Even a resolute republican would have been impressed by one essential aspect of King Charles’s coronation: its delirious abundance of great choral music. In a spectacle that could so easily have turned to pantomime – Gilbert & Sullivan came to mind – it was the music that provided anchorage, magnificently done and standing testament to a historic glory of our culture.
But it doesn’t do to take all this for granted. If it’s not to be consigned to history, it needs to be maintained, refreshed, renewed. And playing no small part in that endeavour is the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music which has just had its 2023 season with events spread across 40 or so venues around the capital.
LFCCM sets out to encourage composers of worth to write for the Church, especially ones that aren’t known as ecclesiastically minded. In recent years, it’s commissioned more than 80 new works and found platforms for them in the course of parish or cathedral worship. But it also promotes concerts – one of which, this year, ran at Hampstead’s Anglican parish church to celebrate the legacy of father/son composers Lennox and Michael Berkeley.
Lennox, who died in 1989, was a convert to Catholicism; Michael, who has just had his 75th birthday, was once a choirboy at Westminster Cathedral; and through the years, the Berkeley family contribution to liturgical music has been significant. Lennox’s modest but fervent Missa Brevis (written for that cathedral in 1960) counts as a modern classic, as does his gentle 1975 setting of “The Lord is My Shepherd”. And Michael’s 2015 Te Deum has similar potential: a striking piece that proceeds with the heavy tread of ancient ceremonial.
All this music featured in the Hampstead concert, as did a brand new piece from Michael setting words from WH Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio” text that Lennox was asked to set back in the 1930s but never did: a neat connection there across the decades. But music aside, the event supplied an interesting glimpse into the context of faith, or otherwise, from which these two composers have approached their work.
Addressing the audience, Michael said of his father’s Catholicism: “If it wasn’t exactly who he was, it was who he thought he should be… He found in religious music a kind of sublimation of the other passions in his life.” And turning to himself, Michael admitted to being “more secular these days, though I’m drawn to ritual”. It left hanging in the air that standard question about whether music for the Church is somehow more effective when it’s written by a true believer. Can you tell? And does it ultimately matter?
Where the LFCCM stands on this, I’ve no idea. But I’m thankful it commissions widely and pursues the best composers of our time – which seems to me the only guarantee of getting the best music. If it’s written with integrity and skill, the listener will find whatever truth lies buried in the notes.
Tango is a strange phenomenon, like a religion to its devotees. So it was interesting to learn last month that the essential tango sound – supplied by the accordion-like squeezebox known as a bandoneon – originates not on the sultry streets of Buenos Aires but in 19th-century German churches that were too poor to afford an organ and in need of an affordable alternative.
I learned this at the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, an annual event that happens at the city’s intimately in-the-round Crucible Theatre (famous for hosting the World Snooker Championship).
This year’s festival, curated by the pianist Kathryn Stott, homed in on Tango Nuevo, the more modern, technically sophisticated adaptation of the tango form developed by the late, great Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. In residence was his successor as the master of contemporary tango music, JP Jofre.
If the name means nothing to you, look him up: he’s an engagingly dynamic force of nature when he plays that squeezebox, and his compositions take the tango way beyond the world of dance into symphonic (I’m tempted to say spiritual) realms.
In Sheffield, he performed alongside the more strictly classical musicians of the city-based Ensemble 360, with Stott herself at the piano. It managed to be both transcendent and electrifying – not least in a sprawling piece called “Tangodromo” which refashions the disrupted rhythms of the tango (eight beats to the bar, counted as 123-123-12) into 20 minutes of heartfelt beauty.
If I’d had the chance to talk to him – sadly I didn’t – I’d have asked if he had any plans to take his instrument full-circle, back to its religious origins. The idea of a tango-Mass may strike some readers with horror, but in the way that JP Jofre handles tango, it has serious possibilities. Something, perhaps, for Taizé: rapt, devotional, but with a rhythmic kick.
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