

7.30 pm

Nicky Spence tenor & Julia Cobby piano

10 pm

Vicki Swan & Jonny Dyer folk music

Thursday 17th July

12.45pm

Stella & Ed Pendrous cello & piano

Bach and Brahms

7.30 pm

Octanphonie Mozart in Prague

Friday 18th July

12.45pm

Abbey Singers Vaughan Williams and Rutter

7.30 pm

Shri Purbayan Chatterjee Indian Sitar

10 pm

David Briggs organ improvisation to Phantom of the Opera

Saturday 19th July

12.45 pm

Vaughan Williams and English Song

Stephen Brown tenor

Paul Jeanes piano

7.30 pm

London Adventist Choral

Tel: 01603 612914 Fax: 01603 624483

E-mail: admin@scm-canterburypress.co.uk

Website: www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk

CMHGSP08

Chester Cathedral Choir at St Luke’s Cathedral, Orlando.

rejoice

The incomparable choir of St Paul’s and superb Grand Organ are the beating heart of the Cathedral’s liturgical life. We intend to nurture them always. But the commitment is a mighty one: some £1,000,000 every year including £12,000 per chorister. You can help us keep choir and organ in good voice now and for generations to come by making a donation today, becoming a Music Patron or by a gift in your Will. The number to call is +44(0)20 7246 8333. Thank you.

www.stpauls.co.ukRegistered charity no 1082711

PHOTOGRAPH: PETER SMITH

Margaret Phillips records Bach

It has long been my ambition to record the organ works of Bach, but when I finally began this formidable undertaking, it was more by accident than design. In July 2004 whilst in Germany searching for a suitable organ on which to record the Mendelssohn Sonatas, I was taken to see the organ at Grauhof, north of the Harz Mountains near Goslar. This is one of the few baroque instruments in northern Germany which has survived almost entirely in its original state, and I very quickly decided that this was a wonderful organ for Bach. Thus it was that the following year Gary Cole (producer/engineer for Regent Records) and I returned to record the ‘Eighteen’ Chorales, Canonic Variations and the Schübler Chorales –my Bach series had begun!

The Klosterkirche at Grauhof was built between 1711 and 1714, soon after the monastery of St Georg relocated to farmland a short distance from Goslar (founded in 1205, its original buildings had been destroyed in the reformation). Twenty years later, Christoph Treutmann, a Silesian-born organ-builder, was commissioned to provide an organ, which he completed in 1737. With 42 stops, this was his largest instrument and, uniquely, it combines characteristics from both Central and North German styles of organ building. The reeds, mixtures and comprehensive pedal division have something in common with Arp Schnitger’s instruments, though there are also many string stops, giving plenty of variety as well as all the gravitas one could wish for. The layout is almost Thuringian, with no Rückpositiv and no

subdividing of divisions within the deep, wide case. The interior of the organ feels more like an open-plan threestorey house, with wide stairways and spacious walkways between the different groups of pipes –the curator agreed that there would be room to install a kitchen and bathroom, and then you could live in the organ! The delightfully rural setting amongst cornfields, and adjacent to a duck-pond and farmyard, was a perfect place to record, with almost no extraneous noise –apart from the occasional tractor.

With a double CD of Bach ‘in the can’, the question was, where next? Finding suitable organs for Bach is not as straightforward as it might appear. In the mid-20th century Schnitger’s instruments in North Germany and Holland were thought to be ideal for Bach, but more recently they have been seen to be more suited to the music of Buxtehude and his contemporaries, partly because they invariably have short octaves1 and meantone tuning. Gottfried Silbermann’s might appear to be preferable, working as he did in the same region as Bach, but they too are problematic. The lack of a complete independent pedal department (often there are only three pedal stops: Subbass 16’, Oktavbass 8’, and Posaune 16’), as well as limitations of the pedal compass (the top pedal note is usually C), makes them inadequate for many of Bach’s organ works. Moreover, Silbermann’s temperament is quite extreme –Bach himself is said to have called it ‘barbaric’ and ‘intolerable to a good ear’.

The Treutmann at Grauhof had none of those problems,

The Klosterkirche, Grauhof, near Goslar, Germany

All photos by David Hunt

and, as luck would have it, a new organ designed specifically with Bach’s music in mind was completed in 2004 by the French organ builder Bernard Aubertin, for the church of St Louis-en-l’Île in Paris. This sounded ideal, and a good excuse for a trip to Paris! But first of all we went to call on Monsieur (now Dr, and Chevalier du Legion d’Honneur) Aubertin, whose workshop is in a picturesque priory dating from 1137, and situated between Dole and Besançon. Since 1978, as well as building organs there, he has been gradually and lovingly restoring the extensive buildings. It is a fascinating place, with craftsmen working on every aspect of organ-building in many different rooms; everything, including all the pipes, action and casework, is made on site using traditional methods –no CAD (computer aided design) here! In the grounds are vast stocks of wood, several horses, some 15 cats, and even a working narrow-gauge railway used to carry wood and other heavy materials. One felt that such an environment, together with a team led by such a dedicated and inspirational artist, could not fail to produce first-class instruments, and this was borne out by the new organ at St Louis-en-l’Île. So a recording was arranged for the summer of 2006, with the repertoire to be the Orgelbüchlein, plus seven of Bach’s free works.

The problem of where to put the microphone was a concern, in view of the height of the west-end organ gallery.

Although Gary Cole has a microphone stand which extends some 15 metres, he did not want to have to dismantle it every time the church was opened to the public between recording

“The delightfully rural setting amongst cornfields, and adjacent to a duck-pond and farmyard, was a perfect place to record, with almost no extraneous noise apart from the occasional tractor.”

The Klosterkirche’s other side, seen from the farmyard

Grauhof: The Christoph Treutmann organ (1737)

The Bernard Aubertin organ (2004), St Louis-en-l’Île, Paris, with Gary Cole’s ‘fishing rod’ and microphone ready for recording

sessions. On a brief visit to the church a month before the recording, my husband, David Hunt, made a recce into the roof of the church, via a little-used 110-step spiral staircase, to see if might be possible to hang a microphone from the ceiling. We had been told this had been done before, via ‘une orifice’, and ‘un fil’, a wire lowered through it. The young sacristan declined, with a shiver, to go up with him, and I could understand why when David returned, extremely dirty, and carrying the skeleton of one of several dead birds he had encountered among the abundant remains of birds’ nests, etc, littering the steps. He had found the said orifice, but the wire cable and its pulley were stiff and rusty and beyond use.

So when we arrived the day before the recording sessions, David was equipped with a dustpan and brush, a roll of refuse bags and (as a potential substitute for the cable) a ball of baler twine, as well as his camera. While I practised, he filled four large bags of debris from the steps, as a health and safety precaution, for which the sacristan seemed very grateful. But after experimenting with the twine, and much debate, Gary decided to risk erecting his very versatile stand in the gallery, and extending the carbon-fibre boom diagonally towards the ceiling like an enormous fishing-rod, with the microphone and its cable taped to it. Very scary, especially as Gary suffers from vertigo, and could hardly bear to look when we extended and adjusted it for him. Apart from a pedal cipher, which David eventually managed to locate and cure, and one or two other hiccups, we managed to commit all 53 Bach pieces to

disc in three and a half days. The wonderful sound of the organ more than compensated for all the hard work, not to mention the unaccustomed pleasure of recording on an island in the Seine and walking across the Pont Marie several times a day.

One puzzle remains: after returning from one of his forays into ‘Le Forêt’ (as it says on the fob of the key which opens the staircase door to the densely and massively-timbered roof), David casually reported that he had come upon a lady, dressed in blue, painting a wall. Since the door from the church had been locked, and he had not been given any indication that someone else might be up there, we thought he must have been seeing things. Was there another way into the roof from the clergy house perhaps? But, …a lady? We are still wondering if it was the ghostly lady, rather than dead birds or vertigo, which deterred the sacristan (and Gary Cole) from visiting ‘Le Forêt’.

Earlier that year, I had played all the ‘Eighteen’ Chorales in a concert on the organ in Trinity College, Cambridge (built by Metzler Orgelbau of Zürich in 1975, using the original Father Smith cases and some pipework from 1694 and 1708). Unaccountably this was the first time I had played this instrument, and with its beautiful sound in an excellent acoustic, it seemed to me one of the best organs for Bach in this country. So the second week of January 2007 (no slacking over Christmas and New Year for me!) saw us converge on Cambridge –Gary Cole from Wolverhampton, me from London (where I’d been teaching at the Royal College of

Margaret Phillips at the console of the Aubertin organ.The Metzler organ at Trinity College, Cambridge

Music), and David from Milborne Port. With the equipment safely installed in Trinity College Chapel ready to begin recording the next morning, we repaired to our hotel. Over the next three days two more CDs of Bach were recorded, including the Toccata in F, Prelude & Fugue in C, a trio sonata, concerto, and some miscellaneous chorale preludes. There were the inevitable hazards: on this occasion the unstoppable chapel clock, which struck every 15 minutes, and the intermittent efforts of noisy pumping machinery brought in to clear a blocked drain in the kitchen yard of St. John’s College next door.

With the ‘Eighteen’ Chorales and the Orgelbüchlein safely in the bag, the only major collection of Bach’s organ chorale preludes still to be recorded was the third part of the Clavierübung. These wonderful mature but often complex pieces cover a wide variety of styles and call for an instrument with a wide range of colour, and it was not easy to decide which it should be. Eventually we decided on one that is relatively unknown –the Trost organ in Waltershausen in Thuringia. Another of Trost’s organs, that in the castle chapel of Altenburg, is famous because Bach inaugurated it in 1739, the very year of the publication of Clavierübung III. So why not use Altenburg for the recording? The most practical reason was its pedal compass, which goes only to middle C, while Waltershausen has the D needed for several of the pieces (though it is not available on the transmitted stops and the couplers –one of the many idiosyncrasies of this organ!).

Waltershausen also boasts the bigger instrument, with three manuals and 53 stops, six of which are by transmission from Hauptwerk to Pedal (Altenburg has two manuals and 40 stops, with five by transmission). Moreover, it was completely restored in the 1990s, so is in excellent condition.

Not that it was easy to play –it was perhaps the most difficult

organ I have ever played, with very heavy manual action (because of the very large pallets for the many 8’ stops), and an extraordinarily wide pedalboard. For those of you interested in such things, it measures 54.9” across, compared with 45.5” , 41.5”, and 33” respectively for three of the organs here at the English Organ School. But it was worth the effort. The Stadtkirche Zur Gotteshilfe in Waltershausen has been described as ‘the little sister of the Frauenkirche in Dresden’, and the organ as ‘the largest organ from Bach’s time in Thuringia’. It has real individuality and personality, quite different from the wonderful Treutmann at Grauhof, but with a unique tonal spectrum that demands and holds the attention in a very special way. There are many eccentric features. The console is extraordinarily ornate, with arcaded keys, key cheeks carved with grinning faces, and stop labels made of glass with gilt

Waltershausen: The Stadtkirche ‘Zur Gotteshilfe’

Interior of the Stadtkirche, Waltershausen, with its organ, pulpit and galleries

lettering on colour-coded backgrounds, corresponding to colours found between the naturals on each manual. The entire organ has only two Mixtures, both of which contain Tierce ranks. The many colour stops were all included in the original specification; some were highly unusual at the time –the string stops, the Flöte Dupla (with two mouths), and the construction of the Unda Maris with its two ranks of wooden pipes back-to-back. The Vox Humana only functions when the wide-scaled Hohlflöte is drawn. Perhaps strangest of all is the Geigen (violin) Principal, played from the Oberwerk manual, but situated immediately above the console on its own ventil chest, and crowned with a cherub playing a violin. Some readers may recall a fascinating article about the organ by the late Stephen Bicknell, entitled Thinking the unthinkable (Choir and Organ, May/June 2005), in which he describes Trost as ‘the rocket scientist of his day… capable of amazing and charming beyond all description’. The few days in October 2007 spent in the company of this organ were certainly very memorable.

Having almost reached the half-way point in the series, the question again arises, where next? One would expect a prime contender to be the organ built in 1746 for the Wenzelskirche, Naumburg by Zacharias Hildebrandt, famously inspected on its completion by Gottfried Silbermann and J.S.Bach himself, but there is a ten-year waiting list to record on this organ. Currently

under consideration are several historic organs in Holland and Germany: the Schnitgers in Zwolle, Noordbroek, Norden and the Jacobikirche, Hamburg, the 1743 Hinsz organ at Kampen and the 1727 Müller at Leeuwarden, and also the new ‘Bach’ organs in Dordrecht and the Thomaskirche, Leipzig.

It is a great privilege to play all these wonderful instruments, and even more so to get to know them over many hours when recording. The actual business of recording is definitely a team effort, with the input of the producer being crucial –he has to be a psychologist as well as a musician in order to get the best out of the performer in what are nearly always trying circumstances, some of the hazards being extraneous noise, tuning and mechanical problems with the organ, language difficulties abroad and tight schedules. I would like to finish by paying tribute to Gary Cole, who fulfils his roles of both producer and engineer with such skill, flair and patience, and also to my husband, who usually ends up being the general dogsbody –turning pages, mending the organ, taking the photos, and endlessly waiting around!

1 The most common form of ‘short octave’ is when the lowest note of the keyboard appears to be E, but actually plays CC, what appears to be F# plays D, and G# plays E. C# and D# are thus unavailable in the bottom octave.

Margaret Phillips at the console of the Waltershausen organ.

The console, with stop labels made of glass with gilt lettering on colour-coded backgrounds

Arcaded keys, a grinning face on one of the key-cheeks, and coloured stop knobs at Waltershausen.

Stiftskirche zu Grauhof

Christoph Treutmann 1737, restored Gebrüder Hillebrand, 1989–1992

Hinterwerck (I) C, D-c’’’

Gedackt8

Quintadena8

Principal4

Flöte Travers4

Octava2

Waldtflöte2

Quinta11/2

ScharffIII

Hautbois8

Hauptwerck (II) C, D-c’’’

Principal16

Viola di Gambe16

Lieblich Principal8

Spitzflöte8

Viola di Gambe8

Quinta6

Octava4

Nassat3

RauschpfeifeIII

MixturIV-VI

Trommet16

Trommet8

Oberwerck (III) C, D-c’’’

Principal8

Rohrflöte8

Octava4

Spitzflöte4

Quinta3

Superoctava2

SesquialteraII

MixturV

Fagott16

Vox humana8

Pedal C, D-d’

Principal16

Soubbas16

Rohrflöte12

Octava8

Flachflöte8

Superoctava4

MixturIV

Groß posaunen Baß32

Posaune16

Trommet8

Schalmey4

Saint-Louis-en- l’Île, Paris 2004 organ by

Bernard Aubertin

I Positif de dos (RP) C−g’’’

à cheminée4

SexquialterII

II Grand Orgue (HW) C−g’’’

Principal16

Octave8

Gambe8

Flûte8

Prestant4

Flûte conique4

Quinte3

Doublette2

CornetVI

MixtureIV-VI

Basson16

Trompette8

III Positif intérieur (UW) C−g’’’ Principal8

Bourdon8

Traversière8

Unda Maris8 Octave4 Flûte4

Tierce13/5

Quinte11/3

Fagott16

Voix humaine8

Pédale C−f’

Violon16

Bourdon16

Quinte12 Octave8

Bourdon8

Prestant4

Flûte2

MixtureIV-VI

Dulciane32

Buzène16

Trompette8 Cornet4

Tremulant für das Manualwerck (Tremulant for the manuals)

Ow/Hw als Schiebekoppel (shove coupler)

Hi/Hw als Zug (Normalkoppel)

3 Sperrventile (Ventiel zum Pedal, Ventiel zum Hinterwerck, Ventiel zum Hauptwerck)

Cymbelsterne

Clavier Glocken-spiel (Ow, g’-c’’’)

Pitch: a’ = 462 Hz (c.5/8 tone above modern pitch)

Tuning: well-tempered (Bach/Kellner, 1/5 comma)

Accouplements: III/II, II/III (à forchettes); I/II (à tiroir); II/ Pédale

Tremblants: I + III; II

Appel anches pédale

Expression Voix humaine

a’ = 440

Tempérament: Young

The Trost organ (1730), its pedal towers partly concealed by the columns on either side of the gallery. Hanging from the galler y rail in front of the console are timpani dating from the time the organ was built, which were played together with trumpets to announce the entry of the Duke to his box opposite the organ.

