In cities all across England, people can walk into a building as evening falls and hear an excellent choir sing. They are not required to do, say, pay, or believe anything; they can simply take half an hour out of their busy lives and listen. This happens every week. In many places, it happens every day. It was going on in 1524 and it is still going on in 2024. Given its track record of surviving all possible disruptions and destructions, it will very likely be going on in 2524. The English choral tradition is one of the minor miracles of human culture – or perhaps one of the major miracles. This year’s festival is a celebration of it.
Our opening program on the 3rd of August is quite fittingly called “A New Song” because it is the first of its kind at the Byrd Festival. Everything in it was composed in the twentieth century, for choir and organ together, which in many ways has become the quintessential sound of the whole English tradition. The organ was already a big part of the soundscape of English churches in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but it did not originally accompany the singers, any more than bell-ringing accompanied them. That all changed during the Reformation as organists started to chime in on simpler music for the common people. By the time of Purcell, it had become clear that organ pipes and human windpipes were a perfect match. In fact the organ at Holy Rosary was built specifically to mix with voices (in the best twentieth-century style: one major inspiration for the stop list was the Duruflé Requiem) and we are delighted to be able to sing with it and for it.
The two centerpieces of the opening concert are two monumental works by Benjamin Britten (Rejoice in the Lamb) and Gerald Finzi (Lo, the full final sacrifice). They were both composed in the mid-1940s, a bleak and lean time in England, when food, fuel, clothing, paper, and other necessities were severely rationed. Musical richness was one of the few things that could not be rationed, and these anthems luxuriate in it. The text of Rejoice in the Lamb was written by a baroque poet named Christopher Smart who was immersed in the whole scope of creation, from the ridiculous to the sublime, from cats and mice to “the echo of the heavenly harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty”; his contemporaries decided he was mad and threw him into an insane asylum. Britten set these larger-than-life visions to splendid music. (One of Britten’s biographers made the sharp and almost certainly true observation that this was the type of music he wished he had encountered in church while growing up.) Finzi turned to the equally baroque poetry of Crashaw, who reworked old Latin liturgical texts in his own fervent style, and he set them as a kaleidoscope of changing musical colors and textures. The last few pages of Lo, the full final sacrifice are one of the great moments of the English choral repertory.
The final concert this year, “Ancient & Modern,” is for unaccompanied voices. It brings together some twentieth-century classics and some pieces by Byrd – including a big motet for eight-part choir, Quomodo cantabimus, which is the only thing we know Byrd deliberately sent abroad, as a gift in 1584 to a colleague who was far away in Prague teaching the Emperor’s choirboys. Every modern composer on this final concert has been a real admirer of early music in his or her own way, and it is not hard to find threads of Byrd’s style in the fabric of their music. This is perhaps most true of all for Howells, whose poignant anthem Take him, earth, for cherishing was sent as a gift to our own faraway part of the world, composed in memory of John F. Kennedy. Some of the twentieth-century music draws on even older traditions of unaccompanied sacred chant, especially Tavener’s Song for Athene and MacMillan’s Christus Vincit. Both those pieces were launched to fame in the 1990s in the great churches of London. Christus Vincit was written for the vast expanse under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in honor of Cecilia, patron saint of music, and Song for Athene was sung (unforgettably) in Westminster Abbey as the body of Princess Diana was carried out to her burial.
Our service of evensong features yet another memorable choral anthem of the twentieth century. Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening is a setting of words that the poet John Donne originally spoke in the presence of the singers of the English Chapel Royal, who would have understood him well:
No darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music...
This year’s evensong also includes works by two guiding lights and great friends of our festival: Richard Marlow, who died in 2013, and David Trendell, who died in 2014, ten years ago now. They loved this music.
- KERRY MCCARTHY