Festal Evensong: Sunday 11th May
Introit: O clap your hands – Vaughan Williams
Evening Canticles: St Paul’s Service – Howells
Anthem: Valiant-for-truth – Vaughan Williams
The Hampstead & Highgate Festival this month as usual incorporates a choral service at the Parish Church in its programme, but for the first time this will be Evensong rather than a morning Eucharist. On Sunday 11th May a truly Festal Evensong will feature music by two of the 20th century’s most prominent English composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. 2008 is the 50th anniversary year of the death of Vaughan Williams and the service will also include a sermon about his music by the Vicar, entitled Composing spirituality’.
In Classic FM’s annual Hall of Fame’ poll of classical music this year, the list of 300 works was topped by Vaughan Williams with his tone-poem The Lark Ascending’; his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ was also very high on the list at no.3 and overall he was in 4th place with 12 works (for the record: behind only Mozart(22), Beethoven(20) and Bach(14), tying 4th with Elgar and Tchaikovsky!). Vaughan Williams did not write a great many sacred works, and they are not nearly as well-known as the works which caught the public ear in the poll, but on 11th May we shall have an opportunity to hear two small sacred gems which demonstrate just as clearly the musical language its ageless modal tonalities and deeply expressive harmonies which have perhaps caused the nation to take him to their hearts. The service will open with the motet O clap your hands’, a setting of words from Psalm 47; Vaughan Williams wrote this joyous piece after his return from WWI (where he had served as a wagon orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps). The anthem will be his Valiant-for-truth’, a motet to a text from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress’ which paints a mood of great serenity finally crowned by the jubilant sounding of trumpets.
Howells was 20 years younger than Vaughan Williams, and was much influenced by the older man, as well as by Stanford with whom he studied at the Royal College of Music. His works include a much larger percentage of sacred music, of which several settings of the Anglican canticles have become a staple of the cathedral repertoire. Howells was an especially gifted choral writer, and never happier than when inspired by choirs in the lofty acoustic of cathedral buildings. His evening canticles from the St Paul’s Service are an uplifting example of his style, characterised by spacious melodies above rich, lingering sonorities.
Music
Gill Perrin