Cathedral Music: Autumn 2008

Cathedral MUSIC

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Cathedral Music

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

ISSN 1363-6960 NOVEMBER 2008

Editor

Andrew Palmer

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ajpalmer@lineone.net

Assistant Editor Roger Tucker

Editorial Advisers

David Flood & Matthew Owens

Production Manager Graham Hermon

FCM e-mail info@fcm.org.uk

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Cathedral MUSIC Cathedral MUSIC

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CM Comment Andrew Palmer’

disbursements: from forty foundation members in 1956 we have grown to nearly 4000 and from our first grant of £200 in 1961, to Barry Rose at Guildford, the annual total has risen to over £100,000, from which almost every cathedral foundation and some of the Greater Churches have benefited. The ‘modernist pressures’ refers to popularising the traditional liturgy and the introduction of unconventional forms of worship, at its worst in the ‘ravein-the-nave’ type of event popular in the 1990s. Choral standards, in my own experience since my days as a chorister, have risen steadily, due to better training, no doubt helped by the ease of making ever higher quality recordings of services and concerts and the availability of an enormous discography of the repertoire.

2009 will be my eighteenth year as editor and during this time I have seen many changes in our field so I want to attempt some kind of evaluation of the state-ofthe-art of cathedral music. It has become something of an FCM cliché to assert, as we do in the Charity Choice encyclopaedia ‘the music in our cathedrals has never been finer but, although widely appreciated, its future is threatened by both economic and modernist pressures’. I now want to put that question up for scrutiny. The statement suggests the ‘glorious tradition’ (another of our straplines) could be undermined. At the time of FCM’s foundation in 1956 the tradition was certainly at risk because of the post-war lack of funds and musicians in the cathedrals, which was why Ronald Sibthorp set up the charity. The aim of restoring choral services to their pre-war levels and raising the performing standards was one that was indeed widely shared and people came forward to support the ‘living tradition’ with their membership subscriptions and donations. These are all part of our core aims: to safeguard our priceless heritage, increase public awareness and appreciation, encourage high standards and, of course, raise funds. The success of the charity is borne out by the steady growth in our membership and cash

This has itself grown, enriched by choral works by some of the leading composers of modern times from Herbert Howells (our second President) and Benjamin Britten, via Johns Rutter and Tavener, to Philip Moore and James Macmillan. Radio and television have helped to raise standards through coverage of choir competitions, The Chorister of the Year event, the weekly broadcasts of Choral Evensong and the growing number of cathedral festivals and concerts, which sustain a tradition started by the oldest of them all, the Three Choirs Festival. Much of these higher standards are due to the talented cathedral music directors, who can now listen to one another’s efforts via increasingly high quality media.

The much trumpeted opposition to girls singing the top line in cathedral choirs on the grounds that it might

OBITUARY Hugh Curtis

undermine the male tradition and drive the boys away is now seen to have been unfounded. Cathedrals that have recruited girls to provide an alternative top line have found it of benefit in several ways: it has brought more families into contact with cathedral music, competition between the two groups has provided a challenge to the boys to sing better and therefore a higher standard for the girls to emulate; by sharing out the choirs’s workload it has also made it possible to sing Choral Evensong daily, including on the most popular visitor day, Saturday. On the negative side there is the additional cost of all this and the extra workload for the lay clerks, who are in any case below strength in several cathedrals and cannot provide additional voices. Also the reduction in the singing opportunities for boys, who used to sing on most days, can result in less practice. We must recognise some of us prefer one group over the other and that the majority of cathedral music directors are not in favour of mixing boys’ and girls’ voices. In fact this was advised against in the 1992 Report of the Archbishops’s Commission on Church Music. There is still only one cathedral in England (Manchester) whose choir has a mixed top line, and one in Scotland (St Mary’s Edinburgh), the latter is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary (see Duncan Ferguson’s article on page 44). However, several more combine the two groups for special services e.g. at Christmas. All of this presents a great challenge to FCM to develop some kind of road-map for the future and for this members need to give their views. Please do so!

I am sad to have to report the death of our long-serving and popular former DR for Chichester, Hugh Curtis, who broke the all-time record for member recruitment in his time. He was the first DR coordinator and a member of Council. His memorial service will be held in Chichester Cathedral on 23 January at Evensong.

...the music in our cathedrals has never been finer but, although widely appreciated, its future is threatened by both economic and modernist pressures.

Philip Stopford

Protruding out of the roof of Belfast Cathedral, stands defiantly the Spire of Hope, a recent addition to St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, and a symbol FCM members were heading for on Passion Sunday this year. Consecrated in 2007 it stands proudly representing a united city. The red glow from the wall heaters located in the nave imbued a sense of warmth that was reflected in the welcome from the staff. There was great anticipation from everyone in the congregation wanting to hear Philip Stopford’s choir.

Philip was appointed Director of Music of St Anne’s Cathedral, in January 2003. He began his musical career as a Chorister at Westminster Abbey, under the direction of first Simon Preston and then Martin Neary. Following a year as Organ Scholar at Truro Cathedral, Philip won a place at Keble College, Oxford, where he read Music and was Organ Scholar. In 1999, he moved to Canterbury Cathedral to be Organ Scholar before securing his first full-time post as Assistant Organist at Chester Cathedral in 2000. In Chester, Philip was responsible for the Cathedral Voluntary Choir, and

accompanying the Cathedral Choir on a daily basis, up to ten choral services a week. He also taught music in local schools, and began receiving commissions to compose church music.

Since arriving in Belfast as Director of Music, he has been innovative in setting up the Cathedral Youth Choir and Cathedral Voices, both broadening the appeal of music at the Cathedral and providing a wider scope for repertoire possibilities. He is responsible for training the Cathedral Choristers, who are recruited from various schools in Belfast and beyond.

Andrew Palmer in conversation with

All photos © Graham Hermon

The first thing Philip says is: “I’m sure you noticed that we have ladies who sing alto, so we are not truly an all-male choir.” Indeed, one thing is certain, FCM members will have picked up on this fact. So how did it come about? Philip explains: “This tradition stems from the much bigger choral society sty1e of choir that would have been here in the early part of the twentieth century.” During a talk he gave after the Eucharist he pointed out to those gathered that everyone can fit in the choir stalls, which demonstrates there must have been a good sixty or seventy people in the choir. “Nowadays, of course, the fashion is very different, with much smaller choirs. St Anne’s Cathedral has had periods of mixed voice top line singing with both adult sopranos and treble voices, and it is only relatively recently that the top line of the cathedral choir has been produced solely by boys’ voices.”

During his talk, Philip points out that Belfast and Northern Ireland has a very proud history of singing, and there are some particularly fine school choirs, mostly involving girls rather than boys. “We do not have a girls’ choir as such at the moment, because I felt it was important for the Cathedral to contrast with the schools and offer singing to boys exclusively. Having said that, we do offer singing opportunities to girls in the Cathedral Youth Choir, but they are older girls, 15 or 16 and above and the remit of the choir is specifically different from the Cathedral Choir, in that its main focus is concert work. This was launched in 2004, as part of the centenary celebrations.”

The third choir, Cathedral Voices, is a select group of sopranos, who join forces with the cathedral choir adults and who perform a more diverse repertoire. This also provides the choristers with half-term breaks and some other Sundays off during the year. Cathedral Voices were preparing to sing at the forthcoming Maundy Thursday Eucharist.

The cathedral’s choirs are all predominantly voluntary. “Having surveyed the music of 2007, I discovered that the choir had sung 376 items in the year, excluding the psalms and hymns, and that if we had sung all the music continuously without stopping, it would have taken nearly 18 hours. When you think that Belfast has the Ulster Orchestra which, does fewer performances, then St Anne’s Cathedral Choir isn’t too bad really for a group of volunteers.” says Philip proudly. St Anne’s Cathedral attempts to offer the same musical and spiritual opportunity that is offered to all cathedral choristers and it offers those memories that last a lifetime.

During his talk Philip plays examples of his copious compositions: in particular we are treated to the Gloria from the Centenary Eucharist. We had missed out on hearing it due to the season being Lent.

Philip says it came about after Ian Barber (who is celebrating 25 years as Assistant Organist) and his wife Jean, asked the Dean if they could commission a musical work as part of the Centenary Celebrations in 2004. “When they approached me to do this I agreed but suggested that a setting of the Eucharist would be more useful perhaps than an anthem and hence the Centenary Eucharist was composed.” It has been recorded by Philip’s chamber choir Ecclesium and recorded by Priory Records in St Anne’s.

“It always amuses me that many cathedral choirs are still singing Sumsion, Darke, Howells, and all those 20th century greats, and then I ask myself why?”

“I believe that the answer lies in the fact that they have functionality in what they offer, and yet are beautiful none the less. Writing music for the liturgy has to be exactly that for any work to have longevity. It is not every cathedral choir or parish choir that can sing Vaughan Williams in G every week, and it is not every dean or clergy person who wants that. The focus for composition has to be the event, occasion and liturgy for which the new work is required,” he says.

In 2004, the Church of Ireland produced a new Book of Common Prayer, and Philip felt it was appropriate to set the Eucharistic text from this new book. He explains that while the same principles of any Eucharist setting need to be adhered to, such as an uplifting Gloria, with a more reflective Kyrie and Agnus Dei, the creativity of the music must be new and exciting and yet manageable week by week as much as possible, otherwise the music falls out of the repertoire.

“I hope to have achieved some of these qualities in this setting of the Eucharist, and also taken into account the Cathedral’s expansive acoustic and the powerful four manual Harrison organ.” He has woven the St Anne hymn tune into the Gloria

Similarly, in 1997, he composed the Keble Missa Brevis for the service of Corporate Communion, when parish churches associated with Keble College, Oxford, were invited to attend a Eucharist and dinner in college. The setting was in English,

harmonically and musically accessible, yet inspiring and fun, and showed off the strongest parts of the choir.

It is not a new phenomenon. Organists have been writing church music for choirs for hundreds of years. Examples would include: Thomas Tomkins at St Davids Cathedral, Henry Purcell at Westminster Abbey and William Byrd at Lincoln Cathedral. Cathedral organists, would-be directors of music and composers would write music for their choirs all the time, as of course did J S Bach. “Yet nowadays, some cathedral organists shy away from doing just this. In the same way that you would expect architects to design houses, surely church musicians should design choral music and have an inside knowledge on how to do it. I heard of one non-church musician who was asked to write a set of responses and they lasted 15 minutes and were in 24 parts! Lovely music but highly impractical for everyday worship and your everyday choir.”

One of the richest sources of words comes in the form of the Collects and I put this to Philip. He is enthusiastic: “They are a challenging and often neglected source. Each has different characteristics and are related to Sunday services. Sometimes I have a commitment to the text but it can take a couple of weeks to compose whilst others take three hours.

So what other texts are there to set? Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, a Eucharist, Compline? The same as it has been for 450 years in the Prayer Book. Then there are carol services and special occasions.

Last year, the Cathedral consecrated the Spire of Hope,

which he points out to those gathered for his talk, we were sitting under! The service was scheduled for September 11th and the preacher, the Bishop of New York. The theme of the service? Hope, the link between the two cities through troubles in Northern Ireland and terror in New York.

So how did he approach writing a composition? “As DoM, I was left thinking, what are we going to sing? What anthem by Tomkins, Purcell or Byrd is going to fit that occasion? And this is where the art of composition is such a gift. I researched some words taken from a service of commemoration in New York soon after 9/11, and combined the words of St Francis of Assisi, ‘where there is despair, let there be hope’. This work opened the service, with a bass drum pulsating through the music from start to finish. On this occasion, the music was able to open up a challenging and thought-provoking service and was specifically related to the liturgy taking place. We are recording this work at the end of this month.”

Philip is also often asked by schools and colleges both here and abroad to set very familiar texts. Two recent examples have been In the bleak midwinter and All things bright and beautiful. “These commissions are often the most difficult, because they have already been set so beautifully, if not by Rutter, then by one of his friends!

“Have you noticed how few musical settings there are of All things bright and beautiful ? I found this nearly impossible to compose, staying within the standards of a primary school choir and yet making it interesting and rewarding to

learn and perform.”

So equally, what were the challenges for In the bleak midwinter? Dare anybody come up with a melody better than Holst or Darke?

Philip says that with this one he tried to compose as simply and as beautifully, but significantly differently to be worthwhile. “As with any text that is versified, once the first verse has been composed to a new melody, it is then a case of arranging the following verses around your new tune! After all, that’s what Harold Darke did, and it works!”

Sometimes, he has made arrangements of pieces he is not so keen on! “Silent Night and We Three Kings were never my favourites”, he says, “so I decided to take a longer look at the words, and arrange the music in a way that the listener might think again. Have you ever thought that Silent Night is actually quite joyful at the end? ‘Christ our Saviour is born!’ Similarly, in the somewhat trivial We three Kings, have you noticed that the crux of the Christian message is contained in this carol, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, not very Christmassy and often overlooked.” Here he punctuates the silence once again with a recording of We Three Kings, again sung by Ecclesium.

I ask what it is like to hear your composition being sung. “In 2006, I was invited out to Indianapolis to work with the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, and to meet with my American publishers, Hal Leonard. When I got to the first rehearsal there were about 100 children on stage singing my carol, A Child is born in Bethlehem. There is certainly nothing more satisfying than seeing, what is essentially a piece of paper with a few

CAMPAIGN FOR THE TRADITIONAL CATHEDRAL CHOIR

President: Dr Simon Lindley

scribbles, being enjoyed by so many people. It was only later on in the day that I discovered there were 10 or 12 choirs of 100 children in each choir, all turning up to rehearsals two or three times a week, with 10 conductors, 10 musical assistants and 10 accompanists, and each child paying $300 a year to be a member. It is astonishing that singing in this way can evidently be so rewarding and uplifting, and I wonder if we can bring an element of this back into our own cathedral choirs.”

“In the UK-wide cathedral music scene, we are blessed with hundreds of years of tradition, and a wealth of choral repertoire that is unrivalled across the world, but perhaps we need to sometimes think slightly outside the box, and gamble on new music that is fun to learn and to perform and uplifting for congregations and audiences alike. And as a cathedral organist-composer, I must try to produce music that not only reflects our tradition, but also inspires and challenges congregations, and glorifies 450 years of Anglican Liturgy as emotively as possible, whilst remaining within a standard that is both performable and has longevity.”

Philip is fast becoming a composer of note, with his own publishing company ‘Ecclesium’ doing well, who has recently signed an American publishing deal with Hal Leonard (www.halleonard.com). The CD of his own church music compositions (part of Priory Records‘ British Church Composers series) received ‘Editor’s Choice’ in the September 2006 issue of Organists’ Review and reviewed in CATHEDRAL MUSIC November 2005. He has also just released a second volume Creation on the Priory label.

SALISBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR

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

To obtain your free copy of the latest list send a SAE (size DL: 110 x 220 mm) to:

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CTCC

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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

As part of our mission to support traditional choirs of men and boys, we are offering free guides listing Cathedrals, Churches, Colleges and Chapels in the United Kingdom and eire where they can be heard.

‘The Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ New York Times

A Sermon linked to the Gospel (Year A) on Passion Sunday preached in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast on Sunday, 9 March 2008 to the Northern Ireland National Gathering of the Friends of Cathedral Music by Bishop Edward Darling, former Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe.

Why this WASTE?

Bishop Edward warmly welcomed the representatives of the Friends of Cathedral Music and conveyed a personal message from the Dean expressing his regret that, due to his previously planned visit to Australia, he could not be present in person to welcome them, but that he extends his good wishes and blessing on the remainder of their National Gathering in Northern Ireland. Bishop Edward went on to say:

“As you come here this morning to share in the traditional Eucharistic worship in this Cathedral Church, I would like to invite you to focus your thoughts on all that is implied in the second sentence in today’s Gospel which has just been read for us: ‘Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.’ That reference, of course, was to an incident which had taken place sometime earlier at Bethany, the same venue as the scene of this morning’s Gospel story –an incident which has a certain relevance for us today as we consider the important place that music plays in the context of cathedral worship.

“With the shadow of the cross deepening before him on

that former occasion in Bethany, Jesus was enjoying a quiet homely dinner with some friends. ‘As he sat at the table’ –no picturesque wording can paint the scene more faithfully than the simple language of the Gospel itself –‘as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.’ And we might have expected that Our Lord’s disciples, his closest friends, would have welcomed this action, that their hearts would have vibrated with sympathy. After all, they knew more than anyone else who and what he was. They had been uplifted with the dazzling hope that he was to be the promised Messiah for whom their nation yearned; but they could not be made to grasp the fact that, in order to reach his Messiahship, he would have to die. They just could not see that this anointing by a tender-hearted woman was, as it were, a prelude to his death, a preparation for his burial. He had certainly told them on more than one occasion that he would have to die, but it never really sank in. And this slowness of theirs to understand the situation showed itself

Photograph © Graham Hermon

clearly in the question which they found themselves asking. They looked at that woman lavishing her love and affection as she poured out her ointment, and they asked: ‘Why was this ointment wasted in this way?’ or, as Matthew puts it more succinctly in his account of the same story, ‘Why this waste?’

“But I don’t suppose she even heard the question! If she did, well, she was probably so absorbed in her devotion that the rebuke would mean very little to her. But, if the words didn’t hurt her personally, think of the pang they must have given Jesus himself. ‘This ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor’ was the argument put forward. It could indeed! And that is both a worthy and a noble thought. It is an admirable thing to help the poor. Nobody is questioning that for one moment and, had the ointment been sold and the money given to the poor, Jesus would probably have been delighted. But what must have been a bitter disappointment to him was that, even at this late hour, his own disciples were not yet spiritual enough to be able to appreciate sheer uncalculated love and affection.

“In the Passover week that had just begun, almsgiving was considered a duty of paramount importance; public opinion demanded it, and, therefore, everybody did it. And those disciples of our Lord found it hard to imagine how Mary, who

ought to be giving alms to the poor, could throw it all away just like this: ‘Why this waste?’

“And, you know, history repeats itself today. In my dealing with clergy, for instance, during my fifteen years as Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe, I became acutely aware that if any of the clergy tried to show our Lord any kind of spiritual devotion or affection to which their parishioners were not accustomed, the same sort of question was asked: ‘Why this waste?’ You see, while many of the laity want the clergy to be sincere people, they also want them to be practical people. They want the gospel to be a gospel of social concern for those in need. And, of course, they are absolutely right, and much of a priest’s ministry just has to be spent in bringing relief and help to the needy. No, I wouldn’t quibble with that at all. But what they don’t seem to understand is that Christ calls each one of us, whether we are ordained or whether we are lay, to serve him and that calling and vocation surely demands a response of love and affection for him in a complete outpouring of ourselves.

“When I began my ministry almost 52 years ago on the Shankill Road, not very far from here, it was customary for the Rector and the three of us who were his curates to meet each morning and evening in the parish church for the daily office of Matins and Evensong, and sometimes people asked us: ‘Do you get many at your daily services of Morning and Evening Prayer?’ And, when we replied ‘No’, or if we should have volunteered the additional information that there were often times when there was nobody present but ourselves, they look puzzled, bewildered, perhaps even horrified, and they invariably asked a second question: ‘Is it worth it?’ That happened on a number of occasions. You see, they were genuinely concerned that we should be tying ourselves down to special times of prayer when we should be leaving ourselves freer to make our ministry a practical one of readily caring for those in genuine need; and, of course, the question that they were really asking is ‘Why this waste?’

“As I said earlier, history repeats itself. We heard that same question here in the course of the past twelve months as we witnessed the erection of the Cathedral’s Spire of Hope: ‘Why this waste?’ Many just could not see that the spire is a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation in a city that has been torn apart for many years by strife, violence and bloodshed.

“And I am sure that there are many friends of cathedral music who have heard that same question: ‘Why this waste?’ over and over again: they will have heard it as they have tried to increase public awareness and appreciation of the priceless heritage of cathedral music; they will have heard it as they have tried to encourage the highest possible standards in choral and organ musicianship; they will have heard it as they have tried to raise money by subscriptions, donations and legacies to help choirs to attain both excellence and dignity in the offering of our worship to Almighty God. Yes, ‘Why this

Photograph © Graham Hermon

Many just could not see that the spire is a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation in a city that has been torn apart...

waste?’ is the kind of question that is familiar to us all. But in that incident at Bethany, referred to at the beginning of this morning’s Gospel, Mary did not pour out her ointment and wipe our Lord’s feet with her hair for the good of her own soul; no! It was a spontaneous desire on her part to give her all as she committed herself to her Saviour Jesus Christ. And that is what the disciples called ‘waste’.

“And so, those of you who are Friends of Cathedral Music, I commend what you stand for, what you appreciate, what you are striving to achieve. But I would want to add this: there will be times when many will either misunderstand or misinterpret your aims and objects, your purpose and intent; there will be times when people will just not be able to appreciate the wealth of beauty and dignity that is conveyed through the music offered to Almighty God in cathedral worship; indeed there will be times when they will interpret such perfection as a complete waste of time: ‘Why all this highfalutin music which people find dull, boring, monotonous, meaningless and unnecessary, when we could be worshipping God in a much more simple way in a more direct, personal, intimate and costeffective way?’ Yes, ‘Why this waste?’

“But the question we have to ask ourselves is: ‘Is it a waste?’ In attempting to answer that question, allow me to cite one very obvious local example. Whenever I stop and consider the talent, the musicianship and the dedication of the Director of Music here, the assistant organist and the choir of this cathedral church, I think I am on pretty safe ground when I make the suggestion that, were it not for the standard and the beauty of the music offered to Almighty God in this place, there probably wouldn’t even be a parish church, let alone a Cathedral, standing on this very site in modern downtown Belfast. It is the cathedral music more than any anything else that brings people to worship God in this place. It is the cathedral music that stimulates men and women to come here and open their hearts to their Creator in a form of worship that is disciplined and dignified. And that is a phenomenon that is surely true of cathedrals all over the world. How true is that comment of a music critic in a national newspaper which I read on the website of the Friends of Cathedral Music!: ‘The choir is the life-blood, the animating factor that turns a cathedral from a beautiful but silent space into one that reverberates with glory.’ Amen.”

Photograph © Graham Hermon

Photograph © Graham HermonPhotograph

© Graham Hermon

SALISBURY CATHEDRAL’S NEW FONT –A MODERN TREASURE

Salisbury Cathedral’s exquisite new font, the culmination of an on-going project initiated 10 years ago by the then Canon Treasurer and now Dean of Salisbury, the Very Revd June Osborne, is seen today for the first time in its full beauty filled with flowing water and truly reflecting the Cathedral’s majestic 750-year-old architecture. Perhaps the most significant addition to the fabric of an English cathedral in recent years, it has been designed by William Pye, Britain’s most distinguished water sculptor, and is the Cathedral’s first permanent font for over 150 years. Cruciform in shape and with a three-metre span to allow total immersion baptism, it is a beautiful green patinated bronze vessel with a Purbeck Freestone plinth and brown patinated bronze grating. The Salisbury Font has been specifically designed to combine both movement and stillness, with living streams of water flowing from its four corners whilst a perfectly smooth, still surface of water reflects the surrounding architecture of the cathedral. June Osborne, said: “This new font is a masterpiece. Now we see it in its permanent position in the middle of our magnificent medieval cathedral, it is even more beautiful than we could have imagined. It is so right for the building, a real 21st century treasure, both contemporary and timeless. It is deeply significant that it will be formally dedicated for us and used for its true purpose of baptism for the first time by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he leads our worship on 28 September during our 750th anniversary weekend. We are indebted to Sir Christopher and Lady Benson and The Jerusalem Trust for their huge generosity in funding what is also a major piece of art for our Cathedral.”

SIMON DELLER RETIREMENT

Simon and Mollie Deller started their married life together in 1966 teaching at Ripon Cathedral Choir School. In 1969 they took up appointments in Guildford when Simon became headmaster of the Lanesborough School. They retired in 1998 and returned to a village near Ripon, Kirby Malzeard, where Simon rejoined the Ripon Cathedral Choir, becoming senior lay clerk and in 2004, Lay Succentor. He retired this year and in recognition of his services Dean Keith Jukes made him an honorary canon.

NEW CHORISTERS, NEW LEADERS AND NEW PROBATIONERS FOR SALISBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR

Special ceremonies were held during Evensong at Salisbury Cathedral during September when eight new choristers –four boys and four girls –were admitted to the choir and the most senior choristers were appointed and received their medals of office. The new choristers are Jack CovilleWright, Sean Frost, Luke Hill, Alex Stagg, Elise Coward, Helena Mackie, Anita Monserrat and Rosanna Wicks. David Halls, Director of Music, said

“It is always exciting training new choristers and hearing their voices develop more power and density. This year’s new choristers are a particularly lively group and are going to be great fun to work with.” In their final year (school Year 8) as choristers, some are given positions of responsibility which reflect their seniority and musical expertise. David Halls continued: “Both boy and girl choirs have a head chorister, deputy chorister and ‘turners’ who assist with the music. This year Robert Folkes is Bishop’s Chorister (head chorister), Tom Watson is Vestry Monitor (deputy head chorister), and Alexander Coplan and Rupert Nodder are Turners. Rosamond Thomas is Dean’s Chorister (head chorister), Eleanor Bonney is Precentor’s Chorister (deputy head chorister), and Imogen Halls and Annabel Cooter are Turners. In the case of Alexander Coplan, we are delighted that he is also the Bowen chorister, which entails extra responsibilities assisting the organist.” The choir also welcomes Tabitha Archer, Finnbar Blakey, Flora Davies, Peter Folkes, Sebastian Halls, Tuomas and Anna Laakkonen, and Hermione Leitch as probationer (learner) choristers. Photos show the newly admitted boy choristers and their fellow choristers with their celebration cake at the tea party following Evensong and one of the new girl choristers with the new head and deputy head chorister, being ‘bumped’ (initiated).

News from Choirs and Places where they sing

NEWS BITES

What place for Jazz in the Anglican Church? A personal reflection

Roderick Williams

In June of 2006, BBC Radio 3 broadcast Choral Evensong live from St Mary the Virgin, the Oxford University Church, sung by Schola Cantorum. The following February, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Matins as the Sunday Morning Worship, again from St Mary’s and again with Schola Cantorum singing. So far, so good.

However, on both occasions a jazz piano trio joined the choir and organ. Apart from my hymn arrangement of a jazz standard by Billy Taylor, the music for both services was all my composition, and was all written as jazz. The Morning and Evening Services came to be known as ‘The Oxford Blues Service’.

Reaction to the broadcasts was varied –we had expected no less. Like any performer, I was irresistibly drawn to the negative responses; the BBC Messageboard was filled with comment, describing the service as ‘sentimental slush’ or ‘cocktail music’ and an inappropriate choice of style for Anglican worship. One listener wrote of the second broadcast that it was: ‘…not a pleasant sound at all, and a hideous act of desecration. It neither reflected the jazz idiom nor the beauty of Anglican matins.’