Stadtkirche ‘Zur Gotteshilfe’ Waltershausen

1724–1730 Organ by Heinrich Gottfried Trost

Brustwerk (I) C−c’’’

Gedackt8

Nachthorn8

Principal4

Flöte douce(II) 4

Nachthorn4 Gemshorn4

Spitz-Qvinta3

Nassad-Qvinta3

Octava2

SesqvialteraII

MixturaIV

Hautbous8

Hauptwerk (II) C−c’’’

Portun-Untersatz16

Groß Qvintadena16

Principal8

Gemshorn8

Viole d’Gambe8

Portun8

Qvintadena8

Unda maris 8

Octava4

Salcional4

Röhr-Flöta4

Celinder-Qvinta3

Super-Octava2

SesqvialteraII

MixturaVI−VIII

Fagott16

Trompetta8

Oberwerk (III) C−c’’’

Flöte Dupla8

Trinity College Cambridge

Metzler Orgelbau of Zürich, 1975-6, using the restored cases of the Father Smith (main case: 1708, Chair case: 1694)

Koppel OW-HW (Hakenkoppel)

Koppel BW-HW (Schiebekoppel)

Wind-Coppel HW-Ped

Brust-Coppel BW-Ped

Tremulant zum ganzen Werck

Tremulant zum Oberwerk

Cymbel-Sterne in C Cymbel-Sterne in G

Calcant

Sperrventile

Stimmung: a’ = 466.8 Hz bei 15o C

Gemildert mitteltönig

Stops marked with an asterisk incorporate pipework from the Father Smith organ

I/II, III/II

I/Ped, II/Ped, III/Ped (by pedals)

Pitch: a’=440

Tuning: Werckmeister III

Hills of the North, Rejoice!

The Choir of St John’s College, Durham; a collegiate choral foundation for the 21st century George Richford

Aman appeared behind me and began vigorously rubbing the top of my back and shoulders. Startled and a little embarrassed, I turned to face him. ‘‘This is a blessing from me and my people’’, he said and immediately, the penny dropped! I had seen the gentleman half an hour previously in the quire of Canterbury Cathedral. He had had both arms raised heavenward during the final phrases of Vaughan Williams’s Te Deum in G; the words, ‘O Lord, in thee have I trusted: let me never be confounded’, wafting like incense from a slowly swung thurible. It is an unforgettable moment in cathedral repertoire. He continued: ‘‘I am a Canterbury scholar studying here for the summer. Today was my first experience of an English choir.” We continued chatting for some time.

It was St James’s Day, last July and the Choir of St John’s College Durham had taken residency in Canterbury Cathedral for three days leading up to the installation of Archbishop Josiah Fearon as a Six Preacher. The tour was extra special not only for this, but also that it marked the end of my three years as undergraduate director of the choir. It seemed appropriate that I should therefore return to Canterbury with my singers, where the original spark of choral inspiration leapt from the song school into my young and influential ears, over a decade ago.

And I remember that moment so clearly: Berkeley The Lord is my Shepherd and Stanford in G from the low bench by the door of Dr Flood’s song school. I can recall my reaction precisely; the essence of which I try to relive and recapture in everything musical that I do. It was beautiful music, so ‘familiar’ and identifiable on the one hand, but also insistent and penetrative in a way which was almost unnerving –for a moment it seemed that every man and boy in that room was singing directly to me! Apart from the incredibly varied aesthetic of the two pieces, it was the devoted and meticulous nature of text-setting which I found inescapable; the sheer detail and obvious thoughtprocesses behind the composer’s interpretation of the words. My reaction (although more introverted) was not dissimilar to the Canterbury Scholar who I had seen in Evensong last summer –completely ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.

So what has all this got to do with the rather ‘bold’, opening statement that St John’s College Chapel Choir is a collegiate foundation for the 21st century? Things are different here. Firstly, Durham is unlike any other university. It is collegiate, like Oxbridge, and so has the advantages of many (14) concentrated student communities within an historic and stunning city, but with centralised teaching departments and administration. St John’s is one of the smaller colleges with an intake of around 150 freshers each year. Some of these colleges have their own, very different chapels ranging from the vast Seely and Paget Art Deco chapel at St Hild and Bede College to the quaint Tunstall Chapel at the Castle. And unlike Oxford or Cambridge, we have the enormous Norman

space of Durham Cathedral sailing proud above the River Wear, a single magnificent venue where choirs of students and musicians can all gather in prayer and worship.

St John’s College has an evangelical Anglican tradition and ethos, incorporates both an Anglican and Methodist theological college, and is open to people of all faiths. We have 500 undergraduates and postgraduates from all different backgrounds, and another 100 ordinands. This very diverse and dynamic environment presents considerable challenges and exciting possibilities on a day to day basis, of which the St John’s Chapel Choir plays an important part.

The Choir is different too. Established in 2004, it is a group of just 16 singers who are all awarded full choral scholarships. The application procedure is always fierce with students applying from around College and the wider University and my ‘inbox’ is often full of hopeful young singers enquiring about the choir. The standard of singers is always very high.

But what perhaps separates the choir further from other similar foundations is our specific commitment to the education of ordinands within the College. Every collegiate choir serves a sector of its college community, but we have the added responsibility of trying to reach out to those entering the wider church to both satisfy those to whom the Anglican choral tradition is second nature and to attempt to ‘reset’ the preconceptions of those to whom choral music carries very different connotations. As Director of the Choral Scholars, I am responsible for the provision of a suitably eclectic programme of choral music which seeks to embrace and

St John’s College Chapel Choir in Canterbury Cathedral cloisters

include rather than exclude or aggravate! I, myself, shudder at using the term ‘inclusive’, as it seems often inextricable with the term ‘compromise’, but I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. First and foremost in my mind when putting together music lists are the readings for the day. Integrity between worship and music is constantly under scrutiny in our individual environment and is a facet of choral worship which is often overlooked. Often college music lists revolve around a concert-like presentation of pieces that the conductor enjoys rather than observing the appropriateness of the music in context. It is an all too familiar sight: an adventurous college or parish church music list which reads something like this:

Sunday Eucharist:

Langlais – Messe Solennelle

Bairstow – Let all mortal flesh keep silence

Sunday Evensong:

Howells – Gloucester Service

Leighton – Let all the world in every corner sing

All fabulous music; exciting, grand and impressive, but perhaps a little over-adventurous and verbose? After all, this is cathedral music, written for great spaces, great organs and great choirs. But can any of us honestly say that we have not succumbed to the temptation of blanketing a Sunday evening with our favourite canticles, anthem and responses before?! As they say, ‘less is more’, and in my experience, this is often the case.

So how does one try to please their very mixed congregation and singers through music in an academic and theological training environment? My starting point is silence. Silence is the blank canvas on which to paint the anthem, or canticle or psalm, etc. It is only through a weekly erasing of

preconceptions and gradual building up of ‘what not to expect’, that one can really begin to appreciate the place of music in a service. That wonderful intake of breath before the choir delivers the first note of an introit or anthem that we are unfamiliar with –the breaking of stillness with words and music. Repertoire is vitally important. New music features heavily on our schemes, ‘fresh expressions’ of texts remind the congregation that sacred choral music is not a museum piece to be dusted down and polished every once-in-a-while but is a living and breathing being which is indicative of the world and the Church today. Of course we must be representative of the Anglican choral framework and adoptive of its long-standing traditions, but as a foundation initiated less than five years ago, we must have the binocular vision to look forward to changing trends in church music. And after all, what is the nature of tradition, if it isn’t a continuously revolving turbine of ideals; collecting up some of the new as it discards some of the old and obsolete? And it causes a stir from time to time. After a broadcast from the Chapel Royal, I contacted Andrew Gant about his very curious set of Responses. We obtained copies and performed them… and my goodness what a stir! We were banned from singing them in some cathedral services, I was accused of blasphemy for including them in an evensong and was repeatedly asked to lose the responses from our repertoire! But, we also had some incredibly positive feedback, from musicians, clergy and the general congregation who felt genuinely moved and inspired by Andrew’s very different interpretation of the text. They say something new, exciting and challenging and (to my mind at least) when worship ceases to be any of these things then we may as well ‘hang up our harps’.

But it is not just the musical dialogue in a service which is important. The skills of communicating with clergy and actively seeking to involve ordinands in choral music-making

Rehearsing at Canterbury

with musicians, is equally important. I recently found myself at a meeting of the Northern District Society of Organists, discussing the very topic. The working relationship between clergy and musicians is an issue which often arises at every level, from grand cathedrals down to chapels and small country parish churches. We are in the privileged position at St John’s to be able to have an open dialogue and good working relationship between the College officers, the ordinands, the choir and myself. In many respects it is a model of how worship and music and the personalities involved can work together. If we want church music to survive, this basic degree of working communication lies at the very foundation of everything that we do. Forget FRCOs, prizes, doctorates and such like; without the ability to communicate effectively, to inspire and invigorate the people who we are working with, what can we hope to achieve? In an academic environment with young musicians forming the core of the choir, it can be easy for Choral Evensong to become a purely musical exercise and this is something I have always tried to avoid. For some choral-sceptics amongst the Anglican community, it has frequently been expressed that Choral Evensong is a concert, being all about the music and not about God. Of course, there will always be some who come to evensong for the music, and would not count themselves as ‘religious’, but I must return to a quote from the former Dean of Salisbury:

‘Who can distinguish the aesthetic from the spiritual, beauty from goodness, art from usefulness, worship from life?’

Can choral and cathedral music survive solely within the confines of the quires and cloisters? In the latter part of the 20th century, Herbert Howells expressed his concern over the future of choral music:

‘It may be that the future of English Church-andCathedral music is hedged with difficulties and doubts. I fear the gross ‘pepping-up’ the ‘putting down the mighty

from their seat’ tonal elephantiasis encouraged by the misuse of outsize organs, the careless denial of idiomatic fitness. These are inherent dangers. They must be countered by men of genius who from time to time offer the Church works of supreme fitness’.1

But of course, cathedral music, is much more than dots on a page. It is a whole ethos and an encouraging, supporting environment for children and adults that is almost completely confined to the cathedrals and larger parish churches. I speak from experience, from a background of a young enthusiastic organist who used to dart around Kent playing services here, there and everywhere whilst at school. Congregations were always grateful and clergy effusive but on numerous occasions I encountered a degree of hostility and jealousy extended from a certain sector of singers and organists whose egos had often inflamed to the extent that anyone else displaying willingness and a degree of talent were ‘put in their place’ straight away! The caricature of the grumpy old organist who will not allow anyone near his instrument is, sadly, a familiar one. But for a young child in the cathedral environment, there is so much support and education, it is a place of training and apprenticeship (choir school or not!). In many ways, St John’s is an extension of this ethos. Not just because we have young singers and ex-choristers within the choir, but because it is a place where everyone has the opportunity to learn and be educated, where talent is encouraged and a place where egos don’t get in the way of what we are trying to achieve. We have a team of musicians and clergy who provide the support and tuition that our students require. James Lancelot and Keith Wright provide organ tuition to our organ scholars, Scott Farrell takes some rehearsals and services and produced our latest CD, vocal tuition is provided by two excellent local teachers and David Flood oversees the whole operation as the Honorary Patron and Fellow of the Choir. By

George Richford

A break at Canterbury Cathedral

St John’s College Chapel

Westminster Abbey choir stallsWestminster Abbey cloisters

having such prominent figures from the cathedral circuit involved on a collegiate level, we not only ensure high standards but also the continuation of such a fresh tradition. It is telling that six of my singers have gone on to be choral scholars or lay clerks in English cathedrals in the past three years and that our current Organ Scholar has been awarded a post at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. A further two ‘John’s’ Choir alumni work within cathedrals, two are training for ordination and four others are preparing for entry into music college.

At St John’s, I am deliberately trying to forge a new path in choral worship and doing things differently. We are not a cathedral, nor are we trying to be! Working with 16 young and dynamic students is always refreshing and ever a joy, but our wider objective is to use choral music as an invaluable tool of evangelism to harness the penetrative energy of singing and wealth of repertoire to present a traditional Office in a contemporary way; to try to inspire and energise new congregations and singers with our music and never be static or lackadaisical in our twice-weekly choral worship. Choral music need not be elitist in delivering the Word of God only to those who understand it, its musical specifics can remain a mystery to some but it is possible, in my mind, that the marriage of aesthetic with liturgical suitability can transcend these boundaries and can be as effective and universal in delivering the Word as any piece of art, film, or spoken word can mediate.

Our first CD (due for summer release) O Lord open thou our lips, showcases music for three evensongs. Typically we have Ireland in F and Stanford’s Beati quorum via representing the Anglican choral staple. We offset this with Batten’s 4th service, Sheppard’s Jesu salvator seculi and an impressive performance of Hear O heaven, sung by student soloists the same age as the young Pelham Humfrey when he composed the anthem in 1668. The opening music contrasts Howells’s last composed evening canticles (the Dallas Service) with Cecilia MacDowell’s stirring Ave Regina, Martin How’s lyrical God be in my head and

Andrew Gant’s controversial Pentatonic responses. All of this music is typical of the depth and variety of music and worship we offer at college on a weekly basis.

This is now my fourth year as Director at St John’s and I will be hanging around for sometime yet. My new position as Director of the Girls’ Choir at Newcastle Cathedral brings fresh challenges but is more importantly an extension of the work I am doing in Durham. The potential is enormous and the next few years in this northern-most corner of England are going to be incredibly exciting if not exhausting!

Back to Canterbury and my conversation with the Scholar. What a wonderful thing that he was unembarrassed and not so self-conscious that he felt able to demonstrate such an honest, physical gesture in English cathedral worship –perhaps indicative of the modes and practices to which he is accustomed at home (in the Seychelles as I later discovered). Wonderful –that the marriage of text and music was conducive to a ‘Godly’ experience, as Sir John Tavener puts it:

‘The whole purpose of sacred music must be to lead us to the threshold of prayer or to the threshold of a true encounter with the living God’.

