Purcell: Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in g minor and
Taverner: Hymn to the Mother of God: Evensong 13 July
In our weekday Evensong services, in which music plays no part, the canticles and psalms are recited antiphonally, the two parts of each verse read alternately by the two sides of the congregation gathered in the Lady Chapel. This is a custom of great antiquity, deriving from the earliest days of the Christian church. To this day, the Syrian Divine Office (which claims descent through Antioch from the Apostles) centres primarily on such an antiphonal recitation of psalms. There is music too in the Syrian Office, in the form of hymns also sung antiphonally – interpolated between the psalm verses. Tradition has it that both psalms and hymns were introduced from the east to the west by St Ambrose in fourth-century Milan; whenever its precise introduction, there is no doubt that the symbolically inclusive antiphonal style of both recitation and singing has been a constant element in western Christian worship for centuries.
Later applied less rigidly than in psalmody, antiphonal setting of other sacred texts has been effectively used by composers down the ages. Some of the most striking instances are Giovanni Gabrieli’s works written for performance by different choral groups placed around the galleries of St Mark’s in Venice. Less dramatic, but no less telling, is Purcell’s antiphonal style in his Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in g minor, which will be sung at Evensong on 13 July. Here the style is not merely a conventional device, but as always with Purcell a tool to enhance the expressiveness of the words. For instance, after the full opening verse, three low voices (alto, tenor and bass) on the cantoris side sing of the lowliness’ of the Virgin, and are answered by two trebles and an alto from decani. The setting continues with this effective alternation of the two voice groups, the full choir only entering to add its weight as required by the text. (The music of the Gloria of the Nunc Dimittis, incidentally, is by Ralph Roseingrave, not Purcell for no better reason than that it appeared in an early MS copy and has ever since been used here by English choirs: it is inauthentic but rather splendid).
The anthem on the same evening also employs antiphonal writing, but to quite different effect. John Tavener’s Hymn to the Mother of God, written (to words from the Liturgy of St Basil) some 300 years after Purcell’s canticles, uses two four-part choirs answering each other at a distance of only three beats. The atmosphere created by such a condensed, overlapping antiphonal style in this short anthem is one of striking and extraordinary intensity.
Music
Gill Perrin