Perversely, I was very pleased to have this particular feedback as it was at least one person’s emphatic answer to a question inherent in writing the music at all –Is there any place for jazz in Anglican church music?

I am a classically trained musician and have no particular jazz credentials; writing in a jazz style was a means to an end. For me the purpose was an examination of a broader question; is it permissible to enjoy Anglican church music? Is one allowed to have fun?

I find myself probing further in search of an answer. What is it a congregation is truly seeking when they attend a choral evensong? Why does the Anglican choral tradition with its semi and fully professional choirs exist? Is ‘a pleasant sound’ a prerequisite? Why is there music in a church service at all?

I can’t claim to have definitive answers for these questions, but my writing this music was something of a personal exploration of the issues. I also hope that both supporters and detractors of this experiment might ask themselves the same questions.

It seems to me that communication is the key; ever since a priest first realised that, to make his voice carry as he recited the liturgy in a large vaulted building, he would need to chant rather than speak, the act of singing has been used in churches and cathedrals to convey text. Throughout the history of church music, composers have developed this fundamental idea, adding texture, harmony, counterpoint and accompaniment to illustrate and illuminate but, above all, to convey the text.

It would logically follow that any form of music that achieves this is appropriate and any that doesn’t, is not. This must have been the conclusion of the Council of Trent when it sought to restrict counterpoint (“Can’t hear the words clearly!”) in the mid sixteenth century. Returning to our own century, I surmised that as long as the jazz music I wrote conveyed text and meaning, surely it could not fail to be appropriate.

As a composer and singer who revels in words, I set about composition with textual clarity as my primary aim. I tried to respond to the linguistic power of the Canticles and chosen psalms using a musical language that was immediate and suitable to the meaning; that my chosen language was jazz was almost irrelevant.

Whatever standards are used to judge the music of both services, I am confident that my primary goal of communication was achieved; the words of the service were audible and on some level musically illustrated for anybody who was prepared to listen. Therefore the problem for complainants must lie in the nature of jazz itself.

Is jazz as a style of music inherently unsuited to church worship because of its association with late-night clubs or ‘cocktail lounges’? This was certainly the objection of several who wrote to complain about the broadcasts. However, while some jazz musicians and composers may indeed be wicked, alcoholic drug addicts whose music and lyrics promote licentious living and sin, there are equally many who hold deep religious beliefs, often reflected in their music.

The roots of jazz in gospel and spiritual music are clear and obvious; it would have been the norm for Black American musicians in the last century to have derived much of their education from Sunday services, especially when it came to

vocal harmonies. Clearly this history is separate from the centuries-old Anglican choral tradition, but the actual suitability of jazz as a medium for worship is well established.

I was inspired to attempt this composition on hearing a repeat broadcast of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert from Westminster Abbey in 1975. Specifically, I was intrigued and affected by the broadcast preamble during which Ellington’s biographers spoke of the strength of his faith and his affirmation that there were no boundaries in his jazz, say between ‘good’ or ‘wicked’ music, ‘godly’ or ‘ungodly’. Late in his career he felt able to speak publicly about his faith which had hitherto been private; indeed the introit I composed for Evensong, Grey Skies, sets a collection of Ellington’s statements, beginning: “Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.”

A greater stumbling block could be the sexual energy of jazz culture and this is surely a subject that causes some Anglicans awkwardness. However, my understanding of Christian theology is that sexual desire is as much God given as any other human facet and I am frequently amused by prudish attempts to gloss over this area in religious circles, especially during settings of some of the racier verses of the Song of Songs. Even the most puritanical of Christians must surely wish for the human race to continue.

Perhaps one can turn this whole question on its head and ask: were one to accept that jazz might be appropriate in Anglican worship, does it not follow that any style of music is acceptable? Certainly, I could point to electric rock music in evangelical worship, though this is an area in which I have very little experience. But to take an extreme example, I find it hard to imagine a liturgical setting written in a punk rock style. I feel context is all-important here; punk in England arose in the 1970s specifically as an anarchic, almost violent reaction to the mainstream and shares little with Christian values. Jazz is not intrinsically the music of revolt; whatever associations one might attribute to jazz, it is not this.

My point remains that there is nothing inherent in the spirit or history of jazz to challenge the traditional Anglican service on a theological basis. I would like to think that an omnipresent

god is as much in evidence at 3.00am in a jazz club or cocktail lounge as in church and those with missionary zeal could even argue that His presence there is all the more desirable.

Having discarded unhelpful associations, I should consider what notions in jazz are useful in this context. It seems to me the most obvious and powerful aspect of jazz is improvisation and it is this, I feel sure, that conservatives could find threatening.

As a singer since my treble days, through university and then as a professional choir member, I have been thoroughly immersed in the Anglican liturgy. It is a part of me and I respond to its profound beauty both musically and spiritually, and I recognize that part of its comfort lies in its enduring ritual. I am sympathetic therefore to those who decry change and wish to worship “in the beauty of holiness”.

I have, at the same time, been uneasy with ritual for ritual’s sake and have over the years, from my vantage point in the choir stalls, developed a distrust of the Pharisee element in any congregation: those who display with alacrity their knowledge of the finer points of evensong etiquette. I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi’s observation about Christianity: ‘I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.’

At moments I admit I have felt an urge to leap out of the stalls and shake the temple a little, wake the congregation from their collective stupor and remind them of the power and expressive beauty of a particular psalm, hymn or canticle. Not terribly Anglican.

Nor, I accept, is the habit of making judgements about the religious motivation of others and I suspect that this reflects prejudices of my own.

However, the sense of freedom in form and expectation that jazz implies is attractive to me. It suggests that one can be inspired in the moment and follow a tangential thread wherever it may lead. Canon Brian Mountford, vicar of the Oxford University Church,` made reference in his Evensong address to ‘theological jazz’. I am intrigued by the idea, theologically and musically, of operating outside one’s comfort zone, starting in a direction without necessarily knowing where one will arrive. It encourages one to consider the moment

afresh, to listen to old, familiar texts and prayers anew.

However, I should also point out how conservative I was in writing the two services. The freedom to improvise does not imply that there are no rules –this is not the anarchy of punk by any means. As a product of the Anglican Choral tradition, my starting point was the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and, with the exception of the Duke Ellington Introit, my texts were selected using the old, rich language of the BCP. I adhered strictly to the form and content of a traditional Evensong. I took care that the canticle settings followed the structure and musical clichés familiar to any choral singer, my intention being that however alien the musical language might be, any worshipper would recognise immediately exactly where they were in the service.

In fact, the musical language I used was also fairly conservative (which, ironically, alienated many pure jazz fans) for the same reasons. As a childhood fan of Bryan Kelly’s 1969 Canticles in C (for a young treble, this was as fun and ‘jazzy’ as church music ever got!) I was always aware that fruity jazz harmonies and syncopations were never far away in late twentieth century church music. Energetic, syncopated rhythm is integral to the choral music of, say, Walton, Matthias and Leighton and for rich jazz harmonies with added sixths, ninths and ‘blue note’ clashes one need look no further than Howells. We had even considered Like as the Hart for the Evensong anthem as its musical language is so close to jazz; add wire brushes and you have a jazz standard.

Indeed, there is the clearly audible difference between our broadcasts and a traditional service –piano, bass and drums with organ. My initial idea was that the whole service should, if performed elsewhere subsequently, be capable of being accompanied by organ alone. Indeed, our wonderful Hammond organ was used only to rescue the situation when the piano trio was found to be incompatible with the baroque tuning of the organ at St Mary’s.

Extra instruments in choral services are nothing new, of course, as many a Tudor viol consort could testify. I knew, however, that the simple inclusion of drums alone would exasperate a section of the listening community. It was partly for this reason that I selected texts for my anthem, Sing unto the Lord a new song, from psalm verses that made specific mention of the joyful praising of God with instruments, especially the ‘tabret’. Perhaps rather mischievously, the

anthem included some ‘happy clapping’ to accompany the text ‘O clap your hands together all ye people’ to illustrate the point that making a ‘merry noise’ has been part of the act of worship long before jazz was invented.

However, the fact remains that this was English choral music, written by a university-educated singer and musician. In evidence were varied choral textures, counterpoint, wordpainting and clear formal structure as dictated by the various texts; all the usual facets of Anglican choral writing. The point of the exercise was an attempt to write music of integrity and, hopefully, some worth. As Duke Ellington wrote, again quoted in the Introit: ‘There is no art when one does something without intention.’

To what extent this experiment succeeded or failed depends on one’s point of view. As previously mentioned, some jazz musicians felt that the music was not true jazz, that there wasn’t enough improvisation in evidence and that the music was safe, clichéd, facile even. (I felt some of this was fair comment and hoped that the Matins service was an improvement in this area.) Others felt that a trained gospel choir should have performed the music and that the mismatch between the jazz musicians and the highly trained classical singers in Schola was detrimental. However, my intention was always to write from within the Anglican tradition as I have lived it, for Anglican choirs in which I have sung, to inspire those used to a diet of Brewer, Sumsion and Watson with something a little different, challenging on all fronts –a ‘New Song’.

On the other side of the coin, there are those who felt that jazz in church was quite simply a ‘desecration’. I can’t help feeling, though, that such detractors were unable to listen beyond an initial prejudice to ‘drums in church’ and I hope I may have explored and exploded these prejudices in the hope that they prompt a deeper, personal examination of what the combination of music and text as an act of worship actually means to an individual.

It was never my intention to promote jazz at the expense of existing choral music, much of which is as much a part of me as it must be for any singer fashioned in the choir stalls. I am still a classical composer. For those outraged by our jazz Evensong broadcast in 2006, ‘normal service’ was resumed the following week.

As a final thought, here at least is some personal vindication I enjoyed. I entered into a brief e-mail correspondence with the gentleman who considered the Matins service a ‘hideous act of desecration’ and invited him to give me more specific feedback and context. He did so, but was obliged in doing so to listen to the service again. A couple of e-mails later, he signed off with the following:

‘Musically it does work and grows on this listener! I’m still listening to it, and I can assure you that other friends of mine have heard it and enjoyed it.

‘I have a gut feeling that your work will find a niche and establish itself.

‘It has certainly made me think.’

A greater stumbling block could be the sexual energy of jazz culture and this is surely a subject that causes some Anglicans awkwardness.

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60Seconds in Music Profile John Robinson

Age: 25

Education details:

Hereford Cathedral school 1994-2001

Canterbury Cathedral 2001-2002

St John’s College Cambridge 2002-2005

Career details to date:

Assistant Organist –Carlisle Cathedral 2005-2008

Assistant Organist –Canterbury Cathedral 2008Director of the Canterbury Singers

What are you looking forward to most at Canterbury?

So many things! The daily round of Evensong in such a building ranks very highly for me. Add to that working with great people in a fine music department, and the enormous excitement that goes with Canterbury Cathedral’s position at the centre of the Anglican Communion and you’ll understand why I’m very enthusiastic. Best of all will be the amount of sunshine.

What did you enjoy most at Carlisle?

The fabulous organ and having time to practise on it was a real plus; I’ve had an invaluable taste of the incredibly hard work of choir training and recruiting without the luxury of a choir-school, and developed an appreciation for traditionally brewed ales and Penrith Fudge.

At which cathedral would you most like to be the Director of Music?

I’d be more than honoured by anywhere that would have me! Situation in a big city might be a bonus.

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

I’ve just started to learn the complete works of S.S. Wesley, after I was asked to record them for Priory last week! I’ve got around two months so it’s going to be tight. I had no idea how hard some of the music is, or how many unanswered questions there are about performance practise, so it’s also going to be a real learning curve.

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

Some of the pieces aren’t published hence the project to record the complete works, and nobody has recorded them all. I’ve been listening to Jamie McVinnie’s excellent recording on Naxos from St Michael’s Tenbury, an organ I have admired since my Hereford days, as well as Paul Morgan’s recording from Exeter.

What or whom made you take up the organ?

Hearing the organ played everyday by Roy Massey and Huw Williams was certainly what got me going. Roy was an inspirational, generous and encouraging first teacher.

Which organists do you admire the most?

Cameron Carpenter, Ton Koopman, John Scott.

What was the last CD you bought?

Errol Garner’s album The Elf. It’s an absolute harmonic orgy.

What was the last recording you were working on?

The first recording of the choral works of Dr F.W. Wadley, organist of Carlisle Cathedral 1909-1960. A friend of Elgar, his music is well –wrought and sumptuous and well worth a listen when its released on Priory.

What is your favourite organ to play?

Hereford Cathedral’s.

What is your favourite building? Canterbury Cathedral.

What is your favourite anthem?

Valiant for Truth by RVW.

What is your favourite set of canticles?

Gibbons’s Short Service.

What is your favourite psalm and accompanying chants?

Psalm 89, chants by Hopkins and Gray.

What is your favourite organ piece?

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in DBWV 532

Who is your favourite composer? Debussy.

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

Buxtehude: Praeludium in D Minor, De Grigny: Recit de tierce en Taille, Franck: 2nd Choral, Lloyd-Webber: Benedictus, Alain: Intermezzo, Ireland: Capriccio

Any forthcoming appearances of note?

Conducting Schubert’s Mass in A flat with Carlisle Festival Chorus and the Northern Sinfonia on 12 July –an appearance of many ‘notes.’

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

Playing the organ at the George Guest Memorial Concert in St John’s was a very special duty.

Has any particular recording inspired you?

Krystian Zimmermann’s Debussy Preludes was absolutely inspirational. It opened a whole new level of listening to me when I was about twelve.

How do you cope with nerves?

Practice. Trying to use the nerves to try to heighten musical excitement is always a good idea. Practising getting nervous is the ideal solution.

What are your hobbies?

I’m always happy to watch cricket, especially spin-bowling on TV where the view is much clearer. Local history –especially of socially worthy causes (like the ‘Carlisle State Brewery Scheme’) is always intriguing. I like playing table-tennis passionately.

Do you play any other instruments?

I love the piano, which is more of a hobby really, and I studied the violin for a long while with an extremely patient and good teacher. All organists should try and learn to sing too.

What was the last book you read?

The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michael Faber. it’s a riproaring read, which I can’t praise too much –a vivid take on Victorian life and morals.

What are your favourite radio and television programmes?

Choral Evensong, The Archers and Love Soup seem to have been staples recently I’m afraid.

Which Newspapers and magazines do you read?

The Guardian, Private Eye, The Week, Cathedral Music magazine of course.

What makes you laugh?

I’ve realised it’s not just things that are actually funny, but also awkward things – it’s always easier to laugh than deal with the problem. All a bit disturbing, that.

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

J.S. Bach, with a translator present, and my wife Emma, reliant purely on my own wits for survival.

What should be the role of the FCM in the twenty-first century?

I think it’s doing extremely well for itself. I like its inclusive agenda which recognises the variety of establishments and people involved in church music. It seems to me that resources and guidance should generally be channelled towards the parish scene and smaller, less wealthy cathedrals.

Reflections from 40 David Flood in conversation

Congratulations on your retirement and all that you have achieved. You have seen lots of changes in cathedral music since 1968 haven’t you; can you describe some of them?

Yes, there have been many. The first is the attitude of deans and chapters towards cathedral musicians. Generally I think that organists and directors of music are treated with greater respect than was the case many years ago. Now we are consulted far more widely as I am sure you have found in Canterbury.

Another change has been in the repertoires of cathedral choirs which has become much more comprehensive and wideranging. In days gone by most of the music we sang was in English, and comparatively little European music was performed. As we both know, Allan Wicks was one of the most enterprising in this area. I suspect that cathedral choirs have also become far more capable of singing extremely difficult music.

There was a time when cathedral choirs were never conducted and I can remember going to Evensong at Canterbury shortly after Allan arrived there, but several years

before I did, when the Choir sang Stanford in C and Bairstow’s Blessed City. It was all very polished and musical, as I recall, but Allan led from the organ. When conducting first began it had to be very discreet and I remember hardly being able to see Allan’s hands. I used to watch his pate. This was of course before the days of closed-circuit television, when you had to peer through a gap in the pulpitum. I believe on one occasion Sir Adrian Boult attended a cathedral evensong somewhere, and complained that the young assistant conducted Tallis’s Salvator mundi as if he were conducting a Tchaikovsky symphony. I was once told by the (minor canon) Precentor at Canterbury to keep my beat as unflamboyant as possible! (It was not me about whom Sir Adrian was complaining!)

The advent of choral scholars in cathedrals is another significant change. We knew about choral scholars in universities, but when I was first went to Canterbury as Assistant in 1968, there were only six lay clerks. Choral scholars were introduced and I think the importance of

years in the business with Philip Moore

having twelve men, particularly in a large building such as Canterbury was a logical move. The success of a choral scholarship system depends very much on the university you have nearby. My recollection is that after trying out increasing the number of men at Canterbury they eventually went over to having just twelve lay clerks, partly, I suspect, because the University of Kent does not have a music department.

At Guildford we had six lay clerks and tried to supplement with choral scholars, up to a maximum of twelve men. This worked well and some of the choral scholars and lay clerks in those days have forged impressive careers. At York, we tried to aim for six plus six, but a problem which we came across three or four years ago was that the choral scholars were becoming very experienced and mature as singers. They were then tempted to apply for lay clerk’s posts in other cathedrals. I persuaded the Dean and Chapter to go to nine songmen plus three choral scholars and that has worked very well, for we were able to hold on to some good voices.

Have you found that there is a regular supply of choral scholars in the voices that you want at the right time?

On the whole we have been very lucky.

Did you find that the choral scholars who had been with you would later come back as lay clerks or had you lost them for ever?

I don’t think anybody returned as songmen, but as I said earlier, choral scholars have become songmen, on account of ability. One of the characteristics of York is that once you go there you don’t move away! I’m a prime example of that of course. This also applies to people in other walks of life.

So have there been changes in other areas?

There have been several changes in the front row. One is that, in boarding schools, it seems to me that people come from a less wide catchment area than they used to. I don’t know if it is true in Canterbury,(it is, yes) but when I was at Canterbury there was a boy from Northern Ireland, one from the Lake

District, someone from Cyprus –all over the place, and that was partly, I think because of the reputation of the school and the choir. Former choristers began to make their names in the musical world. Think of Stephen Varcoe, for example, and Mark Elder, to give two examples. The choir and school had a tremendous reputation.

Well you had some golden years didn’t you? There was Stephen Barlow amongst others. Exactly, and I think it was at a cost because the school was getting too big hence the successful amalgamation which you now have. Clearly the presence of girls in cathedral choirs is one of the biggest changes of all and one which provoked, and still provokes much discussion. Now is not the time to enter into a long examination of this issue. All I will say is that like many imaginative innovations it has brought great benefits, but has also produced difficulties. I think I had better stop there!

In some ways you have already answered my next question which was, what was life like back in 1968 for a cathedral organist, can you remember back then?

There was a wonderful regularity to the life of the choir. There were no diocesan visits, there were no tours. One of the Canons, I think it was Canon Waddams, was reputed to have said: ‘If people want to hear the Canterbury choir they can come to Canterbury to hear us’. But with Allan Wicks of course, as you know only too well, life was incredibly exciting, colourful. We were also in touch not only with music other than cathedral music, but also the arts of all kinds. His interests were wide-ranging. To give you an example, it was he who got me interested, by his enthusiasm, in Stanley Spencer. He would go regularly to art galleries, the theatre and opera. I always remember when I first met Allan he had the reputation of being a very fine choir trainer and as a champion of modern organ music. Which indeed he was, but the first composer he talked about in my appointment interview was Mozart.

When you were there in 1968 did you also meet with Alan Ridout?

I actually met Alan Ridout in 1962, when I entered the Royal College of Music. He was my composition professor and a very good one indeed. Bach and Brahms, to name a few, were always gods, but having also adored Howells and Vaughan Williams from a young age, it fell to Ridout to swing me away from writing music that was not just a pale imitation of their music.

As somebody who wanted to make his way as a player and a choir trainer and also my interest in composition, I don’t think I could have been luckier in having Allan and Alan influencing me. Allan Wicks, as you know, did not pretend to be a composer. In fact he said to me one day: “I have found a marvellous way to compose, I tell Alan Ridout exactly what I want and he writes it for me.” I think it was in those days that there was half an expectation that a cathedral organist ought to be composer. Only a little way down the road was Robert Ashfield at Rochester who wrote some very lovely things, and there were other people, Arthur at Ely for instance. I think Allan might have felt pressured that he should be composing but he did not, partly because he established an excellent rapport with Alan, as well as with other composers. I think Alan Ridout is actually underrated. Some of his best works are very fine. You will probably remember The Prayer of St Mary Magdalen. I also remember hearing a performance of his Recorder Concerto. Superbly inventive and skilfully orchestrated.

I think the other thing I learned from Allan Wicks was, and I said this at his 80th birthday dinner, that he was one of the first people to produce passionate singing from his cathedral choir. George Malcolm at Westminster Cathedral, George Guest at St John’s, and others were certainly working on similar lines. What is not always realised is that Allan was actually at the forefront of that. People didn’t notice it so much because Canterbury wasn’t on the big recording circuit as George was and because Canterbury is slightly tucked away. I think Allan knew about singing and he knew about phrasing, he knew about the voice and although I am a great admirer of George it was Allan as much as anybody who

actually made cathedral choirs sing with more than just a kind of impassive gloss.

Let me take you on a little bit. You went off then to Guildford in 1974 and that was a complete change for you on many fronts. You must have had some thrills and some challenges. The thrill was having the job on my own in which I could do what music I wanted. The challenge was taking over from somebody like Barry Rose, whose work I admired and in fact who admired Allan as a choir trainer: taking over the creation of one man, not a line of people, working in a totally different building in a totally different environment was exciting and alarming in equal measure. I went from a choir where the repertoire was very large, where sometimes we lived very dangerously, to a choir where the repertoire was small but absolutely beautifully sung; that was a complete change of scene. I think it took me about a year to settle into what I had inherited, to settle into what the choir did best and to settle into the way I could get them to respond to me. It also took me time to forget about Allan and develop my own way of doing things.

People were very welcoming and accommodating. There was a very forward-looking Dean and Chapter, Dean, Tony Bridge, being very colourful and eloquent in many, many ways. His belief in the way that music and other arts could say far more than words made a great impression on me. Also, one of the differences between a place like Canterbury, or York, and Guildford is that, although in every cathedral music is crucial, there is less to distract you from the music. When Guildford was mentioned in the early 1960s and 1970s people quite often thought first of the music. When you first think of York you might think of the Archbishop, a great building, or fantastic stained glass. In somewhere like Guildford, music I think occupies, not a more important place, but in a curious sort of way more depends on it. There was a kind of urgency about the music there which was challenging and exciting. The choristers all attended a day prep school, not a school

that was owned by the Dean and Chapter. We had a very good gentleman’s agreement, but there had to be a lot of give and take. We were very lucky on the whole with our intake of children as well as with the quality of the men.

And it was a very successful time for you.

It was yes, a very fruitful time indeed. I remember my time there with great pleasure. There were also, as I recall, some memorable broadcasts.

I need to take you on now. It was 25 years ago, a complete chapter of years ago, that you moved to York. You followed another formidable musician.

I did, which again was not easy because Francis is a great musician, a wonderful player and it was a challenge following him as well, a different challenge. There are similarities to Guildford, however, not least in the way that the choristers are all day children. They all come from a radius of no more than 15 miles at the outside.

We said earlier that York Minster seems to retain organists for a long time. When I was organist of Lincoln for example, I was William Byrd’s 18th successor since the middle of the 16th century: similarly in York people stay a long time. Do you think there is reason behind that?

Yes, I think York is a lovely place to live, the Minster is a wonderful building, the organ is very fine and it is a friendly area. There is also more life in the Cathedral now than there was when I first went there.

Do you think it is a good thing that people stay for a long time? It works both ways. I think you need at least five years to get a choir round to the way you want it and then you need another five to establish what you have built up.

Can you tell us something of the way in which the music in York Minster has changed over the last 25 years?

Photograph © Nick Holowka

I have introduced a lot of Latin masses, but also tried to keep the more traditional ones going as well. The repertoire is on the whole smaller than it was when I first went there but as you know only too well, getting the balance between a repertoire that is well known but yet interesting is a very hard one. You have to balance that chiefly against the ability of the top line. I also tried to retain music that was, as it were, special to York.

What about reaction from perhaps members of the congregation or members of the Chapter?

There were a few people who started to huff and puff because we were singing too many Latin masses. But then people came out almost dancing after hearing a Mozart mass and I think the argument was made.

This is something which has happened all over the country, the Viennese mass in particular.

I think one mustn’t forget the Stanfords and the Darkes and so forth. I think they actually occupy an important place in the repertoire and fit BCP services especially well. At York we have a BCP Sung Eucharist once a month, with the 1928 additions. If we sing Jackson in G for instance, we do every movement, including the Creed, which is fantastic and which is much loved. We all know Jackson in G and we all love it, but if you don’t know the Creed then you need to get to know it, it is very, very good!

The Archbishop of Canterbury made a comment recently that people should sing the Creed more often to some setting, be it Plainsong or polyphonic. We do it in Canterbury if we have an orchestral mass, which we do from time to time, then we sing the Creed.

Like so many things we can say ‘…and was incarnate of the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man’ or we sing it to Merbecke, which is fine, but if you listen to ‘…and was incarnate of the Holy Ghost’ in Francis’s setting, it adds depth to the words which is impossible to describe.

Certain things have happened while you have been there. I suppose not least the great fire; that must have been a very demanding time for you.

Well it was a very strange time because in a funny sort of way these big cathedrals are –I wouldn’t like to say they are selfimportant, but they have a grandeur which is something that people enjoy. We know we are one of the most visited cathedrals in the country and have stained glass that is second to none. Something like the fire brought the whole place to its knees. It was a humbling experience, a levelling experience. Although it was extraordinary, it was a very interesting time. The Dean preached a very good sermon on the Sunday afterwards. What had happened, as you probably know, was the Bishop-elect of Durham, then Professor of Theology at Leeds University, had been saying controversial things about Christianity for a long time. On a television programme called Credo, he said what he had been saying for years and years and the balloon went up because he was Bishop-elect of Durham. He was consecrated on the Friday and then the following Sunday the fire took place and some people pointed a finger. My own view is that God doesn’t work like that and that it was pure coincidence.

Photograph by permission of Dean & Chapter, York Minster

The community must have been galvanised by the event. The great thing about it was that worship continued; on the day after the fire we were singing Evensong in St Michael le Belfry and remained there from Monday to Saturday. Through the tremendous work put in by the stone yard and others, the Cathedral was ready for worship the following Sunday. That was when Dean Jasper preached the sermon saying, if I remember, that the laws of God are so reliable that you can’t expect him suddenly to put out a fire. If the combination of physical situations is right, things will go up in flames: in the same way that if I jumped off the top of that building I would fall in a nasty heap, nothing would save me. There is an absolute reliability of the laws of nature.