And wonderful that the Choir of St John’s College, Durham was able to effectively deliver the text and music in the context of a cathedral service in the most awesome surroundings imaginable, for the most important and prestigious service just four years after being founded and hundreds of miles away from our little Chapel on the South Bailey! As Oakley puts it in his Advent paean: Shout, as you journey home, Songs be in every mouth, and I find it hard to think of a better mission statement for our choir, sailing into the 21st century with good, solid, effective worship at our helm and choral music as our sail! Lo, from the North they come…

1 Herbert Howells’s article on Charles Wood published by the RSCM 1966, English Cathedral Music. Cited from Herbert Howells by Paul Spicer.

The installation of the new Quire in Worcester

Worcester Cathedral is finally having its new Tickell Quire Organ installed. John Norman gives us an insight into this significant event.

The Organ will be inaugurated by Dame Gillian Weir during the Three Choirs festival on 08.08.08.

Organs have been used in cathedral worship since at least the tenth century, when Winchester cathedral had an organ with 400 pipes. An organist was employed at Worcester in the thirteenth century and there were at least three instruments in use by the early 1500s. The famous Thomas Dallam built an organ for Worcester in 1613. The recently removed organ in the Quire was something of a disaster. Not only did it partly block both aisles and obscure the view of Prince Arthur’s Chantry but its sound was deafening in the choir stalls. The instrument dated from 1896 when a maverick organ builder called Robert Hope-Jones persuaded the Chapter that, by using unusually high windpressures to blow the pipes, one single instrument would be loud enough to serve both Quire and Nave. Hope-Jones also conceived the musical design of the organ as a sort of imitation orchestra. This proved useless for the accompaniment of singing - the main purpose of a cathedral instrument. Hope-Jones later moved to America where he went on to design the Wurlitzer cinema organ.

One of the electric blowersKenneth Tickell with block & shallot of 32ft reed pipeChoir Organ –electric key action

Stopper handles for wooden pipesCasework sub-assembliesAdjusting the pipes of the Swell Organ Voix Céleste

Organ John Norman Cathedral

In 1925 Arthur Harrison carried out a clever rescue job, replacing many of Hope-Jones’s pipes and his pioneer electrical mechanism. Further alterations were made in 1972 and 1978 but no amount of modification could correct the fundamental problem that the sound of the full organ approached the threshold of pain for the choristers and lay clerks. When the 1896 soundboards split and the 1925 console wore out it became evident that the only way forward was to start again.

The new organ is placed higher, at triforium level, enabling the aisles to be cleared and the sound to spread more evenly throughout the Quire. The old organ cases in the Quire had been the compromise result of a protracted debate at the time of their construction and were of very dumpy appearance. The pipes on show were all dummies made of zinc, many of them not even having pipe-mouths.

After a competitive bid process, the Chapter unanimously selected Kenneth Tickell and Company of Northampton to build the new organ. Kenneth Tickell’s previous work includes

instruments for the Lower Chapel at Eton College and for Douai Abbey, as well as many smaller chamber organs for cathedrals. The new oak organ cases were designed by Kenneth Tickell in the spirit of the Victorian furnishings in the Quire and made by the cabinet-makers in his workshop. The pipes on show in the case all now speak and are made of 80% tin alloy, burnished to catch the light. Much of the carving from the old cases has been re-used in the new ones and the angels on the top of the cases, now gilded, also come from the same source.

The Quire is the original monastic space for worship. Its use is continued in the daily sung services. The space is such that gatherings are very much ‘in the round’ and, as such, have a degree of natural intimacy. Readers will not need reminding that the quality and breadth of repertoire of the music of English cathedral daily services is the envy of the world. Organ voluntaries are an integral part of this worship, although the Quire instrument is not intended primarily as a recital instrument. The requirements are, however, wide-ranging,

Two Swell Organ soundboards under construction

Pipes of the Choir Organ

Two completed reservoir bellows

Swell-box interior Hope-Jones bellows weights re-used

Old and new carving

drawing on repertoire from sixteenth-century plainsong to the present day and requiring a broad tonal palate. They do need an organ of very considerable versatility; the new organ has four manuals and fifty-three independent stops. Kenneth Tickell’s tonal style, while essentially English in character, is also informed by the sounds of continental Europe. There is a wealth of flute colours and mutation stops, as well as one rank of pipes carefully re-used from the previous instrument (the socalled ‘Viole d’Orchestre’, of unique design), in which the spirit of Robert Hope-Jones lives on. Fifteen reed stops, of both chorus and solo usefulness, will be crowned by a high-pressure Tuba. The console is equipped with comprehensive facilities to help the player in making quick changes to the stops.

The layout of the Quire space has made it necessary for the new organ, like the old one, to be divided on each side. This precludes the use of mechanical connections between the keys and the mechanism in the organ cases high above. A lowvoltage electrical action is used instead. The design of this action has been evolved from an innovative mechanism,

sensitive to the player’s touch, used in the Gloucester Cathedral organ some years ago and since refined in America.

The new organ in the Quire is the first phase in the planned replacement of the cathedral’s organs. The giant case in the south transept was designed by Gilbert Scott and given by the Earl of Dudley. It was originally intended for the north transept and the second-phase plan is for it to be moved there, revealing the glass of the Queen Adelaide window in the south transept and much improving the natural light in the crossing. It formerly housed the 1874 nave organ by Hill & Son, used for the inaugural performance of Elgar’s Organ Sonata but then discarded by Hope-Jones. Hill’s magnificent 32ft bass pipes do, however, survive and will be playable from the Quire organ when the transept case has been moved. It is also planned that this case will accommodate a relatively modest instrument for the accompaniment of the cathedral choir when they sing at the head of the nave and provision for this has been made on the console of the Quire organ.

The electronic instrument installed in the Nave in 1989-90 became very unreliable and was removed in early 2007, the current electronic instrument being temporary. It did demonstrate, however, the value of a separate nave organ and the plan is for a new pipe organ to be constructed on the north side of the Nave at triforium level, four bays from the west end. An innovative modern case design is planned and the instrument will have a dual use in both the nave services and the numerous musical occasions which take place at the west end of the nave.

John Norman is Organ Consultant to the Dean & Chapter. He was previously responsible for the new organ in the chapel of the Houses of Parliament and is currently Chairman of the British Institute of Organ Studies (BIOS), the amenity body for organs.

Some of Kenneth Tickell’s craftsmen

Design for the two new Quire cases

Judy Martin

60Seconds in Music Profile

Education details

MA in Music from Selwyn College, Cambridge (where I was Organ Scholar); PGCE in Secondary Music from Oxford Brookes University; Hon ARSCM given to me in 2006.

Career details to date

Head of Music at The Abbey School, Reading; Director of Voces Sacrae; Director of the Choir at St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford (8-voice professional choir); Assistant Director of the RSCM Southern Cathedral Singers; Director of Chapel Music at Worcester College, Oxford; Director of Music at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

What have been your main achievements and challenges during your first five years in Dublin?

I started at Christ Church with an adult cathedral choir of 11 singers, paid a very small stipend to sing on Thursdays and Sundays, a large girls’ choir which sang treble-voice music on a Wednesday, a part-time secretary, a part-time organist, and an organ scholar shared with St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There was no choir to sing Saturday’s Evensong, and I had to book a scratch choir each week for this service.

The main challenge was to develop and build up the choirs within what is a very tight budget. The cathedral’s Board has been enormously supportive, and, over five years, has trebled the pot of money available for singers’ stipends. The final phase of stipend increases happened in January, and I currently have a cathedral choir of 16 Lay Vicars Choral, paid competitive stipends, four Lay Clerks and two Choral Scholars. The girls’ choir has been scaled down to 18 girl choristers, all on chorister scholarships, who sing on Wednesdays with the Lay Vicars Choral, and join the cathedral choir for all major feasts and some concerts. The 16 Lay Vicars now also sing on a Saturday, and eight of them sing on Wednesdays (on their own when the girls are on holiday). In terms of music staff, we have a full-time assistant director of music, a full time organ scholar, and a 0.8 music development officer.

We are just about to launch our Gap Year Placement Scheme which provides pre- and post-university singers with free accommodation (including all meals and laundry!) in the Church of Ireland Theological College, as well as a stipend. We have released five CDs and one DVD, and two more CDs will be released this year.

You worked in Australia for six months, what was that experience like?

I was basically just out of college, and thought that I’d go to Australia, do a bit of organ playing, and spend a lot of time on the beach. A friend told me that a parish church in Sydney was looking for an organist to fill in while their regular organist was out of the country. As you would, I expected to be asked to play a few hymns and Sunday voluntaries. What I didn’t realise was that the organist I was covering was David Drury, previous winner of the improvisation class of the St. Alban’s International organ festival, and that the church (Christ Church St. Lawrence) had two very fine choirs that sang full choral High Mass on Sunday mornings, and Choral Evensong and Benediction on Sunday evenings. By the third week of my trip I was accompanying Duruflé’s Requiem amongst many other accompaniments, running an organ recital series, and

teaching the organ in a top private school over there. Great experience, but not very relaxing! I still maintain various contacts out there, though, and in 1998 those generous Aussies accommodated us when I took my chamber choir, Voces Sacrae, on tour to Sydney for a month. That tour was undertaken in association with the repertoire promotion department of OUP, and we premiered (and later recorded) Michael Finnissy’s Seven Sacred Motets in a huge concert while we were there.

How much organ playing do you do?

To be honest I do very little playing at Christ Church. My predecessor was Organist and Master of the Choristers, but the job description was changed to Director of Music for his successor. I have an Assistant who does the majority of the playing, an Organ Scholar, and our Music Development Officer also plays from time to time.

What new repertoire have you introduced at Christ Church?

The repertoire here, when I arrived, was quite different to what I would term ‘standard’ cathedral repertoire. That said, Stanford, Wood, Byrd, Gibbons, Tallis, etc. were represented. There was also a huge amount of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European music. I have introduced other staple cathedral fare such as Bairstow, Harris, L. Berkeley, more Leighton and Howells, and many, many more early music Mass settings. However, being a major fan of 20th century and contemporary music, the choir has performed a huge amount of Francis Pott, Judith Bingham, Jonathan Dove, Stephen Hough, Magnus Williamson, Francis Grier, David Briggs, Gabriel Jackson, Michael Berkeley, Philip Moore, Judith Weir, James Macmillan and others. In fact, in 2006, we released a CD of the previously unrecorded music of Francis Pott on the Signum Records label, and plans are afoot for a further disc of Francis’s music. This term we are recording a disc of Howells, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death. This is also with Signum Records. Amongst other pieces included on this disc will be his Missa Aedis Christi (the wrong Christ Church, but never mind…), Sweetest of sweets, and I love all beauteous things.

Which contemporary composers’ works have you thought of introducing to the repertoire recently?

We have scheduled Francis Pott’s My song is love unknown for Evensong on Palm Sunday this year. This is the most incredible piece to sing on that day, as Francis includes a great fight between the words ‘Hosanna’ (women) and ‘Crucify’ (men, who ultimately win) which sums up the position of Palm Sunday within Holy Week –very powerful stuff. We are singing James Macmillan’s Evening canticles this term, and Philip Moore’s Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer but, as you might imagine, much of the term is devoted to Howells. Next term, plans are afoot for a concert performance of Francis Pott’s huge oratorio The Cloud of Unknowing in July, but I can’t say any more about this at the moment…

You have an interest in contemporary music. What or who inspires you and do you commission new works?

It’s difficult to mention all the contemporary composers that inspire me –certainly all the names listed above. If I had to choose, my three favourite living composers would be Francis Pott, Francis Grier and Judith Bingham. We are gradually starting to attract funding for commissioning here; we have just agreed a project with David Briggs to commission him to write

an 8-voice accompanied Trinity Sunday anthem (our Patronal Festival) funded by the Friends of Christ Church. One of the most exciting projects we have begun here, the result of the amazing support and hard work of our former Dean (who tragically died just before Christmas), is to commission music written, in the Irish language, by Irish composers. Tristan Russcher, the Assistant Director of Music, and I had started to do this in a small way by establishing a composition competition for Irish composers (which ran in 2006 and 2007). The Dean took this a stage further by involving Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise (the Irish guild of the Church) which commissioned Seoirse Bodley to write a substantial anthem for an Irish language service, and securing funding from Colmcille (the Ireland-Scotland Gaelic Culture Agency) to commission one of our Lay Vicars Choral, Simon MacHale (who lectures at Cork School of Music and is at Trinity College studying for a Masters in Compositional Analysis), to write an a cappella setting of the canticles in Irish. We already had Irish language responses, and another set of canticles, both written by Caitríona Ní Dhubhghaill, a former member of the choir. This was a very enjoyable project, and one that we will be continuing. The only reservation I had was the most extraordinary experience: conducting Irish language psalms to Anglican chant –weird!

What or who made you take up the organ/choir direction?

My mother is an organist, and she trained as a music teacher when I was very young (she had previously trained as a scientist). She gave me organ lessons as soon as I had passed Grade 8 piano. She was the church organist in our village, and she had built up a choir of 11 boys, 11 girls and about 12 adults. As this choir was so strong and exciting to be a part of, we were able to tackle some very interesting repertoire. I soon got the ‘conducting bug’ and, at the age of 14, was given the job of Assistant Organist at this church. I’m afraid that, once I had started conducting, playing the organ took second place in my heart! I learnt the repertoire by recording nearly every broadcast of Radio 3’s Choral Evensong programme since 1979, and I have a wall of thousands of tapes in my house!

Which music directors do you admire the most?

Without question David Hill, Christopher Robinson, Barry Rose and Adrian Lucas. I also feel inspired by Matthew Owens’ love of contemporary repertoire and his energy and ideas.

What was the last CD you bought?

Francis Pott The Cloud of Unknowing and the BBC Singers’ Chilcott disc.

What is your favourite organ to play? Ely Cathedral.

What is your favourite building? Salisbury Cathedral.

What is your favourite anthem?

That’s impossible!

Bach Komm, Jesu komm

Alonso Lobo Versa est in luctum

Byrd Vigilate

Tallis Videte miraculum

Francis Pott My song is love unknown

Francis Grier Christ’s love song

Judith Bingham The Clouded heaven

And countless others!

What is your favourite set of canticles?

Arthur Wills On Plainsongtones and Leighton 2nd

What is your favourite psalm and accompanying chants?

Tied between Psalm 143 to the exquisite 8-part C minor chant by Paul Sartin and Psalm 84 to Barnard’s sublime D major chant.

What is your favourite organ piece?

Messiaen Transports de joie

Who is your favourite composer? Impossible! There are so many.

Have you participated in a service or event that stands out as a great moment?

There are three particular performances that stand out: directing the world premiere of Michael Finnissy’s Seven Sacred Motets with Voces Sacrae at a concert in Sydney, Australia; conducting Duruflé’s Requiem (with Worcester College Choir, Oxford) two days before I went into hospital for major surgery; conducting Francis Grier’s huge anthem Thou O God art praised in Sion in a service in Christ Church last year, accompanied thrillingly (as ever) by Tristan Russcher.

Has any particular recording inspired you?

Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach series, David Hill’s Weelkes disc from Winchester and Christmas at St John’s , Edward Higginbottom’s WesternWind Masses from New College, Stephen Layton’s O Magnum Mysterium Polyphony disc.

