OWing to the energies of the Revd Martin Eastwood, incumbent (since autumn 2007) of St Andrew’s, Fulham Fields — a trained musician and himself a talented composer — this west-London church has just mounted its first music festival. It was a weekend of events all the more remarkable for the inclusion of several new musical settings, all commissioned by St Andrew’s.
Specialist new-music events on the church-music scene have been in abeyance since the admirable Norwich Festival of Contemporary Church Music, pioneered by Michael Nicholas (then organist of Norwich Cathedral) and Professor Peter Aston of the University of East Anglia, pulled down the blinds after four or five triumphant festivals spanning more than a decade.
More recently, the successful St Pancras Festival of Contemporary Music has reignited the torch each June, and Wells Cathedral has just held its first week-long festival, New Music Wells, which included, inter alia, a (second) new set of evening canticles by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.
Fulham’s exciting musical weekend was a palpable hit with congregation and composers alike, as the Bishop London underlined in a pithy sermon on the last night. During that revealing service, Fr Eastwood’s own accompanied anthem “Sacrificium Deo”, shrewdly conceived and rich in canonic imitation, was sung as an introit.
A new set of Responses by Humphrey Clucas, well-judged and clearly taking cognisance of other outstanding sets by (for instance) Bernard Rose and the late John Sanders, clearly deserve to find their way into cathedral evensongs across the land.
By way of an acknowledgement of his part in promoting new music events such as Norwich’s, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis were by Peter Aston: simply conceived for the mixed forces to hand, with an element of challenge, but not so difficult that they could not be assayed by any half-decent parish church choir.
Best of all the 2008 St Andrew’s commissions was a new anthem by Jonathan Coffer, now a Cambridge undergraduate, who set, most imaginitively and sensitively, a poem by the Archbishop of Canterbury (“Who said that trees grow easily compared with us. . .”) for SATB soli and mixed choir. He employed an idiom that struck me as intelligently thought through, original, and fresh.
INTERESTING musical events came thick and fast in London that week. One of these was a concert at St James’s, Piccadilly, in which we heard the world première of Sha’alu shlom Yerushalayim by Gregory Rose, a work inspired by the composer’s earlier association with the Angkor Children’s Choir of Jerusalem.
This admirable and approachable seven-movement new choral work for unbroken voices (SSA), harp, and organ is by a composer whose name is indelibly linked with musical Modernism, thanks to his studies with the Schoenberg pupils Egon Wellesz and Hans Jelinek, and his landmark recording (with his group Singcircle, for Hyperion) of Stockhausen’s Stimmung — a work to be revived at this year’s BBC Proms.
The new work is a setting of extracts, sung in the original Hebrew, from nine of the Old Testament Psalms of David. (Psalm 122, “Samakhti Beomrim L’ — Sha’alu shlom yerushalaim”: “I was glad when they said unto me. . . O pray for the peace of Jerusalem” — is used in both the fifth and sixth movements.)
Especially affecting and effective were the first, based on Psalm 137.1-6 “Al naharot bave. . .” (“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept”) and the very much contrasted last movement, taken from Psalm 81.1-4, “Harninu le’Elohim uzenu . . .” (“Sing we merrily unto God our strength: make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob.”)
The choir performed this new work perhaps a little less confidently than the glorious, almost 20-minute Our Father (Otcenas) of Janácek, and their electrifying reading, also under Gregory Rose’s enabling direction, of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, in which the treble soloist, James Littleton, showed that, with perhaps just a few months’ added maturity and vocal leavening, he will be ready to tackle anything, including — certainly — the boy Miles in Britten’s first Henry James opera, The Turn of the Screw. The evening’s other soloists were the tenor Robert Johnston, Laurence Hill (percussion) and Nicholas O’Neill (organ).
SCARCELY space to do justice to the week’s undoubted sensation: a semi-staged — but how wonderfully it was plotted and managed and enacted — performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s once ludicrously maligned opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, based on Bunyan. It was mounted at Sadlers Wells Theatre as part of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ongoing half-century tribute to the composer, who died in 1958.
The work is, without a shadow of a doubt, Vaughan Williams at his most sublime; and performers of the calibre of Roderick Williams (Pilgrim), Andrew Kennedy (an outrageous, tempting Lord Lucre, though not quite outrageous enough), and the superlative young bass-baritone Matthew Rose ensured that this was, very nearly, the performance of a lifetime.
Richard Hickox conducted with a perfected assurance, engagement, and communication with his players that even he has rarely achieved, and the general manager David Whelton’s orchestra — often enough England's best, for my money, and led with his usual excellence by James Clark — offered a study in elegant, eloquent perfectionism.
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