It was a major step in bringing the community around the Minster. I think it was.

York Minster is one of the largest church buildings in the world; what are the delights and challenges of that as regards the acoustic and performing in such a beautiful space?

It is the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps, that is the technical description! That puts it in its place for size. The Quire is difficult to sing in because of the wooden vaulting. There is resonance but you nonetheless have to work hard and there is a lot of woodwork around. It is not like being in Hereford, for example, which has one of the loveliest and easiest acoustics that I have ever experienced. At York, the organ is some way away from the choir stalls, although it is an easier organ on which to accompany than some. When you are in the Nave it very much depends where the Choir is situated as to how we sound. On a Sunday morning, we are usually behind the altar and not heard to our best advantage.

So did this situation then encourage you with pieces you have written particularly for York Minster?

Yes I think it probably did. When I was at Guildford it was very easy for the organ, being in the North Transept, to obliterate the choir: anything with sustained chords would swamp the Choir if you weren’t careful. There is a piece of mine which is very generously sung quite a lot, All wisdom cometh from the Lord, and much of the accompaniment consists of short chords. That was specifically designed for Guildford because that worked well there. I think I learned a lot when I went to York from looking at Francis Jackson’s music where the harmonies move very slowly and where the accompaniment is quite often unfussy and sustained. You change as you go on, obviously, and I think that probably influenced me.

Let me take you on to your composing now for which you are justly very famous. That is very kind of you to say so.

We have talked about how you might adapt your style in the commissions somebody else might give you. Do you go out and visit the building before you compose something?

I try to but visits are not always possible. I try to find out about the choir concerned. Quite a lot of the places that I have written for, I knew the buildings already and I always ask commissioners to be as specific as possible about what they want; for instance, if they have a particularly good treble soloist. Some years ago I wrote a piece for the Installation of Dr Jeffrey John as Dean of St Albans and Andrew Lucas was wonderfully clear about what he wanted. He wanted to include the Girls’ Choir as well as the boys and men. The girls sang from the Altar and the boys and men were in the Quire stalls. This gave challenges and opportunities. I designed the

Photograph © Alan Stenson

piece so that they sang separately for much of the time. When they sang together, I organised the harmonies so that if they got out of sync. it would not matter too much! They kept absolutely together, of course!

How else have you noticed your composing language changing?

It is very hard to say actually. I think the longer I live the more I am aware of the importance of form in music and of getting the proportions of pieces right. This applies especially when writing instrumental music, but it also applies with choral music. Even though a text will dictate some sort of shape, you have to make sure that the musical ideas have some sort of logic to them. When it comes to writing choral music, I think I learnt a great deal, once I arrived in York, from looking at Bairstow’s music of which I now know quite a lot. He was very good at getting the stresses right and getting high notes on the important syllables. If you look for instance at Lord, I call upon thee, it’s almost exactly as you say it and it fits the rhythm of the words perfectly. The only thing that he usually avoids is melisma. Incidentally it was in this area, I suspect, that Bairstow influenced Finzi, who was a pupil.

I think also the other thing that has influenced me in my writing both for voices and for instruments, is conducting the York Musical Society, a chorus of about one hundred and thirty voices. Working with an orchestra three or four times a year and a big choral society does have an effect on your musical output. There have been many works that have dug deep into my soul! As well as the standard classics, such as Brahms’s Requiem, The Dream of Gerontius, Bach’s Passions and the Mass in B minor, I have been profoundly affected by Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony and Dona nobis pacem, Tippett’s A Child of our time, as well as three big works of Stanford’s, his Stabat Mater, Requiem, and the Latin Te Deum op 66. Large choral works such as these encourage you to give your music space.

In Canterbury we still have some lovely music of yours that you wrote at a tender age, still in manuscript, of which we are very proud. We have some lovely canticles, based on plainsong, some fauxbourdons: I don’t know if you have published them all. They have been published now by the Chichester firm Cathedral Music. One, for Men’s voices, has been rearranged for SATB and is published by OUP.

I find them so well crafted for that which we need: they’re fairly effortless but so effective.

I love incorporating plainsong into things.

What is the main impetus behind how a piece sounds?

I think it depends on what I am listening to at the time. I do have one or two personal guidelines. There seems to me to be quite a lot of music written today that is fairly static, and moves very slowly, with much repetition. Although the effect can be hypnotic, I think music does need to travel somewhere. Also, it is very easy to produce wonderful effects with much doubling of voices, and I think today there is a tendency to write music that is very thick. Economy of effect is often more telling. Both the Messiah and the St John Passion, to take random examples, are in four-part harmony and I think composers should try to make their vocal lines interesting enough that it is not necessary to lean too heavily on divisi. I know we cannot all be Messiaens or Byrds, but I always think that the Byrd three-part Mass sounds as if it is in four parts, the four-part sounds as if it is in five, and so on. Likewise Messiaen’s O sacrum convivium

never divides at all, yet the lines and the textures are so telling that there is richness without thickness.

I listen to an enormous amount of music even more so, now that I have more time on my hands and I hope that this will influence my writing to good effect!

Do you think that composition for liturgical use needs to be essentially ‘congregation friendly’?

This is an impossibility! What is friendly to one is unfriendly to another. I was vastly amused to learn that one of my settings of Series III was banned by one dean, even though others liked it! What people do not realise is that when you compare much modern church music to what is going on in the classical world, it is tame by comparison by and large.

I think what I often try to do is to write pieces which are challenging for the choir concerned but which don’t need to be re-learnt every time you do them. I wrote a piece about four years ago for Westminster Abbey, a fabulous choir, with words by Andrew Motion. I felt I was able to make it reasonably difficult and they performed it wonderfully well. I have to admit that there is a fugue at the end, and although it is terribly old fashioned to write a fugue, it does mean that there is a sort of tune that goes through and that repeats itself. And I like to think that they can perform the work again, if they want to, without relearning it.

It is a very personal reaction. It is and quite often people’s personal reactions are not what you would expect and sometimes the uninitiated will appreciate things which pass the so-called congoscenti by.

When I was at Guildford we had a coach driver to take us to Germany on one of our tours and he knew nothing about classical music at all. On our first morning he dropped us outside a church for our rehearsal and he said he would just wait in the coach. I invited him to come and listen, and we were practising Lassus’s Missa Bell’ Amfitrit altera. He was absolutely bowled over by what he heard. There was somebody who knew nothing about the church, nothing about classical music, but who found the whole thing just enveloped him, a world that he didn’t know anything about. It was a telling moment and I have never forgotten it.

Such is the language and the power of music. Can you look into your crystal ball and give me what you think your view of our future might be?

I am a fairly positive person deep down, although I can appear pessimistic. I can remember times in the past when people would say: “Oh this is not going to last, the cathedral tradition is on its way out” but not at all. I think people realise now that music in cathedrals is a big, big draw.

I am glad to know that you think we are on to a fairly sound future. I don’t feel pessimistic about it because I think it is of such value and I think if somebody said: “Oh well, the choir at... is being disbanded” a balloon of enormous proportions would go up. Also, people are meeting the varying challenges it presents. The outreach initiatives, for example, are addressing the recruitment problem, and cathedrals are setting up funds so that music can continue.

Can I just say thank you for all you have done for church music over the past 40 years. It has been a most wonderful achievement and we thank you very much.

NEWS BITES

CHANTING ALONG

FCM member Peter Kirk writes: ‘I have been asked to give an update of my National Archive of Anglican Chants by some members. Currently there are around 13500 chants by upwards of 2500 composers. Latest collections include a very interesting Welsh Psalter of 1898, Y Llyfr Gweddi Cadeiriol. This was packed with unknown chants (and composers), how the Ebenezer Tabernacles must have resounded! Did you know that Sir Richard Runciman Terry 1865-1938 wrote 196 chants whilst teaching at Elstow School between 1890-1894? This collection was published in 1930. Whilst working on The Gloucester Cathedral Modern Chants 1893 Chant Book I located six chants, previously not contained anywhere else, by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford 1852-1924. In the foreword page by the editor, Dr. Charles Lee Williams 1853-1935, specific instructions were given to the composers that all chants must have a unison first and third quarter. It appears that many choirs were slow at the beginning of each verse. The unison section appeared to get the psalm moving; many of us have experienced this one!

News from Choirs and Places where they sing

I now have five distinguished patrons who will no doubt give me great support in the future and I thank them. Is there a place for a Chant Society to exchange news/views and music?

Peter can be contacted on peterkirk1685@yahoo.co.uk

STAMP BY STAMP, CATHEDRAL BY CATHEDRAL

New stamps issued by the Royal Mail show different cathedrals: 1st Class –Lichfield ‘The Ladies of the Vale’ is Britain’s only medieval cathedral with three spires. 48p –Belfast After the foundation stone of St Anne’s was laid in 1899, it was built around a parish church which remained in use until the cathedral was complete –only a window now survives of the old church. 50p –Gloucester The foundations of the present building were laid by the 11th century Abbot Serlo. 56p –St Davids. St Davids occupies the site of the saint’s monastery at the most westerly point in Wales, a shrine so important that in 1081 William the Conqueror himself visited. 72p – Westminster. Westminster Cathedral, on the site of the old Tothill Fields prison, was designed by John Francis Bentley in the Romanesque-Byzantine style after seeking inspiration from Romanesque cathedrals on the continent, including St Mark’s in Venice. 81p –St Magnus. St Magnus was begun in 1137 by Earl Rognvald Kolsson to enshrine the bones of the murdered saint, his uncle –and to further his campaign to wrest control of the entire kingdom of Orkney.

GEORGE GUEST MEMORIAL MEDAL

The George Guest Memorial Medal is given annually, presented for the first time in 2006 by Nan Guest, to a chorister of St John’s College, Cambridge. Nan says: “George suggested that a Cymbelstern, a fivepointed star should be added to the organ of St John’s Chapel, in 1974. The star itself, is blue, the colours of Chester Football Club, which my husband so avidly supported. It is mounted on silver.”

MOVES

Scott Farrell has left Newcastle Cathedral to become Director of Music at Rochester Cathedral. His post at Newcastle is being filled by George Richford on an acting basis. After many years as Director of Music, Roger Sayer decided that the time had come to develop his freelance career beyond the cathedral. A part-time post of Cathedral Organist covering the weekends and major services has been agreed, to allow Roger to build up a portfolio of freelance work around his cathedral commitments.

Tom Corns has taken up the post of Musical Director at St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Warwick. A chorister at Wells Cathedral before taking up the organ scholarships at Jesus College, Cambridge and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is leaving Bromley Parish Church where he has been director of music for the past four years.

NEWS FROM THE KENNETH LEIGHTON TRUST

This year is the 20th anniversary of Leighton’s death. The purpose of the Leighton Trust, in addition to providing funds for young performers and composers, is to promote his music and this is a good time to take stock. The Trust was formed five years after his death. In May, Chandos released the first of two string orchestral CDs with Richard Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. It includes the Serenade for Strings (premiere recording), the Organ Concerto with John Scott, and the Concerto for String Orchestra. Hyperion, with Matthew Owens and the Wells Cathedral Choir released premiere recordings of The World’s Desire, A Sequence for Epiphany and the Morning Canticles. Also included are the Sequence for All Saints; O God, enfold me in the sun and the organ work Rockingham

Photo © Mary Bernard

A Visionary OF HIS TIME

Christopher Robinson looks back at the influence of Ralph Vaughan Williams on church music.

If 2007 was Elgar’s year, 2008 certainly belongs to Vaughan Williams. Much has been written about their various claims to greatness and in spite of differences in background and outlook, they have both been described as quintessentially English. This imprecise quality will not be explored here, except to suggest that it might have stood in the way of due recognition overseas. More relevant to this article is the fact that both of them held positions as church organists early in their careers. Elgar followed in his father’s footsteps as organist of St. George’s Roman Catholic Church in Worcester (1886-1889). Here he wrote and arranged music for the choir and tried out orchestral transcriptions as voluntaries, often of startling unsuitability. Vaughan Williams, though not a natural at the organ, took his studies seriously enough to pass the FRCO and became organist of St. Barnabas, South Lambeth in 1895. He formed a choral society and orchestra with the ambitious objective of performing Bach cantatas. After two years he had begun to find the routine increasingly tiresome and a disagreement with a new vicar gave him an excuse to resign. He said that he had discovered what was good and bad about church music and this coloured his approach to his first major assignment.

Though the invitation to be editor of a new hymn book (the English Hymnal) probably came as a surprise to him, many of those who knew him would have appreciated well his suitability for this task. His reputation as a composer was growing (particularly his songs) and he was in demand as a lecturer and writer. His fascination with music of the past, with folksongs and carols, and his trenchant views on the current state of church music expressed in various lectures made him an obvious choice. He accepted the invitation when he heard that the other candidate was Walford Davies. He had a mission to enrich people’s lives and to ensure that music heard in church should be edifying and uplifting. He disliked the indulgence and sentimentality of late Victorian hymn tunes

(blaming the influence of Spohr and Gounod) and lumped together all examples of this genre as belonging to the ‘school of Barnby’. Why Barnby should have been singled out for particular contempt is unclear.

His research into folk song brought a new ethos to the hymn book. There is strong historical precedent for adapting popular tunes for use as hymns. Many German chorales originated from secular songs so Vaughan Williams felt on safe ground when he adapted melodies which he had noted down from local singers in country pubs. In his excellent book on the works of Vaughan Williams, Michael Kennedy traces all forty examples of this procedure which appear in the English Hymnal. The best known are probably Forest Green (O little town of Bethlehem), Monks Gate (He who would valiant be) and Kingsfold (I heard the voice). A few traditional carols were also included and this prefigured a further editorial task which Vaughan Williams would undertake some years later (The Oxford Book of Carols). In fact he researched sacred and secular material from all over the world. Lutheran chorales featured strongly alongside many plainsong melodies and psalm tunes from France and Switzerland, as well as from the British Isles. He particularly liked the Scottish metrical psalm melodies. He discovered many tunes by Gibbons and Tallis, whose third mode melody inspired the TallisFantasia

Vaughan Williams’s preface sets out his manifesto in fairly uncompromising terms and is worth re-reading. Tunes should be at a comfortable pitch for congregational singing (which must always be in unison) and dynamic markings are unwanted distractions. Sentimental tunes indicate ‘poverty of heart’ and the judgement of good and bad tunes is a ‘moral rather than a musical issue’. These are strong views and typical of Vaughan Williams’s missionary zeal.

Then there was the question of which hymns to omit. Initially there must have been quite a list but Vaughan Williams was prevailed upon to retain some ‘old favourites’.

He agreed to compromise and a collection of these is consigned to the Appendix which he called ‘the chamber of horrors’. Here may be found hymns with emotional overtones like The day thou gavest. E.J. Hopkins’s fine tune Ellers was not only relegated but the chromaticisms were removed. Here he went too far. Goss’s harmonisation of Verse 3 of Praise my soul is omitted altogether. Some tunes disappeared because of copyright problems –Dykes’s Dominus regit me and Sir G.C. Martin’s St. Helen perhaps come into this category.

As a whole the book was scholarly and well researched. It occupied Vaughan Williams fully at a time when he might well have preferred to work at the Sea Symphony. Initially, reaction was somewhat hostile but it certainly raised standards at a time when hymnody was in need of a purge. Vaughan Williams was not anxious to include ‘specially composed tunes’ but a few were included. Three of these are now firmly part of our heritage: Holst’s In the bleak midwinter and his own Come down, O love divine and For all the Saints. There was also Hail thee festival day; it is surprising that this stirring processional hymn has been somewhat neglected. His exertions with the English Hymnal did not deter him from further editorial challenges; both Songs of Praise (1925) and the Oxford Book of Carols (1928) bear his imprint.

After the publication of the English Hymnal (1906) music specifically for church use faded into the background. In recent years choirs have made use of several numbers from Five mystical songs (1911), notably the choral finale Let all the world. This has become a popular anthem but in all conscience the organ makes heavy weather of the orchestral part; the bustling excitement of the string writing seems essential. The choral writing is hearty and vigorous but the flattened sevenths and hemiolas have not worn well.

The period following the first world war (in which Vaughan Williams served initially as an ambulance orderly) was more productive. O clap your hands (1920) is a fairly conventional but stirring burst of praise, somewhat reliant on the brass fanfares to provide excitement. Lord, thou hast been our refuge (1921) is more substantial. The first few verses of Psalm 90 are

set in a plainsong-like manner for a semi-chorus (D minor) set against the main choir singing St. Anne pianissimo (D major). This juxtaposition looks unlikely on paper but can be quite magical in performance. An atmospheric second section illustrates the text with richly coloured harmonies (‘for when thou art angry…’) and ends quietly in a comfortable E flat major. The organ then enters distantly and in a remote key. Vaughan Williams seems to have accepted that choirs would probably lose pitch in the long, opening passage. The organ music, with hints of St. Anne, builds to a climax and the opening section is reprised forte. This leads into a resplendent contrapuntal conclusion with St. Anne as cantus firmus on a trumpet. This is Vaughan Williams at his finest.

Just as Elgar (the Roman Catholic) had drawn great inspiration from the music-making at Worcester Cathedral, Vaughan Williams (nominally a Protestant) found a kindred spirit in R.R. Terry at Westminster Cathedral who was leading a revival of liturgical music from the sixteenth century. O vos omnes (1920) was written for his choir and suggests Vaughan Williams’s admiration of such works as the Palestrina Stabat Mater and the Tallis Lamentations. Despite these influences the music is pure Vaughan Williams, particularly in its use of harmony. The masterly Mass in G minor (1922) followed in similar vein and this could be described as a choral companion to the TallisFantasia. If the initial impression seems archaic there is no shortage of strikingly original features. After the plainsong-like interweaving melodies of the Kyrie, the Gloria begins with solemn block harmony; an unexpected E major chord highlights the word ‘pax’. Rich, slow-moving chords create an ever more magical effect in the Credo (et homo factus est). After the swaying, censerlike opening of the Sanctus and the elation of antiphonal Osannas, the Agnus returns to plainsong-like material. Intensity builds and the richest and most sublime sounds are reserved for the final dona nobis pacem. The Mass (dedicated to Holst) was first performed in Birmingham Town Hall by the City of Birmingham Choir in 1922. A liturgical performance soon followed in Westminster Cathedral. The music certainly needs the acoustics of a large church.

Though Vaughan Williams often spoke in support of the English cathedral choral tradition, he did not seem particularly drawn towards writing for Anglican cathedral choirs. Rather, he preferred to provide material for less expert resources, for example the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in C for village choirs, 1925 (do they still sing Evensong, one wonders) and a complete set of canticles for C.S. Lang and the boys at Christ’s Hospital. These settings contain a part for the whole school to join in. The musical ideas are simple and easy to grasp, but always characteristic, skilfully worked, and far more satisfying than they seem on paper. It was good to see the St. Endellion Festival reviving the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis; perhaps others will follow suit. Vaughan Williams said that he had found recent settings of the Evening Canticles ‘smug’. There is nothing complacent about the Te Deum in G which he wrote for the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928. A hearty unison opening develops into antiphonal writing of increasing richness at the words ‘holy, holy, holy!’ A shift to compound time at ‘heaven and earth …’ again leads to exciting exchanges between Dec and Can for the ‘praise ye’ refrain. Some joins (unless very well managed) can sound clumsy but the contemplative ‘vouchsafe O Lord’ brings the setting to a serene conclusion in the familiar key of G minor. Another Te Deum (in F) written for the 1937 Coronation has never found favour. The traditional melodies on which it is based lack real variety.

Two fine motets from the 1940s deserve special mention. Valiant for truth (1940) shows Vaughan Williams’s ongoing preoccupation with The Pilgrim’s Progress and the text must have had a particular resonance in the dark days of the war. The altos set the scene in quiet, narrative style before the basses take up the words ‘I am going to my Father …’. Tension builds up to the question ‘Death, where is thy sting’ and the final section begins with distant trumpet calls (‘sounding on the other side’) of increasing excitement, culminating in a full-throated choral fanfare. Prayer to the Father of heaven 1948 was written for an occasion in Oxford to celebrate the Parry centenary. Vaughan Williams had found Parry a more sympathetic teacher than Stanford and he hoped that he might have found something characteristic in this short piece. The text is by Skelton (a poet suggested by Elgar for the Five Tudor Portraits). Parry would not have been surprised by the dissonance, the chromaticisms and the restless shifting harmonies, though these features are said to have perplexed the Oxford Singers.

Preparations for the 1953 Coronation found Vaughan Williams complaining that there had been no congregational participation in the 1937 service. He therefore offered a ‘mess-up’ (as he called it) of the Old 100th; this has, of course, become a classic. In the event, the congregation was a little confused, first by the gathering notes (which he rightly insisted upon) and the little fanfares between the lines of the final verse. He also contributed the short and beautiful O taste and see and the Credo and Sanctus of the Mass in G minor were sung in an English version by Maurice Jacobson.

Vaughan Williams’s last choral excursion was the Vision of Aeroplanes, a colourful and arresting interpretation of the first chapter of Ezekiel. His long experience of writing film scores had enhanced his facility for dramatic effects and the brilliant, almost hysterical writing for organ sets the scene throughout. The first performance (as with Valiant for Truth) was given by Harold Darke (1956) and John Birch’s organ playing drew special praise.

Like many great composers Vaughan Williams was highly

regarded in his early and middle years, but later attitudes became less favourable. His folky heartiness attracted some scorn and his modal, pastoral idiom was thought to have worn thin. He was even accused of sounding pious –rather odd for a man who often, perhaps mischievously, described himself as an atheist. There is, of course, a quality of religious serenity which pervades a number of his works, in particular the Serenade, Symphony No. 5 and the final section of Flos Campi (all in D major).

He loved hymns and their influence is strong. The use of Tallis’s third mode melody in the Fantasia and the tune York in Pilgrim’s progress are obvious examples. Phrases from his own hymn-tunes occur regularly, especially For all the Saints. The first four-note figure appears again in O taste and see (and its inversion in Down Ampney), and the alleluia refrain is more than hinted at in the first movement of the 5th Symphony but even in this outwardly serene work there is an undercurrent of unease. The anger of the 4th Symphony, the desolation of the 6th and the passion of Flos Campi are worlds away from the pastoral musings which his critics decried. A recent film highlights these points as if to put the record straight.

To explore the religious convictions (or otherwise) of a composer is beyond the scope of this article, but clearly Vaughan Williams is a fascinating case. Professing atheism at Cambridge did not prevent him from visiting Ely Cathedral on Sunday mornings to enjoy the liturgy and the architecture. “There is no reason why an atheist should not write a good mass”, he once said. He may have tried to escape from his roots but in the end Charles Darwin’s great nephew was still the parson’s son from Down Ampney.

Dr Christopher Robinson is FCM President and former Director of Music at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Would you ADAM & EVE IT!

Colin Shaw, Lay Clerk

The ‘Adam and Eve’ has for many years been number one choice of drinking hole for the gentlemen of Norwich Cathedral Choir. Indeed, the masons and labourers who built the cathedral were paid in beer and bread from the establishment, cementing the fact that this wonderful hostelry is the oldest pub in Norwich by miles. It also claims to be one of the oldest in the land.

Its close proximity to the law courts means that prosecution barristers will often rub shoulders with defendants without either party knowing!

Throughout the years, certain lay clerks and choral scholars have tried alternative venues for post-evensong pints, but these forages have been shortlived as the ‘Adam’ remains the closest inn to the cathedral precincts (our

concerts only have 20-minute intervals) and the welcome we receive from landlady, Rita, is outstanding.

Delicious meals are served all day from 12 to 7pm, but if we have a special service, or even a lay clerk’s birthday, out come free potato wedges and sarnies spontaneously.

Apart from the ‘Adam’s’ huge collection of whiskey, it is famed for its careful nurture of real ale – the most quaffable being Southwold’s most worthy export, Adnams. As one OMC of many years, Dr Michael Nicholas, said on many occasions, ‘Adnams does not travel well’. Fortunately, Norwich is only a hop, skip and a jump from the Suffolk coast, so the quality of this beer is exceptional.

‘Drinking hole’ is not a bad description, as there is an ancient well underneath the bottom bar which very

occasionally makes itself known during bouts of hot weather!

There is also a ghost known to haunt the pub. I have had personal experience of this: once, an invisible hand stroked my hair, and on another occasion a rather large table came tumbling down the stairs without anyone being near it.

FCM members might well have heard of an interesting change within the management of Norwich Cathedral Choir. Like a few other cathedrals, the powers that be have appointed a specialist choral trainer –David Lowe –to be Director of Music and the other David (Dunnett) has now become the Organist –doing the job he loves best.

Colin Shaw

Colin is the FCM Diocesan Rep for Norwich.

LAY CLERKS’ TALE Where do lay clerks hang out in your part of the country? If your local hostelry is worth a mention drop the Editor a line along with a photo of the lay clerks partaking of a pint.

A parish church choir school in London

By David Gedge MBE

In May, 1882, a young lad went for a voice trial at St Paul’s Cathedral. A whole army of candidates were tried by Dr Stainer for two vacancies and the boy was placed third. “Come back in December and try again”, he was told. This he did but to no avail as on this second occasion, he failed to reach even the final round. There were, however, other choir schools in London at this time, notably attached to the churches of All Saint’s, Margaret Street, near to Oxford Circus, St Andrew’s Wells Street, close by and St Mary Magdalene Paddington, not far from the famous railway station, all built as a result of the revolutionary Tractarian movement with its desire for beauty and holiness in the worship of Almighty God. So, in due course, the boy presented himself for an audition in the drawing room of the headmaster of the choir school at St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, sang to the satisfaction of the organist and from April 28th 1883 until the end of July 1886, was a member of the choir. Today this magnificent Gothic-revival church with its tall, gracefully slender spire, the creation of the great Victorian architect, George Edmund Street, stands amidst blocks of recentlybuilt flats. In those days, however, it dominated the neighbourhood standing at the junction of three dingy streets, Clarendon Street, Woodchester Street and Cirencester Street, all of which eventually found their way into the Harrow Road. St Mary Madalene choir boys were only allowed into these streets when going to church and when visiting the grocer’s shop on the north side of Clarendon Street, where broken biscuits could be purchased fantastically cheaply. The district here was rough. Often gangs of hooligans would lie in wait for the choirboys as they came for Evensong, knocking off their caps and beating them with larded handkerchiefs. Happily little harm was done; indeed, when in the company of a master, the choirboy generally were left alone. Nor was it unknown for a member of the congregation to act as bodyguard whenever necessary, sometimes smashing an umbrella over any lout who tried to break into the ‘crocodile’. Yet such attacks were understandable: the choirboys were well-off, well fed and well dressed by comparison with the local boys who were not, Furthermore, this state of affairs was exaggerated by the residential area beyond with its unassuming terraces and crescents, avenues and squares, containing the houses from which came the constant stream of worshippers to the church. As for the working classes, those that frequented churches were mostly to be found in two subsidiary establishments!