How do you cope with nerves?

I don’t really get nervous when I’m conducting. I was nervous last year when I conducted the complete Messiah one day after I gave up the crutches having broken my leg. I was convinced I was going to fall over!

What are your hobbies?

I’m afraid I’m a complete addict of Strictly Come Dancing. I have the CD, DVD and annual! I am also very excited about watching tennis, reading gruesome crime novels and church architecture.

Do you play any other instruments?

Piano. As a music teacher I had to be able to play a simple tune on most instruments. I could never get a note out of a trumpet though. I did study the flute and violin when at school.

What was the last book you read?

I’ve nearly finished Alan Mould’s The English Chorister, and I’ve just finished a really disturbing Tess Gerritsen novel about organ transplants.

What are your favourite radio and television programmes?

I am a Radio 4 addict, and I love all their comedy programmes. My favourite Radio 4 show, though, is From our own correspondent. Television Strictly Come Dancing, Have I got news for you and The F Word.

What Newspapers and magazines do you read?

FCM’s CATHEDRAL MUSIC (of course), Choir and Organ and I dip into the Church Times.

What makes you laugh?

Farce and political satire.

If you could have dinner with two people, one from the 21st century and the other from the past, who would you include?

From the 21st century it would have to be Stephen Fry. From the past it would very interesting to talk to Elizabeth I.

What should be the role of the FCM in the 21st century?

The FCM already does a tremendous amount to support cathedral choristers and choirs, and plays an important part in encouraging and galvanising the co-operation of individuals and other bodies. In today’s world of accountability and accessibility, cathedrals are constantly expected to demonstrate their relevance to the whole of society, and to defend themselves against the criticism of ‘elitism’. All cathedrals have the capacity to give an enormous amount back to the community by way of carefully considered and inclusive educational outreach programmes (to use the buzz words…). With the supportive help of the FCM enabling music departments to take part in such schemes and, more importantly, sending the message to the wider world that these initiatives are coming from cathedrals, other avenues of funding will surely become available to them. Secondly, the level of success achieved by musical ensembles these days appears to be in direct proportion to the amount of marketing and publicity available. If the FCM can get the message about the quality and unique nature of cathedral music out to the man and woman in the street, we have more hope of sustaining one of the world’s most precious musical resources into the future.

LETTERS

Mr R Francis Nuell, Bristol.

Sir: I read with interest the article on ‘Scandal’ at the Three Choirs Festival in 1900. The excellent Festivals Overview included the 2007 Three Choirs at Gloucester. Here, once again, was a scandal of sufficient might that I feel obliged to sever my relationship with what has been for 25 years a highlight of my musical life.

The problem is that they have made no attempt to update their procedures and policy for the 21st century, and probably never will as long as they can hide under the clause of ‘no refunds even in the event of a change of artist or programme’.

On the Thursday afternoon, a nearly full house was looking forward to a performance of a rarely heard symphony by Bax conducted by Vernon Handley. Sadly, Mr Handley was taken ill during rehearsals and was unable to direct the concert. The Festival organisers then took it upon themselves to scratch together a hotch-potch programme of any old pieces they could find the scores for at short notice, together with a few pieces from the original programme conducted by one of the players. I had paid good money to hear Bax and wanted my money back if they could not come up with the goods somehow!

Rather than offer a refund to anyone who did not wish to attend the substitute programme and would have preferred to go home, we were told in a very condescending manner that their substitute programme was the best option. As far as I was concerned, I had paid £32 to hear a Bax symphony and not a Mozart Wind Octet!

To make matters worse, a distinguished conductor had apparently been on standby in case of illness but, amazingly, was stood down a couple of weeks beforehand by the Festival!

Furthermore, there was a similarly distinguished musician in the audience who knew the work inside out (not me, I hasten to add) having conducted it a few weeks earlier with a full orchestra; fortunately, he did not put himself forward as I am sure the powers that be would have been muttering in their beards about ‘maintaining standards’

All general points and comments welcomed. Please send letters by 1 September 2008 to: The Editor, 21 Belle Vue Terrace, RIPON, North Yorkshire HG4 2QS ajpalmer@lineone.net Letters may be shortened for publication.

and declined. The concert was, of course, a complete waste of money for those of us who love English music.

The only way to get my money back in respect of this shambles (scandal?) is to decline to attend any more Three Choirs concerts, thus depriving the Festival of around £250 per year. There are plenty of other festivals which will be glad of my money! When I hear that the Three Choirs have got their act together and had a clear-out of the ‘management team’, I may return, but I fear it is unlikely.

Glad to see Vernon Handley in fine fettle in London conducting Vaughan Williams at the Cadogan Hall in February. Yes, I’ll stick to London concerts!

distinguished critics from the both the Guardian newspaper and the Church Times. I take this opportunity to thank the musicians of the Philharmonia whose total professionalism helped solve a very difficult situation. Under our terms of trade, clearly stated in the brochure, ticket holders may return their tickets in the event of ‘substantial alteration’ and a few people preferred to do this rather than accept the substitute programme. Their money was promptly refunded.

Bernard Day, Chairman, Three Choirs Festival Association, replies Sir: Thank you for allowing us to comment on your correspondent’s letter about the Three Choirs Festival of 2007. I am very sorry to learn of his dissatisfaction and very much wish he had shared his thoughts with me at the time, so that we could have explained the problem more fully. I would like to start by repeating the apology I gave to the audience at the festival.

The situation on that Thursday was one of extreme difficulty, particularly in the light of Vernon Handley’s undisputed reputation as a peerless interpreter of Bax’s music. There is no adequate substitute for Vernon Handley and, even if there were, at the point when he fell ill, during the final rehearsal, there was not enough time for another conductor to rehearse this complex and unfamiliar work to the requisite standard.

In those circumstances the Artistic Director, the Festival Management and the Philharmonia Management all agreed that priority must be given to putting on a quality concert for the capacity audience, rather than leave them without music. This necessitated a change to the programme, substituting pieces by Mozart and Elgar for the Bax symphony, but keeping the rest intact. As chairman, I explained all this to the audience, who clearly approved of the action we had taken, as did the

We intensely regret being unable to deliver the programme as planned as a result of circumstances beyond our control, and hope that we are able in the future to programme the Bax again. Your readers may also be interested to know that in the 18 months for which I have been privileged to be chairman of the Three Choirs Festival Association Ltd, our governing body, my colleagues and I, with the help of the Arts Council, have comprehensively reviewed the management structure of the festival. We appointed Dr Paul Hedley as our first overall General Manager, from 1 February this year. This new structure will enable the festival to evolve going forward into the 21st century, continuing to deliver a first-class musical experience for its festival-goers, and building on its successful 280-year history.

Christine Bland, Reading.

Dear Sir: I was interested in the article featuring Sir Philip Ledger, as I was at school in Bexhill-on-Sea at the same time as him. I was sorry that the ‘young woman who inspired his life-long love of the piano’ was not named. She was Jean Tucknott, who died in 2006 in her early 80s.

Jean was an inspirational teacher who fired the enthusiasm of all of us in the choir at St. Francis’s School for Girls. We carried off numerous trophies at the Hastings Music Festival in the early 1950s. The highlight of the Festival for me was being taken to hear Philip Ledger and Jean Tucknott playing together in the piano concerto class. I still think of him whenever I hear the Grieg concerto.

Jean’s obituary states [as a girl] ‘Jean showed prodigious talent and this was

rewarded with much early success, culminating in the winning of a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music, London. While at the RAM, Jean studied piano with Percy Waller who nurtured the talents of many who rose to the top of the profession. Jean won a number of prizes for her performing and in later years the Academy awarded her the ARAM diploma in recognition of her outstanding achievements as a teacher.’

Barrie Jefferson, Spalding.

Sir: I was delighted to read in CATHEDRAL MUSIC 2/07 that, referring to broadcasts of Choral Evensong, the BBC is ‘taking note of the reaction of listeners’ and that ‘the change of transmission day is being kept under review’.

I began listening to Choral Evensong on the radio while a student at college in the early 1960s. For three years it was an ‘institution’. Then forty years of a working life in education followed so I was not free on a Wednesday afternoon to listen to the broadcasts. In retirement however, I have reverted to the great pleasure again of being a regular and devoted listener.

The move of Choral Evensong from Wednesday to Sunday afternoons seems to me to pose some problems:

1) FCM members like ourselves would probably be more inclined to attend their local diocesan cathedral for Evensong live on a Sunday rather than tune in to the BBC. (By contrast many cathedrals do not have a sung service on a Wednesday.)

2) The listening audience for Choral Evensong is likely to be the same audience who would view Songs of Praise. Yet these programmes often overlap or follow each other in quick succession.

3) I recognise that most working people would not be free to hear Choral Evensong on a Wednesday afternoon at 4.00pm.

So… Why not broadcast Evensong live on a Sunday and then repeat the broadcast on a Wednesday? (Or vice versa.) That way the BBC would keep everyone happy!

(Your wish has come true. See Comment [Ed]).

Mass, and their performance of Byrd’s Ave Verum in particular was unforgettably mouth-watering in the lush acoustic –oh for a recording of it! The skills displayed there of our choral tradition certainly made an impact on the Greek lady next to me who was in raptures and told me that living in France, she seldom heard such beautiful singing. I told her that the choir would next be performing at La Madeleine and she was there again to savour in the dreamy acoustic, among other items, O Sacrum Convivium by Messiaen, and Charles Wood’s Collegium Regale setting of the Magnificat, towards the end of which the acoustic was allowed to die away after the interrupted cadence in the closing bars to breathtaking effect before the final Amen. Memories of the integrity and high standard of the performances I attended there in Paris stay with me to this day –and probably with the Greek lady too who left La Madeleine in a very uplifted frame of mind.

Geoff White. via e-mail …so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips. (Psalm 106 v 33)

Sir: I was in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris in 2002 when one of our cathedral choirs, on tour there, sang

The performances of the choir were nothing more nor less than I expected, but I relate the story because the said lady’s exuberant joy on hearing such quality singing served as a timely reminder that it should not be taken for granted, and that in our choral tradition we have something not just very special, but extremely special, and we must never dismiss it as anything else. Quality of performance doesn’t just happen when choirs are on tour of course, but hopefully at every choral cathedral service –but how much do we actually take all this for granted? Much hard work and dedication are required from the musicians to maintain the high standards we enjoy from our cathedral choirs and the simple fact that we are members of FCM clearly means that we appreciate all aspects of the sung liturgy and hence I am hopefully (I so wanted to avoid these words!) ‘preaching to the converted’. But it strikes me that some members of the clergy remain unconverted and as we strive to maintain high quality in our much cherished choral tradition, to my mind we need the clergy on our side. You would perhaps think that they are on our side but I for one am not convinced –take for instance the recent intrusion of a sermon (more fashionably ‘homily’) during broadcasts of Choral Evensong on Radio 3 since it changed to its Sunday slot earlier this year. We should not underestimate the importance of Radio 3 broadcasts of Choral Evensong which are supporting our choral tradition superbly and long may they continue to do so, and clearly the BBC team members are essentially

guests of each particular foundation when they are relaying live broadcasts, but they would get my applause if they said: “Sorry –we don’t do sermons”. After all –what place does a sermon have at Choral Evensong? Who wants one? I make confident assumptions here that the choir doesn’t want one and I’ll bet the worshippers don’t either –which leaves –the clergy. A sermon clearly has a place in the liturgy and I have heard some very interesting presentations from the pulpit, but not during Choral Evensong, the make up of which has invariably been without a sermon all the time I have been attending such services since the late fifties. Doubtless there are ecclesiastical historians who know how long Choral Evensong has been free of the encumbrance of a sermon and I don’t know how many years have to pass before a tradition is created, but I would have thought that fifty was enough to establish the form of the service currently enjoyed, which is to my mind customary now, but which just might be under attack from regressive sermons.

To make matters worse, the situation has been compounded by the fact that it seems that the intrusion of a sermon –in recent Radio 3 broadcasts at least –has deprived us of enjoying the singing of the psalms of the day in favour of a convenient ‘psalm appointed for the day’ –where does that come from –unless it is a Proper Psalm? The importance of the psalms should not be dismissed, because the complete appointed psalms of the day as set in The Book of Common Prayer are a seriously significant part of the Anglican liturgy and the worrying thing is that a trend may have been set here, and other cathedrals might regress to the same dreaded format whether broadcast or not, and this could be the thin end of the wedge. If the traditions of Choral Evensong are to be preserved for future worshippers, these unacceptable developments need to be addressed head-on.

The theme of this sermon therefore is that the clergy should not meddle with a tried and tested format –a tradition –which has served and enthralled us seamlessly for many years by custom and practice during countless Choral Evensongs. The challenges facing us in maintaining our much loved choral tradition have been voiced and penned many times and we should mark well the words quoted towards the end of the article by Andrew Bryden in CATHEDRAL MUSIC issue 2/07: ‘If we allow the tradition to disappear we will not be able to bring it back. Once it is gone, it will be lost forever’. I would add to that: Be afraid! Be very afraid!

BBC PROMS

at the Royal Albert Hall Roger Tucker

2007 Review

The 2007 season, Sir Nicholas Kenyon’s last as Proms Director, marked the 80th anniversary of the BBC’s involvement with what has always been the world’s largest music festival. In 1927 the fledgling national broadcasting organisation, newly empowered as a public corporation with a Royal Charter, saw the great advantages of rescuing the ambitious concert series created by the uniquely enterprising British conductor, Sir Henry Wood, and making it available nationally via the new wonder medium of ‘the wireless’. Orchestral concerts have always been the mainstay of the season but in recent years there has been an increasing number of complete operas and largescale sacred choral works.

In 2007 the trend was for shorter sacred works mixed with secular.

Prom 3 The Monteverdi Choir under John Eliot Gardiner gave a stylish concert of French baroque music: excerpts from Rameau’s stage works, preceded by Campra’s austere Messe de Requiem.

Prom 4 Rossini’s lyrical Stabat Mater, done by Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy under Antonio Pappano, with agile soprano Emma Bell. Prom 6 Sublime Renaissance polyphony, immaculately rendered by the BBC Singers and the Tallis Scholars, under Peter Phillips, works by Lassus, Tallis and Striggio, with 40-part motets by each of the last two. Finally, a richly polyphonic Mass by Striggio in both 40 and 60 parts, directed by musicologist Davitt Moroney, who has rediscovered it.

Prom 11 Welsh forces under Thierry Fischer gave us the ravishing Fauré Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine

Prom 17 Richard Hickox and his period-instrument Collegium Musicum 90 in a lively and finely drawn performance of Schubert’s last Mass in E flat, with five excellent soloists, preceded by Hummel’s short Marian Offertory Alma Virgo, lit up by Susan Gritton’s pure, coloratura soprano.

Prom 34 was all-Bach: three Cantatas and the short Mass in G, done with great style by the Bach Collegium Japan under founder Masaaki Suzuki.

Prom 46 Elgar’s oratorio The Apostles, began in a ponderous, reverential style under Sakari Oramo with the CBSO and Chorus. It gathered more urgency later, when the line-up of top soloists brought it to life.

