20th-Century British Sacred Music

* Herbert Howells:
        - Mass in the Dorian Mode
        - Salve Regina
        - O salutaris Hostia
        - Sweetest of sweets
        - Come, my soul
        - Antiphon
        - Nunc dimittis
        - Regina caeli
* Bernard Stevens:
        - Mass for Double Choir

The Finzi Singers/Paul Spicer
Chandos CHAN9021 Total time: 70:32

Summary for the Busy Executive: Strong performances of serious choral
repertoire.

Most people know Herbert Howells primarily as a church composer, although
he wrote chamber and orchestral pieces as well.  He considered himself
a follower of Vaughan Williams, having heard the premiere of the latter's
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and, indeed, having studied with
Stanford, one of Vaughan Williams's primary teachers.  I must confess
up front that I greatly prefer his instrumental work and his magnificent
solo songs to his choral pieces, even though he wrote a number of very
beautiful ones.  For me, his best is his unconventional Requiem, written
in the anguish he suffered at the death of his young son.  The late Take
him, earth, for cherishing, on the death of President Kennedy, recalls
some of that pain.  I've a soft spot for the St.  Paul's Service, superbly
fitted to the acoustics of the building he composed it for.

Howells has the technique, at least, of a master choral writer.
The problem is that his choral idiom, though highly refined, isn't
particularly memorable.  One - unfairly perhaps - keeps comparing him
to Vaughan Williams, Holst, or Finzi, beside whom he usually looks rather
colorless.  Where one sees in, say, Vaughan Williams's choral work strong,
dramatic gestures and contrasts (I can't think of too many composers who
can get as much as Vaughan Williams out of a single unison line of music,
for example), Howells usually comes across as a pastel wash. One sees
this most readily when one considers Howells's Herbert settings besides
those of Vaughan Williams.  Both men set Herbert's "Antiphon," Howells
in 1977, Vaughan Williams as the final movement of his 1911 Five Mystical
Songs.  Howells's settings stand among the best of his output, and
considered on their own, get the blood going.  But they do lack the
direct expressive vigor of his hero - the ability to turn an almost
too-simple musical idea into something powerful.

One can say much the same for the early Mass in the Dorian Mode.
Howells wrote it in 1912 for Richard Terry, music-master of Westminster
Cathedral, who did probably more than anyone in England to revive the
sacred music of the Renaissance in general, and the English Tudor composers
in particular.  Stanford encouraged all his students to hear the cathedral
choir.  "Palestrina for a penny" was his motto, referring to the carfare
from the Royal College of Music to Westminster.  Patrick Russill's liner
notes point out that Howells's mass predates Vaughan Williams's Mass in
g-minor by over a decade and, in so doing, again puts a fine work in the
shade of a flat-out masterpiece.  The Howells mass is what you'd expect
from a Stanford pupil working in the modes.  The Brahmsian Stanford
himself, late in life, studied modal counterpoint, which he employed in
a double mass for Terry - now lost - and in the oratorio Eden.  Clearly,
Terry and the Edwardians' nostalgic revival of the Tudor era had a
palpable effect.  Howells's counterpoint is assured, but he can't resist
putting in extra filigree or post-Brahmsian chords.  In general, the
most successful movements - the Kyrie, Sanctus, and especially the
three-voice Benedictus - are the most spare, and one can hear the
intertwining of the separate lines.  Vaughan Williams's Mass in g-minor,
on the other hand, is less contrapuntally "correct" and more expressive.
The revival of Renaissance modal counterpoint, although a touchstone of
the work, doesn't become the end.  Indeed, an early critic observed more
parallel fifths than any work "since Perotin." This should tip us off
to Vaughan Williams's lack of concern with imitation or revival.  He
actually creates something new and strongly individual - a work that by
touching both Tudors and contemporaries transcends both times.  Howells's
mass, however, remains of its time - Georgian nostalgia.  Again, Russill's
liner notes do Howells no favors by pointing out that his mass precedes
Vaughan Williams's.  In art, it matters less who goes first than who
does best.

If you don't know anything by Bernard Stevens, you've missed a rare
treat.  Everything I've heard I at least respect, and most of it knocks
me over.  I consider him a rough British equivalent of the American
Walter Piston.  Both composers turn out architecturally beautiful and
powerfully moving music.  Apparently, Stevens wrote slow and careful,
so his catalogue remains small.  The early Mass for Double Choir (1939)
stands with the best of modern British choral music.  This masterpiece
can stand beside the monuments of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Britten,
Elgar, and Walton without becoming dwarfed or washed out.  It's also a
bit of an anomaly in Stevens's output.  As far as I know, Stevens was
an atheist, or at least an agnostic.  The work answers the question of
whether a non-believer can write a successful sacred work resoundingly
in the affirmative.  Stevens wrote it apparently as a composition exercise
at the Royal College of Music.  Like a lot of his music, he didn't push
it forward to performance or publication, and his widow found the
manuscript among his papers.  She suggests that this reluctance may have
stemmed from Stevens's disappointment with Christianity as a force to
combat Fascism and his subsequent embrace of left-wing politics.  Although
not yet possessing the sound of the mature Stevens, it's an astonishingly
accomplished work for a twenty-three-year-old.  In its own way, it
hearkens back to the Vaughan Williams mass, even if the part-writing
exhibits fewer quirks.  Significantly, I think, it lacks a Credo movement.
The Credo usually stumps composers, probably because it lacks the imagery
and the passion of the other mass movements.  It hasn't the archaism or
the pain of the Kyrie, the heavenly blaze of the Gloria and Hosanna, the
humility of the Benedictus, or the blessing of the Agnus Dei.  It's as
much a political statement - a remnant of the doctrinal wars of the first
millennium - as a statement of personal faith.  Not even the believing
Catholic Poulenc set the Credo in his mass.  My one carp with the piece
is that it relies a bit too heavily on antiphony, a natural device for
two choirs.  However, the cool beauty of the whole shows up that criticism
for the pickiness it is.  As I say, it can stand in the company of the
Vaughan Williams mass or the Britten Hymn to St.  Cecilia without bleaching
out.  It is itself a monument of British choral music, and to think that
it took over half a century to come to general notice.  I can't recommend
this piece strongly enough.

Spicer and the Finzi Singers constitute British choral royalty.  In a
country chock-full of superb small choral ensembles, they stand out,
along with the Tallis Scholars, the Sixteen, the King's Singers, and one
or two others.  These works demand top-of-the-line choirs with a serious
commitment to "hard" music.  The Finzi Singers are that good and that
dedicated.  Their sound and blend is superb.  They yield a little to the
Dale Warland Singers in clarity of parts, but who cares?  They're still
wonderful.  Their intonation is dead on.  Spicer makes musical sense of
very complex works and has trained the choir to deliver.  Anybody
interested in choral singing should pick up this disc.

Upsetting postscript: With the imminent disbanding of the Dale Warland
Singers, the United States loses its best group.  Furthermore, American
church and school choirs have been dumbing down repertoire for so long
in the name, I suppose, of non-elitism that I might bet against finding
ten choirs in the country that could pull these pieces off.  It means,
of course, that few will recognize first-rate music, because fourth-rate
music is all most people know.  The presumption of elitism not only
insults the intelligence of people ("I understand it, but they won't")
but actually damages the culture.  How long Britain will be able to hold
the fort is anybody's guess.

Steve Schwartz