The vicar and founder of the parish, was Richard Temple West. He had worked previously at All Saint’s,

Margaret Street and had brought its inspiration to this less favoured part of Paddington. The choirboys stood in great awe of him for not only did he rarely speak to them but if they coughed in divine service he would bang the desk on his pew and if they sang badly or misbehaved he would harangue them. Yet the very sight of him gave them confidence for his very person exuded holiness. His staff of five unmarried clerics all lived in a clergy house close to the vicarage, the sixth who was married, was headmaster of the choir school. All apparently were devout, reverent and happy, doing their work because they loved it, respected even in the most pagan parts of the parish.

The church services were always well ordered. Matins and evensong were strictly according to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) with the daily psalms sung to plainsong. On Sundays the sermon was included in Matins but omitted from High Mass, which also was according to the BCP, with the addition of an Introit, and the Ten Commandments were always said. There were no servers in the sanctuary but always there were three ministers at the High Altar. Incense was used on very great festivals. All was carefully planned and no eccentricities of behaviour tolerated. Congregations on Sunday mornings were large, divided more or less equally between men who sat on the north side of the nave, and women who sat on the south side. When the worshippers dispersed at 1pm, it was not uncommon for the choirboys to find carriages stretching down the Ranelagh Road to Westbourne Terrace North.

The choir school was housed nearby at No.8, Westbourne Square, a good house in a pleasant neighbourhood. Into this were crammed twenty boarders, the headmaster and his wife and a small staff of maids, also, sometimes, an assistant master. The two large ground-floor rooms were used as classrooms, the backroom of the basement, which was level with the garden was a dining room; the first-floor drawing room was the preserve of the headmaster and the choirboys passed it only on their way upstairs to the dormitories where they slept altogether, in close order, without the luxury of space. From the window here they could enjoy an uninterrupted view of West London with the flag of Whiteley’s, the famous Bayswater shop, waving proudly for all to see. A year later a second was opened, at 1 Delamere Terrace, five minutes walk away, to cope with the increasing number of pupils. This was put under the charge of the head master’s sister-in-law, a Miss Bidwell, and became the headquarters of the chief assistant master. So there was additional classroom and dormitory space and also room for a chapel, although everyone continued to eat in the proper dining room at Westbourne Square. This resulted in an increase in the amount of walking undertaken by the choirboys which in winter months sometimes could be quite unpleasant with the streets often being badly paved and in bad weather covered with a mud that no other city could rival, with electric lights still unknown both inside and outside houses, and with the constant presence of fogs which were so thick that even gas lights failed to penetrate the gloom.

Food was never in short supply at the choir school but what was provided usually was coarse and uninteresting. Thus the weekly three-pence pocket money often was spent at the grocery shop at the corner of Westbourne Terrace North, where Fry’s Chocolate Cream and Garibaldi biscuits were obtainable. Popular too was the bakery further down the road, where half-penny currant buns could be purchased hot at seven for three-pence. In Porchester Road three cornered tarts could be purchased at a shop called Steward’s, while in Chichester Street, there was a greengrocer’s shop. Best of all

was the occasional food parcel from home ! The school meal most guaranteed to please was lunch because the headmaster and his wife shared it with the boys, yet even so the bread not consumed, sometimes with butter on it, was collected up to be available again at the next meal.

The headmaster, S. Theodore Wood, MA, BCL, a former junior student of Christ Church, Oxford, was responsible for the classical education of the senior boys. Unfortunately, his temper was uneven. Whenever the choirboys saw him biting his fingers they knew that the birch and the cane were about to be wielded mercilessly and with pitiless severity. Sadly this uncertainty in temper spread to uncertainty in school affairs and no one could ever be sure whether he would appear in time, or, indeed appear at all. Sometimes he was not to be seen for days whereupon the senior choirboys had to carry on as best they could, then when he returned the boys working for scholarships would be required to stay late at their studies. Nor was his control of the school accounts any more successful. Eventually an ex-Indian army officer General Lawford, who sang tenor in the choir, was called in to sort out the mess but eventually was forced to give up the unequal struggle!

Very different was the chief assistant, Frank Wyatt. Educated at Tiverton, he was desirous now of a degree at London University and earned a living by teaching and doing other jobs at the choir school. He was never absent, never ill, never unpunctual and always ready to teach anything that came along, mathematics being his speciality. Patience and perseverance he had in abundance. Another assistant master was a young man from Gloucester who when not busy would entertain some of the boys with an infinite variety of comic songs, or would stroll down with them to Paddington Station to watch the 9pm train leave Platform 1 for Penzance.

Surrounded as the choirboys were by high walls and chimney pots, with the nearest grass around one mile away, sport featured less than it should have done in school life. Occasionally in the summer they played cricket at Regent’s Park or on the Eton and Middlesex ground near to Swiss Cottage, even sometimes at Neasden where there was a large network of cricket grounds, However, with such irregularity of practice, while they might contain the choirboys of St Andrew’s, Wells Street, who suffered under similar disabilities, they stood little chance on the cricket field against the country preparatory school teams. In the winter it was football of the rugby variety that the choirboys played, which was a strange choice considering the small size of the school and its wide age-range, but fortunately there were no outside matches. It took a walk down the uninviting Harrow Road to reach the ground for this activity, which was on a farm belonging to the Aylesbury Dairy Company at Kensal Green, close to the recently opened Kensal Green cemetery. However, the choirboys were never really short of exercise as they were kept fit by walking to and from church, by walking backwards and forwards between the two houses at Westbourne Square and Delamere Terrace, by walking to and from the football or cricket ground, by walking for exercise to Kensington Gardens or Hyde Park, also, once a week in the winter terms, by walking to and from Regent Street and the polytechnic, for the use of the gymnasium there. With so much exercise, not surprisingly their record of health was good with only the occasional common cold, which was hardly surprising in foggy London, and of this the authorities took little notice unless it became unduly noisy and, presumably, could cause a distraction at divine service. As for epidemics, all that occurred at this time was a not very serious attack of measles!

Who were these choirboys, where were they from and why did they come to such a choir school? Most of them were from professional homes which were not necessarily wealthy, from various parts of Britain ranging from Bodmin to Aberystwyth, from Southwell to Horncastle and East Dereham. Not necessarily being highly intellectual they rarely found their way into one of the ancient public schools. Many indeed went straight from the choir school into business life as happened to the solo boy at this time, one H. F. Tilsley, who, despite being elected to an Exhibition at Felsted School, shoes to stay on at St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, until he was able to join Lloyds Bank. Another choirboy, Vincent Blagden, remained at the choir school until he was old enough to go away to Hamburg to learn to speak German before taking up an appointment with the Eastern Telegraph Company. Vincent’s younger brother, Claude, was the young lad who had entered the choir school on April 28th 1883, remaining there until July 1886. These two boys were the sons of the Revd H. C. Blagden Vicar of Newnton Longueville, then a remote village near to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, now almost part of Milton Keynes. As this living was not a particularly lucrative one, their father and mother looked to a choir school to provide a cheap, good Christian preparatory school education for their sons. Claude Blagden, the younger of the two boys, was one of the successes of the choir school attached to the church of St Mary Magdalene, Paddington. From there he won a scholarship to Bradfield and later he won another scholarship which took him as an undergraduate to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After lecturing at the university he went on to become Rector of Rugby and, finally, from 1927 to 1949, Bishop of Peterborough.

Claude Blagden was not the only St Mary Magdalene choirboy to join the ranks of the clergy because three more from his generation followed the same calling. This is astonishing when it is considered what was required of the choirboys in addition to their schoolwork. They went to practise in the vicarage every day at 9am and they sang Evensong every day at 8pm, sometime staying on after that service to rehearse any special music which was to be sing on a coming Sunday or festival. On Sundays they sang Matins at 10.30am and the Holy Eucharist at 11.45m. At 4pm the choirboys alone sang a simple Evensong for those who could not come out later, and at 7pm they sang a fully choral Evensong which was followed by an organ recital. Sometimes on a great day like Ascension Day, they sang the Holy Eucharist very early in the morning at 6am or even 5am, for in those days some people in London arose then for their work! In Holy Week, still more was asked of them, indeed on Good Friday they were kept in church for many hours at a stretch, saying a full Matins at 10.30am, and leading the hymns through the Three Hours’ Devotion, all this without food from breakfast until tea-time, also with the obligation of silence all the day. No one ever seemed to break down under the strain to be physically the worse for it, nor did any choirboy revolt against the system or the religion which was its background. What saved the choirboys from the peril of disillusionment and rebellion was the atmosphere of the early Church that prevailed in the church of St Mary Magdalene, Paddington. The Christian world there was young, eager and sincere. The ministry of the Word and Sacraments was a living experience. The Church was on the march and the clergy and laity were moving out beneath its banner. The discipline might be hard but the way was clear and the choirboys were content to follow it.

The discipline of daily choral services never stopped for holidays but continued throughout the year uninterrupted as

some of the choirboys remained in residence. So, although a new choirboy, young Claude Blagden was expected to stay with some of the other boys throughout August during his first year, 1883. However, his older brother, Vincent was kind enough to stay behind voluntarily to keep him company. Later that year, Claude also had to stay behind to sing in the choir over the Christmas festival, with its additional important feast days that follow on closely, but this time Vincent spent his holiday back at home in Newnton Longueville.

If the choir did not number among the finest in the land that was simply because the tenors and basses were amateur singers who were busy with their own occupation and therefore not always available for divine service, In addition many of the trebles, like Claude, were rejects from cathedral or more famous parish church choirs and therefore were not the best of singers. Nevertheless, the choir had at its head an organist and choirmaster of distinction, Richard Redhead, now perhaps known only as the composer of two famous hymn-tunes sung to the words: Rock of ages cleft for me and Bright the vision that delightest. Born in Harrow on March 1st 1820, he had trained as a chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford, where there was a choir school that met with no criticism in the survey of such establishments that was carried out by the ‘Choristers Friend’ Maria Hackett. In the year 1839, he had become Organist at Margaret Chapel, the future All Saint’s, Margaret Street, where he had set about establishing a choir. For this collection of singers he had helped to produce the first Anglican Plainsong Psalter, Laudes Diurnae, which appeared in 1843. In 1847, Richard Redhead was appointed also organist at the neighbouring church of St Andrew, Wells Street, but as the duties of the two churches soon proved incompatible, he resigned from St Andrew’s Church. In 1864, he became organist of St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Paddington, although the building of the new church was not completed until 1873. Claude Balgden in his autobiography, from which most of the information for this story is taken, recalled how, initially a fire had destroyed much of what had been constructed with the result that the finished edifice rose phoenix-like from the ashes. This greatly caught the imagination of the public which crowded into the striking church when eventually it was consecrated for worship.

The choirboys at St Mary Magdalene Church held Richard Redhead in great awe, they looked on him as a stern, never to be satisfied tyrant. One choirboy could only disarm him by singing and that was the solo boy H.F. Tilsley. To the remainder he could be a hard task master, a squat figure in a snuffy, serge cassock, sitting at the organ and playing it divinely despite his broad, flat fingers, reviling one or other of the choirboys for their delinquencies, knocking the heavy Introit book out of their hands. Sometimes, during divine service, the organ would cease to sound whereupon he would be forced to climb down the organ steps in an effort to discover what had gone wrong with the hydraulic blowing apparatus. If this could not be put right quickly then he would call for Mr Applethwaite, the saintly-looking verger, who would be expected to rectify matters by operating the hand-pump.

Alas, the choir school and daily choral services at the church of St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, which gave this drab and desolate corner of west London a touch of romantic colour are now no more, overtaken by development in the state system of education. Yet the existence of such a school, for however short a period of time, is a great tribute to the reforming zeal of the Tractarian branch of the Anglican Church, with its desire to ‘bring all heaven before our eyes.

J Paul Burbridge looks back at the life of

David Cooper

Earlier this year when David and I discussed his expected obsequies, the very first thing he said was: “I want them to say the Lord’s Prayer properly none of this hybrid ‘Our Father WHO art in heaven. . .etc.” A strange way to open an obituary, you may say: and yet it was significant. For David was a stickler for perfection and for detail, indeed his attention to detail has become almost legendary. Those of us who have ever sung under his direction will remember his almost apoplectic objection to the intrusive ‘R’ in ‘HosannaRin (excelsis or) the highest!’ He was noted for the exceptional quality of detailed precision that he brought to any choir with which he had to do. David came to us at Norwich at a time when the recruitment of boy choristers had been particularly difficult, and it says volumes for his choir-training skills that he was able to produce such remarkable results in so short a time. In addition to his excellent, if demanding, choir training ability, his other exceptional musical expertise unquestionably lay in his ability at keyboard improvisation, and this has been widely recognised. At an organ recital shortly before I left Norwich, David was to do an improvisation on any hymn tune of my choosing –quite unprepared. In the sealed envelope handed him he found he had the choice of either ‘St Fulbert’ or Wesley’s great tune ‘Cornwall’. After a couple of minutes, in which we soon recognised ‘St Fulbert’, we were absolutely astounded to find he was actually combining it with ‘Cornwall’ as well! It was a masterly tour de force demonstrating both his

innate musicianship and performance skills before a very appreciative audience.

His output as a composer was not very extensive, but was correspondingly exciting –most notably his chants, but then Anglican psalmody was one of his particular loves. It was significant that he asked for not one but two of Coverdale’s Prayer Book psalms to be said by the congregation at his funeral. As he once pointed out: ‘Whilst not everyone can sing, most people can speak.’ I suspect he would have found a congregationally sung psalm on that occasion lacking in that delicacy and precision that he always strove for.

The anthem that remains uppermost in mind is his setting of George Herbert’s poem Come my Way, my Truth my Life which he wrote specially for a previous Blackburn choirs’ festival.

His undoubted love and admiration for the Book of Common Prayer received final testimony in his personal choice of a (19281 Prayer Book funeral service. However, that did not mean that he was unwilling to work with the liturgical developments that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. His loyalty was always beyond question, and he was a most helpful friend and supportive colleague.

It is probably true that he found his most fulfilling period during his 12 years at Blackburn, but I shall always be most grateful to David for the many gifts he brought with him, together with the standard of excellence he achieved, during the sadly short time that I was with him at Norwich.

Lambeth 2008 David Flood

the Cathedral of Canterbury host

Anglican Communion. It

hosted the assembled bishops

The Resolutions passed by a Lambeth Conference do not have legislative authority in any Province, until they have been approved by the provincial synod of the Province concerned. The Lambeth Conference does not impose doctrine or discipline, but it is a forum where the mind of the Communion can be expressed on matters of controversy.

Canadian bishops were the first to raise the idea of a gathering of Anglican bishops, as a means of facilitating understanding of activity in other Provinces. The heads of various Provinces wished to meet to create a supreme government for the Anglican Communion, and to maintain a unity when dealing with controversial issues in local circumstances. Resolution 11 of 1978 stated that no individual province should take action on major issues without first

in

consulting the Lambeth Conference or a meeting of the primates. Over the past 13 Conferences, the bishops have expressed their minds on more than 750 issues, ranging from international politics, social policy and other matters of secular concern to Church order, doctrine, ethics and Christian unity.

For us, the community in and around Canterbury Cathedral, it is a very exciting and demanding time and it is the basis from which so much of our international contact and outreach stems. It reinforces for us our situation at the very focus of the worldwide communion and we make every effort possible to support the work of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

For 2008, it was decided that for the first time the Cathedral musical foundation would stay in residence throughout the

Once every ten years the City and

the gathering of bishops from the worldwide

was

1876 that Archbishop Longley first

from around the world. This Lambeth meeting was not called Council or Synod but a Conference, in Archbishop Longley’s words, “For brotherly counsel and encouragement.”

18-day conference. This was, I understand, a conscious decision to enable the Cathedral and its services to continue as they normally would throughout the rest of the year. The Foundation would be complete. So we were able to maintain our regular sequence of sung services, with the usual variety of music. In fact, the variety was at its peak, since the end of the year brings more rehearsal time, opportunity to bring in the ‘big’ pieces and, of course, the favourite choices of the leaving choristers! We were delighted to welcome bishops from the Conference as they came away from the University of Kent and their daily work and, naturally, many found the Cathedral services a huge resource.

The Conference began with two days of retreat for the bishops, when the Archbishop led a sequence of sessions in the nave of the Cathedral. As a closure to each of these days, the Cathedral Choir sang a short and modest setting of Evening Prayer, unaccompanied, in the nave which was completely filled with bishops and conference staff. The effect of these services and the very simple music was enormous and the retreats were a major catalyst in the opening of the conference.

There is always a decision to be made about the balance between what might be called “Cathedral repertoire” and the need to bring a truly international feel to these great gatherings. For each of the Sunday Eucharists, a different rite was used and the service led in many languages. The Opening Service, on 20th July, was based on the Congolese Eucharist with parts spoken in Swahili, Korean, French, Hindi,

Portugese and Japanese as well, of course, as English. For this reason, we were asked to sing the Missa Luba which is a Latin Mass based on traditional Congolese songs arranged by Fr Guido Haazen. In contrast to this and to create the balance and variety for which we were seeking, the Cathedral Choir accompanied the 30-minute procession of delegates with music by Gibbons, Harris and Stanford.

In each of the great services, we were keen to give as much opportunity for the bishops and their staff to participate and to feel welcome. A new hymnal, Lambeth Praise, was published by Canterbury Press in Norwich and prepared with expert guidance from Geoff Weaver. This hymnal was the source of all the congregational music throughout the Conference and is an astonishing collection of hymns and service music from around the world.

A comment which I had heard from a number of the bishops who attended the conference in 1998 was that the sound of the congregation singing O for a thousand tongues to the tune Lyngham at the end of that opening service had lived with them ever since. We therefore repeated the experience in 2008. Sung in four languages at once, it was again a truly memorable way to send the delegates into the work of the next two weeks. Such energy should always be encouraged!

Although the rite was Congolese and the music a tapestry of many colours, the service will stay in the consciousness of those who were there because of the remarkable sermon from the Bishop of Columbo, the Rt Revd Duleep de Chickera. Never

before have I heard a sermon applauded spontaneously by a full cathedral of over 2,000 people, nearly half of them bishops.

The province of Melanesia had been invited to take a significant role in the worship of the whole Conference and the gospel procession was led by a group of Melanesian Brothers and Sisters, singing and dancing all the way from the High Altar to the Compass Rose. Accompanied by remarkable instruments made from clusters of huge bamboo tubes and sounded by hitting over the open ends with what appears to be the sole of a sandal, the Brothers and Sisters carried the Gospel book in a small, plain boat supported on the shoulders of two of them. Such rare contributions underline the astonishing scope and variety of the Anglican Communion. The opportunity to experience such an individual contribution from a relatively small part of the Communion made an indelible impression.

Throughout the 18 days, a group of musicians led by Geoff Weaver produced music with enormous variety and versatility for the services which were held daily on the campus of the University of Kent. Therefore, for the closing service on 3rd August we were able to incorporate some elements of the music they had sung together during the Conference.

A much more informal service with no long processions, the order was taken from the New Zealand Prayer Book and celebrated by Sir Ellison Pogo, the Archbishop of Melanesia. An Urdu Kyrie, a Brazilian hymn in which the choristers played tambourines, a South African Gospel Alleluia, a Chinese intercession response and a Punjabi hymn were amongst the international mosaic of music. When we sang the Agnus Dei from the Mass in G minor by Vaughan Williams at the end of the communion, the Nave was silent and still. A remarkable moment. Jeremy Frost had composed an anthem for the occasion set to the text of the Compass Rose itself: ‘The truth shall set you free’, sung in Greek, and the Dean of Canterbury, the Very Revd Robert Willis wrote a new hymn, with which the whole Conference ended: ‘I am the Light whose brightness shines/On every pilgrim’s way’ set to the tune Richmond

One of the overwhelming roles which the Cathedral and its staff played during the Conference was, of course, host and the glad provider of hospitality. After the Closing Service, since security was still relatively high, the Cathedral choristers had to delay their departure until a little later in the evening. We were

all invited to share the enormous barbecue which the Cathedral presented for the delegates in the Precincts. This would have been the most wonderful party if only it hadn’t been raining! The bishops made the most of the occasion, though, before travelling up to the University in their coaches for the last time. They said they were delighted to stand and watch the event happen in true English rainy weather! We were delighted that we managed to secure the necessary support to provide (until supplies ran out!) bottles of a product of one of our good neighbours in this part of the world, Shepherd Neame: their ale, aptly named ‘Bishop’s Finger’.

The Conference itself was judged a huge success and the Archbishop of Canterbury was effusive in his thanks and compliments for all those who had worked towards such a success. He himself must reap the rewards of steering such a gathering at such an historic time. Lambeth 2008 was a defining time. It is widely understood that any further Lambeth Conferences will undoubtedly be fixed in Canterbury. We look forward to welcoming them.

Post Script

The Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, wrote: ‘I am sure that you and the Choir receive many accolades and compliments to which you may now add mine. I attended the services on 20th and 27th as well as the final service on 3 August and I was hugely impressed by the range of music, all gloriously presented, and by the faultless (to my ear) blend of the voices, particularly the boys. The Luba Mass on the 20th, the singing of simple items before Evensong on the 27th and the Howard Goodall anthem were especially appreciated. (The 27th items referred to might not be the cup of tea of the purists, but, whatever one’s taste may be and mine is very broad I congratulate you and the Choir on presenting these and everything else with sublime class.) Might I also add praise for your own personal input as Director of Music? The humanity and enthusiasm, dignity and discipline which you demonstrated in a completely unfussy and gentle way were themselves a lesson. I am sure that your personal approach does much to get the best out of others. Sadly, I was not among those visiting the Cathedral who was able to play the organ, perhaps another time and another occasion - we stay, as a family, at the Old Palace from time to time.’

NEWS BITE

CHANTING ALONG

The Chapel Choir of King's College Cambridge is the busiest in the University, with a heavy schedule of services and concerts. The Director of Music, Stephen Cleobury, conducts the Choir in a service of Choral Evensong according to the Book of Common Prayer, every afternoon except Monday. There is generally a sung eucharist on Sunday mornings. On Saturdays at 6.30pm in term time there is normally an organ recital on the historic chapel organ. The Choir has a busy concert and tour schedule, which in 2008 has taken them to the USA, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and major venues in the UK, such as Birmingham Town Hall and Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. There is also a big annual Christmas carol concert at the Royal Albert Hall and a series of concerts through the winter – Concerts at King’s. At Easter, as well as liturgies for Holy Week and Easter, such as the Ante-Communion for Good Friday, there is a high profile concert series, which together comprise the festival Easter at King’s. During the Christmas season, the Choir records the Carols from King’s service for BBC 2 and, on Christmas Eve it sings the world-famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, which is broadcast on radio worldwide.

News from Choirs and Places where they sing

When Stephen Cleobury came to King's in 1982 he was keen to demonstrate a commitment to contemporary music for the College's liturgies. So he decided to commission a new carol each year for inclusion in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols; thus a new tradition was born. The first composer to be commissioned was Lennox Berkeley, and amongst those who have followed him are, Judith Weir, Thomas Adès, Judith Bingham, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, James Macmillan and John Rutter, to name but a few. A CD recording of the commissioned carols entitled On Christmas Day is available from King's shop.

The Festival is primarily intended for the City of Cambridge and members of the general public. Apart from those reserved for members of the College and their guests, seats are kept for those who are prepared to queue. Due to the increasing popularity of this service, the demand for seats always outstrips the number available. Normally, anyone joining the queue before 9.00am will gain admission, but this it is not guaranteed. The queue is admitted at 1.30pm. Entry to the televised service is by ticket only.

King’smakeseveryefforttomakechoristershipspossibleforanyboywith therightmusicalability,regardlessoftheirfamily’sfinancialcircumstances.

Gloucester Cathedral Choir

Tour to the USA

3rd -15th April 2008

Edited report by Joel Newsome (Choral Scholar) and Helen Sims (Tour Manager)

It was on a typically cold, wet April morning that Gloucester Cathedral Choir set off on their tour to the USA. The party comprised thirty seven (Director and Assistant Directors of Music, 8 Lay Clerks, 4 Choral Scholars, Organ Scholar, eighteen choristers, Precentor, Tour Manager, Chorister Chaperone, and our Tour Doctor). The British Airways flight Heathrow-Denver passed without incident, and some choristers and lay clerks enjoyed watching the UK Cup Stacking Team get in some last minute practice prior to the World Cup Stacking Championships in Denver.

Arriving in Denver at about 7pm local time we were all shattered, having added seven hours to our daytime. We travelled by coach to St John’s Cathedral through sleet, but, despite our tiredness, were all immediately captivated by downtown Denver with its glittering skyscrapers and grand

state buildings. Arriving at the Cathedral we were warmly greeted by our hosts who had generously (or possibly naively) agreed to open up their homes for us for four nights. My fellow choral scholars and I were whisked away to beautiful homes in the Denver suburbs, where we were well fed and then shown to our rooms for what we all imagined would be a long sleep.

Friday 4th –Despite tiredness most of the tour party awoke early, keen to explore the delights of Denver. The next morning was free time, planned so that everyone could recover from the flight, but most people went sightseeing with their hosts, making the most of the bright blue sky. Everyone convened at St John’s Cathedral for an afternoon rehearsal led by our new Assistant Organist, Ashley Grote. The altitude of Denver (the mile-high city) was certainly noticeable when we sang.

Trinity Episcopal Church Columbus, Georgia

Saturday 5th –Most of the tour party set off for a day in the town of Boulder, with the highlight promising to be Banjo Billy’s Bus Tour. Banjo Billy himself was highly entertaining and knowledgeable about the murders and ghost stories around the town. Back in Denver that evening we watched a baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks. Especially noteworthy was the tremendous atmosphere inside the stadium.

Sunday 6th –After a relaxing few days of enjoying the sights and sounds of Denver it came as quite a shock to us all to actually have to do some work, but the choir all enjoyed the opportunity of singing the morning Eucharist at St John’s Cathedral; we were told that the Cathedral was unusually full and at coffee afterwards we were highly praised for our singing of the Mass in G minor and motets of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The concert that evening also proved to be hugely popular, and a large and appreciative audience certainly enjoyed a glimpse of the English Choral Tradition with music by Byrd, S.S. Wesley, Gowers and Howells as well as hearing the choir perform some music associated with the USA in the form of five Spirituals taken from Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time.

Monday 7th –From Denver we flew for three and a half hours to Atlanta airport, from where we travelled by coach to Columbus, a small town on the Georgia/Alabama border,

which, by American standards, is very old and historic. The welcome we received in Columbus was especially touching, and it seemed everyone was very excited about our arrival.