Only two concerts featured organ music: Prom 30 with finales of Reubke and Elgar sonatas (I. Farrington) Prom 67 with seven Buxtehude pieces finely played by John Scott and D. Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater superbly done by the BBC Singers under new chief conductor, David Hill.

2008 Preview

I have now seen the highlights of the 2008 Proms and can give you good news: there is clearly going to be quite a feast of both choral and organ music. The new Director, Roger Wright, is giving the restored Albert Hall organ plenty to do.

July 18 Wayne Marshall opens the First Night playing a Richard Strauss organ prelude and later, Messiaen’s Dieu parmi nous.

July 21 Olivier Latry plays Messiaen’s L’Ascension and the solo in Saint-Saëns’ ‘Organ’ symphony.

July 27 Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur done by BBC Welsh forces, plus the Symphony Chorus, under Thierry Fischer;

July 31 a semi-staged performance by Glyndebourne Festival Opera of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea;

Aug 3 the first of four organ recitals: Wayne Marshall plays Demessieux, Messiaen, Dupré and Hakim;

Aug 5 a late prom for the 40th anniversary of the King’s Singers: French Chansons, Madrigals, English part and folk songs

Aug 10 the second organ recital: Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte, played by James O’Donnell, with movements from a Manchicourt mass sung in alternatim by the BBC Singers;

Aug 15 the Janáček 80th anniversary: all BBC forces under the doyen Pierre Boulez in the Sinfonietta, Concertino and Glagolitic Mass (revised version with one extra movement)

Simon Preston is the organist;

Aug 16 Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar in three acts, done by the Orch. of the Age of Enlightenment & Choir under Mackerras.

Aug 17 Jennifer Bate gives the third organ recital: Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur and L’Apparition de l’église éternelle

Aug 24 Bach Day: 4pm Simon Preston gives an organ recital; 7pm the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists under Eliot Gardiner in the St. John Passion; 10pm solo cello suites.

Aug 26 Vaughan Williams anniversary concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis;

Aug 27 London Sinfonietta’s 40th birthday: Tavener’s The Whale and Cantus Mysticus, under founder David Atherton;

Aug 31 Verdi Requiem with BBC forces under Jiří Běhlohlávek.

Sep 7 Spanning six hours, the vast Messiaen Saint-François d’Assise in three acts, with the Netherlands Opera under Metzmacher.

Never in my experience (prommer since 1943) has a new Director planned such a monumentally ambitious season and given himself and his team such a huge challenge to deliver it all. All concerts are broadcast live on Radio 3. I have no details of TV coverage yet, but the planners are spoiled for choice! www.bbc.co.uk/proms

Roger Tucker

DVD REVIEWS

There are at present only a handful of DVDs in our field, so I intend to select those most likely to interest our readers. For this first column I have chosen two exciting organ productions: one from Durham and one from Liverpool.

JAMES LANCELOT AT DURHAM CATHEDRAL

ELGAR Sonata for organ Op 28

Mark Venning talks about the organ

Visit to Harrison & Harrison’s works

Visit to the Elgar Birthplace Museum

Musical discussions –Memorabilia

Masterclass on performing the Elgar

Recorded in widescreen PAL Colour

DOUBLE DISC DVD & CD SCMA 1001

Price £19.99 plus p&p

Order from the Elgar Birthplace Museum, Tel: 01905 333224, or on-line at www.elgarfoundation.org

This is the first DVD from the new Durham University Media Academy, which is based at St Chad’s College. It has been produced in association with the Elgar Birthplace Museum. The Academy is a significant new specialist outfit at Durham which, on the evidence of this production, has both expertise and a media mission to promote church music.

The great Norman cathedral on its peninsula, which dominates the university city of Durham, contains one of the finest Romantic organs in the country. It is ideal for a complete performance of Elgar’s only major work for organ and the Cathedral Organist, Canon James Lancelot, gives a definitive and satisfying reading of it as the core track. There are seven other sections, covering the music itself, the organ and its builders, the birthplace museum, with its fascinating Elgar memorabilia and archives, where the staff contribute many nuggets of information about the composer’s complex character and help to evoke the Elgarian ethos. Some technical points: the sound recording has a closer than normal microphone balance, to match what the player hears; mostly we are looking over James’s shoulder at the console, which is en fenêtre in the south case. The shots of the playing hands on the four manuals and the feet on the pedal board are well framed and reveal the precision of the nimble footwork, shared between careful adjustment of the three expression pedals and playing the pedal notes. There are some close-ups of the score but for anyone studying the work, there could be more. The eye is beguiled by splendid architectural cutaways and during the organ demo, ranks of pipes. I enjoyed the masterclass, where Lancelot takes us through the work and shows us how he registers it, with close-ups of the stop names being drawn. Mark Venning (MD of Harrison & Harrison) gives a crisp historical and technical background to this famous instrument, the cathedral flagship of its builders, and we go round their Meadowfield works. There is also a ‘virtual discussion’ between Canon Lancelot, Dr Relf Clark and Prof. Jeremy Dibble about Elgar. These are edited to compress the message but lack the vitality of actual dialogue. All in all, this is a highly satisfying package, both musically and technically, with excellent shot selection and high quality sound, although the microphone balance loses the rich but elusive acoustic ‘bloom’ available at Durham. The Media Academy’s first DVD is a ‘must’ for all organ-lovers; it is a pity there is no booklet.

ST

DAVIDS CATHEDRAL FESTIVAL

G yL EGLWYS GADEiRIOL TYDDEWI 23 May - 1 June 2008

Further details from www.stdavidscathedral.org.uk

tel 01437-720057 e-mail cathedralfestival@onetel.com

Supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Wales

A series of professional classical and contemporary music concerts set in the historic venue of St Davids Cathedral

IAN TRACEY AT LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL GRAND ORGAN

Full recital programme

History of organ & demonstration

Ian Tracey talks about his career

Recital works: Handel Overture, Bach Chaconne (BWV1004) (both arr. Goss-Custard); Schumann

Four Sketches; Verdi Grand Marchfrom Aïda (arr. Ian Wells); Walford Davies Solemn Melody; Mulet Noel, Toccata; Tchaikovsky Three Dances (arr.Tracey); Lefébure-Wély Bolero de Concert; Nevin Will o’the Wisp; Peeters Two Lieder; Dawes Melody; Edmundson Toccata ‘Vom Himmel Hoch’

Recorded in 4:3 PAL Colour

DOUBLE DISC DVD & CD PRDVD 1

The Liverpool package is in striking contrast to the Durham one: a 20th century cathedral, rather than an 11th century one, with the largest organ in the UK. Instead of one work and an in-depth study of it and its composer, we have a substantial recital given by Prof Ian Tracey (now the Organiste Titulaire) presenting 19 pieces by 12 composers, As he tells us, the programme is based on his famous bank holiday recitals, calculated to show off the huge organ and the many styles it can cope with. Using the 5-manual floor console, Tracey plays everything with his customary panache but always with good taste. There are some well-chosen architectural cutaway shots, including unusual glimpses and, to puzzle you, the Lady Chapel organ. There is even a tantalising shot of the twelve bells in the Vestey Tower, which compose the heaviest ringing peal in the world. Would that we could have seen and heard them in action!

Because of the large projecting stop jambs and roof of the mobile floor console, the playing hands are not seen from a proper high-angled ‘mapping shot’ as at Durham, The tighter shots of Prof Tracey’s rather large hands are taken from along the forearms, obscuring the actual notes he is playing. The big close-ups show only the back of one hand, the other is hidden and the fingers and their position on the keyboard is lost. The dominant impression is of the economy of his handshape and motion, a virtuoso technique in close-up. Subsequent tracks give us the history and a fascinating demonstration of the seven divisions of the Grand Organ. I am always struck by Tracey’s affinity for the instrument, enabling slick display of the 146 speaking stops (recently increased by the six stops of the Central Space division to 152).

Picture-wise, the history of the organ and the autobiographical tracks consist of a basic talking shot, seated at the console, with only a few, but well-chosen cutaways, notably, a dramatic shot of the Trompette Militaire pipes, standing vertically in the Corona Gallery, the loudest rank of all, on 50” wind pressure. Television-trained purists like me, will find it distracting that in the playing shot editing the basic angle is changed by directly intercutting right side and left side matching shots. ‘Crossing the line’ repeatedly is jarring and bad video grammar.

Despite Ian Tracey’s engagingly fluent talking, these later tracks are a disappointing video experience, crying out for cutaway shots of GossCustard memorabilia. In fact, after the recital and demonstration we have only separate talks to camera. The versatility capacity is not exploited at all: there are no alternative shot options, nor other contributors.

However, that said, Priory is to be congratulated on producing its first DVD, with high quality pictures and sound, although the mike balance is too distant for my liking, making for lack of clarity in the notoriously unfocussed 9”/10” reverberation. If ever an organ cried out for multimiking it is this one – but Priory prefer a single position. There is a nice booklet with track timings and a full specification of the organ.

BOOK & MUSIC REVIEWS

SHEETMUSIC BOOKREVIEWS

FANFARE FOR FRANCIS

Editor Paul Hale

Banks Music Publications £14.95 (incl. free CD)

Eleven composers were commissioned by the Percy Whitlock Trust to write a tribute to celebrate the 90th birthday of FCM vice-president, Francis Jackson.

The idea for this volume was inspired and is a magnificent accolade to Dr Jackson, whose first published piece Impromtu, was written in Italy in 1944 and dedicated to Bairstow, his predecessor at York. The album kicks off with a wonderful Fanfare for Francis by Noel Rawsthorne with a suitable tuba part. Malcolm Riley contributes a challenging Prologo e Toccatina based on an alphabet system to spell Francis Alan Jackson. Robert Gower’s piece is a Hymn Prelude on York followed in the collection by a simple but beautiful Prelude composed by Richard Shepherd. A Passacaglia by Andrew Carter is a set of 22 variations which allude, more or less overtly to particular organ works or choir pieces that Francis has championed, with an exciting climax. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Simon Lindley’s Echo Rondel which intersperses free plainchant-like quotations from Jackson’s works with dance episodes and like Richard Shepherd’s piece is not too difficult. John Scott Whiteley’s mighty Scherzetto & Fugue hints at Dupré, Duruflé and Ravel, favourite composers of Francis. Film composer John Barry, who was a chorister at York, offers another short, simple but effective piece Pray to the Lord. Philip Moore chose Francis’s East Acklam for Variations and Fugue. Alan Spedding’s Deo Gratias is also based on East Acklam and it leaves Robin Walker to round off this set of compositions with a piece, Malton. All the compositions can be played on most organs and there is something for everyone here from beginner to more experienced player. John Scott Whitely has recorded everything brilliantly on the Minster organ. Recommended without hesitation.

Andrew Palmer

THE ENGLISH CHORISTER: A History by Alan Mould

384 pages ISBN 9781847250582 Paperback £16.99

Continuuem Int. Pub. Group

It’s hard to improve on all the plaudits for the hardback version of this book. For all those who have been waiting for the paperback, now’s your time to go out and buy that copy. It is well worth it.

Ex-CATHEDRAL MUSIC editorial adviser Alan Mould’s erudite treatise is a must. However, don’t let the word ‘erudite’ put you off. This is a book which contains so much interesting material that is written in an easily digestible way. Anyone commissioning a book on this subject would have not had to think twice whom to go to, Alan Mould is the authority. It is a corpus spanning over 1400 years of history of music in our cathedrals and college chapels. One little mistake is contained on the back cover, where Andrew Lumsden is knighted and credited with having written the review in this magazine. In fact, it was Andrew’s father, Sir David. I cannot improve on the latters excellent review of the hardback where he writes: ‘time and again he (Mould) offers insights and touches of humour, which tantalise by their brief appearance, to be overtaken by the next nugget of information. The reader is repeatedly torn between either racing through the present book or putting it down in order to research (with the author’s help) some detail or aspect which Mould couldn’t possibly have undertaken without making his book totally out of scale and thereby totally unreadable. He throws us a challenge: ‘OK, you are interested in this bit if you want to know any more you will need to do your own background reading, and my footnotes and bibliography are there to facilitate just that’. What more stimulus can anyone need? This book is certainly a jewel and the best on the market. No one reading this magazine can be without a copy.

Andrew Palmer

1

Edington Festival

Jennifer Bate

Dame Gillian Weir

James O’Donnell

John Scott

Charles Cole

John McGreal

Patrick Russill

David Titterington

Thomas Trotter

Huw Williams

August 17 - 24, 2008

The 53rd Festival of Church Music within the Liturgy Priory Church of St Mary, Edington (near Westbury in Wiltshire)

tickets 0871 663 2539

www.southbankcentre.co.uk/messiaen

Information from John d’Arcy, The Old Vicarage, Edington Westbury, Wiltshire BA13 4QF Tel: 01380 830512

February–10 December 2008

This major celebration of Messiaen’s centenary features recitals in Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, St Paul’s Cathedral and the London Oratory, as well as orchestral and chamber concerts. Artists include:

CHORALCDs

ANTONY PITTS: ALPHA AND OMEGA

Tonus Peregrinus

Director: Antony Pitts

The Peace of Jerusalem; Sanctus and Benedictus; A Thousand Years; My Dove; The ‘I AM’ sayings of Jesus.

HYPERION CDA67668 TT 68:05

Antony Pitts’ singers’ Tonus Peregrinus, prove to be highly skilled in singing their founder’s compositions. These works are well-worth hearing, especially My Dove and the major piece here, The ‘I AM’ Sayings of Jesus, cleverly put together where the concentration is on unison intervals and the piece grows from chaotic pre-creation sounds to the focused parallel harmony of medieval music. The choir manages to bring the work to a fitting conclusion where the opening unisons have expanded to octaves and the ecstatic and expansive writing becomes stratospheric at points. A thrilling and exciting choir and equally a fantastic choir. A winning combination of choir and composer and a triumphant recording.

Daniel Reed.

GEORG SCHUMANN

The Purcell Singers

Director: Mark Ford

Sopranos: Geraldine McGreevy & Mary Nelson

Jerusalem, du hochgebaute Stadt.

GUILD GMCD 7311 TT 67:43

Having never heard of this German composer (18661952) before, or the Purcell Singers for that matter, I was pleasantly surprised at what I heard, and ended up playing the recording to family and friends, who agreed that this music is most attractive. The motets are written for eight-part choir, with some having additional parts for solo singers and brass. These brass parts in Mit Friedund Freude, ich fahr dahin and Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme adds an added sense of occasion to the music, and provides the listener with some variety of timbres. It would be good if this sort of music caught on.

Stephen Power

CREATION Choral Music of Philip Stopford

The Ecclesium Choir

Director: Philip Stopford

Organ: Tristan Russcher

Alleluia; A Mother’s Prayer; O thou who camest from above; Belfast Centenary Eucharist; Morning has broken; God be in my head; Jesus Christ the love that gives love; Preces; Responses, Amen; Psalm 121; Belfast Canticles; Creation; Silent Night; We three Kings; Love Divine; O God the King of Glory; There is a green hill; Christ the Lord is risen again.

