Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

The choir of St John’s, Cambridge

former director of music at St John’s, ‘that boys produce naturally.’

It was Malcolm’s 1959 Westminster Cathedral recording of Victoria’s Tenebrae Responsories that first took our choral community by the ears, though it was the recording (now on Decca) of the Missa brevis Benjamin Britten wrote for Malcolm that same year that offers the more immediate sense of how viscerally engaging that revolution was.

Another revolution, in which King’s and St John’s were closely involved, was the appropriation by Anglican choirs of Gregorio Allegri’s setting of the Miserere, the great penitential psalm at the end of that candle-dimming service of Tenebrae (‘darkness’) that used to be performed in Catholic churches during the final days of Holy Week.

Allegri’s was the last of 16 settings of the Miserere composed for the Sistine Chapel choir between 1514 and 1638 – and the most famous. Encased in legend, it became a powerful drawer of crowds during the centuries that followed, as the great and the good of the musical and literary worlds jostled to join the mayhem the event inspired in this most theatrical of ecclesiastical spaces. (For a ringside seat, read Dickens’s report in Pictures from Italy.)

The entire story has now been told by Graham O’Reilly in an academically rigorous yet thrillingly narrated and beautifully written book, Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel (Boydell, £45). There are parts of the story that might do service as the basis for a Netflix blockbuster. Nothing is more surprising, however, than that Anglican takeover.

This took root in 1963 with a famous recording at King’s, Cambridge, in which the 12-year-old Roy Goodman, unrehearsed and fresh from the rugby field, was the treble soloist. Rarely have those stellar high Cs – never part of Allegri’s score but who’s counting? – been sung with such consummate ease.

That was sung in English, though by the 1970s the psalm was again being sung in Latin, in a performing edition by George Guest that regularly featured in the BBC’s Ash Wednesday broadcast from St John’s. It’s also used in a matchless 1990 St Paul’s Cathedral recording, Jeremy Budd the treble soloist, directed by another former St John’s musician, John Scott.

Last autumn, the St John’s choir released a CD, The Tree (Signum Records), a moving retrospective of its work with four directors. Three of the finest tracks come from the current choir under Andrew Nethsingha. They include the 34-year-old James Long’s thrilling Isaiah-inspired and trumpetaccompanied anthem Sicut aquilae (Like eagles).

It starts with the cry ‘Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard?’, two questions we might well ask of the college’s current management.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON SONGS IN WARTIME

So far, nothing from Bob Geldof, and nothing from those celebrities who came together to warble Imagine on Zoom during the lowest point of the pandemic, but it can’t be long now.

The first Rock 4 Ukraine gig has been announced (in Bournemouth, headline act, the tribute band Meetloaf) and dealers in NFTs (please don’t ask me to explain) are selling one-off digital images of Artists for Ukraine such as Tina Turner. Turns out that where there’s trucks in muck, there’s brass.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has blotted out everything else and, in the five clear minutes between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of the Third World War, I keep having this thought: my father was born during the Second World War. He is now past 80 and the next one is upon us, which means his entire life has been one of peace and prosperity. Talk about timing being everything, eh?

My father – along with Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney – came of age with protest songs, which he sang to us, his children. We Shall Overcome. If I Had a Hammer. This Land Is Your Land. Blowin’ in the Wind. These were the first songs we ever knew, living in America in the 1960s, until the assassination of Bobby Kennedy freaked out my mother so much that we came back to England. My father didn’t sing us war songs, though war songs are just as powerful, in a sweeter, more plangent way.

What will the soundtrack be to this one? There are no reference points.

Nobody under 80-something has been in a world war before. We have to imagine the raw emotion coursing through the moist-eyed listener in the 1940s as they heard Vera Lynn singing about the white cliffs of Dover on a crackly Decca LP, or Flanagan & Allen hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line, or as they travelled even further down memory lane to the Great War, Pack Up Your Troubles or Keep the Home Fires Burning.

This new war of 2022 is not in a faraway country of which we know little.

My husband took my elder son to watch Liverpool play Real Madrid in Kyiv in 2018!

Nothing can convey in music the escalating awfulness of events. Any attempt to write a song to channel the fury of the civilised world as it contemplates the icy tundra of Putin’s Siberian soul would be catchpenny and bathetic. Ra Ra RatPutin – Russia’s Greatest Death Machine?

Let us only hope the war is over (if you want it, as John Lennon said) before anyone tries.