Tuesday 8th –After a morning spent at ‘Hollywood Connection’ (choristers enjoyed the crazy golf, rock wall and roller blade rink) or the country club, depending on one’s age, we reconvened in Trinity Episcopal Church for a rehearsal and early evening concert. The concert was tremendously well received with a standing ovation at the end and then again after the encore.

Wednesday 9th –We went to the spectacular Providence Canyon outside Columbus today, and a picnic lunch and a game of rugby rounded off the day. By this time we were all missing Choral Evensong having not done the service for over a week, so we were delighted to have the opportunity of performing the service in Trinity Episcopal Church.

Thursday 10th –Reluctantly leaving Columbus we made our way by coach to St Philip’s Cathedral, Atlanta, via ‘Six Flags’ theme park.

Friday 11th –After a morning rehearsal the choir visited the World of Coke Museum. A Mr John Pemberton developed Coca Cola, and chorister Lawrence Pemberton informed our guide of his surname connection and earned himself a special commemorative plaque. After watching films and presentations about the making and designing of coca-cola

St John’s Cathedral, Denver Colorado

products, and seeing a walk-through exhibition of the history of the company, we ended our tour in the most exciting room of all –the tasting room. Back at St Philip’s Cathedral for an evening concert we were all relieved to sing in a big acoustic again, albeit not quite as big as Gloucester’s. The highlight of this concert was the percussive effects! A joint effort between Mr Kevin Kwan (Organ Scholar) on Bass Drum during Good Hope by Peter Gritton and the thunderstorm outside.

Saturday 12th –After an enjoyable morning spent at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, we set off to Columbia, South Carolina, our final point of call on the tour.

Sunday 13th –A packed church was rewarded with Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G at two Eucharist Services this morning and we also sang an evening concert, a busy singing day.

Monday 14th –It was sad to think a great tour was coming to an end, but by now we were all so tired that the prospect of a

day spent on a coach was rather an attractive one. Stopping for lunch in the pretty town of Greenville, we made our way back to Atlanta Airport for the overnight flight to London Gatwick.

Tuesday 15th –Landing at 7am we were greeted with the pilot telling us the outside temperature was 5 degrees Celsius. Some things never change, although it seems we missed the April snow storms. At last everyone could relax and enjoy a long sleep on the journey back to Gloucester.

We all had a wonderful tour. The food and weather were excellent throughout. The music we performed was superb. The people we encountered, the warmth of their welcome and their generous hospitality far exceeded our expectations and I am sure many friendships formed over just a few days will stand the test of time and distance. As for ourselves we were aware of the enormous goodwill, team spirit and high profile that the tour generated. Here’s to the next tour!

Flourishing North of the Border

January 1978 was a momentous month in the history of cathedral music.

As the boy choristers of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh returned from their Christmas holidays to school and to their routine of daily choral services, they found that they were not alone: a girl had joined their ranks.

Over the following years, as applications for choristerships from girls were accepted and encouraged, their numbers steadily increased. Thirty years on, girls are integral to the choir’s top line whilst, despite much debate and argument to the contrary, the boys have not gone away and instead continue to flourish.

It would be wrong to characterise the introduction of girls into the choir at St Mary’s as a planned revolution. It was rather a natural evolution, with a number of factors conspiring together to demonstrate it as being the most sensible way forward. In the late 1960s St Mary’s Choir School was severely struggling. The school had been providing education and accommodation for boy choristers since the Cathedral’s foundation in 1879, but, with a rise in expectations, parents were demanding higher academic standards than the choir school in its extremely modest accommodation and with its major financial restrictions could possibly offer. With these issues coming to a head, the bold decision was made in 1972 to reform the school so that it offered not only choristerships but also instrumental scholarships. The plan –the brainchild of the Provost at the time, Philip Crosfield, and the late Dr Dennis Townhill –attracted a number of keen supporters (Yehudi Menuhin perhaps being the most important). The school admitted its first instrumental pupils in August 1972, and officially became independent as St Mary’s Music School the

following year (St Mary’s Music School is celebrating its thirtyfifth anniversary this year). Pupils in the school now ranged from seven to eighteen-year-olds. Girls were offered instrumental places on the same conditions as the boys, whilst boy choristers still had guaranteed places at the school. With a total of between forty and fifty pupils, the children were educated in small groups, boys and girls together.

It is fair to say that there was considerable danger of the school developing as ‘them and us’: the instrumentalists on the one hand –boys and girls who were exceptionally gifted young musicians –and the boy choristers on the other, who earned their places at the school merely by virtue of a good ear and a voice with some potential. School teachers were reluctant to allow instrumental pupils to sing in the choir, even if they were talented singers. The question kept coming back to the Cathedral: why should girls, who played a full part in life at the school and could earn their place on any instrument, not be allowed to take a place in school as a chorister? Issues came to a head in 1978 when a girl auditioned as a pianist. She was not strong enough instrumentally, but she was found to have a good voice and to be hugely enthusiastic about singing. It was perhaps here that the issue of ‘fairness’ as well as practicality kicked in. How reasonable was it to exclude a pupil from what was known by the Cathedral to be a unique education just because she was a

Duncan Ferguson

girl, when the rights of girls to audition as instrumentalists at the school had never been in question? Dr Townhill took the plunge and from 1978 on, girls have been admitted into St Mary’s Cathedral Choir.

If this seemed to ‘just happen’, it is emphatically wrong to suggest that the move was made without serious thought. There were a number of considerations. Girls and boys had, of course, sung together in church choirs for decades, even centuries, but not before in a Cathedral. How would the treble sound be affected? How would behaviour be? What would be the effect on the boys?

Dr Townhill consulted widely, and clear principles were established for the introduction of girls. The girls would join and leave the choir at precisely the same age as the boys: there would be no question of a talented senior chorister staying on for an extra year or two. The number of girls admitted was kept proportional to the number of boys in order to tread carefully with regard to sound and not scaring off the boys, who at chorister age were thought not to like girls very much.

Susan Hamiton, founder member and Artistic Director of the Dunedin Consort, was one of the first girls to join the choir in August 1978. She recalls with great fondness her time in the choir, as described in the article on page 46. Apart from the usual teasing that one might expect from boy choristers, the girls were immediately accepted, and indeed it immediately led to a more harmonious relationship between the school and the Cathedral. Susan feels that she owes her whole career –in particular her interest in Renaissance and Baroque music –to her time at St Mary’s, music which she would not have been introduced to at such a young age without the chorister education. ‘It also makes me a better singing teacher to the choristers’, she says of her current role with the choir, ‘because I know the repertoire and the sort of vocal changes that girls and boys go through at chorister age.’

There were in actual fact very few teething problems. As is still the case today, almost all doubt about boys and girls singing together came from people outside, most of whom had never heard the choir sing. It quickly became clear that fears about ‘sound’ were groundless. The argument about whether boys and girls can sound the same –chorally trained ones, that is –may go on and on, but the blending of voices was and is highly successful. The famous ‘blind test’ was conducted at the Cathedral Organists’ Association conference in Edinburgh in1990, when girls and boys stood behind a screen and sang one after the other. Delegates were invited to mark whether they thought it was a boy or a girl singing. Unfortunately for the sceptics, one organist’s wife was the only person who had any reasonable level of success!

Indeed the admittance of girls into the choir at St Mary’s can only be described as a move ahead of its time and an unqualified success. Before my own move to St Mary’s, and with no previous experience of mixed or even girls’ choirs, I was uncertain about how the mixing of voices would work. Yet it quickly became clear to me that, just as boys can be taught to sing in a certain way, training individual (and often very different) voices with a unified approach to create that which is distinctive about each choir, so boys and girls can be. One girl’s voice may sound different from a boy’s voice, but in all likelihood it will also sound different from another girl’s voice. Gender is not the only factor in creating variation in voices. Indeed at chorister age, both boys and girls produce their sound based on what they hear around them. Starting in choir at the age of 8, the vast majority of children will naturally start

to produce a sound which is similar to the other choristers. Similarly, children who listen to nothing but musicals will be influenced to produce or imitate that type of sound. Again, gender here seems largely irrelevant.

Of course, there are practical advantages to having girls sing as well. With boys and girls singing together, many has been the time that having a senior girl or two has helped overcome the problems of early voice change (increasingly a difficulty) with the boys. On financial grounds, running two separate choirs –a boys’ and a girls’ choir –would be an impossibility, even if it was considered desirable. And if there was a separate girls’ choir, the result, inevitably, would be a diminishing of what the boys do. Reducing what the boys sing (from the current situation of daily services to approximately three a week) would lessen their importance and, undoubtedly, qualities such as sight-reading (which develop so quickly with daily rehearsals and services) would be somewhat set back. When cathedrals join their two choirs together for big occasions, does that not have a rather severe impact on the choir ‘sound’?

At the same time, there is an appreciation that the culture at St Mary’s is an unusual one: a mixed, specialist school, at which music is the normal –in fact, the most important –thing to be doing. Without such a culture of boys and girls making music together, there are more issues to overcome, which is perhaps why so few choirs have followed the lead given by Dr Townhill and St Mary’s in 1978. Had St Mary’s not already been well established as a mixed school, the introduction of girls as choristers probably would have had a negative impact on the boys, at least in the short term, feeling like an ‘invasion’ of their world.

With recruitment of choristers –boys particularly –now being an issue for the vast majority of choral institutions, it is perhaps understandable that institutions without an established culture of music making by boys and girls have not followed suit. These seem to be good practical reasons why, at many institutions, boys and girls singing together is not seen as the best way to enable girls to have the same opportunities as boys and, instead, separate choirs are formed. These views carry rather more weight than some of the entrenched conservatism that sometimes blurs the debate.

It is interesting to note that a boy chorister at St Mary’s, when interviewed this year about the thirtieth anniversary by the BBC, made the point that he could simply not imagine the choir being boys only. To him, it was the choirs in which boys sing by themselves that were unusual. The culture of girls and boys singing together is right for St Mary’s. The choir goes from strength to strength: whether it was on tour this summer in the USA and Canada, or in our day-to-day services, the boys and girls are stronger for singing together. Indeed, at least in the St Mary’s case, hopefully most would agree with the editorial from The Times earlier this year, with the St Mary’s anniversary as its subject: ‘It is the quality of singing that matters, not the gender of the voices.’

Duncan Ferguson was appointed Organist and Master of the Music at St Mary’s Cathedral in 2008, having held the position in an acting capacity from September 2007 and been Assistant Organist since 2005. He was formerly an Organ Scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford, and St Paul’s Cathedral, London. St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral is Scotland’s only foundation with sung daily services and its own choir school. It was the first choir in the United Kingdom to mix girls of the same age as the boys in its treble line, thirty years ago this year.

A tribute to Dr Dennis

Dennis Townhill was born in the city of Lincoln on 29 May 1925. His mother died at the age of twentythree when he was only two years old and he was then brought up by his grandparents. At the age of nine he successfully auditioned for a chorister place in Lincoln Cathedral Choir and this was to be the start of a remarkable career dedicated to music and the church. On leaving the choir at the age of 15 he took on a number of Sunday organ jobs and in 1943 Dr Gordon Slater, the Organist and Choir Master of Lincoln Cathedral, offered him an apprenticeship as his pupil-assistant. During this time he studied for the Bachelor of Music Degree at Durham University externally and completed it in 1947. This was the year he proposed to Mabel Ellingworth and on 21 May 1949 they were married in the Parish Church of St Peter-at-Gowts, Lincoln, where they had met at Youth Fellowship.

Before his appointment as Organist and Master of the Choristers at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh in 1961, Dennis was Organist and Choirmaster at the Parish Church of St James, Louth coupled with the position of Music Master at the town’s grammar school from 1949-1956 and then St James’, Grimsby from 1956-1961. He also directed the

“My choristers days were almost unadulterated joy except for the first year when I was a probationer and not allowed to sing during services...”

Townhill OBE

Choral Society in Brigg and the Grimsby Madrigal Society.

Armed with this knowledge and experience, Dennis embraced his new role at St Mary’s and within a short period he had given the choir a very distinctive voice. One of his first tasks was to persuade the clergy to increase the number of paid daily lay clerks from three to six with an additional eight honorary lay clerks who sang on Sundays. During his thirty years he also greatly expanded the choir’s liturgical repertoire which spanned a wide spectrum of six centuries. Before his arrival the choir sang mainly Victorian and Edwardian settings. He also introduced a good deal of mainstream twentieth century music and commissioned new works. Dennis established annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Passion Sunday which latterly changed to Good Friday and then alternated with Bach’s St John Passion; a Requiem Mass on Remembrance Sunday, either Brahms’s or Fauré’s setting and at Christmas, Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. In addition to his work at the cathedral, Dennis lectured at Edinburgh Theological College and taught for many years at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

1972 saw the birth of St Mary’s Music School, Scotland’s first specialist music school. The choir school where the choristers

were educated had been causing concern for many years both financially and academically. One suggestion was that the school should be closed down, but fortunately it didn’t come to that. There was a group of five people who were behind the move to create the music school and they all shared the vision of the choir school becoming a specialist music school for exceptionally gifted children. They were Dennis, the Scottish composer Isobel Dunlop, Joan Dickson a renowned cellist and teacher, Kenneth Leighton at that time Professor of Music at Edinburgh University and Philip Crosfield the Provost at the cathedral. Advice was sought from Yehudi Menuhin who had established the Menuhin School some years earlier and this school in many ways provided the model for St Mary’s. He agreed to become the school’s patron and thought it particularly fortunate to base the new Music School on a choral foundation. He affectionately referred to it as his ‘younger sister school in Scotland’. Dennis acted as voluntary, unpaid Director of Music for the first four years until the numbers increased and it was necessary to appoint someone full-time. He and Mabel also looked after the boarders initially in their home and then in the boarding house which they agreed to do for three months and which ended up being three years!

I first met Mr Townhill (as he was known in those days) in August 1978 when I auditioned for a chorister place at St Mary’s Cathedral. I didn’t realise at the time that this was a historical moment and I was to be one of the first girls to be given the opportunity of this unique musical education singing in a cathedral choir alongside the boys. Girls had previously sung at St Davids Cathedral in Wales and also St Edmundsbury in Suffolk but, the experiments there didn’t last and St Mary’s was the first to have a treble line of both boys and girls of the same age. There were two people instrumental in this change taking place. The first was Eva Patterson who joined the choir in January 1978 and Dr Carolyn Coxon who was headmistress of St Mary’s Music School at that time. Eva came for an advisory audition and the quality of her voice and love of singing were apparent. Carolyn then suggested to Dennis and Philip Crosfield that perhaps they should consider offering her a place in the choir, however each thought the other would be against the idea. Dennis thought on reflection that he might move with the times and embraced the experiment with enthusiasm on condition that Eva would not be the only girl. I feel so grateful that this decision was made as it broadened my horizons and set me on the path of my future career.

One could not wish for a more dedicated and inspiring choirmaster and I feel so fortunate to have been one of Dennis’s choristers. He shared with us his love and enthusiasm for music,

especially choral music, and installed in us the discipline one needs to have for a career in music. He did this by teaching us respect –respect not only for him, but also for our fellow choir members and most importantly the music. He never treated us as children, but as professionals in his choir. He made us understand that we had a very important role to play in the act of worship at the cathedral and in sharing God’s word through music. The fact that we were paid for our duties also gave us a great deal of self-respect and incentive. We were paid 8p a service and £2.50 for special services (weddings and funerals). We would be paid at the end of every term and I can still remember feeling so proud as I walked out of the Song School clutching hold of my envelope with my first pay package!

Our school day started at 8:30am with a half-hour practice with Dennis. It began with a ten-minute warm-up and then he would put his briefcase on the top of the piano and reveal the music he wanted us to work on that day. November and December were my favourite months as we would be working on the Messiah for our now annual performance. This was a wonderful occasion of music-making involving the choir and most of the school either singing in the choir or playing in the orchestra. I know many of us now, later in life, are so grateful that at such a young age we were learning and also performing some of these great works by Handel and Bach. This was the beginning of my interest in and love of baroque and early music, the field I specialise in today.

Unlike some choirmasters Dennis even allowed the probationers to sing. I think this was because of his own experience. He writes in his autobiography The Imp and the Thistle ‘My choristers days were almost unadulterated joy except for the first year when I was a probationer and not allowed to sing during services. I found this very frustrating and frequently went home tearfully complaining to my grandparents.’ As a child who never stopped singing, the thought of spending a year of my life listening and watching others enjoying the music would have felt like a prison sentence!

Dennis was also one of the finest organists of his generation. He loved the music of J.S. Bach and would always include works by him in his recital programmes and on more than one occasion during the Edinburgh Festival he played his complete organ works. In 1990 he recorded the complete organ works of his dear friend and colleague Kenneth Leighton. A reviewer in the British Music Society wrote: ‘This is a superb release, Dr Dennis Townhill possesses an intimate knowledge and understanding of the music, I do not think that his performance can be bettered.’ Robert Lawrenson in Organists’ Review says: ‘Dr Townhill plays with consummate

musicianship, assured technique, and a grasp of the very heart and soul of Leighton’s music.’

On his retirement from St Mary’s in 1991 Dennis was appointed Organist Emeritus, however his schedule continued to be as busy as ever. He was a special commissioner for the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM), chairman and later honorary vice president of the Federation of Cathedral Old Choristers’ Association and an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. He continued to give recitals and would cover as a locum at various cathedrals. He was awarded an OBE in 1992.

I have so much to thank Dennis for. He recognised my talent and passion for singing immediately and through his wonderful teaching I have never looked back. I sang in the choir for six years and I treasure every one of them. His dedication and high standard of excellence I try to attain in every concert I give. I would bump into him from time to time in and around the cathedral and he was always interested in what I was doing and with whom I had been working and was genuinely very proud of all my achievements. The passing of Dr Townhill is the end of an era and he is sorely missed. However, his spirit and love of music lives on in everyone who was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of working and learning from this great man.

Susan Hamilton is Artistic Director of The Dunedin Consort. She was born in Edinburgh and began her musical career as a chorister at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and a pupil at St Mary’s Music School. She specialises in Baroque and Contemporary music and is in demand as a soloist working with many conductors.

St

CHORISTER VOICE TRIALS

VOICE TRIALS

Formal Voice Trials for boys aged 6 – 9 years old, who are interested in admission to St John’s College Choir, are held in spring and autumn each year.

For further details please contact Mr Alex Loria at St John’s College School on 01223 353652 or by sending an e-mail to admissions@sjcs.co.uk

Roger Tucker

2008 Festivals OVERVIEW

Southern Cathedrals Festival Winchester – 16-19 July

The annual SCF rotates between Salisbury, Chichester and Winchester, this year’s venue, which has no cloisters, so we were allowed to set up FCM’s display in the Nave. It was seen by record numbers of people during the four days, with back copies of Cathedral Music being snapped up for requested donations. SCF 2008 offered seven choral services, three concerts and an organ recital given by John Scott, (now based at St Thomas Fifth Avenue in New York City.) At Winchester this will be given every three years as a memorial to Clement McWilliam, one of the city’s most talented and much loved organists. The recital had a very eclectic choice of works from Bach to Messiaen and Jonathan Harvey, whose Toccata for organ and tape I had heard at St Alban’s Cathedral. In Winchester’s vaster acoustic it tickled my ear more persuasively and this time I enjoyed it… and the whole of John’s brilliantly played recital. He in fact stayed over till Friday so as to give a masterclass in Winchester College Chapel with the boy choristers of Salisbury and Winchester (Chichester were singing Evensong), using Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, with its tricky top line, as a test piece. The patient, persuasive Scott style of training paid off and we all heard the benefit to the trebles’ singing.

The Festival had begun with a rare opportunity to enjoy Mattins, very finely sung by Winchester to Stanford’s B flat canticles. On Friday morning the cathedral nave, (the longest in Britain) was filled with the colourful procession for the Festival Eucharist. This was sung by the boys and gentlemen of the three choirs, using Vaughan Williams’s unaccompanied Mass in G minor, with Messiaen’s O sacrum convivium as the communion motet. The evening concert, sung by the girls and gentlemen, was entitled The Feast –A foretaste of Heaven. This was a contemplative and beautifully sung selection of plainchant and settings by Byrd, Finzi, Vaughan Williams, Victoria, Howells, Villette and Lennox Berkeley, ending with Edgar Bainton’s And I saw a new heaven. The sequence was interspersed by readings, finely spoken by Freya Bennett, which complemented the Eucharistic

theme. The three cathedral directors, David Halls, Andrew Lumsden and for the first time, Sarah Baldock, (returning to the cathedral where she was formerly Assistant) shared the conducting.

Saturday offered a brilliantly played cello recital by Alice Neary in College Chapel (including two of the Bach Suites), a combined Evensong including Stanford’s powerful Latin Magnificat and a Nunc Dimmitis, also in Latin, commissioned from Tarik O’Regan by the SCF, with the choir of gentlemen from the three cathedrals, and the top line brilliantly sung by the Salisbury and Winchester girls. The anthem was Let all the world by Vaughan Williams.

The final concert, sung by the boys and gentlemen of all three cathedrals, featured a splendid sequence of choral music from the High Baroque. Apart from the opening motet attributed to Gombert, this was all written within a span of fifty years by Blow, Handel, Purcell and Bach, whose Magnificat received an inspired reading. The penultimate work, Brandenburg Concerto No 5 BWV1050, gave the choir a rest and allowed us to enjoy the playing of Rachel Brown (flute), Lucy Russell (violin) and the Festival Director, Andrew Lumsden, who gave a very stylish rendering of the demanding keyboard part on a light-toned harpsichord, which was rather drowned by the energetic playing of the Southern Sinfonia and was only clearly audible to those in the front seats. I had moved close up at rehearsal and so was able to appreciate the virtuosity of the finely nuanced interpretation.

Andrew Lumsden and his festival team are to be congratulated on delivering such a satisfying programme, with choirs and instrumentalists maintaining a consistently high standard of performance over the three days, with rehearsals fitted in between events.

Once again, Andrew Lumsden demonstrated his talent for inspired programme building.

Finally, a special bouquet for the Festival Organist, Philip WhiteJones, whose brilliant playing enhanced all the concerts and services, on one of my favourite cathedral organs.

SCF concert in Winchester’s NaveThe new Tickell Organ in the quire of Worcester Cathedral

Three Choirs Festival Worcester – 2-9 August

Like the SCF, the Three Choirs Festival, rotating between Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, always has a uniquely friendly and stimulating atmosphere, yet each of the three cities provides a distinctively different setting, with its own organising team and funding. Any idea of centralised control of the annual ‘Music Meeting’ (the original name used in the early 1700s) has never won favour. After its loss-making 2005 festival, Worcester had to turn things around decisively. Its response was to field a completely new administrative team and restore the valuable elements which had been dropped in 2005. Catering was brought back in-house with the Friends’ Committee firmly in charge of frontof-house operations. The big marquee on College Green was once again the centre for festival catering and the ticket and information offices were back nearby, where people could easily pop in. Further strengthening and assisting Debbie Liggins, the new Worcester Festival Administrator, was Dr Paul Hedley, who was appointed the first overall General Manager of the Three Choirs Festival last January. He will in future provide continuity and operational support and also a channel for sharing financial wisdom between the three fully independent festival committees. Debbie Liggins is now also the Festival Development Manager.

Now, what about the 2008 programme developed by Worcester’s Artistic Director, Adrian Lucas? At first glance, the aficionados were shocked at the innovations they saw listed: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (in high summer?!), a concert called Love and Lust (in a cathedral?), Music from the Movies as the final concert? Old hands, like your reviewer, know that whether ideas like these work cannot be prejudged – they might. In the event, they did. Outstandingly, all six parts of the Christmas Oratorio (Tues) on either side of a 75 mins Christmas dinner interval, was a very uplifting experience, (despite the Christmas pudding). Edward Higginbottom directed an authoritative, lively and stylish rendering by the three cathedral choirs, the Academy of Ancient Music and a quartet of top quality soloists. In the setting of Worcester Cathedral, it was unforgettable, as were the other evening concerts given by the Phiharmonia Orchestra.

On the first Saturday Elgar’s The Apostles under Adrian Lucas’s firm direction was brought to life by well-judged tempi and six outstanding soloists. The well-rehearsed Festival Chorus sang with conviction from its first entry, always at home with the Elgarian idiom.

On Sunday we had a concert of Baroque Splendour: music by Handel and Purcell and a rare delight, a lively Cello Concerto by the Durham born John Garth (1740 –1810), in which the agile soloist was the Philharmonia’s principal, David Cohen. This sat well between a Handel Chandos Anthem (No.9) and Purcell’s St Cecilia Ode and gave the Festival Chorus a rest. Geraint Bowen planned and directed this inspiring concert, with soprano Lorna Anderson, counter-tenors James Bowman and Charles Humphries, tenor Simon Wall and basses Daniel Jordan and James Birchall all giving shining performances.

On Monday evening Adrian Lucas and the Philharmonia filled the cathedral with Passion and Pomp: Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Howard Ferguson and the world premiere of Andrew Gant’s A British Symphony, a difficult work for the ear to receive at first hearing, even with a detailed explanatory note as guide! On Wednesday Saintly Visions evoked by the baton of Adrian Partington opened with Elgar’s Froissart Overture (a Worcester commission in 1890) then gave us Stokowski’s refreshing, lighter orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition, which breathed new life into the tired old warhorse. Britten’s delightful St Nicolas Cantata featured the Worcester boy and girl choristers and the Chorus, in a sensitive rendition. The theme for Thursday was Seascapes: Messiaen’s Les Offrandes Oubliées (orch.1930), Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, entrusted to Martyn Brabbins; the Britten is a never failing masterwork, as is the Vaughan Williams, both given a confident reading of great warmth. With the theme Love and Lust the penultimate night offered a highly attractive concert, in which the Festival Chorus was augmented by the Choir of All Saints, Worcester, Massachusetts, directed by Adrian Lucas. Howard

Ferguson’s Overture for an Occasion provided a brilliant opener and deserves to be heard more often. Lucas’s tight rhythmic control in Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, drew dazzling playing from the Philharmonia, needed even more in the final work, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, driven with exciting tension and passion, three excellent soloists: Maureen Braithwaite, Lawrence Zazzo and Christopher Purves, surmounted all the vocal challenges. The final concert directed by John Wilson Classic British Film Music was a welcome contrast to seven nights of more highbrow fare, presenting a sequence of some of the best film scores, from Walton and Lambert to John Williams, also including a wistfully delecate performance of Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto with soloist Lucy Parham. It certainly worked for me as a winddown. There were other mood-changers, late night events such as the Cathedral Lay Clerks in Concert, Compline from the Eton Choral Course (too brief to establish the hoped-for tranquility), with the alternative of jazz in College Hall and Bach Cello Suites from Angela East. Outstanding for me was Malcolm Creese’s Acoustic Triangle performing The 2008 3-Dimension Tour , which exploited the spaces of the cathedral nave, some playing on the main stage, others emerging out of the shadows down the aisles, grouping and re-grouping: virtuosic playing from Creese himself on the double bass, other strings and winds and dazzling dexterity from Gwilym Simcock on piano. The session was recorded for broadcasting on BBC Radio Three.