PRIORY PRCD 891 TT 77:23

This music has wide appeal, and there is much here to whet the appetites of those who haven’t heard volume one (Priory Records’ British Church Composer Series-2). The lush sweet harmonies in Stopford’s music gives everything that warm glow, but listening to the whole CD at once is rather like sampling all the desserts at a dinner party. The CD booklet gives the website address for Ecclesium, who publishes this music. Alleluia is short and emphatic, written for Easter. A Mother’s Prayer was written specifically for Mothering Sunday. So it goes on, various works with specific occasions at Belfast Cathedral in mind. Particularly pleasing is the Eucharist setting, which would be a welcome addition to any cathedral choir’s library. It is a short setting, in English, which will appeal to many modern liturgists. The title work of this disc is without doubt a masterpiece. Creation has a lovely alto solo; it is a great relief that there is now a modern work with an extensive solo for counter-tenors to enjoy! The Ecclesium Choir is mixed-voiced, consisting of 19 singers. Slightly coarse-sounding sopranos spoil the rest of the ensemble, but the ample acoustics at St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast makes up for this. The organ, perfect for the accompaniment of this music, is well controlled on the whole by Tristan Russcher. Occasional minor niggles are far outweighed by the freshness of the compositions. I am sure we haven’t heard the last of Philip Stopford. John Rutter, beware!

Stephen Power

POULENC: Gloria & Motets

Polyphony

Director: Stephen Layton

The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge

Britten Sinfonia

Gloria; Salve regina; Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence; Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël; Exultate Deo.

HYPERION CDA67623 TT 55:41

This disc has all the hallmarks of a great performance. Stephen Layton’s Polyphony joins forces with his choir from Trinity College, Cambridge. Layton has established himself as one of the finest choir directors on the scene. His recordings receive much praise for the way his choirs sing with vitality, enthusiasm and energy. This recording has the characteristics that are associated with Layton, a choir director who obviously does his homework in order that the performances are commanding and certainly convincing. The Britten Sinfonia is also on top form as is soprano Susan Gritton who is captivating. The Gloria is a work of contrasts that are brought off with finesse. The motets are glorious and full of passion. Recommended.

Patrick Mayhew

DAVID BRIGGS: REQUIEM ORGAN CONCERTO

Ave Maria

Euphony

Northern Chamber Orchestra

Director: Richard Tanner

Organ: Greg Morris

Recorded at Blackburn Cathedral

CHESTNUT MUSIC 002 TT 74:19

Imagine you have died and gone to heaven… The choirs of angels (Euphony) are praying for your safe deliverance to the pearly gates, and you get there to discover that neither John Rutter nor Maurice Duruflé (to name but two possible contenders!) were available to write the music for your requiem. Your disappointment is short-lived, when you hear the serene music, in the French impressionist style, wafting over you. “Who is the composer?” You ask. As I said, the music is serene, if a little unmemorable. The concerto is arresting and exciting, and the musicians at Blackburn Cathedral are incredibly lucky to have this collaboration with David Briggs who re-designed the organ and wrote the concerto to re-open said instrument. The choir and instrumentalists complete the cast. The music is recorded to perfection.

Stephen Power

MONTEVERDI VESPERS OF 1610

The Rodolphus Choir

Southern Sinfonia

The English Cornet and Sacbutt Ensemble

Director: Ralph Allwood

SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD109

TT CD1 51:20 CD 2 38:46

The Gramophone Classical CD Guide for 2007 lists over 10 recorded versions, by many eminent directors and groups, so Ralph Allwood faces some serious competition. At the trivial end of comparisons the new Signum duo of discs loses out on the lack of any ‘fill-ups’, by up to half-an-hour or more. The Rodolphus Choir members are aged 25 or under and are drawn from participants from the rightly legendary Eton Choral Courses. As you would expect, voices and blend are of uniformly high order, the singers fresh and enthusiastic and with enviable clarity of diction. They sound youthful without any sense of immaturity and are supported by an accomplished team of soloists and excellent instrumental support. There are some lovely moments (Audi coelum, with magical ‘echo’ effects, and the women in Sancta Maria) and this seems to me an altogether worthwhile performance, which should find many friends. My only reservation is about the recorded sound, which seems to me to lack any sense of spaciousness. Readers of my generation will recognise what I mean by a slightly ‘plum label’ sound. That said, you will not be disappointed, though other factors such as loyalty to particular musicians, or the lack of ‘fill-ups’ may also affect you choice from an impressive selection of recordings.

Richard Osmond

FULL OF WILLS! MUSIC BY ARTHUR WILLS

The boys of Ely Cathedral Choir

Director: Paul Trepte

Organ and piano: Jonathan Lilley

GUILD GMCD 7315 TT 72:53

Those of you who took this reviewer’s advice to buy and read Dr Wills’s autobiography Full with Wills will surely have become aware of the powerful stimulus to composition provided by his appreciation of his choristers’ ability and his delight in the traditions of the City and Cathedral of Ely. This highly enjoyable recording presents a well-contrasted mixture of ‘Ely specials’ and works written for other choirs; if the performances (and the piano!) are a little rough and ready, they nonetheless convey a great enthusiasm and are highly evocative of the grand and rugged building in which the boys sing day by day. Fully a third of the disc is devoted to Caedmon, a ‘somewhat free interpretation of the Venerable Bede’s account of St Caedmon’s calling’ with music in an overtly ‘popular’ musical idiom, huge fun and a regular feature of the programme for the choir’s visits to churches in the Ely diocese. Otherwise there are carols, anthems, a 1968 Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for Ely, a 1980 Mass (‘modern’ English text) for the Auckland Boys’ Choir, a Te Deum and a splendid march arranged for the organ from the Fenlands suite for brass band. Buy this CD and discover some very original and worthwhile music of great variety and interest.

Timothy Storey

THE ALPHA COLLECTION NO 11: PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL CHOIR. Royal Music from Peterborough Cathedral

Director: Christopher Gower

Organist: Gary Sieling

Parry I was glad; McKie We wait for thy loving kindness; Johnson Benedicam Domino; Willan O Lord our Governor; Byrd O Lord make thy servant; Lloyd Music for Queen Mary; Britten Jubilate Deo; Harris Te deum; McDonald The praises of that Queen; Victoria Ave Maria; Wesley Thou wilt keep him; Weelkes O Lord, grant the King; RVW Old 100th

PRIORY PRAB 110 TT 46:19

Recorded in 1987 in anticipation of H.M. The Queen’s visit in May of the following year during the celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the present building’s consecration, this anthology fittingly offers an ingeniously designed anthology of music united, albeit somewhat tenuously in places, by its association with royalty. The singers acquit themselves well, despite some funereally slow tempi; it was no doubt inevitable that the disc should begin with Parry’s I was glad, but if you feel that you could live without hearing this yet again you could always start with the second track, as there are some interesting rarities to enjoy in the rest of the programme. I would single out Benedicam Domino, a sacred madrigal by the Scottish priest Robert Johnson who became chaplain to Anne Boleyn, Healey Willan’s 1953 coronation anthem O Lord our Governor, and the rather fine B flat Te Deum which Sir William Harris composed for the 1937 Garter Day service in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Nor are O Lord, make thy servant and O Lord, grant the King a long life, prayers for Elizabeth I and James I by Byrd and Weelkes respectively, everyday fodder for most choirs. Recommended.

Timothy Storey

BRITISH CHURCH COMPOSERS SERIES -10: Richard Shephard

The Ecclesium Choir

Director: Philip Stopford

Organists: Richard Campbell and Stephen Hamill

I heard the voice of Jesus; The Secret of Christ; And when the builders; And didst thou travel light; Sing my tongue; Eternal light; Holy is the true light; May the power of your love; A new commandment; Preces; Lord I have loved the habitation; Magnificat & Nunc dimittis; Responses; Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem; Like all but like no other; Song of Mary; In darkness held; The shepherds heard the angels; Holy thorn that blooms; Never weather beaten sail; Christ whose glory fills the skies; The Easter Song of Praise.

PRIORY PRCD 840 TT 73:54

This makes for extremely agreeable listening, with uniformly good singing and some magnificent sounds from Belfast Cathedral’s fine Harrison organ.

Shephard is a versatile composer, who has written cathedral music of more than usual interest and also a quantity of smaller-scale works, often of the ‘hymn-anthem’ genre, suitable for choirs of more modest ability. His ‘cathedral style’ is represented here by a fairly unremarkable setting of the Evening Canticles and by two large-scale anthems, And when the builders and Ye choirs of new Jerusalem, both given exciting and sparkling performances; otherwise, the anthology is rather weighted in favour of the ‘short and easy’ end of the composer’s output, with a resulting monotony of effect. The inclusion of his Preces and Responses (plus a trio of collects) surely takes comprehensiveness to rather absurd lengths; it were far better to have ditched these (and a few anthems) in favour of one of his Mass settings. For all that, it is a disc of more than usual interest and quality, well worth adding to your collection.

Timothy Storey

BRITISH CHURCH COMPOSERS SERIES -11: Francis Jackson

The Choir of York Minster

Director: Philip Moore

Organist: John Scott Whiteley

Sing a new song; Dominie ihesu Christe; O people of sion; Blow ye the trumpet; O salutaris hostia; Tantum ergo; Benedicite in G; Jubilate Deo in G; Word made flesh; Remember for good, O Father; Laetentur coeli; Hereford Service; Audi Filia.

PRIORY PRCD 841 (originally issued as PRCD 611) TT 72:16

It is good to have this available again, now safely gathered into Priory’s British Church Composers series, and it is appropriate that most of the works included were composed for the Minster or at any rate sung there regularly while Dr Jackson was Organist. Furthermore, the accompaniments are in the safe hands of the composer’s last assistant and are every bit as colourful, imaginative and appropriate as one would expect. Many of you will perhaps also be pleased that the music is sung by a cathedral choir rather than the ad hoc ‘rent-a-mob’ ensembles employed for most of this series so far, excellent though many of them have been. The music is of great variety and interest, and most of it will probably be new to the listener, though Blow ye the trumpet and the Benedicite, here included, are also currently available in Dr Jackson’s own performances from the same record company (Alpha series, No. 6: York Minster Choir, PRAB 105). Especially striking are the two great anthems from the 1950s. For his own wedding Dr Jackson wrote Audi filia, a radiantly happy and attractive piece which is good to sing and to hear, and whose text is also suitable for Marian festivals; and the dedication of the Minster’s astronomical clock in 1955 as a memorial to the RAF brought forth Remember for good, O Father, wonderfully sombre and expressive but with moments of great power. It is perfect for Battle of Britain Sunday; why do those few places that still observe this anniversary always seem to dish up Greater Love, whose text has nothing at all to do with any sort of remembrance? This disc is by no means flawless, for the Minster choir seems overtaxed by some of the music and the sound engineers have done something very odd at the end of Audi filia, but nonetheless it contains many good things and I strongly advise you to buy it.

Timothy Storey

FIRE BURNING IN SNOW: BAROQUE MUSIC FROM LATIN AMERICA -3

Ex Cathedra Consort & Baroque Ensemble

Conductor: Jeffrey Skidmore

HYPERION CDA67600 TT 72:19

The first disc of Baroque Music from Latin America (New World Symphonies, Hyperion CDA67380, still available) created quite a sensation; your reviewer was not alone in being completely bowled over by it, for several of its tracks were almost daily listening on Classic FM for quite a while. Jeffrey Skidmore has continued to explore this rich, but until almost recently, completely forgotten treasury of music, and this new recording gives us the fruits of his visit to the Bolivian National Library to research the music of Juan de Araujo, born in 1648, who from 1680 until his death in 1712 was organist at the Cathedral of la Plata, now known as the Bolivian judicial capital of Sucre. One of his handful of liturgical pieces is included, an extended triplechoir setting of the Vesper Psalm Dixit Dominus, but most of his surviving works are non-liturgical, vernacular pieces in the popular villancico style; eight of these are included, and it is from the last few lines of one of them that this recording takes its title, as seeming to summarise the passion and dramatic contrast of this musical genre. The only other composer featured is Diego José de Salazar (c. 1660-1709), whose iSalga el torillo hosquillo!, a re-enactment of a

bull-fight with the matador transformed into the Virgin Mary, has already been recorded by these performers in another version; another re-working is the anonymous Hanacpachap cussicuinin, reputedly the oldest printed polyphony in the Americas (1631) which introduced the original disc alluded to above but which now appears in its complete form, 20 sombre verses, distributed five-ata-time throughout the programme. The performance is generally of the high quality one has come to expect from these forces, but sadly the overall effect is ultimately somewhat monotonous, the singers’ less-than-ideal intonation in later tracks perhaps indicating that Juan has begun to outstay his welcome with performer as well as listener. This is nevertheless a most distinguished disc of more than usual significance, though likely to appeal principally to devotees of this style and period of music.

Timothy Storey

JONATHAN WILLCOCKS: A GREAT AND GLORIOUS VICTORY AND OTHER WORKS

Tenor: Allan Clayton

Portsmouth Choral Union

English Cathedral Singers

Southern Pro Musica

Conductor: Jonathan Willcocks

PRIORY PRCD 877 TT 63:48

This is great and glorious fun, strongly recommended. Haydn’s Nelson Mass was an obvious choice for a concert in HMS Victory’s home in the Battle of Trafalgar’s bicentenary year, but it is rather too short for a full-length programme. The Portsmouth Choral Union therefore had the truly inspired idea of commissioning from its conductor a tailor-made programme-filler, using the same orchestral forces, and the result could not have been better. Willcocks has struck gold with this clever amalgam of great Victorian hymns (Lord of our life and God of our salvation, the last verse of Eternal Father, strong to save and The day thou gavest), parts of the Latin Requiem Mass and the Book of Common Prayer, and even the odd word or two from Nelson himself; and the music is both effective and accessible, with a particularly fine storm scene. The performance is entirely satisfactory, and I hope that choral conductors will buy this disc and take up this splendid work with their own choirs. If the other music on the disc is not of the same interest, who cares? It is worth buying just for the Glorious Victory

Timothy Storey

HOWELLS: HYMNUS PARADISI AND SIR PATRICK SPENS

Sopranos: Katy Butler and Claire Rutter

Tenor: James Gilchrist

Baritone: Roderick Williams

The Bach Choir

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: David Hill

NAXOS 8.570352 TT 65:01

‘The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking the blood-red wine/”O where shall I get a skeely skipper to sail this new ship o’ mine?” Sir Patrick Spens is the chosen skipper, who is sent somewhat against his better judgement to ‘bring hame the king’s daughter of Norroway’; and of course the trip ends in disaster with shipwreck and the loss of all on board. The twenty-five-year-old Howells composed this short cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra in 1917, a fine addition to the genre of nautical adventure popularised by Stanford and Vaughan Williams; most surprisingly, it had to wait until 1930 for its first and only performance in the composer’s lifetime. It is a swift-moving and vivid work, with the depiction of storm and shipwreck highly effective and the ensuing lament beautiful, gentle and most moving; the performance succeeds triumphantly, with Roderick Williams admirable as ever, in the taxing role of Sir Patrick himself and both orchestra and choir (who, I believe, received special coaching in the Scots dialect) sensitive to all the work’s demands. The accompanying Hymnus Paradisi is given a perfectly decent, slightly brisk and matter-of-fact performance which does not have anything particularly new to say; those in search of rare Howells run the risk of accumulating several such, as disc-fillers. One need not, however, feel guilty of great extravagance in buying this disc at the usual Naxos bargain price just for Sir Patrick Spens, for it is a great ‘find’ for which we should be very grateful to David Hill and all concerned.

