For this Summer Season at Hampstead we will begin what will become a fixture for the First Sunday in the Month at Evensong: a series based specifically around a Composer or a specific theme. And there could be no better way to kick this off than by exploring the settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by Charles Villiers Stanford, the great Irish composer who brought about a Renaissance in English Church Music at the end of the 19th Century.
Many of Stanford’s works were written for the choir of Trinity College Cambridge, where I myself was Organ Scholar and had the opportunity to perform these works in the chapel for which they were conceived. Stanford was appointed organist there whilst still an Undergraduate (at Queens College!), and his precocious talent, rooted in a sound upbringing of Purcell and Bach, brought to the church anthem and canticle a new style, a quasi orchestral architecture that developed musical material within each setting, moving away from the older style of dividing up each line of text into separate sections.
Stanford’s depth and richness of musical language, coupled with powerful word-setting, heralded a new age in the Anglican style, and remain today grand pillars in the musical canon. Of his four settings of the Canticles for Choir and Organ, we begin with the A major on the 4th May, a grand orchestrally conceived work (the composer’s own orchestration, rarely performed, is a revelation). His Service in G on 1st June (Ascension Day) portrays the young Virgin as a solo soprano singing to the whirring accompaniment of her spinning wheel (a notoriously difficult keyboard passage for the organist). And as we approach the end of the choir’s term, on the 6th July we will hear the composer’s own favourite, the setting in C, the most majestic and sweeping of them all. This leaves one remaining, which we shall leave until September, his setting in B flat, full of dancing joy and pathos.
Other highlights of the upcoming month include our evensong as part of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music on 18th May, featuring works by 5 living composers and an introit by the late John Tavener. Francis Pott’s exquisite setting of The Souls of the Righteous, inspired by Stanford’s setting of the Latin text Justorum Animae, features as the anthem, for double choir and tenor soloists.
I very much hope you will join us for this musical and spiritual journey, and will take the opportunity to speak with myself and some of the choir members over a glass of sherry at the back of the church following each 1st Sunday evensong of the month! Wishing you a wonderful spring.