The crowning glory of the Three Choirs and its original raison d’être are its choral services: the Festival Opening Service 2008 combined the Three Cathedral choirs, the Festival Chorus and the Philharmonia Brass; the Howells Collegium Regale morning canticles and a Vaughan Williams anthem Lord Thou hast been our refuge resounded to a packed cathedral, both visually and musically unforgettable. Later, the Cathedral Chamber Choir gave us more Howells in the first of six festival Choral Evensongs: the Responses and the Worcester Service, and Elgar’s Great is the Lord. On Sunday in the Festival Eucharist the three Worcester Cathedral choirs sang the Vaughan Williams Mass in G minor and Messiaen’s O Sacrum Convivium (the same music as in Winchester’s Festival Eucharist). Later the Cathedral Choir sang Evensong to Tomkins Responses and Fourth Service and a Tarik O’Regan anthem Beatus auctor saeculi. In the remaining Evensongs, highlights were Stanford’s ‘Latin’ canticles, Leighton’s Second Service, S.S. Wesley’s The Wilderness, the New College Service by Howells and Harris’s Faire is the heav’n and on the final Saturday Adrian Lucas directed the home choir augmented by the visiting choir from Worcester, Mass. in Howells’s Gloucester Service and Bairstow’s Blessed City, Heavenly Salem The Americans blended very well and helped produce a wonderfully refined English cathedral sound. Five of the Choral Evensongs were preceded by a half-hour organ recital on the new 4-manual, 54-stop Tickell Quire organ, whose distinctive voicing and considerable power was one of the highlights of this year’s festival. Its versatility makes it equally effective, whether in an accompanimental or a solo role. It was heard at length in Dame Gillian Weir’s eclectic 90mins morning recital, which brilliantly put it through its paces to great effect. (see CM 1/08 p.44 for John Norman’s article about the new organ) Younger organists were featured in the exemplary RCO lunchtime recital series at St Martin’s church. One other morning event in the cathedral caught my attention: the CBSO Youth Orchestra, directed by Michael Seal, played an attractive concert of Pärt, Ligeti, Rodrigo and Beethoven’s Symphony No.7; this last was driven along at such excessive speed that intonation and ensemble fell apart and the music was rubbished.

I have not been able to mention any of the chamber and vocal recitals, which are normally held away from the cathedral, but it all adds up to one of the most concentrated musical feasts, of the highest standards anywhere. Adrian Lucas and all the cathedral musicians and the new Worcester administration deserve many plaudits for making it all happen. Worcester 2008 made a comfortable profit.

Proms 2008 – 18 July - 13 September

Sacred Choral & Organ Music

Seventy-six Royal Albert Hall concerts in eight weeks, in the longest, increasingly diverse, music festival. My forecast that Director Roger Wright’s first season would contain an increase in choral and organ music came true: four organ recitals and seven sacred choral concerts, plus others with solo organ works included. In fact, the First Night got off to a rousing start with Wayne Marshall high up at the organ console giving us Richard Strauss’s rarely heard Festliches Präludium with his customary bravura style, contrasting with a delicately expressive rendering of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto K314 by Nicholas Daniel and the BBC Symphony under Jiří Bĕlohlávek, followed by Strauss’s Four Last Songs hauntingly sung by Karita Mattila. After the interval Wayne was again alone on stage for a fiery Dieu parmi nous from Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur, a touch too fast for my taste but we had the antidote, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s elegant playing in the Beethoven Rondo in B flat for piano and orchestra. Elegance was not required in the first performance of Elliott Carter’s Caténaires for solo piano but passion returned in Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy.

On July 21 we had another organ piece by Messiaen L’Ascension, this time Olivier Latry played the hall’s huge Willis organ, making way for the same composer’s purely orchestral Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum but returning for the organ part in Saint-Saens Symphony No3 in C. The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Myung-Whun Chung was fully equal to M.Latry’s virtuoso playing. I was becoming tuned-in to the Messiaen idiom and found great spirituality revealed in his major 1960s choral work La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (July 27) superbly done by all BBC forces under Thierry Fischer, one of the highlights of the Proms Messiaen Centenary.

Aug 3 Wayne Marshall returned to the organ console to give the first Sunday afternoon recital with an all French programme: Demessieux, Dupré, Hakim and Messiaen: all very speedy and flamboyant!

Aug 10 the organ recital featured another sacred work by Messiaen the Messe de la Pentecôte played by James O’Donnell with movements from a Manchicourt Mass sung in alternatim by the BBC Singers. This was an inspired idea: the organ sounded very French, the Singers authentically monastic, the hall a sacred space.

Aug 15 the Janáček 80th birthday concert we heard the powerfully idiomatic Glagolitic Mass Simon Preston delivering the organ part with its dramatic and difficult solo movement. The BBC and London Symphony Choruses brought the old Slavonic text to life with startling clarity, evoking an almost barbaric joy under Pierre Boulez, who was directing the reconstructed, more fiery original version of the work.

Aug 16 another dynamic veteran conductor, Sir Charles Mackerras directing the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gave us one of the finest of Handel’s oratorios Belshazzar (1744) with five excellent soloists; everyone was on top form in response to Sir Charles’s charismatic direction.

Aug17 Jennifer Bate devoted the third organ recital to Messiaen: a finely crafted, introspective reading of La Nativité du Seigneur, preceded by an earth-shaking rendering of L’Apparition of de l’église éternelle. Ms Bate told me afterwards that the composer had instructed her to use all available pedal fluework, including the 32ft stops, for the climax, which on the RAH organ was literally sensational!

Aug 24 was Bach Day, with three concerts: an organ recital by Simon Preston, opening with his most famous organ piece Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Canonic Variations BWV769 and then the ‘St Anne’ Prelude and Fugue with two Chorale Preludes and a Duetto in F in between. The playing was immaculate and mature, registered with restraint on the ultimate grand organ, the antithesis of a Bach instrument. There was a packed audience for this recital and the evening St John Passion, done by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under Sir John Eliot Gardiner, with seven serene soloists. Sir John’s reading was as always reflective and authentic, deserving many plaudits. To round off the day the young Chinese virtuoso, Jian Wang played the first three of the solo cello Suites, with calm authority.

Throughout the season my impression grew that the Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiří Bĕlohlávek, is of exceptional musical stature and this was most sharply focused by his reading of the Verdi Requiem with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, augmented by the admirable Crouch End Festival Chorus, with four outstanding soloists. The performance was electrifying, one of the most exciting I have heard since Toscanini’s and I sensed Maestro Bĕlohlávek’s attention to every detail and his power to share his vision of the music with the orchestra and chorus, who performed as never before.

The most formidable Prom was the six-hour (including two intervals) Messiaen opera St Francis of Assisi in a semi-semi-staged performance by the Netherlands Opera under Ingo Metzmacher. The incredibly difficult score, with its kaleidoscopic birdsong effects, was served by the brilliant playing of the Hague Philhamonic, and fine singing by the large chorus, eight male soloists and one female angel. There was no separate stage, so the cast moved about on the orchestra’s platform, standing, lying down or exiting as required. This did not work, in a giant auditorium with vast sightlines and large platform orchestral forces the eye has to be led to the action in a recognizable area. In fact, there is very little action, with many longueurs, to make matters worse, the Franciscans and the Angel were dressed in chef-style short, white tunics, which looked absurd. Franciscan habits would have worked wonders for the story. Presumably they are banned by the Dutch Reform Church! The variable audibility of the French text in the vast space, frustrated my attempts to follow the story.

I enjoyed two late-night concerts: Renaissance polyphony sung by the Tallis Scholars and Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.

It was certainly a wonderfully rewarding season and Roger Wright can take pride in its success, with higher ticket sales and appreciation levels than ever before.

LETTERS

Denis Roberts. Penn, Bucks.

Sir: In the normal course of events I am not given to writing letters to editors but, having just read Penelope MartinSmith’s article on page 5 of the 1/08 issue, I am moved to express my surprise at the description of breast-feeding which she felt was appropriate in the journal devoted to Cathedral Music and to your presumed editorial approval.

I am by no means a prude, but I confess to being uneasy at this lack of discretion in her phraseology in your magazine, for which I have the highest regard and respect.

Stephen Green. London

Sir: Your correspondent makes the odd suggestion that a sermon is out of place at Choral Evensong. At St Paul’s Cathedral there is always an address at

All general points and comments welcomed. Please send letters by 5 February 2009 to: The Editor, 21 Belle Vue Terrace, RIPON, North Yorkshire HG4 2QS ajpalmer@lineone.net Letters may be shortened for publication.

Choral Evensong on Sundays, Festivals and major saints’ days.

Michaela Philp, Lincoln Cathedral Music Council

Sir: I read the latest CATHEDRAL MUSIC, as always, with great enjoyment and interest. I was particularly struck by your comments on psalm singing and just want to let you know that here in Lincoln, the psalms are alive and very well and always all present. Every Choral Evensong offers beautiful psalm singing by our choir, whether with boys’, girls’ sections or ‘men only’, a rare treat this, with clear words, wonderful chants, the chant book has just been re-assembled, and most sensitive attention to the nuances of the words. As if this were not enough, the accompaniments played by Colin Walsh or Charles Harrison vividly underpin the sense and mood of the words being sung so that each evening,

the psalms live again and are always a fresh and illuminating experience. That is not to hint, by the way, that they are turned into a concert performance. The choir will release a new CD later this year of psalm singing and I, for one, am looking forward with great anticipation to listening to it. It will also solve at a stroke my Christmas List question. By the way, the introduction of a girls’ section some 10 years ago has certainly not compromised the recruitment of boys. On the contrary, we have a full two sides of boys with many probationers in the wings. The back row has also increased in numbers thanks to a forward-looking recruitment policy. Many of our exchoristers, boys and girls, go on to join the Minster School Choirs or the Cathedral Chamber Choir, which bodes well for back rows of the future.

One of our very talented ex-choristers has made a DVD of life as a chorister.

To be reviewd in the our next edition.

BOOK & MUSIC REVIEWS

BOOKREVIEWS

THE ORGANS OF SOUTHWELL MINSTER

by Paul Hale

The Minster Shop, Southwell Minster

ISBN 978-0-9552580-9-1

Price £7.95 or £10 by post (to include p&p)

Early in his time at St Paul’s Cathedral, John Goss petitioned Canon Sydney Smith for some new stops to be added to the organ. The request elicited a characteristic response from the Canon: “Ah, Goss, what a strange set of creatures you organists are… you are like a jaded cab-horse, always longing for another stop.” One wonders what Smith would have made of Paul Hale who, since his arrival at Southwell in 1989, has not merely added single stops but complete instruments to serve the musical needs of the Minster. Southwell now boasts three organs in the church and another in the Song Room.

In this fascinating book Paul Hale charts the history of Southwell’s organs from the Reformation to the present day with characteristic thoroughness. On the way he gives as much technical information as would satisfy the most dedicated organ fanatic but in addition there is a wealth of anecdotal detail which gives the narrative much human interest. The book is beautifully produced and illustrated with many excellent photographs. Highly recommended –a jolly good read!

Alan Spedding

MORE FROM A COUNTRY CATHEDRAL ORGANIST

David Gedge

ISBN 978 0 95585 960 1

£12.50 plus £2 p&p from the author Bridgend House, 24 Bridge Street, Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire SA17 4UU.

This is the second and final part of David Gedge’s memoirs which takes us from around 1980 until his retirement in 2007 after 41 years as Organist & Choirmaster at Brecon Cathedral together with Hazel, his wife, as Assistant Organist.

Inevitably such a record-breaking stint at one Cathedral had its high and low moments but David’s phlegmatic and unselfish approach to any problems that arose and his great sense of humour carried him through, a very necessary quality considering the inadequate salary paid to him and Hazel. David recounts all this without a trace of bitterness which reflects the unselfish commitment they had to the Cathedral for so many years and the tremendous volume of work they got through. Having gone through many Deans during his tenure, David ended at Brecon Cathedral with a caring Dean at its head. The book contains such a rich tapestry of happenings dug out of David’s incredible memory. His countless stories are told with a boyish sense of adventure and enthusiasm, whether it is his honest account of an ‘appalling BBC television Songs of Praise broadcast’ from the Cathedral in 1980, the sheer enjoyment of his occasional visits to Choral Evensong at St John’s College, Cambridge where his son Nicholas had become head chorister followed by a drink with George Guest in the ‘Baron of Beef’ or overseas trips with the choir. Mention is made of the FCM Gathering held at Brecon in 1991 and FCM’s Tony Harvey who was fulsome in his praise for a wonderful weekend. It was here that the visiting Bishop “discovered a quaint FCM custom: when he went to the Great North Door to bid members ‘good-bye’ at the conclusion of the service, not one person stirred until the organ voluntary had ended!” When David

received the MBE in 1993 for services to music in Wales from HM The Queen at Cardiff Castle, he reminded her that he had sung as a chorister at her Coronation. He recalls conducting the performance of Haydn’s Creation in Brecon Cathedral in July 2006 when he suffered a stroke. He recovered well enough to be able to go to Lambeth Palace later when Hazel and he were presented with the Cross of St Augustine by the Archbishop of Canterbury for their unique services to cathedral music. They now enjoy an active retirement at Kidwelly. Obtain a copy –you’ll enjoy it.

Trevor Godfrey

MUSIC AT RIPON CATHEDRAL

ISBN 657-2008-07-12

Malclom S Beer and Howard M Crawshaw

£12 Cheques and postal orders for £12 +£4 p&p made payable to Ripon Cathedral Music Foundation). Available from Ripon Cathedral Gift Shop (Tel: 01765 601 347); Malcolm Beer 24 Byron Court, Beech Grove, Harrogate HG2 OLL (Tel: 01423 526 720 or Malcolm@thebeers.org.uk)

Perhaps because I am so close to Ripon I have enjoyed this book immensely. It took two men, two years to research the musical activities at the cathedral leading to one of the most comprehensive and well-written books chronicling the work of the cathedral choir, organists and bell ringers, on the market. There are revelations spiced with amusing anecdotes about the personalities, the conflicts, the successes and the set-backs over the years at Ripon Cathedral. The book grew out of an idea to mount an exhibition on the history of music at the cathedral for the National Festival of the Federation of Old Choristers’ Associations held in Ripon this year. The book, authorised by the Dean and Chapter, charts the history of music at the cathedral, beginning with the monastery founded in the heathen village of Rhypum in 657 with its renowned abbot, Wilfrid, through to life in the minster today. There is a chapter dedicated to music written for Ripon, for instance did you know that Patrick Hadley’s My beloved spake was written for the wedding of one of his students at Ripon Cathedral on 2nd May 1936? An appendix lists all the broadcast radio programmes with full music lists that came from the cathedral. A letter from Vaughan Williams written to Dr Moody about keeping the cathedral tradition alive makes for interesting reading. Under Moody, rehearsals at the Song School were always an event; not many boys fell asleep but if they showed the slightest sign of lapse in attention, (Moody) would hit the music stand with such force and hymn books were often used as missiles! Can you imagine that happening today?

Much time was spent researching material for this masterpiece; numerous people were interviewed, including a chorister who had been in the choir in 1928. Howard Crawshaw spent many hours in the Brotherton library, Leeds, where Ripon Cathedral archives from the 13th century to the mid-1980s are stored. It is all this research that makes this book most interesting.

As the build-up for the girls’ choir began in earnest, Kerry Beaumont decided to give the girls confidence and build morale by encouraging them to repeat the words at the end of Verse 2 of Angel Voices: ‘Yes we can’. Nothing is left out of this book and the authors have recognised that music is not just about the cathedral choir –there is a chapter dedicated to the bells at Ripon and another on the different music that takes place in the cathedral: Ripon Choral Society and the brilliant St Cecilia Orchestra which grew out of accompanying the cathedral choir for the annual St Cecilia Day’s concert are just two examples highlighting how much music goes on at the cathedral. This book is appealing, well-written, amusing and entertaining and sale proceeds go to the music campaign. Malcolm Beer and Howard Crawshaw should be thanked for producing such an engaging narrative and other cathedrals would do well to mirror what these two have achieved because there is definitely a place for this type of book.

Highly Recommended.

Andrew Palmer

SHEETMUSIC

THE COMPLETE ORGAN WORKS OF MARTIN HOW

For Home and Church use

MH0502 £15 order through www.martinhow.com

What a treat. On every page of this collection of Martin How’s 31 pieces for organ, one can feel his personality. I was lucky as a young aspiring organist and choirmaster, to have been inspired by the man through attending Royal School of Church Music courses and also by singing and playing the music he composed, so I welcome this compilation. The compositions are arranged into six sets and are accessible and straightforward. The only piece not included is Golden Evening, otherwise everything is there, both new pieces and revisions of earlier ones. The printing and type setting is clear and the overall package is excellent. There is something suitable for all tastes, occasions and instruments and there will be much joy in picking this volume up for the first time and working through its 152 pages. Although it caters for a range of abilities, the majority of compositions are for advanced players and it will be a collection to have within easy reach. I had great fun discovering Festivio, a superb vivacious short piece; May Song –a wonderful composition for flute and strings, and other gems. For those looking for something without pedals, try the, five manuals only, pieces (delightful), which I rediscovered and along the way look out for Idyll, Farewell Aria (for Oboe stop), For an Occasion, Lament, Elegy , Summer Haze and Homage to Elgar. How’s thoughtfulness, sense of fun and occasion (not just joyful but meditative too) shine through. I thoroughly enjoyed reviewing this collection and have already introduced many of them at my church. A welcome addition to the organ catalogue and I have no hesitation in recommending it and hope that you enjoy working your way through Martin How’s opus.

Andrew Palmer

THE RESTORATION ANTHEM VOLUME TWO 1688-1714

Edited by Keri Dexter and Geoffrey Webber

Published on behalf of the CHURCH MUSIC SOCIETY by Oxford

University Press

ISBN 978 019 390091 2

Clarke Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem & Praise the Lord, O my soul; Croft Hear my prayer, O Lord & We will rejoice in thy salvation; Purcell O give thanks; Richardson O Lord God of my salvation; Tudway I am the resurrection and the life and I heard a voice from heaven; Turner My soul truly waiteth still upon God; Weldon Hear my crying O God. This volume is the bee’s knees as far as up-to-date research on the restoration period is concerned. The pieces within, all of which are unfamiliar to me, are worthy additions to any choir’s repertoire worth their salt. There are one or two passages which may challenge singers with poor technique, and at some point or other, all vocal parts divide. (The final bars of Hear my prayer is in eight parts). There are also some anthems exclusively for SATB (Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem and We will rejoice in thy salvation) and some with quite substantial verse and solo passages (Praise the Lord, O my soul) where good soloists will be required. The preface gives historical background and deals with performance issues including the use of instruments and tempi, and it is a good read as well as being of great importance if these works are to be properly performed. The critical commentary too is really quite interesting, it’s not just for the stuffy academic, but also for a music lover and a performer. You will read that it was common for some lay clerks at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, to swap voice parts, and therefore swap from a high tenor to falsetto for certain solos. As with most contemporary editions, rehearsal accompaniments are provided in small notation for pieces thought to be unaccompanied, as are editorial accompaniments where figured bass is given prominence. I hope to be able to hear these very clear dots on the page spring to life in the future.

Stephen Power

O SALUTARIS, AVE VERUM, TANTUM ERGO

Nicholas Wilton SATB unaccompanied

Distributed by Banks Music Publications for Philangelus £2.50

These are three attractive settings in sharp keys of the well-known Latin texts. O Salutaris, in F# has a lilting time signature. I find it odd that the alto and tenor parts are the same for the first three bars, and then go their separate ways. Ave Verum and Tantum Ergo are both in F# minor, and all three pieces are very short, approachable to both choir and congregation.

Stephen Power

SANCTA ET IMMACULATA

Nicholas Wilton SATB unaccompanied

Distributed by Banks Music Publications for Philangelus £1.30

Nicholas Wilton has written an approachable anthem with a Latin text to the BVM. The soprano, alto and tenor parts divide in places, but the harmonies are diatonic, so should not be problematic. The engraving is very detailed and clear.

Stephen Power

MISSA BREVIS & O SACRUM CONVIVIUM

Nicholas Wilton SATB unaccompanied.

Distributed by Banks Music Publications for Philangelus £3.50.

Here we have a simple short setting of the Mass ordinary and a setting of O sacrum convivium under one cover, and all for under a fiver. The motet would be most suitable as a communion motet, and the Mass, in B major/minor also includes four different intonations for the Gloria, according to the season.

Stephen Power

TO THE QUEEN OF HEAV’N

David W. Jepson

Text Anon (16th Century)

Banks Music Publications ECS 474 £1.25 SSA Unaccompanied

This is a delightful, three-verse hymn written for three voices unaccompanied in A flat major. It is most suitable for Christmas, but the second half of verse two also relates to the Crucifixion. The first soprano part has the same melody for all three verses which ascends to a top A flat on the word Glo(-ria), whilst the other two parts are different enough to cause a little confusion, though the varied harmonies (referring to those printed!) are an added bonus.

Stephen Power

THE SINGING WORLD

Stephen Wilkinson

Text by George Herbert (Let all the World)

Distributed by Banks Music Publications, engraved by David Toms SATB, Trumpet and Organ £1.95

Unison passages for the main thread (My God and King) alternate with simple SATB harmonies. The trumpet part is integral though it may be played by a second player if a trumpeter is not available. Neither instrumental parts are very taxing. The main feature of the work seems to be a canonic version on the back page along with a modern-day puzzle on the front cover, showing the melody circumnavigating the earth –a puzzle apparently common in mediaeval times. If your organist can’t play the Vaughan Williams setting, this may be worth a go.

Stephen Power

CHORALCDs

EDITOR’S CHOICE HANDEL Dettingen Te Deum

Te Deum in D ‘Dettingen’; Organ Concerto No 14 in A; Zadok the Priest; The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Academy of Ancient Music.

Director: Stephen Layton.

Organ: Richard Marlow. Bass: Neal Davies.

HYPERION CDA67678TT 60:33

An hour of superb music, well-sung and to be frank a sheer delight. After listening to the wonderful control and superb diction of the choir throughout the Te Deum we are treated at the end to one of the finest performances of Zadok the Priest I have heard in a long time. It sparkles and the trumpets and drums are let loose; there is no shyness from this department. Throughout the choral pieces add a special touch which makes this recording outstanding. It also has that spine-tingle factor. The speed is just right for everything and the entries are precise. The main work was composed to celebrate George II’s victory against the French in 1743. Whenever a recording comes along with Stephen Layton as conductor, then critics know they will be writing many superlatives and this disc is no exception. Bass, Neal Davies, is terrific and sensitively and expressively sings his solo sections. The playing of the Academy of Ancient Music is excellent all the way through, not least when they are joined by former Trinity College Director of Music, Richard Marlow, to play Handel’s Organ Concerto No 14 –an added bonus. Graham Hermon.

MORALES Magnificat Motets: Lamentations

Coph Vocavi; Zai Candidiores; Nun Vigilavit; Gaude et laetare, Ferrariensis civitas; Sancta Maria, succurre miseris; Salve regina; Regina coeli; Spem in alium; Beati omnes qui timent Dominum; Magnificat primi toni. The Brabant Ensemble.

Director Stephen Rice.

HYPERION CDA67694 TT 73:39

For anyone who has not discovered Morales and enjoys polyphony then here is a treat. He was thought to be the most outstanding Mass composer of his generation. He was born c1500 in Seville. The Spanish theorist Juan Bermudo declared him ‘the light of Spain in music,’ while in1559, a Mexican choir –Spanish polyphony in particular was quick to reach the New World –sang his music at a service commemorating the death of Charles V. His fame held strong on into the eighteenth century, when Andrea Adami da Bolsena, biographer of many papal musicians, praised him as the papal chapel’s most important composer between Josquin and Palestrina. Stephen Rice’s Brabant Ensemble is well-suited to performing music from this era. Morales’s output runs to over 220 works, of which all but a handful are sacred. The longest piece is the Magnificat primi toni, one of a set of eight covering the eight tones which Morales published in 1542 for the choir of the Sistine Chapel and this CD is the first complete recording of the piece. The 15-strong Brabant Ensemble enjoys this wonderful music and although intonation is good sometime the diction does not match. The CD was recorded in Merton College, Oxford.

Patrick Mayhew.

THE ART OF THE CHORISTER

Mendelssohn Laudate pueri; VeniDomine; Couperin Lauda Sion; Mozart Ave Maria;Laudate Dominum; Seid uns zum zwiten Mal willkommen; Ireland Ex ore innocentium; Tallis Audivi vocem de caelo; Purcell O dive custos; Pergolesi Stabat Mater; Sancta Mater; Bach Schlummert ein; Alain Ave Maria

The Choir of New College, Oxford.

Director: Edward Higginbottom.

NEW RECORDS NCR 1380 TT 58:00

www.newcollegechoir.com New College Oxford OX1 3BN.

New College’s choristers have gained a deserved reputation for their exceptional musicianship and vivid singing, and in his writings Dr

Higginbottom has proved to be a doughty champion of his charges. This fascinating and enjoyable anthology is described as a ‘snapshot of New College trebles in the year 2005/2006’, and presents their performances (with the occasional help of the New College men) of Alain, J. S. Bach, Couperin, Ireland, Mendelssohn, Pergolesi, Purcell and Tallis; rather more than half of the works are given with string accompaniment. One can only marvel at the confidence and skill of these young musicians, though some listeners may find their somewhat unrelenting tone a little wearisome; the inclusion of works by some of the College’s own organist-composers might have been appropriate also, such as the beautiful King of glory, King of peace which W. H. Harris (organist 1919-29) dedicated to his New College boys, and the remarkable Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for six-part unaccompanied trebles by H. K. Andrews (organist 1938-56). I hope you will feel encouraged to buy this CD; the choir’s online shop is www.newcollegechoir.com and I can vouch for its promptitude and efficiency.

Timothy Storey

JUBILATE Celebrating 900 years at Chichester Cathedral

Bowerman Fanfare; Shephard Song of Mary; Holst Turn back O man; Nunc Dimittis; Parry Dear Lord and Father; Crossing the bar; I was Glad; Foster Christ the Lord is Risen again; Child of Heaven; Jubilate Deo (organ); Walton Magnificat; Jubilate Deo; Elgar Imperial March; O Salutaris Hostia; Ireland

The Holy Boy; Eben A Festive Voluntary; Archer Benedicite, Omnia Opera; Weelkes O How Amiable; Thurlow Delight Thou in the Lord

Chichester Cathedral Choir.

Director: Alan Thurlow.

Organists: Mark Wardell, Colin Gray, John Birch.