Timothy Storey

ORGANCDs

THE ENGLISH CATHEDRAL SERIES VOL XIV

Paul Hale plays organ music from Southwell Minster.

Cooke Fanfare; Liszt Orpheus; Couperin Messe pur les Couvents; Karg-Elert Homage to Handel

REGENT

REGCD248

TT 79:34

It is an understatement to say that Paul Hale is a man of many parts. Having been Organist of Tonbridge School, Organ Scholar of New College, Oxford, and Assistant Organist of Rochester Cathedral, he became Rector Chori of Southwell Minster in 1989. Amongst other posts, he is also Organ Adviser to two Anglican dioceses, Conductor of Nottingham Bach Choir, Examiner for the RCO, and Chairman of his local area of the RSCM. He is an engaging speaker and, if judging only by this CD, an exceptionally fine organist. The unusual programme here of music from three different centuries demonstrates the wide resources of the Southwell Minster organ as well as Paul Hale’s formidable technique and exemplary playing. François Couperin (1668-1733) was known as ‘le Grand’ to distinguish him from the other members of the Parisian family of musicians. There is only one collection of Couperin’s organ music extant, the Pièces d’orgue. This consists of two Organ Masses, the Messe pour les Paroisses and the Messe pour les Couvents. The former was intended for the use of secular parishes ‘on solemn feast days’, and the latter for convents or abbey churches. In each Organ Mass, five movements of the ordinary, Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Ite Missa est are subdivided into many short sections, giving a total of 19 movements. As choirs are not part of the French Catholic tradition, during the celebration of the Mass, the organ would play a short movement after each section of the liturgy had been said or sung. These short sections often would be (and are today) improvised, and could be based on the appropriate plainchant. But the ‘convents’ for which this organ mass was written would all have their own non-standard chant. So there are no references to plainsong here, but the movements of the Mass are separated by appropriate chants by Nivers sung by Paul Hale (another one of his ’parts’) and four choristers from the Minster Choir. It all makes for a long (over 47 minutes), but very satisfying performance. John Cook (1918-1984) was British by birth, but emigrated to become organist of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Ontario. He later held posts in the USA. In 1951 he was commissioned to write the music for the Festival of Britain Pageant at Hampton Court, and the Fanfare is based on music from that score. The piece displays the variety of reed stops available on the Southwell instrument. Karg-Elert (1877-1933) must be known primarily for the 66 Chorale Improvisations, op 65, and particularly for the one on Nun danket alle Gott. (Some of the other 64 are worth playing too!) Homage to Handel consists of 54 variations on the ground bass from the Passacaglia, which is the final movement of Handel’s seventh keyboard suite in G minor. The variations use many technical devices, a variety of solo stops, and a variation on the Hallelujah Chorus. There are long crescendos, a bravura variation for pedals alone, and quadruple trills. The work was dedicated to the RCO in 1914, when Karg-Elert was elected an honorary member.

Liszt (1811-1886) composed the symphonic poem, Orpheus, for orchestra in 1854, and it was transcribed for organ by Robert Schaab, although the published version contained many amendments made by Liszt himself. The piece is not based on the story of Orpheus and Euridice, but portrays Orpheus himself –the singer with his lyre.

The accompanying booklet has succinct, but informative, programme notes, a brief biography of Paul Hale, and details (with specification) of the Southwell organ. All in all, this is a highly recommended issue. (OK then, I am a nit-picker –there is a small grammatical error in the booklet!)

David Knight

ALKAN Organ Works Vol 2

Kevin

organ of Blackburn Cathedral. Pro Organo; 12 Études pour les pieds seulement Nos 712; 11 Pièces dans le Style Religieux et 1 Transcription, du Messie de Handel.

TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC 0031 TT 73:40

This is the second disc in a series of three of Alkan’s organ music, most of

which appears to have been conceived for the pedal piano. The iconic 1969 Walker Organ in Blackburn Cathedral is heard here in its post 2002 guise following a rebuild and enlargement by Wood of Huddersfield, when the instrument acquired a new seven-stop Solo division and two digital pedal ranks, one each at 16’ and 32’, even though the original Walker scheme already provided a 32’ flue, albeit with an acoustic bottom end. In spite of these additions, the character and spirit of the original Walker scheme has been retained, mercifully, for all to appreciate and marvel at. The 12 Études date from the late 1860s and are a technical tour de force for the pedals only. Numbers 7-12, recorded here, present a balanced suite of contrasting musical moods and styles that make mindboggling demands of the player’s footwork; chords, grace notes played simultaneously by both feet and 4 against 3 figurations, all tackled with seemingly effortless ease. The 11 Pièces dans le Style Religieux are short character pieces and in them Kevin Bowyer demonstrates the full tonal range and palette of colours available on this quite remarkable instrument. Mr Bowyer’s keen ear for colour and registration captures the wide range of the musical moods and conveys the character of each individual piece. The final piece of the set is a transcription of the Pastoral Symphony from Handel’s Messiah. The disc also features the first recording of Alkan’s Pro Organo, a short piece for manuals only.

Jeffrey Williams

RESTORED TO GLORY

Thomas Trotter plays the organ of Birmingham Town Hall.

Commemorative recording 2007.

Handel Organ Concerto No 16 in F; Thalben-Ball

Variations on a theme by Paganini for pedals; Elegy; Best Concert Fantasia on a Welsh March; Ireland Villanella; Bizet Carmen Suite; Lemare Andantino in D flat major;Rondo Capriccio; Concertstück; Rienzi Overture

REGENT REGCD265 TT 75:44

After being present at the re-opening concert and then listening to this recording of the Birmingham Town Hall organ, one cannot but agree that the title, Restored to Glory, reflects adequately the work that N. P. Mander has done on this historic instrument. The title equally applies to the beautifully and sensitively refurbished building itself. When the Town Hall first opened in 1834, the instrument, built by William Hill, was the largest organ in Britain with four manuals and a complete set of pedals and, for the first time, 32ft pipes were incorporated into the decorative case. Over the years the size of the organ has grown from 3,000 to 6,000 pipes. There have been seven Birmingham City Organists since its opening, including Sir George Thalben-Ball from whom Thomas Trotter assumed the post. He has become a well-known part of the of the Birmingham scene, also giving regular recitals on the Klais organ in Symphony Hall and in Birmingham Cathedral following the closure of the Town Hall in 1996 for refurbishment. From time to time Trotter went into the building to play the instrument in order to monitor its condition. His programme for the CD shows off the instrument’s immense range of colour and features a programme of concert organ music all of which, as the excellent accompanying notes suggest, was composed or transcribed for this kind of instrument. Four of the six movements of Handel’s Organ Concerto No 16 in F, arranged by Trotter based on the reduction for organ solo by Marcel Dupré, fittingly give the start of the CD a ‘mood of festive celebration’. In an affectionate reminder of his distinguished predecessor, Thomas Trotter gives a flamboyant interpretation of Thalben-Ball’s tricky Variations on a Themeof Paganini for pedals. To hear it performed is one thing but to see it, through the specially designed organ stool which allows good viewing of the feet, is something else. A further touching ‘nod’ in the direction of Sir George is his evergreen Elegy. One is also reminded that John Ireland was a church organist in London for much of his life by Villanella, a delicate extract from his Miniature Suite. Where would town hall recitalists be without W. T. Best and Edwin Lemare? Both were great city organists, composers and arrangers and Lemare was in fact organist at St Margaret’s, Westminster, a post held today by Thomas Trotter. Best is represented by his Concert Fantasia on a Welsh Air and Lemare by no fewer than three of his own compositions and two arrangements of Bizet and Wagner. Indeed, the whole CD draws from the great town hall tradition with original works for the organ and colourful transcriptions to demonstrate this magnificently restored instrument.

Trevor Godfrey

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DREAMWORLD

Recorded in Gloucester Cathedral (organ works) and the Chapter House (Dreamworld).

Organist: David Briggs

Tenor: Edward Goater

Marche Episcopale; Variations on Greensleeves; Trio Sonata; Song Cycle Dreamworld; Variations on ‘Laudi Spiritual’; Fantaisie.

CHESTNUT MUSIC 001 TT 75:15

Last year’s organ recitals at Southwell Minster included James Bond film music, transcribed for duet. Will Chestnut’s 007 be a disc of similar transcriptions, I ask myself? Chestnut Music 001 is David Briggs’s first disc on his own record label, with recording production by Lance Andrews. The combination of performer and producer has been used before to great effect, and the quality of this particular recording is no surprise.

Briggs’s own musical compositions are greatly influenced by the French composers such as Debussy and Ravel, as well as organists such as Langlais, Tournemire and of course, J.S. Bach. The Marche Episcopale was written for the Incorporated Association of Organists (first performed at Southwell Minster) and is a useful addition to the repertoire. The Variations on Greensleeves put an amusing slant on this well-known melody, and features separate variations for the Cremona and Vox Humana reed stops, ending with a clever fugato movement. The virtuoso Trio Sonata has light and bubbly outer movements with a more sedate middle movement, in which Bach makes his presence felt. Dreamworld comprises six songs, sung in French by its dedicatee, Edward Goater. The lush, slow harmonies, occasionally mixed with great energy, played on a not terribly distinguished sounding Blüthner grand piano, accompany some impassioned melodies, performed with great expression and quality.

Laudi Sprituali is the name of a Victorian hymn tune, adopted by the Worshipful Company of Actuaries for their ceremonial song. It is given the Briggs treatment, as you might well hear him improvise. The Fantaisie is a 15minute long tryptique, which takes texts from Tennyson and Kahlil Gibran as its inspiration. It is a work full of contrasts and effects, tackling the different facets of human love. Translations with amusing and informative notes are contained in the accompanying booklet. David Briggs is emerging as one of the finest 21st century composers.

Stephen Power

THE ART OF ORGAN TRANSCRIPTION

David Briggs plays the organ of Blackburn Cathedral.

Schubert Symphony No 8 ‘Unfinished’; Tchaikovsky Symphony No 4 in F minor.

CHESTNUT MUSIC 003 TT 72:11

David Briggs observes in his programme notes that ‘at the beginning of the 20th century… the playing of orchestral transcriptions in organ concerts gave the general public virtually their only regular opportunity to experience the great orchestral and operatic repertoire first-hand.’ At the beginning of the 21st century, we’ve moved on somewhat. Audio equipment that can almost recreate the sound of live concert in our own homes is available at reasonable cost and we have the ability to obtain almost any work on demand via the Internet. It is therefore valid to ask why David Briggs has spent a great amount of time transcribing and recording these two works. His answer is simple –he has two aims. The first is to try to present the music in a new light, noting that a ‘good transcription can heighten our awareness of the message behind the music –we can listen with new ears as a new artistic dimension is given to the original.’ The second aim is to ‘entice lovers of organ music to branch out and explore the wonderful riches of the symphonic repertoire’, and he tells the story of an organ music enthusiast who knew Mahler’s Fifth Symphony only through Briggs’s transcription recording of it and whom he admonished to go out and buy the original thing. The question that readers will be expecting me to answer is ‘does it work?’, to which the answer is ‘yes’. The works do appear in a new and exciting light. We also hear the enormous range and tonal spread of the Blackburn organ, not an instrument which was conceived with the performance of transcriptions primarily in mind. Those of you who count yourselves as lovers of organ music and who don’t know these works can help David Briggs to achieve his second aim by buying the disc, listening to it and possibly then getting the ‘real thing’. I’m certain that you won’t regret it.

Tim Rogerson

FANFARES AND DANCES

Robert Sharpe plays the organ music of Paul Spicer on the organ of Truro Cathedral.

Four Pieces for Organ; Prelude; Suite for Organ; March for the Governor of Hong Kong; Elegy and Retrospect; Fanfares and Dances; The Martyrdom of St Oswald; Fanfares for Chad; Kiwi Fireworks. Dreams of Derry.

REGENT REGCD259 TT 79:17

Here we have the complete organ works of the Lichfield-based musical polymath, Paul Spicer. Robert Sharpe, a former assistant organist of Lichfield Cathedral, and Director of Music at Truro Cathedral, plays the ‘little giant’ Willis organ. Lovers of this instrument’s fine reed stops will be pleased to read that they get a good outing on this recording! The playing is assured, and the style of music is pleasing to the ear. All in all, a good disc showcasing the composer, performer, instrument and, once again, Gary Cole’s skill at capturing the sound. We must congratulate Robert Sharpe on his appointment to the post of Master of Music at York Minster, announced in February 2008.

Stephen Power

THE ORGAN OF ROMSEY ABBEY

David Coram

Organist: David Coram

Guilmant Scherzo Symphonique; Bridge Adagio in E; Bach Trio on ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr; Chorale

Prelude ‘O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross; Fughetta: Allein Gott in der Höh sei Her; Trio Sonata No 6, Movement 1 (Allegro); Warlock Capriol Suite; Gigout Scherzo; Scott Chorale Preludes Martyrdom & Adoro Te; Franck Chorale No 2

VIF RECORDS VRCD060 TT 63:38

This recording commemorates the 150th anniversary of the construction of this fine Walker organ. Romsey Abbey’s Assistant Organist, David Coram, puts the instrument through its paces in a programme which he feels ‘best encapsulates (the) various sides of the organ’s character.’ The recording, for me, is all the more remarkable given the organ’s deficiencies in the Swell string and 16’reed department; so much organ music from the 19th century to the present calls for such registers to be used. The tracks which stand out for me are the Scherzo Symphonique, the Bach Trio Sonata Movement (if only Coram had recorded the whole thing) and Franck’s Third Chorale. The lack of Vox Humana stop on this organ does not register with the Oboe and Tremulant create such a suitably plaintive sound. The Swell reeds sound well too in Gigout’s Scherzo. All-in-all this is a pleasing recording that shows off one of the country’s best 19th century instruments.

Stephen Power

OLIVIER MESSIAEN ORGAN WORKS

Michael Bonaventure plays the Rieger Organ of St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh.

Livre d’orgue; Méditations sur le mystére de la Sainte Trinité.

DELPHIAN DCD34016 CD1 TT 72:02 CD2 61:12

Olivier Messiaen had a wonderful skill at being able to transcribe bird song into organ sounds. It is a shame, therefore, that much of it is totally unmemorable. His music is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, which gives the modern organist a problem of when to play it, and which bits of the œuvre to play. Having said that, I surprise myself in that, the more I immerse myself in his music, the more it grows on me. This is helped by the compelling perfomance recorded by Delphian on this double CD by Michael Bonaventure, who puts the stunning Rieger organ at St Giles, Edinburgh, through it’s paces. I particularly enjoyed Méditation VI with the obvious use of plainsong. The Livre d’Orgue is more disjointed than the Méditations, so may be more difficult to comprehend. If you are a novice, don’t be put off purchasing this recording however. The booklet is informative but not too technical, and helps to put these works into context.

Stephen Power

BACH: CANTATAS Vol II

Cantata Movements for organ

four hands.

Euwe de Jong and Sybolt de Jong play on the 1727 Müller-organ Grote of Jacobijnerkerk, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.