SIX MUSIC PRODUCTIONS. www.sixmusicproductions.co.uk TT 77:03

I found this CD in the Cathedral bookshop and it is currently not available elsewhere. The CD marks 900 years since the consecration of the Cathedral and fittingly also the year in which Alan Thurlow retired as Organist and Master of the Choristers at the Cathedral. The 20 tracks contain a range of compositions and many of the writers or composers had associations with the Cathedral or West Sussex, ranging from Thomas Weelkes (who was organist there from 1602 to 1623), to Elgar (who lived in the county between 1917 and 1920), Holst, Parry, Ireland, Malcolm Archer and Anthony Foster among others. The track which displays the Cathedral Choir and the acoustic of the Cathedral at its best is the delightful Song of Mary, a metrical setting of the Magnificat with words by Mary Holtby (whose late husband was a previous Dean of Chichester) to music by Richard Shephard, former headmaster of the Minster School, York and who sang for many years at the Southern Cathedrals Festival. Anthony Foster’s gentle setting of Child of Heaven to Mary Holtby’s words, is sung with great tenderness. The CD ends with Parry’s I was glad which, despite the relatively small choir (just fourteen boys and six men on this recording) works well. The recording was made possible thanks to the generosity of a private sponsor and is highly recommended. It comes with a comprehensive leaflet.

Copies available by post or phone from Chichester Cathedral Shop, The Cathedral Cloisters, Chichester, W. Sussex PO19 1PX (Tel: 01243 813599). Price £10 plus £2.50pp. Please quote product code 0142033005. Cheques made payable to Chichester Cathedral Enterprises

Trevor Godfrey

TORMIS

Haks laulu Ernst Enno sõnadele; Holm eesti mängulaulu; Holm laulu eeposest ‘Halevipoeg’; Lnvlaste pärandus; laevas lauldakse; Sügismaastikud; Neh eesti hällilaulu; Helletused Holst Singers.

Director: Stephen Layton.

HYPERION CDA67601 TT 71:50

Internationally Arvo Pärt may be Estonia’s most famous living composer, but Veljo Tormis, five years his senior and his one-time teacher, is the composer Estonia cherishes most on home turf. Tormis is fully engaged with a lifelong evangelism for his country’s folk-song tradition. The disc is made up of twentysix a cappella songs, the majority coming from small to medium scale cycles that range from about seven to seventeen minutes long. The Holst singers, expertly directed by Stephen Layton, create a great atmosphere on this recording. There is wonderful contrast in dynamics, and perfect tuning. You can see why the Holst Singers are one of Britain’s leading choruses.

Matt Lennox

THE GEORGIAN ANTHEM

Wesley Exultate Deo; Constitues eos principles; All go unto one place; Crotch How dear are thy counsels; The Lord, even the most mighty God; Battishill Call to remembrance; O Lord look down from heaven; Walmisley Remember O Lord; Evening Service in D min; Attwood Come Holy Ghost

The Choir of New College Oxford.

Director: Edward Higginbottom.

Organ:Ryan Wigglesworth.

CRD RECORDS CRD3510 TT 66:43

THE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ANTHEM

Elgar Give unto the Lord; Ave Verum; The Spirit of the Lord; O Hearken Thou; Parry Lord, let me know mine end; My soul, there is a Country; I was Glad; Stainer I saw the Lord; Wood Hail Gladdening Light; O thou the central orb; Gray Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis; F Bridge Happy is the Man.

The Choir of New College Oxford.

Director: Edward Higginbottom.

Organ: David Newsholme and Nicholas Wearne.

CRD RECORDS CRD3513 TT 68:49

For me these two CDs are a find, a treasure trove of all that is good about cathedral music. It’s not until you play them that you realise how refreshing they sound. Why should this be? Is it because much of the Georgian anthem is not heard these days? I don’t know, but even the Victorian and Edwardian pieces sound new. There is so much music coming onto the market by contemporary composers that cathedral choirs do not record the likes of Battishill, Crotch and Attwood these days. And, after a period when the likes of Parry’s I was glad Elgar’s Give unto the Lord were recorded to death, and given over exposure they are now considered rarities on the recording market. It may just be that Higginbottom’s choir is at its zenith. I am beginning to run out of words of praise to use. The choir gives spirited and polished performances, all sounding effortless.

Daniel Reed

THE RESURRECTION Music by Simon McEnery. Text: Jeremy Davies.

Salisbury Cathedral Choir. Sarum Orchestra.

Piano: Daniel Cooke.

Director: David Halls.

Soporano: Imogen Roose. Mezzo: Carolyn Jackson. Tenor: Declan Kelly. Baritone: Dyfed Wyn Evans. PRIORY PRCD 1002 TT 66:00

With music by Simon McEnery and Libretto by Canon Jeremy Davies, this new oratorio was first performed at the Churches Together event of Holy Week 2005. The Choir performs admirably but it is very difficult, because of the mixing, to hear the harmonies in the music from the choir. The sound is very atmospheric, but I feel that McEnery could have pushed the boundaries a little more, after all it is The Resurrection. There is some beautiful singing from Declan Kelly and Dyfed Wyn Evans, who has a warm baritone sound, however Imogen Roose seems to find the tessitura a little high, and there is the slight issue of Carolyn Jackson’s vibrato interfering with the musical line. All in all, I feel that this music would most appeal to a choral society wishing to put on something new and uplifting.

Matt Lennox

SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES

Sacred Choral Works

Magnificat and Nunc Dimiitis ‘The Edinburgh Service’.

Three Organ Voluntaries; O Magnum mysterium.

The Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh.

Director: Matthew Owens.

Organ accompaniment: Simon Nieminski.

Organ solos: Michael Bonaventure.

DELPHIAN DCD34037 TT 71:22

It was far-sighted of Matthew Owens to found the Capital Commissions Scheme in Ediburgh in 2001, before he moved on to Wells Cathedral, and one of its

Christmas Album by the Choirs of Rochester Cathedral with The Locke Brass Consort directed by Roger Sayer & Daniel Soper

The Choir of Winchester Cathedral

Andrew Lumsden director

Sarah Baldock organ

The sound of fine unaccompanied voices singing motets from every age and style - Byrd to Lauridsen.

Trinity Boys Choir

David Swinson director

from Beverley Minster

Preludes, Sonatas, Concertos with transcriptions of popular pieces. Crispian Steel-Perkins trumpet Alan Spedding organ

fruits was the Edinburgh Service, Maxwell Davies’s first-ever setting of the Evening Canticles. It is a serious piece of composition, given an utterly convincing performance by its dedicatees; and it is no everyday affair, being very long (over fourteen minutes for Magnificat and eight for Nunc Dimittis) and not immediately accessible, though it does grow on one with repeated hearing. It is always of more than usual interest when a composer outside the ‘cathedral tradition’ sets these familiar texts, and there is an obvious comparison to be drawn with the St John’s Service by Tippett, if only in that they both somewhat ludicrously use the archaic pronunciation of imagina-ti-on, salva-ti-on and the like, presumably under the impression that this is expected in church! The other large-scale work on the disc is the familiar O magnum mysterium sequence from 1960, which manages to sound more aggressively ‘contemporary’ than the Edinburgh Service and which is given an equally fine performance. The organ works here recorded rather fail to ‘come off’ despite the performer’s best efforts. Students of contemporary cathedral music should buy this without fail, as it is hard to see how the performances could be bettered.

Timothy Storey

HEINRICH SCHÜTZ

Die Vögel unter dem Himmel

Scheidt Modus pleno organo pedaliter a 6; Ein Kindelein so lobelich; Da Jesus an dem Kreuze; Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott; Schütz Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen; Ich weiß, daß mein Heiland lebt; Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes; Die mit Tränen sein; Aus der Tiefe ruf’ ich, Herr, zu dir; Alleluia! Lobet den Herrenl Singet dem Herrn einneues Lied. The National Youth Choir of Great Britain.

Director: Mike Brewer.

Organ: John Kitchen

DELPHIAN DCD34043 TT 74:16

The glorious music of one of Germany’s finest early composers is here done justice by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, expertly conducted by Mike Brewer. The range of dynamics and clarity of articulation is excellent, especially considering the size of the choir –140 voices strong. The tuning in Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen is excellent, with the choir creating a wonderful antiphonal effect between the upper and lower voices, It is very refreshing to hear such vibrancy and attention to detail from such young singers. The choral music is interspersed with organ music by Samuel Scheidt, expertly played by John Kitchen. I look forward to hearing more from this wonderful choir.

Matt Lennox

FRANCIS POTT The Cloud of Unknowing

Vasari Singers.

Director: Jeremy Backhouse.

Organ: Jeremy Filsell.

Tenor: James Gilchrist.

SIGNUM SIGCD105 CD1 TT 45:28. CD2 TT 43:18

Pairingmy favourite adult choir with the excellent soloists of organist Jeremy Filsell and tenor James Gilchrist, is an instant winner. Furthermore, to combine all three with Pott’s exciting oratorio is a must and I wholeheartedly recommend this recording of The Cloud of Unknowing, an interesting and powerful response to the wars and atrocities of the past five years and specifically to the 7 July bombings in London. Not having heard any of Pott’s compositions before I was immediately won over by his 80-minute work. The drama this challenging piece demands is captured by the brilliance of the choir’s performance and Filsell copes with an immensely difficult organ part bringing the work to life with some wonderful registrations. The text is drawn from a number of sources: The Psalms, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Traherne and the modern Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, creating a powerful voice to demonstrate the conflict and instability of an uneasy world. The emotion is perceptively displayed without any sentimentalism by the superb Vasari Singers, who treat the quieter sections with complete sensitivity. There are two CDs and the second opens with the brilliant James Gilchrist setting the scene and ambience as he skilfully interweaves with the choir. The wonderful, evocative ending is beautifully executed with a hushed reverence as the choir fades away to leave the organ on its own for a few seconds and then cleverly, the recording continues with silence for a little while longer to capture the moment and emphasise the experience. A riveting and outstanding performance and excellent recording.

Andrew Palmer

HOWARD SKEMPTON The Cloths of Heaven.

Choral Music and Songs

Upon my lap my sovereign sits; O saviour of the world; Locus iste; the Song of Songs; O Life!; Nature’s Fire (Organ); Adam lay y-bounden; Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (Edinburgh Service); Lamentations Beati quorum via; Emerson Songs; he wihses for the Cloths of Heaven; Ave Virgo sanctissima; Missa Brevis; Ostende nobis Domine; Recessional (Organ). The Exon Singers.

Director: Matthew Owens. DELPHIAN DCD34056 TT 70:17

Matthew Owens is foremost in championing the music of contemporary church musicians and this CD presents a retrospective programme of the music of Howard Skempton written over the last twenty-five years. The composer is fortunate in having the excellent Exon Singers and soloists to perform a variety of pieces from motets and anthems to canticles and solo songs under the expert guidance of Matthew Owens who himself instigated the composition of several of the items on the disc. These include Beati quorum via, Ave Virgo sanctissima, Adam lay y-bounden, Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis for trebles and Missa Brevis written especially for this CD.

Alan Spedding

HANDEL MESSIAH

The Sixteen.

Director: Harry Christophers. Carolyn Sampson, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Mark Padmore, Christopher Purves.

CORO COR16062 CD1 70:27 CD 2 74:16 CD3 55:30

Here is a fresh recording with so much to offer for a period-instrument performance. Tempos aren’t rushed, the acoustic of St Paul’s, Deptford is thrilling and the Hallelujah Chorus a joy to listen to. The passion and enthusiasm convey all the right messages, the dramatic chorus Surely is light but effective and the accents are exhilarating with the strings making an effective contribution. Carolyn Sampson’s voice really adds something to this CD and she manages to convey different moods so well. Other soloists are excellent too: Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Mark Padmore and Christopher Purves. Much of the singing is light but lively and the orchestra excellent –one can forget this is a period-instrument performance. In fact, once bought this will become the favourite interpretation and a live performance will have a lot to live up to. The soloists, orchestra, The Sixteen and Harry Christophers have produced a CD which is more than just another Messiah, try it –you won’t be disappointed. Unreservedly recommended.

Sarah Samuelson

JOBY TALBOT PATHS OF MIRACLES

Tenebrae.

Director: Nigel Short.

SIGNUMN CLASSICS SIGCD078 TT 62:26

Do you know what a ‘pasiputput’ is? It is a rising vocal glissando of Taiwanese origin, and begins the piece on this CD, Paths of Miracles. Santiago de Compostela is a city in north-west Spain, and it boasts a magnificent Romanesque cathedral. The name derives from a twelfth century legend. Bishop Theodomir was guided to a field by a star, and found the bones of St James, the Apostle interred therein. The city became the destination for pilgrims, and the principal route by which they travelled, and continue to travel, is known as the Camino de Santiago. It begins at Irun, in northeast Spain. (I have visited Santiago twice, but must confess that I travelled by train on both occasions.)

Joby Talbot was born in 1971, and studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has an impressive list of compositions to his credit, with performances given by, amongst others, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, and Evelyn Glennie, and Tenebrae, a professional choir directed by the former King’s Singer, Nigel Short. The four movements of Paths of Miracles bear the names of stopping places on the Camino de Santiago, the final movement having the title of the destination city. The texts are taken from a variety of sources, mediaeval and modern, and in addition to the pasiputput mentioned above there are other modern choral effects. (I do not use this word in any derogatory sense.) There are also passages where

tonality pervades, but the whole composition has a sense of unity, and I found it most moving. The booklet is very informative, and almost free from typographical errors. All the texts, in their many languages, are provided, with, I am glad to say, translations. If you want something out of the ordinary, try this –I recommend it.

David Knight

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS A cappella choral works

The souls of the righteous; Greensleeves; Three Shakespeare Songs; Prayer to the Father of heaven; Mass in G minor; O vos omnes; Ca’ the Yowes; Three Elizabethan Part Songs; Silence and Music; Heart’s Music.

Laudibus. Director: Mike Brewer. Delphian DCD34074 TT 64:00

Laudibus is a small group (seventeen singers on this recording) chosen by audition from the highly-regarded Youth Choir of Great Britain, and it is more than equal to the considerable challenges of this wide-ranging remembrance of the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death. The souls of the righteous, O vos omnes and Heart’s Music are particularly welcome inclusions, as are the contrasting sets of part-songs, the late nineteenth-century Three Elizabethan Part Songs and the Three Shakespeare Songs composed as test pieces for the 1951 festival of the Federation of Music Festivals; as befits test pieces, they pose formidable difficulties of tuning and ensemble, for which these young singers are more than a match, though to my mind their attempt at the bell effects in Full fathom five is more akin to machine-gun fire than campanology. The choir is at its most impressive in quiet singing, though I have to enter my habitual protest against the current plague of dark vowel-sounds (what is a ‘pahgeant’, for example?); and the smaller-scale works are the best part of the programme. I was less happy with the centrepiece of the programme, the Mass in G minor, which is given a perfectly competent but somewhat soulless performance, not enhanced by some exaggerated tempi; just because you can sing ‘pleni sunt coeli’ at breakneck speed does not mean that you should, and one cannot help thinking of Dr Johnson’s famous saying about the dog standing on its hind legs or his equally famous: “Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.” The choir sounds over-driven, nor does the tone of the quartet of soloists delight the ear; such vibrato in young singers is frankly alarming. There are better performances of the Mass available, but this disc is probably worth buying for the rest of its contents.

Timothy Storey

HEAR MY WORDS

Parry Hear my words, ye people; I was glad; Byrd Teach me, O Lord; Stanford Magnificat in G; A Song of Wisdom; Haydn Benedictus (Little Organ Mass); Boyle Thou, O God, art praised in Sion; Greene Lord, let me know mine end; Ley A Prayer of King Henry VI; Mozart Laudate Dominum; Tomkins Out of the deep; Franck Panis Angelicus; Mendelssohn Hear my Prayer and O for the wings; Berkeley The Lord is my Shepherd Eton College Chapel Choir.

Director: Ralph Allwood.

Organ: David Goode.

SIGNUM SIGCD115 TT 79:00

This is, of course, no ordinary chapel choir, and its singing bears comparison with the very best in the Church Music business. Since the closure of Eton’s choir school in the 1960s, the chapel services have been maintained by members of the school, with treble line dependent on an annual intake at 13plus of ex-choristers from cathedrals and other good musical establishments. This disc was made early in 2008, when there were as many as eight good treble soloists still at the height of their powers. Not the least pleasure and interest for the listener is to compare the very different styles of singing which they have brought with them from their earlier training elsewhere, in works by Berkeley, Byrd, Haydn, Mozart and Stanford, plus the inevitable but regrettable Hear my prayer and O for the wings of a dove; there is surely something ludicrous about a twenty-first century teenage boy having to sing ‘My heart is sorely pained within my breast’. That apart, it seems an aptly chosen programme, and if many of the works are large-scale, as befits a choir of eighteen trebles, twelve altos, ten tenors and fourteen basses, there are quieter moments as well. There is a dutiful nod towards Eton’s connection with Malcolm Boyle, Henry Ley and Hubert Parry (Hear my words and I was glad); I wish there could have been a re-

take of Hear my words, as the organist’s rhythm is disturbingly unsteady in places and there is an obvious pedal mistake at the bottom of page 6 in the Novello edition (should be E natural in 2nd bar, not E flat). That’s a very small quibble compared with the generally excellent standard of the performances, and it should not put you off buying this fine CD to which I have listened several times with very great pleasure.

Timothy Storey

RE-ISSUEDCDs

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS CHORAL WORKS

Serenade to Music; Toward the Unknown Region; The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains; A Song of Thanksgiving; Dona nobis pacem; The Pilgrim’s Progress –A Bunyan Sequence; Five Mystical Songs; Fantasia on Christmas Carols; Lord, Thou hast been our refuge; Three Chorals Hymns; Magnificat; The Hundredth Psalm; Flois Campi; Four Hymns for tenor, viola and strings. Corydon Singers.

English Chamber Orchestra. Corydon Orchestra.

City of London Sinfonia.

Director: Matthew Best.

4 CDs HYPERIONCDS44321/4 TT 4 hours 41 mins.

What a joy to have the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ death celebrated with so many CDs flooding the market. These are a bonus and a wonderful collection where Matthew Best and his Corydon Singers have joined with some of the country’s finest soloists. Four glorious hours of RVW’s magnificent output. The delightful Serenade to Music is simply enchanting with an alluring array of soloists. There is a disc that celebrates some of his church music and John Gielgud’s distinctive voice is heard in The Pilgrim’s Progress. These discs have all been released before to critical acclaim, but Hyperion has seen fit to put them in a boxed set and who would be without them? The Corydon Singers have a phenomenal reputation and the singing has set a high benchmark. The feeling that conductor, singers and players create make these an exciting rerelease. Best certainly cuts the mustard. No excuse is really needed to put these recordings back on the shelves. What better than to relax into your favourite chair and take pleasure in the beauty of RVW’s music. An attractive boxed set.

Ian Morgan.

DUFAY MUSIC FOR ST JAMES THE GREATER

Mass for Saint James the Greater; Rite majorem Jacobum canamus’Archibus summis miseri recluse; Balsamus et munda cera; Gloria; Credo; Apostolo glorioso. The Binchois Consort.

Director: Andrew Kirkman.

HELIOS CDH55272 TT 66:53

Ten years after its first appearance, this distinguished recording comes up fresh and bright; it presents a complete Mass for St James, who was a popular focus for late mediaeval devotion, sundry motets and an additional Gloria and Credo. The liner notes provide copious information about the music, but fail to tell us anything about the composer, a curious omission which I seem to remember occurring before with these performers; my Penguin Dictionary of Music gives Guillaume Dufay’s dates as c.1400-74 and describes him as a Franco-Flemish composer who sang in the Papal choir at Rome (1428-37) and was in service to the court of Burgundy in the 1440s. It is interesting to see such famous names as Andrew Carwood and James Gilchrist among the four altos and four tenors of the Binchois Consort; the absence of bass voices will be noted. The singing is of the highest quality; the sound is lean, bright and well-blended, and the performers make light of the music’s considerable difficulties of both rhythm and tonality. This disc may be too far an excursion into the middle ages for some listeners, but its quality cannot be denied; it is an essential purchase for any devotees of this style and period of music who missed it first time round.

Timothy Storey

CHORAL EVENSONG FOR ST CUTHBERT’S DAY

From Durham Cathedral

Lloyd The Windows; Grier Preces & Responses; Leighton

The Second Service; Tavener Ikon of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; Mulet Carillon-Sortie; Langlais Prelude modal.

Durham Cathedral Choir. Director: James Lancelot.

Organ: Ian Shaw

PRIORY PRCD5029 TT 63:17

There can only be a small percentage of the population (and it does not include me) which finds it convenient to visit a cathedral regularly in order to enjoy a service of Choral Evensong. Playing a CD such as this is a very good substitute. The Book of Common Prayer Service – beginning with the preces – is followed faithfully, although the lessons are read from the RSV. The recording, made in 1989 and here re-issued, is of very good quality, although the read parts of the service are recorded at a lower level than the music. The music is largely twentieth century the –canticles are from Leighton’s Second Seervice, the Responses are by Francis Grier, and the anthem is Tavener’s Ikon of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. The Introit, which was new to me, is The Windows by Richard Lloyd, a former organist at Durham. The voluntaries are by Langlais and Mulet. Performances are excellent throughout. Living south of Watford, my knowledge of St Cuthbert was very limited, but the booklet was most informative although he surely did not die on Fame (sic) Island. Details of the music are a little sketchy, but this is to be expected in a re-issue. Recommended.

David Knight

CHORAL MUSIC FROM CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL

Byrd Laudibus in Sanctis; Walford Davies Magdalen at Michael’s Gate; Weelkes Give ear O Lord; Ridout I turn the corner of prayer; Gibbons Hosanna! to the Son of David; Brown Laudate Dominum; Stanford The Lord is my Shepherd; Purcell Let mine eyes; Williamson Wrestling Jacob.

Canterbury Cathedral Choir. Director: Allan Wicks.

Organ: David Flood.

PRIORY PRAB 111 TT 48:30

Priory’s re-issues of the Abbey catalogue continue to delight us, and here we have a 1980 recording following the usual scheme, a pre-CD sixty-minute anthology of what the choir did best, with a few rarities of local interest. Canterbury had something of a reputation for contemporary music, so it comes as no surprise to find works by Christopher Brown (b. 1943), Malcolm Williamson (1931-2003), and of course Alan Ridout (1934-96) with whom the choir enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration. These are perhaps the best-sung works, though anthems by Byrd, Gibbons and Weelkes are enjoyable enough; Stanford’s classic The Lord is my Shepherd is painfully slow –one can well imagine a cathedral canon gratefully interjecting ‘let us pray’ at half-time –and Magdalen at Michael’s gate (Walford Davies) is curiously wooden and inexpressive. Allan Wicks doubtless discovered this when Assistant Organist at York Minster: I much preferred the version in this same series by his old master Francis Jackson and the York choir, which may not be so neat and tidy but receives a far more effective performance. That said, though this anthology is a bit of a curate’s egg, it makes enjoyable listening: it would be well worth adding to your set of these re-issues.

Timothy Storey

MORALES

Missa Queramus cum pastoribus. Andreas Christi famulus; Sancta Maria, succurre miseris; Clamabat autem mulier Chananea; O sacrum convivium; Regina coeli. Mouton Queramus cum pastoribus.

The Choir of Westminster Cathedral. Director: James O’Donnell.

HELIOS CDH55276 TT 65:25

Morales was born in Seville around 1500 and spent the greater part of his life in the service of Spanish Cathedrals, up to his death in 1553. As the booklet points out however, if judged by the sound of his music, Morales is far less easy to identify as a Spaniard than is his most famous sixteenth century compatriot Victoria. All

the music bar two pieces is written for five voices and sung by the outstanding choir of Westminster Cathedral under James O’Donnell. Any of us who collect Hyperion’s re-releases on the Helios label will have a terrific collection of the finest examples of church music and cathedral choirs. Keep them coming.

Ian Morgan

MOZART Epistle Sonatas

The King’s Consort. Director: Robert King. Organ: Ian Watson.

HELIOS CDH55314 TT 59:37

When this disc was released a number of periodicals described it as ‘Cannot fail to delight’ or ‘Not to be missed’. I would certainly echo those sentiments. An integral part of the music for Mass was a short instrumental piece to fill the gap between the readings of the Epistle and Gospel and this is where these compositions originate from. Once again Mozart and chartered unknown waters to produces these sonatas which convey different moods, in particular K67, which is the most interesting, for it has the saddest mood. One would liked to have been present during the services, although how long they lasted is anyone’s guess! As a disc there is plenty here to sit down and enjoy the musicianship of the King’s Consort and organist Ian Watson. Enchanting pieces.

Sarah Samuelson

FRANCISCO GUERRERO

Missa Sancta et immaculata; Hei mihi, Dominie; Trahe me post te; Virgo Maria; Magnificat septimi toni; Vexilla regis; O lux beata Trinitas; Lauda mater ecclesia. The Choir of Westminster Cathedral. Director: James O’Donnell.

HELIOS CDH55313 TT 64:53

Guerrero (1528-1599) published more than one hundred motets, two books of Masses, Psalms, hymns and canticles for Vespers, and much more. The Mass is based on Morales’s four-voiced motet Sancta et immaculata virginatas. He was a proflific and versatile composer. The copious recordings that mark O’Donnell’s tenure at Westminster Cathedral are an inspiring testament to his work conducting the choir. He has always attracted excellent reviews for the recordings that came from this era. This is no exception. Consummate musicianship from everyone. This is a recording from 1997 and still it commands attention as Westminster Cathedral Choir thrills with its interpretation of Guerrero’s polyphonic compositions. Simply outstanding and well-worth buying.

Daniel Reed

CHRISTMASCDs

SING REIGN OF FAIR MAID Music for Christmas and the New Year

Britten A Ceremony of Carols; Corpus Christi Carol; A New Year Carol; Dunhill To the Queen of heaven; Moore Personent Hodie; arr Willcocks; Hadley I sing of a maiden; Anon Gaudete!; Berkeley Salve Regina; Handel Let the bright seraphim Karg-Elert Vom Himmel hoch; Organ: Edmundson Toccata-Prelude ‘Vom HImmel hoch’; Bach Chorale Prelude on Vom Himmel hoch; Pachelbel Chorale Prelude on Vom Himmel hoch.

Ely Cathedral Girls’ Choir.

Director: Sarah MacDonald.

Organ: Edward Taylor.

Harp: Danielle Perrett.

Violin: Rachel Stroud.

Trumpet: James Fussey.