Concerto Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh’ allzeit; Suite; Aria; Concerto; Trio Zudem ist weisheit und verstand; Gefigureerd koraal Der Leib zwar in der Erden; Trio Ertöt uns durch dein’ ‘Güte; Concerto Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig; Aria Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen; Prelude Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh’ darein.

Order from www.dejongdejong.nl English version TT 55:00

There is a diversity of contrasts in these skilful arrangements of Bach’s cantata movements by Sybolt de Jong and the playing by both performers is flawless throughout. At times four hands, four feet and all three manuals are used simultaneously. Yet at no time does the music suffer because of technical display; the playing conveys beautifully the character of each individual piece. As impressive as the arrangements and playing are, the real star of this recording for me is the magnificent 1727 Müller Organ, which sounds stunning in every respect. Unfortunately, there is no history of the instrument in the booklet, but there is the specification and, very happily, details of the registrations used. If you can get hold of a copy do so and bathe in the glorious sounds.

Jeffrey Williams

HISTORIC ORGANS OF MALLORCA

Played by Arnau Reynés I Florit and Michal Novenko.

Cabanilles Corrente italiana; Pascalles; de Cabezón Diferencias sobre el canto IIano del Caballero; y Coll Batalla de 5.tono; Puxoi Tiento; Frescobaldi Canzona dopo I’epistola; Correa de Arauxo Tiento pequeño y fácil; Literas Tonada; Bruna Tiento de primer tono de mano derecha y en medio a dos tiples; Ximenez Batalla de sexton tono; Elías 5 versos Novenko 5 Versos improvisados; Scarlatti Sonatas in C minor; D Major; G Major; Kuchafi Pastorale in C major; Albeniz Sonata in D; Salas Petita fuga; Thomás entrada; Villancico

PRIORY PRCD 865 TT 79:10

The organs of Mallorca are, we learn from the booklet, made up of two types, those in the Catalan-Balearic tradition, usually two manual instruments, and those of the Castilian tradition, single manual with ranks divided into treble or bass. The oldest organ featured on this disc dates from the 17th century and the most recent from 1823, in the Parish Church of Arta, which is also the smallest of the instruments represented. The largest is the organ of Sóller, housed in a striking case on a gallery beneath a rose window. Most of the music is from the Spanish school, not surprisingly, and many of the pieces are quite short, though there are some more substantial works. For me, the fascination of this disc is in the opportunity it affords us to hear some authentic Spanish pipework and voicing. Regal stops, mutations and Spanish Trompetas abound and how splendid it all sounds too, though the tuning is not always what we are used to here in these isles. There is a generous programme of music at just under 80 minutes and the booklet gives specifications of all the organs featured. One for the enthusiasts or even the curious.

Jeffrey Williams

RESPIGHI –POULENC –RHEINBERGER

Peter King plays Bath Abbey Organ.

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Conductor: François-Xavier Roth

Respighi Suite in G for Strings and Organ; Poulenc

Concerto in G minor for Organ, Strings & Timpani; Rheinberger Concerto No 1 for Organ Strings and three Horns.

REGENT REGCD257 TT 69:12

I enjoyed listening to this disc, which has been released to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Klais organ in Bath Abbey. The Poulenc Concerto is relatively well known, whilst the Respighi and Rheinberger works are less often performed. Peter King, the organ of Bath Abbey and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales are all on fine form and bring enthusiasm and vigour to these three works. The balance between organ and orchestra is also good; the organ never unintentionally dominates and softer organ solos emerge

through the orchestral texture clearly. An added bonus is that because the recording was made in Bath Abbey, which has a generous acoustic, there is more warmth generated by the natural reverberation of the building than would be the case in a studio or a purpose-built concert hall.

Tim Rogerson

SOUNDS OF SOUTHWELL Simon Bell plays the Nicholson Organ of Southwell Minster.

Bach Sinfonia from Cantata No 29; Guilmant Sonata III; Widor Scherzo ‘La Chasse’ from Symphony 2; Duprè Entrée, Canzona et Sortie; Widor transcribed Duprè Marche Américaine; Leighton Prelude, Scherzo and Passacaglia; Grainger Handel in the Strand; Locklair Rubrics

REGENT REGCD248 TT 66:10

The Nicholson organ at Southwell is crisp and tonally refined from its digitally enhanced pedal to its smallest, peppery mixture. The excellent sleeve notes make it clear that, due to the lack of available space, electronic basses are used to enable two 32’ stops and a 16’ Open Wood. These electronic bass stops integrate seamlessly as they augment the conventional wind-powered elements of the pedal department. The provenance of the pipework used in the construction of the instrument makes an interesting story in itself. The quality of the recording is very high and totally free of extraneous distractions. French composers get their fair share of time on this disk. Widor’s rather jolly Scherzo, now known as La Chasse due to its sporting style and horn intervals, makes a good introduction to the French contribution; a veritable paean to the hot pursuit of vermin!

Guilmant’s contact with the anglophone world centred around his concert tours of the USA where he was clearly a popular performer, self-publicist, an adept user of film as an advertising medium, and a lover of very big organs. Dupré’s featured composition on this recording was also written late in his musical career. Kenneth Leighton built his composition from a basis of flexible melodic structure, enabled by odd time, sounding over the contrast of an insistent harmonic foundation. It is hard to predict where this will all lead but it rapidly becomes gathered up in a disciplined fashion closely mimicking the harmony, atmosphere and precision of a medieval military brass section on the

march. The Passacaglia neatly unwinds into a final grand major chord. Simon Bell maintains a brisk tempo as he plays Handel in the Strand. There are contemporary reports that Grainger would allow a shambling gait tempo or taproom lilt to develop during piano performances of the piece, and he added further syncopation where appropriate in what is essentially a novelty piece from the 1930s. The final composition is Locklair’s Rubrics. The pipe-smoking, jet-setting American composer, equally at home with the music of William Byrd, Charlie Byrd, madrigal, spiritual, motet, waltz, reggae and ragtime, constructs a suite which uses, as its template, the schedule contained within the prayer book of the Episcopal Church. He draws upon a range of musical resources, historical and modern, to produce his work. The Peace May be Exchanged from this composition was used at the funeral service of former US President, Ronald Reagan. Simon Bell plays this complete selection with a deft touch which, together with a quality instrument and excellent audio engineering, produces a first-class recording.

Michael Smith

RE-ISSUEDCDs

THOMAS WEELKES

The Choir of Winchester Cathedral

Director: David Hill

Organ: Timothy Byram-Wigfield

Voluntarie I & II; Alleluia! I heard a voice; All laud and praise; Laboravi in gemitu meo; Give the king thy judgements; Pavan; O Lord, arise; Service for Trebles; Give ear, O Lord; If King Manasses; When David heard; O how amiable; Gloria in excelsis Deo; O Jonathan; Hosanna to the Son of David. HYPERION (HELIOS) CDH55259 TT 66:32

Wonderful singing by the Winchester Choir. A CD re-issue that is superb Voluntarie 1 opens this atmospheric programme followed immediately by a sumptuous Alleluia! I heard a voice. The singing sets the quality for what is to follow. A fine, resonant performance of Hosanna to the Son of David concludes the recital. Sandwiched in between are equally accomplished performances of some of Weelkes’s magnificent compositions. Superlative singing by David Hill’s choir.

Daniel Reed

ORGAN WORKS BY BUXTEHUDE & JACKSON

Graham Matthews plays the organ of Sheffield Cathedral (1979)

Francis Jackson Fanfare; Pageant ; Diversion for Mixtures; Toccata-Prelude: Watchet Auf; Toccata in B minor; Archbishop’s Fanfare; Buxtehude Magnificant primi toni; Chorale Prelude: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland; Fugue in C; Prelude, Fugue & Chaconne

HERALD HAVPCD 338 TT 45:55

This is a re-issue of a cassette recording made in 1979 by the then Master of the Music at Sheffield Cathedral, Graham Matthews. The significance of this recording is put into sharp focus given that the organ is now unplayable. As a deputy songman and organist at the Cathedral I am regularly reminded of this fact hearing the sound of the present ‘temporary’ digital installation. The playing by Matthews is assured and the sound of the instrument is warm and compelling. The juxtaposition between music of the two master musicians featured here works well, though some modern-day consumers will note the short length of this CD; it serves as an historical record of one of the country’s finest new instruments of the 1960s. Perhaps in the not too distant future, a pipe organ of similar stature will sound out in Sheffield Cathedral.

Stephen Power

FRENCH CHORAL JEWELS

The Choir of Worcester Cathedral Director: Donald Hunt

Villette Tu es Petrus; Hymne à la Vierge; Attende Domine; O salutaris hostia; Ave verum corpus; Fauré Messe Basse; Poulenc Litanies à la Vierge Noire de Rocamadour; Salve regina; Exulte Deo; Messiaen O sacrum convivium; Langlais Mass ‘Grant us thy Peace’.

GRIFFIN GCCD 4061 TT 73:40

A compilation re-release disc of the Worcester choir during incorporating tracks from five different recordings made in 1976 (with Harry Bramma at

the organ), 1977, 1983 (with Paul Trepte accompanying), 1984 and 1988 (accompanied by Adrian Partington). Of particular interest to this reviewer was the ‘Grant us thy Peace’ Mass. Langlais offered to write this work after having given a recital at Worcester as ‘a tribute to the great musical traditions that were so lovingly preserved in that beautiful place’, and it received its first performance at the 1981 Three Choirs Festival. We are told (in Donald Hunt’s carefully prepared notes) that Langlais was especially devoted to the ‘wonderful language of the Prayer Book’ and so the Mass uses the BCP texts. Donald Hunt also notes that the items on the ‘disc were recorded over a period… during which time the Cathedral Choir built up an enviable repertoire of French church music. Naturally the personnel of the choir changed… but the commitment and sincerity of the performances remained consistent throughout this time and it is hoped that this will be conveyed to the listerer in what may be an unfamiliar yet very refreshing and spiritually uplifting programme’. Give it a try, you might enjoy it!

Tim Rogerson

DUFAY Music for St Anthony of Padua

The Binchois Consort

Director: Andrew Kirkman

Missa de S Anthonii de Padua; O proles Hispaniae/O sidus Hispaniae.

HYPERION (HELIOS) CDH55271 TT 50:02

HOWELLS & VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Corydon Singers

Director: Matthew Best

Organ: Thomas Trotter

Howells Requiem; Take him, earth, for cherishing; Vaughan Williams Mass in G minor; Te Deum in G.

HYPERION (HELIOS) CDH55220 TT 60:26

Two great CDs. Dufay’s music is given an outstanding performance by Andrew Kirkman’s Binchois Consort. As to the Howells and Vaughan Williams, I have worn out my original CD and so am grateful for the re-issue. The Corydon Singers is one of my favourite groups. This is a ravishing performance of the Mass in G minor and Take him, earth. This singing group tackles the a cappella music on this disc superbly. Simply beautiful singing and a must.

Andrew Palmer

-

Globe Touring Company

- World première of Andrew Gant Symphony

Cathedral MUSIC Cathedral MUSIC

Allegro Music ................................................................66

Banks Music....................................................................61

Canterbury Cathedral Choir ........................................64

Carlisle International Summer Festival ......................28

Christ Church Cathedral School ................................63

Common Praise ............................................................10

Dean Close Preparatory School ..................................15

Edington Festival ..........................................................56

Festival of the Sons of the Clergy..................................67

George Sixsmith Organs ..............................................61

Harrison & Harrison ....................................................20

Herald ............................................................................58

Hexham Abbey Festival ................................................51

Hymns of Glory, Songs of Praise ..................................28

Incorporated Association of Organists ........................47

Kenneth Tickell ............................................................47

Leeds Parish Church ....................................................25

Makin Organs ..................................................................2

Advertisers and Supporters

Matthew Copley Organ Design ....................................20

New English Hymnal ....................................................10

Orgues Aubertin ..........................................................11

Regent Records ............................................................67

Ripon Cathedral Voice Trials ......................................61

Royal School of Church Music ....................................61

Salisbury Cathedral Voice Trials ..................................67

South Bank Messiaen Festival ......................................56

Southern Cathedrals Festival ......................................63

St Davids Cathedral Festival ........................................55

St John’s College Choir ................................................47

St Paul’s Foundation......................................................29

Three Choirs Festival ....................................................65

Viscount Classical Organs..............................................63

Westminster Abbey Choir ............................................51

Westminster Cathedral Organ Series ..........................15

Xatrox ............................................................................15

CORPORATION OF THE SONS OF THE CLERGY 354th Festival Service

Tuesday, 13 May -5.30 pm St Paul’s Cathedral

Three choirs will take part from Ripon, Truro and St Paul’s Cathedrals.

Free tickets are available: send SAE to The Registrar, Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, 1 Dean Trench Street, Westminster, London, SW1P 3HB.

Tel: 020 7799 3696

www.clergycharities.org.uk

SALISBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR

“Alabelwhoseorganrecordingsareconsistentlyamongstthefinestemergingtoday”

Thelatestreleasein

✣ The ENGLISHCATHEDRAL Series ✣

VOLUMEXIV-SOUTHWELL

playedby PaulHale

Fanfare Cook, Orpheus Liszt, HomagetoHandel Karg-Elert MessepourlesCouvents Couperin(thecompletework,withchantbyNivers) REGCD248

PICTURESATANEXHIBITION

RussianandFrenchShowpiecesforOrgan ROBERTHOUSSART OrganofGloucesterCathedral

Troïka(LieutenantKijé) Prokofiev,HommageàIgorStravinski Hakim, Toccata Guillou,PicturesatanExhibition

REGCD267

ACandletotheGloriousSun

Sacredsongsby JohnMiltonandMartinPeerson

TheChapelChoirofSelwynCollege,Cambridge Directedby SarahMacDonald

ThefirstrecordingofthecompletesacredmusicbytheEnglishTudor composer,JohnMilton(fatherofJohnMiltonthepoet)coupledwitha selectionofsacredworksbyMilton’srenownedcontemporary,MartinPeerson. REGCD268

Previouslyreleased...

thefirsttwovolumesofMargaretPhillips’Bachseries

Do you know a child who loves singing?

Salisbury Cathedral Choir offers a wonderful opportunity in a spectacular setting

INFORMAL PRE-AUDITIONS at any time by arrangement

BE A CHORISTER FOR A DAY

Saturday 15 November 2008

Open Day for prospective choristers in Years 2, 3 & 4 and their parents

VOICE TRIAL WORKSHOP

Saturday 6 December 2008

VOICE TRIALS

for children currently in Years 3 or 4

Boys - Saturday 24 January 2009

Girls - Saturday 7 February 2009

All children are educated at Salisbury Cathedral School Scholarships and bursaries available

For an informal discussion with the Director of Music and/or further details please contact: Dept of Liturgy & Music

Tel: 01722 555148

Email: s.flanaghan@salcath.co.uk

(all2-CDsetsatspecialprice)

“theseareorganrecordingsparexcellence.....Listeningtothisdiscisarealaural delight.Phillipsiscertainlyanuncannilyvividandperceptiveinterpreter......Some ofthefinestperformancesofBachChoralepreludesondisc.” InternationalRecordReview forreleaseinSummer2008:

Vol3theTrostOrgan,Waltershausen REGCD276 Vol4TrinityCollege,Cambridge REGCD258

Mussorgski