REGENT REGCD284 TT 68:06

I found this CD quite satisfying. Some of the music was unknown to me, not least the Karg-Elert, but after hearing it I was quite captivated. He uses violin, voice and organ intertwined with each other in lyrical dialogue. The girls’ choir tackles the programme of suitable music for them with aplomb. It is uplifting to have music on this disc that is not the normal run-of-the-mill fare as it adds something to the joy of listening to these excellent girls. Philip Moore’s

ELY CATHEDRAL CHOIR

WOULD YOUR SON LIKE TO SING IN ONE OF THE FINEST CATHEDRALS IN EUROPE? CAN’T AFFORD TO CONSIDER IT? YES YOU CAN! READ ON…

There are chorister vacancies from September 2009 for boys currently aged 7 or 8.

All choristers automatically receive a 50% bursary to help with their education at The King’s School during their time as a chorister. In addition, two vacancies offer potential extra funding (on a means-tested basis) for the boys concerned – in once instance throughout the whole of his time at The King’s School, Ely, and in the other instance throughout his time as a chorister .

The Director of Music, Paul Trepte, is always pleased to talk to parents about what is involved. Interested parents are invited to contact him as soon as possible, ahead of the main voice trial date (Saturday, 7th February, 2009).

He can be reached on 01353 660336 and P.Trepte@cathedral.ely.anglican.org

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT THE MUSIC PAGES AT: www.cathedral.ely.anglican.org

KING’S SCHOOL WEB SITE: www.kings-ely.cambs.sch.uk

Magnificat is wonderful and fits so perfectly. The Britten, always a favourite, is the staple diet and with Danielle Perrett joining Sarah MacDonald’s choir it makes for an excellent programme although everything seemed to be taken quite slowly. However, with some lovely sounds from the organ and the addition of trumpet in the Handel it makes for a good buy.

Daniel Reed

CHRISTMAS FROM TRURO

Carols: Once in Royal David’s City; Ding dong!; Coventry Carol; Away in a manger; O little town; First Nowell; O come all ye faithful; See amid the winter’s snow; Angels, from the realms; While shepherds watched. Christians awake!; Hark the herald; We wish you a merry Christmas; Mathias Sir Christmas; Jackson Nowell sing we; arr Rutter Sans Day Carol; Ord Adam lay ybounden; arr Willcocks Tomorrow shall be my dancing day; Skempton Rejoice, Rejoice; Old Basque The Angel Gabriel; RVW The Truth from above Truro Cathedral Choir.

Director: Robert Sharpe.

Organ: Christopher Gray. REGENT REGCD281 TT 65:33

The booklet describes this as a new collection of classics and is based on the Cathedral’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Oliver Hooper kicks off with a well-sung solo in Once in Royal David’s City and along the way Robert Sharpe’s choir has good control. This was recorded before he left for York. There is a gem within this collection, a blues-inspired arrangement of Away in a manger by Gary Cole. Howard Skemkpton’s Rejoice should be better known, this is the first recording of the piece commissioned by the Precentor in memory of his mother. It is as the book says a very simple and very telling carol in which the words are presented in a four-part chordal texture. I do wish that we could hear While shepherds watched to the tune of On Ilkley Moor – so much better. After taking us all on the Christmas journey including the final verse used on Christmas Day of O come all ye faithful with organ thundering through, Truro round off this disc with a performance of We wish you a merry Christmas

Patrick Mayhew

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A CHRISTMAS CAROLL From Westminster Abbey

Arr Pearsall In ducki jubilo; Poulenc Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël; Leighton A Chritsmas Caroll; Walton All this time; Lavino Nativity; Rutter Dormi Jesu; Chilcott

The Shepherd’s Carol; Dove The Three Kings; arr

Cleobury Joys Seven; arr Bowers-Broadbent Silent night; arr O’Donnell I saw three ships; Head The little road to Bethlehem; Mathias Ave Rex The Choir of Westminster Abbey. Director: James O’Donnell. Organ: Robert Quinney.

HYPERION CDA67716 TT 64:34

This is the perfect Christmas disc to put on and sit back to relax to after a cold winter’s walk. The warmth that emanates from the disc is perfect. The singing is as ever brilliant and the choice of repertoire is superb. There is something here for everyone although on first glance at the contents one may not think so. James O’Donnell has put together an enterprising programme recognising that Christmas has proved an apparently bottomless source of inspiration for composers throughout the history of notated music. Everything is here. The CD ends with Mathias’s short work Ave Rex a carol sequence full of parallel fourths and fifths, a sound Robert Quinney says is guaranteed to evoke medieval music. He also uses bitonality. As one has come to expect from the coupling of Hyperion and Westminster Abbey there is not much to complain about. Perfect in fact.

Daniel Reed

THE THREE KINGS Music for Christmas from Tewkesbury Abbey

G Jackson The Magi; Thou whose birth; Whitacre Lux Aurumque; Bax Lullay, dear Jesus; Wilby The Word Made Flesh; Cornelius The Three Kings; Reger The Virgin’s Slumber Song; Parry Welcome, Yule!; When Christ was born of Mary free; Dove The Three Kings; Tavener God is with us; Edmondson Vom Himmel Hoch; Joubert There is no Rose; Bassi Quem pastores laudavere; Langlais La Nativité; Howells O my deir hert; Rutti I wonder as I wander Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum.

Director: Benjamin Nicholas.

Organ: Carleton Etherington.

DELPHIAN DCD34047 TT 66:02

If you happen to live in or near Tewkesbury then you are very lucky as this latest recording by the Abbey Schola Cantorum is something special. The boys’ sound is bright and full. Although the Abbey School closed down two years ago, the boy choristers have transfered to Dean Close Prep in Cheltenham, whence they travel to the Abbey to sing Evensong during the week. There is great variety of music on this recording. ranging from Cornelius’s The Kings and Joubert’s There is no rose of such virtue to less standard repertoire such as Whitacre’s Lux Aurmque and The Three Kings by Dove. There are also three first recordings; The Magi and Thou whose birth by Gabriel Jackson and When Christ was born of Mary free by Parry. This would be a great addition to any music lover’s collection.

Matt Lennox

BERLIOZ L’Enfance du Christ Corydon Singers.

Corydon Orchestra.

Director: Matthew Best.

HYPERION 2 CDS CDD22067 TT 100:52.

Just in time for Christmas this re-release on a work described by German poet Heine: ‘I hear on all sides that you have plucked a nosegay of the most exquisite blooms of melody and that all in all your oratorio is a masterpiece of simplicity’. The Corydon Singers and Matthew Best do justice to Berlioz’s work. A great line-up of soloists who all make an excellent contribution especially bass Alastair Miles as Herod, Gerald Finley as Joseph and Jean Rigby as the Virgin Mary. An all-round classic performance.

Daniel Reed

ORGANCDs

NAJI HAKIM plays the organ of Glenalmond College

Langlais Te Deum; de Grigny Récit de tierce en taille; Hakim Sakskøbing Praeludier; Franck Choral III; Boëllmann Prière á Notre Dame; Hakim Glenalmond Suite and Improvisation on Amazing Grace. Live Recording.

SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD130 TT 71:58

This is a recording of the inaugural recital on the Harrison and Harrison organ (2007) in the Chapel of Glenalmond College. Naji Hakim puts the two-manual, 26-stop mechanical action instrument through its paces in a programme designed not only to exploit the instrument’s capabilities, but also to entertain the audience. The recitalist’s own lively compositions both have Danish connotations, although Glenalmond Suite was commissioned by the College. The recital is rounded off with an improvisation on Amazing Grace with two more tunes New Britain and Auld Lang Syne introduced towards the end.

Alan Spedding

THE ORGAN IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY RUDE, STIRLING

John Kitchen plays

Guilmant Grand Choeur in D; Duruflé Méditation pour orgue; Widor Symphony No 4; Asma Fantasie over de Avondzang ‘k wil U o God mijn dankbetalen’; Stanford

Hymn Tune Prelude St Columba; Milford Hymn Tune Prelude St Columba; Parry Hymn

Tune Prelude Croft’s 136th; Rowley Benedictus; Elgar Pomp & Circumstance March 1; Kee Variations on a Dutch song ‘Merck toch hoe sterck’.

DELPHIAN DCD34064 TT 78:32

This, like many CDs to come from the Delphian recording stable, is produced to a very high quality. It is certainly one of the finest labels around managing to get clarity in the production and engineering which adds to the overall experience. However, that said there is one niggle, the track numbers do not tie-up with those on booklet. Anyway, here we have a superb organist, John Kitchen, playing Scotland’s largest organ. The instrument has never before been heard on disc, the 1939 Rushworth & Dreaper represents the zenith of British organ. The Programme is excellent showing the full range of colour.

After a stirring performance of Guilmant’s old chestnut Grand Choeur in D Kitchen tackles some interesting repertoire. In particular, Asma’s Fantasie over de Avondzang where the solo French Horn stop comes into its own. Kitchen dazzles us with his usual flare and, at the same time, demonstrates a truly commanding technique. It can’t be repeated enough; the success of the recording rests with the disciplined playing and in the demonstration recording quality. Highly recommended.

Ian Morgan

THE ORGAN OF BUCKINGHAM PALACE BALLROOM

Joseph Nolan plays the newly refurbished organ of the Buckingham Palace Ballroom.

Bach Passacaglia in C minor; RVW Rhosymedre; Mendelssohn Sonata No 3; Dubois Toccata; Rawsthorne Dance Suite

SIGNUM SIGCD114 TT 48:24

Having given the inaugural performance on the newly-refurbished organ of Buckingham Palace’s Ballroom, Jospeh Nolan gives a splendid recital committed to disc on the wonderful Signum label. It’s a shame there are only 48 minutes, but the programme is wonderful, beginning with a sprightly performance of Bach’s Passacaglia and ending with Noel Rawsthorne’s splendid tongue-in-cheek Dance Suite. I would be interested in buying a copy but it is out of print. Intertwined in this suite we have On Ilkley Moor and a twinkle-toe Line Dance a medley inspired by Michael Flatley’s Irish dance and featuring the Shaker hymn, Lord of the Dance. The organ dates from 1818 and is a three-manual instrument originally by Henry Lincoln for the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. This is a marvellous CD with some great ‘hits’ from the repertoire all well-played.

Patrick Mayhew

HANDEL-INSPIRED

Paul Ayres plays the Goetze & Gwynn Handel House organ at St George’s Church, Hanover Square. Handel Sinfonia from Solomon; Voluntary in C; Air and Bourée from Water Music; Overture to ‘Esther’; Siciliano and Minuet (Fireworks); Fugue in A minor; Two Pieces for Mechanical Clock; Hawkins Footnote; Smith Scherzo on ‘Gopsal’; Ikeda Water Bubbling; Ellis Overture and Gigue from Handel-inspired Suite; Janczak Le Tombeau d’Handel; Wolstenholme Introduction and Allegro from Sonata in the Style of Handel; Martens Little Prelude; Parwez In Handel’s Name; Guilmant In Handel’s Name; Neal Lednah Loblied; Wesley Variations on a theme in Handel’s Otto; Ayres after Handel The Departure of the Queen of Sheba PRIORY PRCD 894 TT 72:25

In 2006, the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Kenneth Leighton Foundation generously provided the prizes for a ‘Handel-Inspired’ composition competition, where entrants had to submit pieces for a one-manual chamber organ. The eight winning pieces are played on this CD by Paul Ayres, together with some genuine George Frideric, and pieces by Guilmant, Samuel Wesley, and Wolstenholme. The featured organ is the one-manual 7-stop instrument built by Goetze and Gwynn in 1998 for the Handel House Museum. It is based on the work of eighteenth-century English builders, Richard Bridge and Thomas Parker. Handel lived for the final 36 years of his life at what is now 25 Brook Street in London, W1. (If he had lived a lot longer, Jimi Hendrix would have been his neighbour at no. 23.) 25 Brook Street is now the Handel House Museum, although the organ resides in the Church of St George’s, Hanover Square, which is just round the corner, and is where Handel worshipped regularly. Perhaps it is obvious to state that Handel’s own music is the most memorable, but the other pieces show considerable invention. My favourite was Alan Smith’s Scherzo on ‘Gopsal’. But the most interesting of the modern pieces was Paul Ayres’s own The Departure of the Queen of Sheba, which inverts Handel’s themes, and ends with the Queen disappearing into the distance. (Paul has an inventive mind having recently reviewed Exite Fidelis, may I suggest a future composition could be The Exit of the Gladiators.) The playing is exemplary, and demonstrates well what can be achieved on a small instrument. The contrasts achieved are remarkable, and the informative booklet tells you how this is achieved. This a thoroughly recommended issue.

David Knight

& Son Ltd Organ

OLIVIER MESSIAEN ORGAN WORKS Vol III

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

Livre du Saint Sacrement.

DELPHIAN DCD34076 2 CD SET TT 117:08

There is a story –apocryphal, I am sure –of organists from all over Europe arriving at the Church of La Trinité, Paris, to hear Messiaen improvise at the end of Sunday morning Mass, and colliding in the doorway with members of the congregation in a hurry to get out.

Apocryphal, possibly, but this story does highlight the responses from both music lovers in general and organists in particular to the music of Messiaen. If you are a Messiaen lover, then all I can say is that the performance on these CDs is impeccable, and the booklet is excellent, giving a long and lucid essay on the music, details of the organ, and a biography of the organist. If, at present, Messiaen’s music presents you with considerable problems, may I suggest that you try this recording. The Livre du Saint Sacrement (‘Book of the Holy Sacrament’) is a suite of eighteen short movements –most are between five and eight minutes long. As titulaire at La Trinité, Messiaen was obliged to improvise during the Masses, and the majority of the movements of the suite developed from these improvisations. Other movements are based on historical events from the Old and New Testaments (eg, the crossing of the Red Sea or the appearance of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene), and the whole piece crystallised during a visit Messiaen paid to the Holy Land in 1984. But, be warned, this is not music to accompany driving or eating. It should be listened to, perhaps in small sections at a time, perhaps with a score, perhaps with the booklet in front of you. Perhaps you will be converted to the company of Messiaen lovers. But do try.

David Knight

NIGHT Music for Choir and Cello

Allain Night; Ubi Caritas; Ferko Motet for Passion Sunday; Lord, let at last Thine angels come; Tas Miserere; Nysdedt Stabat Mater; Duggan Futility; Maconchy Variations on a Theme for Vaughan Williams’s ‘Job’. Commotio.

Director; Matthew Berry.

Cello: Rosie Banks.

Tenor: Christopher Watson.

HERALD HAVPCD340 TT 79:47

I began to listen to this CD with pleasurable anticipation, as my knowledge of the repertoire for choir and cello was minimal –no, not minimal, zero. But I was slightly let down, as only half the pieces are for that combination. Ubi caritas, Futility, and Motet for Passion Sunday were for choir alone, and the Maconchy piece was for solo cello.

This latter piece could almost have been by RVW himself. It was written to be played on Vaughan Williams’s 85th birthday on 12 October 1957 (not the 11th, as stated in the accompanying booklet), and the score is inscribed ‘For Dear Uncle Ralph on his 85th birthday’. However, the soloist, Arnold Ashby, was ill at the time, and it was not played until 23rd January 1959, by when, of course, RVW had died. All seven variations are recognisably based on the given theme. Knut Nystedt is a Norwegian composer, and I have played some of his organ music. He was born in 1915, and his music often combines a simple tonality with intense chromaticism. In the Stabat Mater, which was written in 1987, this makes for a most effective setting of the text. The other composers were new to me.

Richard Allain sets his texts most effectively. In Night, with a text by Shelley, the cello weaves its way throughout the vocal texture, which alternates between the concordant and the harsh. Although the key centre moves continuously, the cello’s high E acts as a focal point. In Ubi Caritas, there are effective antiphonal effects between the upper and lower voices.

The pieces by Frank Ferko are in a tonal idiom, and the setting of the texts is generally effective and shows the influence of Messiaen. The harmomy of Rudi Tas and John Duggan’s compositions is much harsher, and I found they needed several hearings to penetrate them. Matthew Berry gives convincing performances. The booklet is informative, and gives the words of the pieces in English, but there are no Latin texts and no translations thereof.

David Knight

GREAT EUROPEAN ORGANS No. 74

Richard Lea plays the Walker organ of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

Benson Psalm 145; Hakim The Embrace of Fire; Jarvis Sonata in E minor; Trustam Pastorale Interlude; Davies Suite On the Magnificat.

PRIORY PRCD 871 TT 79:56

In 1967, shortly after Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral was opened, I visited, and was stunned, not only by the building itself, with its magnificent stained glass, but also by the organ, which is an integral part of the building and placed in a central position. I was fascinated by the chamade trumpets, and when the organ began to play, I was riveted. And one of my earliest LPs (SDD 236) was of Jeanne Demessieux, Flor Peeters and Noel Rawsthorne playing the instrument in a mixed programme, including Messiaen’s Transports de joie and Mathias’s Invocations. The sound on the CD under review captures the sound of the organ exceptionally well, and has the edge on the LP, which I have played again. Richard Lea has been the organist of the cathedral since 1999, and has featured on several CDs. His playing is exemplary. The programme is entirely of twentieth century music, and all pieces, except the Hakim, are recorded here for the first time. And, apart from Hakim, all other composers featured have a connection with Liverpool. Caleb Jarvis was organist of St George’s Hall and Liverpool University, and was the teacher of Noel Rawsthorne and Brian Runnett, as well as John Benson and Elisabeth Trustam. Nicholas Davies was a graduate of Liverpool University, and studied organ with Terence Duffy (formerly organist of the Metropolitan Cathedral). Although the music was all composed in the last century, there are a variety of styles. The Benson and the Hakim pieces show the influence of Messiaen, whilst the Jarvis has a much more English flavour about it. Pastorale Interlude by Elizabeth Trustam is a very gentle piece with a beautiful melodic line it could, perhaps, have been by Whitlock. The five movements of Nicholas Davies’s Suite are varied in both tempo and dynamic, and the music shows influences of, perhaps, Holst and Langlais. The booklet was, most remarkably, free from error! I recommend the CD.

David Knight

TWELVE EAST ANGLIAN ORGANS

Bairstow Sonata No 1; Herron Trumpet Voluntary; Buxtehude Chorale Prelude; ‘Vater Unser’; Widor Toccata; Pachelbel Fugue in F major; Boyce Voluntary in G; Langlais Te Deum; Darke Fantasy; Willan Introduction, Passacaglia & Fugue; Bach Chorale Prelude Vater Unser; Anon Voluntary in A; Parry Chorale Prelude ‘St Cross’; Vivaldi arr Bach Concerto in A minor; Stanford Postlude in D minor; Handel Organ Concerto Op 4 No 2.

PRIORY PRCD6011 2CDS

This double CD brought back memories of my (considerably) younger days when I was a student in Colchester, and was given lessons on the instrument in St Botolph’s Church. I was also able to hear in the flesh some of the other organs featured here. The recordings were made in 1977 and 1978, and were originally issued as LPs. They were made by Michael Woodward, who recorded organs as a hobby. The original LPs were given splendid cases, with splendid photographs of the organs recorded, and these feature on the cover of the booklet accompanying the CDs. The booklet also gives a specification and brief information about each instrument, and an account of the work of Michael Woodward. There is, however, only minimal information about the music played, and there are a few spelling, syntactical and typographical errors. Geoffrey Hannant’s playing is always precise and well registered, and shows off the capabilities of the instruments. It was fascinating comparing their wide variety, from the four manual instruments of St Edmundsbury and Norwich Cathedrals to the 5-stop organs in St Margaret’s, Ipswich and Snape Maltings. I am amazed that it was possible to play the organ of St Peter’s, Sudbury. The church was declared redundant in 1972, and some pipework was unplayable due to builders’ rubble, etc. The picture of the Colchester organ also contains some percussion instruments, and reminded me of the excellent concerts given by the St Botolph’s Music Society in my student days. And their orchestra features here, accompanying the Handel Organ Concerto. Perhaps surprisingly, I found most fascinating the one-manual

instruments in Snape Maltings and St Margaret’s, Ipswich. The chiff on the 8-foot stop of the Roger Pulham instrument was delightful, and the sounds of the Bach and the ‘Anon’ pieces on the Peter Hindmarsh were remarkable for an organ with only five stops. Space considerations here prevent me from eulogising on the other instruments –but if you buy these CDs, you will also have the enjoyment that I had.

David Knight

ABBEY SPECTACULAR!

Gerard Brooks plays organ favourites from St Ouen, Rouen Boëllmann Suite Gothique; Dubois Toccata; Lemmens Fanfare; Bonnet Étude de Concert; Vierne Carillon de Longpont; Toccata; Carillon de Westminster; Mulet Tu es Petra; CarillonSortie; Gigout Toccata; Widor FinalSymphonie No 2; Guilmant Final Symphonie No 1.

PRIORY PRCD 5032 TT 76:13

What better than to have all your French and Belgian romantic repertoire on one CD played by the brilliant Gerard Brooks on the Cavaillé-Coll organ of St Ouen, Rouen. Simply perfect. This CD does not let the listener down with the opening majestic chords of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique to the end and Guilmant Final Symphonie No 1 it is an exhilarating ride through the repertoire of Dubois, Vierne, Mulet and Widor. Refreshing too to have the Finale from his Symphonie 2, the fifth and its ubiquitous Toccata does not appear which makes it an even better buy. Gerard Brookes has moved to become Director of Music at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster in addition to his other posts. The note in the booklet states that the organ today still sounds magnificent (I agree) but there is no doubt that a major restoration is needed as the action is becoming increasingly fragile and the plentiful wind supply and soaring power of the trebles of which Cavaillé-Coll was so proud is beginning to wane. A superb CD and well-worth purchasing.

Andrew Palmer

J S BACH ORGAN WORKS Vol III

Margaret Phillips plays the Trost organ (1724-1730) of the Stadtkirche, Waltershausen 2CD set.

REGENT REGCD276 TT 128:56

J S BACH ORGAN WORKS Vol IV

Margaret Phillips plays the Metzler (1976) organ of Trinity College, Cambridge 2CD set.

REGENT REGCD258 TT 136:35

For the latest two volumes in her widely acclaimed Bach series, Margaret Phillips uses two contrasting instruments. The Waltershausen Trost is housed in a magnificently extravagant baroque case with a gloriously over-the-top console. The Trinity College Metzler occupies one of the best known of English cases in a rather more restrained style. The programmes are chosen with consummate skill to suit the characteristics of each organ. The sharp pitch and modified meantone tuning at Waltershausen add a salty piquancy to elegant interpretations of the Clavierübung III and Sei gegrüsset variations and the cymbelstern (one of two in the specification) is given an airing in the final item, the Pièce d’Orgue, BWV 572. The mellifluous tone quality of the Trinity College Metzler is put to good use in a programme in which the larger-scale works are interspersed with chorale preludes based on Advent and Christmas melodies. Both volumes are well presented with meticulous notes and registration details. Margaret Phillips is not only a great player, but also a fine teacher. Frescobaldi in his preface to his Fiori Musicale (1635) (which Bach himself copied out), exhorts the student to play one of the pieces by saying that he will thereby ‘learn not a little’. In a similar spirit, the serious student will learn much by listening to these superb collections.

Alan Spedding

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Advent and Christmas at St Paul’s Cathedral

Family Carols

20 December Service for all ages

all welcome On Angel Wings Sunday 21 December by Michael Morpurgo

(entry by ticket only) (Send a sae for free tickets to The Education Dept, St Paul’s Cathedral, St Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD)

Christmas Carol Service Tuesday 23 December

all welcome (but limited capacity)

Christmas Eve Carol Service Wednesday 24 December 4.00pm all welcome (but limited capacity)

TSB)

all welcome (but limited capacity) Ceremony of Carols Saturday 13 December by Benjamin Britten

all welcome

Midnight Eucharist Wednesday 24 December 11.30pm all welcome (but limited capacity)

Sung Eucharist Thursday 25 December

Festal Evensong

For more information about any of these events please call 020 7236 4128 or visit www.stpauls.co.uk

“Alabelwhoseorganrecordingsareconsistentlyamongstthefinestemergingtoday” InternationalRecordReview-January2008

Internationally-respected OrganistofYorkMinster, JohnScottWhiteley playsadazzlingcollectionof French20thcenturyshowpieces, includingfivefirstrecordings, andhisowntranscriptionof Cochereau’smagnificent improvisedSymphony

REGCD275

ThecompleteViernechoralworks performedbythecriticallyacclaimedTruroCathedralChoir andthecompleteorganworks writtenforliturigcaluse,playedon thefamous‘FatherWillis’organof TruroCathedralbyRobertSharpe, plusanewrecordingofVierne’s beautifulsacredsongcycle LesAngélus,Op57

REGCD263

MesseSolennelleinCsharpminor,Op16,MesseBasse,Op30,Triptyque,Op58,ThreeMotets, Messebassepourlesdéfunts,Op62,LesAngélus,Op57, ToccatainBflatminor&CarillondeWestminster(fromPiècesdeFantaisie)

Acollectionofwell-lovedtraditionalCarolsasheardeveryyear attheNineLessonsandCarolsandMidnightMassServicesin TruroCathedral,performedbyTruroCathedralChoir,directed byRobertSharpe.Alsoincludesfirstrecordingsoftwonew carolsbyleadingBritishcomposersGabrielJacksonand HowardSkempton,commissionedbyTruroCathedral,andGary Cole’sblues-inspiredarrangementof AwayinaManger.

ThedebutrecordingbytheElyCathedralGirls’Choir Anunusualselectionofrarely-heardmusicforuppervoicesfor AdventandChristmasandNewYear

TotheQueenofheaven Dunhill, CorpusChristiCarol Britten, Magnificat(TonusPeregrinus withfauxbordons) Moore, PersonentHodiearr. Willcocks ,ChoralePreludeonVomHimmel hoch,BWV738 Bach,ACeremonyofCarols,Op28 Britten, ChoralePreludeonVom Himmelhoch Pachelbel,ANewYearCarol Britten, Isingofamaiden Hadley, Gaudete! arr.MacDonald ,SalveRegina Berkeley,Letthebrightseraphim Handel, VomHimmelhoch Karg-Elert, Toccata-Prelude:‘VomHimmelhoch’ Edmundson

Availablefromallgoodclassicalrecordshopsordirectfrom REGENTRECORDS POBox528,Wolverhampton,WV39YWTel:01902424377, Fax:01902717661E-mail:info@regentrecords.com Web:www.regentrecords.com-Nowwithsecureonlineordering Cathedral/churchshopspleaseorderdirectfromRegent UKRetaildistributionbyRSKEntertainmentLtd, Tel:01488608900,info@rskentertainment.co.uk USAdistributionAlbanyMusicDistributorsInc.(mailorderwww.arkivmusic.com)

Litanies Alain,Berceusemarine,Op.24 Guillaume,CortègeetLitanie,Op.19ii Dupré,arr.Farnam, Piècepourorgue,Op.80 Pâque,Scherzo-Caprice,Op.26ii Bernard Petitpoucet Ravelarr.ScottWhiteley,Organetto Verdin, Symphonieenimprovisation Cochereautrans.ScottWhiteley